12 months ago - Ahskance - Direct link

One of the best translation tools I found was this YouTube video:




The game of Go has an incredible number of options in terms of "What could happen". I think the tagline spoken was that "there are more possible board combinations than there are atoms in the known universe."

World of Warships can seem more straightforward than that at first glance, but given that even given location on the map could be occupied by a variance of ship types, further compounded by the ship to be angled at any of 360 degrees (or more if counting sub-units of a degree)... there's a lot of possibility that exists. It's an overwhelming amount of what "could" happen, even though patterns of play are often noted and tend to be the norm across many games.

When I was being trained to play CV for a Hurricane team, I was being given a crash-course in map tactics and positioning. I'd come to infer much of what I was being told through simply playing the game thousands of times, but to actually be able to break down the concepts and recognize the second-order effects was not something I had in my back pocket.

The reason why I reference the above video is because a player made a move by putting a tile on the 19 x 19 grid, and in some cases the commentators would react in shocked amazement at the beauty of the move. Other times laughter as the move seen made seemingly no sense or was considered insane. To my untrained eyes, I just saw a new dot on the board and had no frame of reference for why people could see more than just a dot being added to a board. I had no concept for the deeper implications of taking the position because I am not a person studied in Go.

I genuinely believe players can play our game for hundreds or thousands of repetitions without coming to realize the deeper implications of "Cruiser in upper-left [map square] while angled at [degree]". It's similar to how you might recognize a sign indicating something familiar is nearby without being able to read a language, despite having seen the language hundreds or thousands of times. The "key" is not always readily apparent.