T4R6M4 Quality Delibs

Lady Beetle:

Wow! I expected a lot from two characters with such massive potential for destruction and environmental control, but I think you two really brought your A-Game here. I am seriously impressed with both of these strategies, so before I get into individual strategies I just want to commend both teams for what you put out here! You're really showing why you got this far here. Without further ado, let's hop into the strategies!


Kaito:

Our favorite Booze-Brewing Bancho is back in full force, and he's here to tear shit up. You pulled out all the stops here, with a pretty fluid (heh) strat format consisting of a large, varied list of various destructive methods. All in all, a good plan! The lack of exact structure can be of benefit in a match like this, as it allows things to be less linear and more adaptive. And, looking at your list of methods, wow!

From burning, to exploding, to just straight ripping stuff out of the ground, your plan has a massive amount of destructive potential, with clever ideas such as bellows to blow burning embers to cause the wildfire to spread even quicker, giant flaming death crossbows; and of course, finishing it off with an absolute bang with things such as the Hibernian Obliterator, as well as Treegorg. All in all, just a really clever and varied list of destruction here; I also appreciate that, with the large scale of your strategy, you put the time in to make sure you're not tripping the loss condition by accomodating for Gioia.

So, where this strat definitely exceeds in creativity and scale, I feel like that scale might also be a bit of a downfall in a way. I feel like, despite the fact that you're constantly creating booze and that'll net you a good amount, you might be overselling how much booze you'll have at given points in your strategy. At C Speed, I feel like Fujisawa loser can't necessarily produce as much booze as would be necessary at certain points, especially with some of your more resource-expensive plays.
That isn't to say I think you're going to be twiddling your thumbs, I think you have a lot of recurring methods that are quite destructive and give you a good shot at succeeding, but I definitely think that in shooting for the sky with your creativity, you might have flown a bit too close to the sun.

Other than that, I feel like there also could have been a bit more in the way of considering harassment and interference from your opponent. You do have a decent amount about not doing certain techniques if you can't, and keeping her out of harm's way, but I definitely think more could've been done in the way of accounting for her interloping with your plans.

Despite these criticisms, I still really like this strategy, and think that it has a lot of creativity put into it. I'm going to give it an 8/10; This could definitely be higher if the above criticisms were handled a bit better. I mused on giving it a 7, but I don't feel it was quite so egregious as to ding it that hard, as I think it could definitely reach a 9 or a 10 if not for what I mentioned. All that said, greatly entertaining strat and really good work.

Gioia:

True to her stand's massive environmentally manipulative capabilities, Gioia doesn't pull any punches in this absolutely solid and destructive strategy. Again, I was seriously impressed with what you put out here!

With a fairly straightforward yet really well thought out plan, I think you executed this match about as well as you could have, paying respect to you opponent's destructive capabilities, and taking a lot of measures to mitigate them, protect yourself from them, and work around them.

As mentioned, your plan of action itself was fairly straightforward, yet effective. You work your way through the orchard with solid pathing in mind, tearing trees up and spreading ignitables so as to increase potential spread of destruction as well as attempt to mitigate Kaito's stand a bit. I had thought about you potentially playing into Kaito's plan with these ignitables, given he uses a lot of fire and explosions within his plan as well, but I do think the fact that he explicitly avoids doing these near you to keep you out of harms way kind of ensures that that doesn't happen. With that, your pathing complete, you ignite the trail you left, and thus the orchard, left to watch it burn away.

Were this the entirety of your strat I don't think I'd have quite as much to say about it, and I'd be a bit iffy on its viability. But from here, you have a lot of solid methodology of interfering with Kaito (without putting him in harm's way mind you), as well as optimizing and adapting your route to potential obstacles as well as your opponent. On top of this, a pretty solid list of defensive measures and contingencies as well.

Overall, I think the execution of the objective is straightforward in a really solid way, but also leaves itself open to plenty of adaptability, and you do a good amount to mitigate your opponent while also keeping his capabilities in mind and respecting them as such.
With all this in mind, I feel comfortable giving you a 10/10 on this strategy. I think it really fulfilled what the optimal strategy for this kind of objective is. Straightforward yet creative, solid planning yet adaptable, and just overall really well executed and well structured. Really great job here!

Tiger Beetle:

The openings are both fairly good. I think that Kaito will take a little longer than he anticipates to gather supplies at the tool shed, and with Gioia's rush to the vehicles he will likely arrive second. I wasn't super sure on the mechanics of the booze spring, especially the landing, but overall I think Kaito and Gioia reach the vehicle shed at roughly the same time. From there, with Gioia having an early advantage in trees, they more or less separate to do their own things. I don't think Gioia taking the gas tanks is too big of an issue for Kaito.

Overall, the biggest criticism I have of Kaito is sort of a regular one: output. I can buy some of his larger moves like Treegorg or the Annihilator working after a while, but I'm not sold on, say, the Subterranean Boogie working. I would have preferred a bit more indication on precisely where or when moves would be used. As well, the other big criticism is with how he treated fire.

While he planned for some interference by Gioia, his use of setting multiple massive fires in several places around the orchard, in my eyes, interferes with some of his biggest moves. The Annihalator, for example, as it hampers his ability to get straight lines with his Annihilator or safely get to certain patches with massive booze quantities, without there being some oopsies along the way. The trees are too dry for me to super buy the bow working either, though just chucking the tree would absolutely work.

I think that overall, this could easily have been a nine or ten. The uses of Fujisawa are extremely creative and have a lot of really awesome applications. The number of trees destroyed for each move was very nice. That said, I’ve bapped Kaito for overestimating production a fair bit over the course of the tourney, and this is round 6. I think that I’ll unfortunately give this strat a 7/10. Being a little more conservative with output and being more careful vis a vis clear positioning with the fires he sets would lead this to easily be higher.

As for Gioia, this is… just a very well optimized strategy. It doesn’t have the pure flash factor of Kaito’s many methods of destruction, but she has a very, very clear plan to take care of the trees. I don’t have too much to say for this strategy, it did most of the work for me. I enjoyed how optimized that it was. There was a nice sense of pathing throughout, and I enjoyed the sections specifically dealing with Kaito, while the strategy as a whole mostly didn’t rely on it. I think that I’ll give this one a 10/10 in Quality for sheer optimization; I really do not think that Gioia could have done better for this match.

Soldier Beetle:

First up, Kaito. Tiger striped speedo? 10/10.

Moving on to Gioia...

Kidding, kidding. But with his boozy doozy of a strat, I believe Kaito has earned a perfect score. The creativity of the methods used in his strategy leave nothing to be desired, and I can’t think of anything else to ask for from this flavourful and easy to read strategy. I firmly believe that Kaito will attain the vehicles and other necessary items listed in his strategy before Gioia, given the latter’s strategy making sure she pulls up trees along the way, whereas Kaito, upon building up some booze, simply flings himself over, and that his listed moves and contingences will definitely prevent her from doing too much damage to his plans, between him playing keep away, and dividing out his booze so that she won’t succeed in lighting it up or getting rid of it unless Kaito wants it to catch fire.

I debated a lot over how to score this strategy. It’s well written for sure, but its more linear, rigid structure makes it occasionally questionable in how it interacts with Kaito’s, especially given his heavily mentioned avoidance of you. Will you chase him down to ensure certain parts of your strategy will go through at the expense of others? Or will you simply let him vault away and focus on yourself, letting other parts of your strategy go? While the other judges are in contention with myself on who reaches the shed, the vehicles etc first, I’m not quite sure taking down four trees at a time, even going as fast as you can, will bring you to Kaito’s level of destruction, unless you’re able to successfully pull off your end game. Despite these quandries, this strategy is above average, and deserving of a 8/10.