Warlight Training School is a circle of warlight players led by me which seeks to help beginner players become better at the game. We started around 3 weeks ago. We mostly play 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 games on various templates to showcase different settings to students. I provide quality games and good community for anyone who is participating in our games. Our students start from simpler templates and maps and with increasing complexity move through all settings and most special maps like complex Europe or hopscotch. After each game I comment on what each of players has done right and wrong and depending on how much time I have left at the time, I also try to write reviews of the games.

Participating in our program may take around a year and 50 games, so you should keep it in your mind if you want to join. You do not need to undergo the whole program, but skipping parts of it might leave you with limited knowledge. We require our students to understand English language well, be communicative and active. Our players participate in 5-10 games at any given time and our games have 3 days boot standard and honor vacations, so if you can handle it, you are good to go. We have already assembled 4 beginner players and have 12 various skill levels players joining the games to help students see different examples of gameplay.

All the games and reviews at the moment are solely made by me so only limited amount of new students can join at the moment. There are 6 open spots for new students at the moment and if there will be more interested players I will choose who gets to participate on these criteria: ability to communicate well, will to improve and current skill level. Generally weakest players are first to be accepted as they have got the most to learn and therefore Warlight Training School has the most potential to help them. Depending on the time of your joining you will be assigned to a group of players with similar progress on training program.

If for some reason you cannot participate as the student or want to simply play some fun games, you can join as a guest player and you will be sporadically invited to our training games. There are unlimited spaces for this position, but the more players join the less games will they get invited to as there’s only so much games I can have my students in at any given time.

If you are interested you could apply for a teacher position. You would be invited to some of the training games and would be required to comment on student’s performance and help them learn to play better. Being a teacher is a great responsibility as you will be greatly trusted by our students and you will need to meet their expectations. Before becoming a teacher you would need to have a motivational conversation with me and also prove that you know the game well enough to be capable of teaching it.

I have recently made a blog to contain all the reviews of student’s games. Its link is https://warlightgamereviews.wordpress.com/ There is still some work to be done to improve it, but in my opinion it’s already good enough for public usage. Writing a review takes plenty of time so I have only written and added 4 reviews in total. I would greatly appreciate anyone’s effort to help these reviews come up more often. If you are interested in writing reviews, let me know and I will send you some game links of other finished training games.

If you are interested in either being student, guest player, teacher or game reviewer, write a post on this thread or contact me directly through Warlight mail.

The full list of already participating players can be found here https://warlightgamereviews.wordpress.com/about/

I'd like to participate as a student.

I think it's a great idea. I'm unsure how well it will work, but at least the concept I strongly approve of.

Implementation-wise though, most of the "guest" players seem like mediocre players, at best.

In fact, 2 of the 4 students listed are better than most of the guests IMO.

EDIT: I also question the point of starting with Imperium Romanum, especially the template you used. It's cities, not warlords. I can't think of a single strategic template that uses cities. Might as well be full dist It'd be terrible either way.

Edited 9/24/2016 21:43:43

Imperium Romanum was chosen because it's a popular map, so beginner players could feel comfortably at first. I could have chosen earth maps, but they have plenty of strategic templates based upon them, so they will be eventually covered up. Introduction to Strategic templates is in stage 2, so it might get boring for players to play the same map over and over again.

My training games start on full distribution and then move to cities and later warlords. I want players to have equal time on all distributions as they all tend to lead into different picking strategies. On Imperium Romanum cities distribution makes 1 territory 1 income bonuses less valuable, which does force players to consider starting in different locations of the map.

Cities and full distributions often lead into situations where players start in the same bonus, so they need to consider it carefully when choosing where to start. I also think that early contact situations are valuable lessons for students as they get to experience what does it mean to face opponent from turn 1 and are taught about holding their position and efficient expansion. I think that full and cities distribution are best to showcase some of the beginners how much cluster-picking can be dangerous or ineffective.

Anyone can be a guest player as long as they don't get booted or ruin conversations/mood of players. Some of them are clearly not very good, but I do believe that they can serve as a stepping stone for my students as they can quickly get the taste of first victory and therefore get more motivated to work harder to beat more players. I also think that even if guest player is not very good at first he can improve thorough training games as game reviews will include his moves and during the games he might receive comments from other stronger players as well.

I agree that full dist and cities allow people to hugely mess up via cluster picking, but I don't really think it's more likely to border turn 1 on those distributions. I'd argue you're more likely to start bordering your opponent when a larger % of all available starting spots are going to be populated turn 1.

My beef with cities and full dist is I just find it much more difficult to make "dominant" picks. The fewer options there are, the more realistic it is to go through various permutations to find the best picks available.

I'd be interested in writing reviews, but I wouldn't claim to be knowledgeable enough on all templates you are likely to use.

ie. I can analyze strat 1v1 games effectively. I think I can analyze strat 2v2 fairly well as well.

I'd be horrible at analyzing 3v3 Europe. Similarly I rarely play Guiroma or any other template on Imperium Romanum.

Edited 9/25/2016 09:02:01

Thank you for your interest. I currently have barely any time to write full reviews, so any type of help is greatly appreciated.

My students at the moment are being introduced to cards and also have been invited to some games with random distribution to check how they act in uncommon scenarios. Later I plan to introduce them to 1 income per x territories setting and later make some basic games on original Earth map to see how my students calculate bonus efficiency into their play. After that I plan to move to strategic templates introduction phase. Prior to this point all the games they had were on Imperium Romanum map with 2-4 manual picks, full/cities distribution, both blockade cards, airlifts and reinforcements. All of them were either 1v1s, 2v2s or 3v3s.

I'll pm you full list of unreviewed games, pick one of them and write what mistakes and strong moves did all players involved make. Some of my players are pretty weak, so try to write in a way that it would be easy to understand even for a beginner.

I have currently privately contacted 3 players offering them training and now await their response. 3 more players either in this thread or privately have expressed their interest in participating too. I'll wait for the end of the week and then depending on the situation will start making training games for new applicants.

At the moment I am looking for additional people interested in writing game reviews. I want Warlight Taining School to function smoothly and game reviews is there I fall behind. You will be allowed to write reviews at your own pace, but it would be best if you would complete at least 1 review per week. You could look for example reviews here: https://warlightgamereviews.wordpress.com/

cool initiative! it's not for me though.

2 cents if you care about my suggestions: long descriptions can be useful, but also quite heavy to digest. i would assume it's best to focus on specific topics one at a time. and have videos of the things being explained instead of walls of text describing the logic. :)

don't think you'll ever best vernita green's school of warlight though. ;)

1v1: 1313 / 1401 (94%)

What can I say...

There are currently ~7 reviews awaiting completion and my main goal is to write 3-4 of them by end of week. Each review is sent directly to student and blog is currently serving as reviews' storage. As time goes on I intend to start including photos in reviews and also sort them by their featured mistakes. I may include video reviews as well, but at the moment that's the last thing I plan to do.

At the moment I am mostly looking for 1-2 additional game reviewers and 1 game teacher. If I manage to find them, WTC will have enough workforce to function properly 100% of time.

Warlight Training School October update

---

During previous month we:

• formed 3rd students group .
  
• made 15 additional games, 6 of them being 1v1 games .
  
• wrote 1 full review and wrote 5 ingame short reviews.
  
• found additional teacher https://www.warlight.net/Profile?p=9522268564 if he proves himself to be skilled enough for the position he will be given a student group (3-5 players) and will be given an option to make his own training program for them.
  
• made an update to training program. Now all the different settings/cards are introduced before moving to different maps/templates.
  
• changed game amount for each of the participant depending on how much free time they have. Students can leave game cycle and return at any time they wish, although boots in games won't be tolerated.

Our plans for the future are:

• look for players interested in doing game reviews. So far the previous players interested in doing reviews haven't written a single review.
  
• look for additional teachers and recruit a new student group for each new teacher.
  
• make a first student only tournament in which students would have a perfect opportunity to learn more about each other and maybe make among new friends with students from different groups.

Players interested in joining as students or guest players are welcome too, but at the moment we already have enough of them, so no active search from our side is done and if you want to participate as one of them, you need to show your own interest.

If you want to get invited to any of positions(teacher, game reviewer, guest player, student) contact me directly via private message or write in this thread.

Warlight Training School November update

---

During previous month we:

• Wrote 1st part of our training program. It contains our goals and list of first 30-40 games from settings introduction phase. Our program can be found here: https://warlightgamereviews.wordpress.com/2016/11/04/warlight-training-school-program/
  
• Reviewed 5 games. Their review can be found here: https://warlightgamereviews.wordpress.com/2016/11/25/mega-review-of-5-1v1-training-games/
  
• Made 17 games, 6 of them being 1v1 games.
  
• Found 2 new students.

Our plans for future are:

• Continue searching for players interested in writing game reviews. So far we have 0 additional game reviewers, but 2 players have promised to help around 2nd half of December.
  
• 4 of our students have requested vacations ranging from 1 to 3 months. 2nd and 3rd student groups have been merged and at the moment we're forming new group.
  
• Update game review blog. At the moment some of its pages are out of date and require updating.
  
• Once we have 10 students, we intend to make a 1v1 student exclusive tournament. It was intended to be made last month, but because of student drop offs got delayed.
  
• Continue working on training program and hopefully finish it. At the moment we need to complete introduction to strategic templates/maps phase and write criteria for exam games

If you want to get invited to any of positions(teacher, game reviewer, guest player, student) contact me directly via private message or write in this thread. We currently are looking for 2 more students and 2 game reviewers. You can apply for other positions as well, but at the moment we are not in desperate need for more teachers and guest players.

I volunteer as teacher. It fits perfectly with what I already do in Illuminati.

This is a great initiative. Best of luck to it!

I would be interested in doing at least one review, but I have some suggestions about reviewing first. The first thing is that I think you would get more response if you allowed people to view the game URLs without having to contact you first. For example, you could post a list of recent games either here or on your blog, perhaps tucked away on a sub-page of your blog so that only motivated people bother to go there. By opening up the process this way, you're sure to get more people interested in reviewing.

Secondly, I think you'd also get a lot more response if you allow people to submit sparse and/or incomplete/partial reviews. These partial reviews would not be given directly to the students, but would only serve as seeds to help a proper review to be written with less effort. You could even allow reviewers to read other peoples' reviews of the same game, so that they can shorten the amount of time they need to discover the key moves in the games. When people ask for feedback for their games in the forums, this is how it works. Someone might write a short blurb about a crucial mistake. Another might write about the picking stage. All you would need to provide the student with would be a compilation/summary of the various feedback bits that scattered reviewers have submitted.

With those two suggestions in mind, I would be interested in helping to provide some of that 'review fodder'. But I would probably have a hard time writing a complete, thorough, comprehensive review of the whole game from every aspect. At least I can save some time/effort for whoever writes the final review. (This is not to say I definitely *couldn't* write a full review, just that I probably won't be able to do so on a consistent basis.)

If you 'open up' the review process like this, to allow a more wiki-like or Amazon.com-like contribution model, I bet you will get a lot more participation, and you will probably end up with good reviews either way. Certainly something imperfect now will be better than something perfect that never comes.

I'll send you a PM, so if you're willing to allow such review fodder efforts, I would be interested to see some of these games that have been played. :-)

Edited 11/25/2016 22:12:41

I would like to apply as a student.

would also like to apply as a student thank you

im not a beginner player. im just trash. i barely win any games, and the ones i do win, its only team games where my team is good. idk if i would qualify as a student. but if i do, may i please join?

I would like to apply as an intermediate student / student helper.

(Help the newbies in some capacity, and learn the advanced stuff.)

Edited 11/28/2016 10:39:31

To new applicants, I'll invite you guys to a 1v1 later today. Pakh will decide on your official acceptance, but myself and DanWL are currently his teachers, and I'm always happy to help someone make progress.

Reviewed 5 games. Their review can be found here: https://warlightgamereviews.wordpress.com/2016/11/25/mega-review-of-5-1v1-training-games/

Sadly the template is rather poor with only 1 pick :(