How to think about Offence in Fighting games
I’ve seen a lot of new players struggle to figure out how to evaluate what do to in fighting game. What makes moves actually good? what should I do for oki? When a new character comes out, how do I tell what their best tools are? Well, there is a consistent way to figure out what do to, and it’s how I think about fighting games in general, so let’s get to it
We’ll start with my first main character in Street Fighter 6, E honda, and a common situation with a midscreen buttslam knockdown
What should we do from this situation? Let’s think about our character first, and what we can do.
We can attack, throw, throw bait, or do nothing to try and bait reversal. Our opponent can do Invincible reversal, reversal normal, reversal movement (backdash/jump), parry attempt, drive reversal, drive impact and block. That’s a lot! What helps us though, is the reward and cost of these different options are quite different, so that helps us evaluate what to do.
We’ll start with E Honda’s only plus on block normal, 5MP, vs our knocked down opponent.
If we meaty 5MP and:
- Our opponent uses an ex dragon punch: They win, but it costs 2 drive bars. This is bad, but not *that* bad, so I’ll give it a -10
- Reversal super: they win again, but it costs them up to 3 bars of super. If we don’t die, it could be a big long term win resource wise. -10
- Reversal normal: We win, and with a counterhit it’s a big combo. +20
- Throw Tech: We win, same as reversal normal
- Reversal movement: We win with a regular hit, +10
- Parry attempt: If the perfect parry is not successful, its the same as blocking, which is a win for us at +5. If the PP is successful, we do get punished but the damage will generally be small, so -10
- Drive impact: This is a reaction check but in most cases is a big win for us, +20
- Block: We’re plus on block and have a lot of choices on how to continue offence, so +5
Now, we could add all these up to see if our choice is good or not, but we have to also think about our opponent. Let’s think of the average ranked player, Steve Standard. When he’s on wakeup defence, he acts roughly like this:
- Block 40% of the time
- Parry 30% (we’ll split this into 2, 20% are regular parry and 10% perfect parry. Since block and regular parry are equal, we’ll do it as one calculation)
- Throw tech 10%
- Movement 10%
- Reversal 5%
- Normal 5%
so we multiply the value of our meaty attack by the probability of each result, and we get our expect value:
- Block + regular parry 60% x 5 = 3
- Perfect Parry 10% x -10 = -1
- Throw Tech 10% x 20 = 2
- Movement 10% x 10 = 1
- Reversal 5% x -10 = -.5
- Normal 5% x 20 = 1
So we add all those up, and the ev of the meaty 5mp from honda is +5.5. Great, that’s in our favour, so let’s get into a match and medium punch away!
Oof, that didn’t go well. What happened? Well, we forgot the worst part of playing fighting games: Our opponents have agency. When you as a player choose an attack, your opponent also sees what you do and can remember what happened last time. When your offence only consists of one action, Steve Standard learns that over time and adjusts to doing reversal a lot more, defeating our range. I think this type of back and forth is what makes fighting games so great. Nothing either player does happens in a vacuum, you can learn from your opponent and your opponent learns from you.
Get Charlie G’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
So your opponent has agency, and is adjusting to your offence, so what do you do? Let’s see what blocking is normally vs when you know a reversal is coming:
- Our opponent uses an ex dragon punch: Big win for us, +20
- Reversal super: Depending on what super you block it can either be +3 0
- Reversal normal: They win, -10
- Throw Tech: They win, and many times this is a back throw into the corner -20
- Reversal movement: A loss for us but not too bad, -5
- Parry attempt: This is a reaction check but is a win for us, +10
- Drive impact: This is a reaction check but in most cases is a big win for us, +20
- Block: They win but don’t actually hit us, just escape, -5
So then we math it out using regular Steve
- Block 40% x -5 = -2
- Parry 30% x 10 = 3
- Throw Tech 10% x -20 = -2
- Movement 10% x -5 = -.5
- Reversal 5% x 20 = 1
- Normal 5% x -10 = -.5
So vs regular Steve, our overall ev here is -1, But if we know Steve is going reversal mode, and is going to reversal at like 80% or more, the Value of blocking goes up significantly and dominates the other options.
The real takeaway is that while a strategy may seem sound based on the positive outcomes, No offence is perfect and requires on the fly adjustment. Use the baseline expected value to find out what the choice you are making gives you, then adjust what you’re doing as the game goes on. Options and choices that seem bad on the surface can have a higher value or even be the best option when the context is there.
Addendum:
One important thing I want to mention here is that the Steve Standard range also depends on game context. When Steve is at 100% life, and when Steve is at 10% life are two different people with two different values on when they will reversal. Universally players will more often reversal at lower hp than they would at full life. This goes for whatever the game state will be, so you should think about that as well
