Assignment 2: Replay review

A written review of one of your own bot matches, in the format Day9 used to teach StarCraft players to watch themselves

Due: 30 April 2027 · Weight: 20%

The brief#

Watch your own replay. Narrate what you were thinking. Then say what you should have been thinking.

Day9’s replay reviews were not about the game; they were about the player watching it. He would stop on an ordinary moment — not a fight, usually a worker walking somewhere — and ask what the person had been paying attention to when they made that call. That question is the whole assignment. You are not reviewing a match, you are reviewing the person who played it, and you happen to have unusually good access to what they were thinking.

The mistake this assignment is designed to catch is the highlight reel. It is very tempting to find the three moments where you died and write those up, because deaths are legible and they feel like the errors. They usually are not. A death is the last event in a chain of quieter decisions — where you stood, what you had not looked at, what you bought instead of the thing that would have saved you — and the quiet decisions are the ones that repeat. A strong review finds a decision you made eight or ten times without noticing, and shows that it was the same decision each time.

Use a bot match. Bots are predictable, which is a weakness when you are trying to improve and an advantage when you are trying to see yourself: what varies between your games against them is mostly you.

By week 8 the course has given you a vocabulary for this — the resource lens, the decision each week was built around, and the control material that week 8 itself teaches. Use it. A review that says “I played badly here” is an observation; one that says “I spent time to buy space I had no way of holding” is an analysis.

What you submit#

• A written report, submitted as a document, identifying the match by its replay ID so we can watch what you watched.
• The report must stand on its own. Assume your reader has the replay available and has not opened it.

There is no length requirement. Reviews that find one repeated decision and follow it properly are consistently better than reviews that list six.

How it is marked#

Read for three things, in this order: whether the decision you identified is genuinely a repeated one rather than a single dramatic moment; whether your account of what you were thinking is honest rather than reconstructed to look reasonable; and whether your proposed alternative is something the course has actually taught you to do by week 8. Writing quality matters only where it obscures the analysis.