NT CUP prep summary

I started about a month before the tournament collecting people for my roster. I took anyone that was willing to play on the weekend of the matches, plus a few “ringers” who I respected in my corp regardless of their commitment. This went pretty well, and I had several people who were out-of-alliance. The tighter-knit group you start with though, the better. After two full months, my roster was down to about 5 subbed pilots and 3 emergency players who never come to practice, which really limits what you can do.

To prepare for the Cup, I watched nearly an entire season’s worth of Cup matches from the previous season, maybe 10-15 hours worth. I had no tournament experience prior to this so understanding the setup of the matches (warp-ins and drafting) was an exercise in archaeology. I also learned how hard commentary is – even rewatching a match twice and pausing it you can see an incredible amount of detail that is impossible to capture in real time, like manual piloting techniques, heat management, drone assignment, and so on. I started making a list of mistakes I saw other teams making to coach my team not to do those things, like forgetting to double click at the start of a match (early inputs are ignored on Thunderdome!).

Two weeks before the tournament, I held a briefing, announced how prizes would be distributed (if we won any), and the practice schedule. Then we waited patiently for fittings to be released. Waiting patiently is a crucial skill in tournament team management. Once the fittings were released we started setting up: making comps, getting the fittings set in-client, making a practice arena, making a pre-flight checklist, and so on. This took more time than expected and could have been done earlier, but I had expected some of this and it turned out okay.

We started practicing. Luckily, I had enough excitement to run a couple 5v5 internal practices, which is very efficient if you have the manpower. Basically doubles the amount of practice you can do testing comps, evaluating players, getting a backup fc time in the seat, drafting… These were by far the most productive practices of the next two months. We spent about a week testing different battleship matchups – in addition to being the most powerful ship on your team, the battleship is drafted last under NT rules, meaning it is the most surprising and onerous part of your draft – you need to draft with battleships in mind from the start. We started from the last season’s meta and iterated as best we could – we found the Maelstrom and Hyperion to be very competent. We found that we needed a lot, a lot of practice flying kiting comps in order to execute the long game properly, which was basically never achieved. They required long games, which tended to expose us to mind-boggling piloting errors of one kind or another, we’re talking boundary violations, heating mods until they break, failing to screen, or getting caught for no reason. I never gave up but we never did win a match, scrim or actual, with a kiting comp.
We then utilized our “patiently waiting” skills to for Thunderdome access. We only got access a couple days before the tournament itself. Running practice on Sisi sucked compared to Thunderdome, especially for skills like links, t2 rep bots, and other things that not everyone has trained.