Many new strategies that are presented in this forum share a basic flaw, one that makes the pretty much useless. For that reason, I decided to write a mini-guide about how a new strategy must be shaped in order to make sense.

Guide to creating and describing a new strategy

So many strategies here are like: "You take a second TC early, then spam unit X combined with unit Y. With these you raid his gold miners, so he has no more gold. You now take a third TC. Because he has no more gold income, he cannot make any TCs of his own, or train any more units. It will take him several minutes to recover from your rush, and by then, you have a pop limit army of 30 pop more than he has, so you invade his base and win the game."

The above would work perfectly for any race - if the enemy sat idle all the time and waited for you to do it without dishing out blows against your econ and buildings on his own. Moderate CPU mostly makes this mistake, which is why pretty much all strategies work against it, including ones that are not really viable.

Any strategy that is actually convincing must always include a section that discusses how to deal with the enemy moves. It is legitimate to say: "He is an Isis, so he will most likely FH and then spam chariots or elephants. Against these, you do xyz. However, keep his base scouted early on, and when you see some barracks going up, then he will probably attempt some rax units spam. In this case, you do abc." In other words, you need not cover every possible move of him, no matter how remote it may be. But at least the typical ways of playing his god must be covered with an explanation how your strategy plans on dealing with them, occasionally factoring in the map on which the action is taking place.

I have a feeling that I will frequently link strategy-posters to this thread in the future.

[This message has been edited by DeathAndPain (edited 03-17-2008 @ 04:58 AM).]