How to Get Better by Playing Yourself

Transcript

What’s up everybody? I just finished playing a learning game of Warmachine against myself to practice a new army I haven’t played before. I thought it’d be a great time to show you how I play solo war games, how I approach it, and how you can still have fun and learn from it. Obviously it’s not quite the same as a real opponent, but it can still help you get good.

Here’s the aftermath. This is why there wasn’t a video yesterday—I recorded a whole battle report and it just won’t export out of Premiere. I played myself and lost, but lots of lessons were learned and that was the whole point.

Step One: Pick the Right Game System

I’m using Warmachine, which obviously does not have a hard solo rule component—it’s two-player PvP. But Warmachine specifically is a great system for solo play because there’s no gotchas. All information is public. Your list is presented. In a tournament setting you have two lists, so the only unknown is what your opponent picks—and usually you have a pretty good idea anyway.

All abilities, strategies, everything is public knowledge. There’s no gaming the system, no sneak attacks or surprises. When you lose in Warmachine, it’s usually because the other player was flat out better and outplayed you, or you made a couple key dumb mistakes. In my opinion, you don’t really lose Warmachine matches because of bad dice rolls.

This would never work with something like Infinity—the hidden information and reactive mechanics make it basically impossible to play solo. Warmachine’s public information makes it perfect.

Step Two: Deployment

Both sides deploy. In Warmachine there’s a roll-off to see who goes first. I used the recommended cluster setting from the Warmachine rulebook for terrain layout. You can see that one side of the table is skewed—more defensible, better positioning. The other side has hindering terrain slowing you down in the middle of the deployment zone.

I gave my opponent the good side and gave myself the bad side. This is the hardest part—making sure you’re not accidentally giving yourself an advantage. You really have to watch out for that.

Step Three: Play Short Games

Most of the time I won’t play full games when playing against myself. I’ll just take the first two or three turns and then pick it back up and start over. This lets you practice deploying, figure out how to unpack from the deployment zone, and see what happens in those first critical turns.

A lot of times I lose in real games because I make poor deployment decisions or forget what my plan was when the dice start rolling. Practicing deployment a ton before even playing is half the battle.

Step Four: Don’t Dunk on Yourself

The goal here is not to win. The goal is to play the other force as hard as you possibly can into yourself so you can learn the army you’re playing. If you were to root for a side, you kind of want to be rooting for the other side. You really want to come at yourself hard. Don’t set up easy wins—that’s kind of dumb.

If you just want to have fun and roll dice, play a different game. Don’t play a war game against yourself. This is for getting better when you can’t get real games in.

Takebacks Are Encouraged

As I start moving, if I do something out of order or that doesn’t make sense with the opponent’s army, I’m going to take it back. Maybe not with myself—I might have to eat that and learn how to recover from being out of position. But for the opposing side, I’ll take it back and fix it so it’s harder and better.

The whole point is to learn and get better. Give yourself grace. Tons of takebacks. I tend to be much tougher on the army I’m actually trying to learn, because I’ll make those mistakes in real games and need to know how to get out of them.

Why This Works for Learning a New Army

This technique shines when you already have a main army you know well and want to learn a new one. You can proxy your opponent’s army—it doesn’t have to be the real models. I already know how Menoth plays, so I can sit down without looking things up. For me, I’m trying to figure out how this Infernals army even works.

This saves me the embarrassment of getting kicked for weeks or months if you’re only getting one or two real games a month. I can run through three or four short games and pretty much learn the gist of how everything goes until we hit the attrition point—which is a whole other part of the game.

What I Learned

Specific things I learned from this one session:

• Threat ranges — what I need to stay away from, what goes well into what
• Tough ignore units — they ignore the Tough rule and get a second attack on kill. Perfect for mulching infantry
• My caster’s realistic spell economy — I was thinking I’d get 3-4 casts off, but realistically it’s 2, maybe 3 boosted. Huge difference for an assassination caster
• New scenarios — this year’s Steamroller has seven scenarios, some new to me. Setting one up and running through it teaches me how it plays

These are all valuable things to learn that would otherwise take weeks or months of real games to figure out.

The Bottom Line

Find a game where there’s no gotcha. Warmachine is perfect because information is public. The lines of play aren’t “gotcha”—they’re about positioning, thinking turns ahead, and decision-making.

There’s WarTable online, so you can usually find an opponent any day of the week. But I don’t have time to constantly play real matches. I can do a turn here when I have 20 minutes, another turn a couple hours later. It fits my schedule while still feeling like I’m progressing.

It sucks to get your ass kicked a ton of times. I don’t mind it—I want to get better—but if I can kick my own ass and get better faster, that’s just better.

Tomorrow I’ll actually play some games and walk you through it in a proper battle report. Thanks for watching.