Think, Don’t Mash! Part 2: Expanding Your Strategy

Learning a fighting game, like any other complex skill, involves starting with the basics, internalizing them, and then adding to your repertoire slowly over time. This process should be pretty straightforward. First, you pick your core plan of a handful of generally strong, useful moves. Then, you take that plan out into the wild and see how it functions against actual human opponents.  

Human opponents can be unpredictable.

I don’t go over this in the videos, but sometimes, the core plan itself might need to be revised a bit, which is a similar but separate issue. You might realize almost immediately that there’s a glaring deficiency that needs to be addressed really early on, so you have to tweak your initial plan. This is to be expected! How can you possibly know what your strategy should be before you’ve even really played the game? This happened with my Chun-li example from the video series. The plan as shown in part one was:

1.  st.HP: Ground control.

2.  b.HK: Anti-air.

3.  Throw (LP+LK): When they're scared/blocking.

4.  Walking: precisely adjust spacing

5.  Dashing: quickly move (risky)

6.  cr.MP: deal with fireballs

…but originally, I wasn’t planning to have cr.MP at all! You don’t necessarily need an anti-projectile move on the list. You can walk forward and block fireballs as necessary to gain ground and eventually get into range for something like st.HP.

However, it quickly became apparent that a more immediate answer was needed. The universal way to deal with fireballs is to predictively jump over them and hit your opponent with an aerial attack while they are still recovering from the move. I opted for cr.MP as it was more reactive, less risky, and would avoid the temptation to jump around like a nut so we could start off on the right foot. I wanted a sturdy risk-averse playstyle.

Don't play like a nut.

Once you’re done tweaking the original plan, you go all in, putting it into action and testing it out in dozens (or hundreds) of matches. You have two simultaneous goals while you do this. The first is to get very comfortable with your chosen moves, internalizing when they are and are not effective. The second goal is to keep a close eye on situations where none of the moves in your arsenal provide a solid answer to a problem you are facing.

Eventually, you’ll hit a ceiling of how far your existing strategy can take you, and that’s where you take that data you’ve been collecting and decide the next handful of moves you’ll add to your plan. You’ll be looking to add moves which address the biggest unsolved problems you’re running into, and this is what we look at in part two.