McCain had no choice but to try to cheese. He already did his presidential bid when the housing bubble patch came out and being a war hero got nerfed into the ground while Democratic economy attacks had that ridiculous buff. He was sitting there with a stack full of nothing but lame ass powers like "suspend my campaign" and had to gamble on a long shot to even have a chance.
Ugh, '08 version was a while ago so I might have forgotten a little. It's true, McCain had few options. For me its just that running a tight, rigorous, defensive campaign is a decent choice when the odds are highly against you (on the other hand, given the situation Obama had the advantage and his strategy was entirely tailored to that, so both were following the meta to the extent that there was one for '08 - despite that I'd say its acknowledged Obama played incredibly good ground game, so it wasn't purely situational advantage). Despite that, its one thing to say "cheese," its another thing to embrace the cheese. It's true in all games with cheese: when you cheese, you go big or go home. Half-assed cheese just diverts resources from the fight. It was probably too late-game to go big cheese, but it was probably still costly in the end, and I'd argue the margin could have been closer. Of course, hindsight is 20-20: Live by the cheese, die by the cheese.
@misko: Except that both candidates look like they're going in the same direction with their VP candidates, basically someone as neutral, vanilla, and 'unexciting' in the sense that they have lower key personalities. Trump went with Pence, who is about as conservative and vanilla republican as they come, while from all appearances, it seems like Clinton might do the same http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/clinton-vp-pick-tim-kaine-226013 (the pick hasn't been announced yet, despite the somewhat misleading URL).
Sure, and that's ok. A little weird with Trump, since he's running such a meta-breaking (and I might even say "cheese-heavy") strategy that no one knew what to expect and figured he might well do something totally weird, but I'd say even then, there's nothing wrong with a safe VP pick. Of course Trump never really had a ton of options to begin with: the "Bridge-burner" rule he's leaned on so heavily has been working out fine for him so far, but one of the costs of using that rule (as well as unprecedentedly bad toxicity score, I mean damn he didn't even try to manage it) is you limit your VP pick pretty severely. Even there, though, there is always,
always a safe pick if not a great situationally useful pick in the deck somewhere. And just because Clinton has more options doesn't that a safe pick isn't the best choice either, especially if trying to focus on bringing down Trump instead of going for a leftist bonus that might leave her vulnerable.
Again, hindsight. Trump may well have made a terrible VP pick or an entirely reasonable one. We'll see. VP's aren't usually game winners or losers anyway. I'm just saying that there is an argument to be made that Trump would have made better use of Palin than McCain would. Maybe Pence will give his build some much-needed stability (Trump's campaign organization skills are incredibad, and while in a build that tosses the meta out the window it's not a death sentence, it still bites him with those gaffes and unforced errors, as we saw during the convention event), or it could provide Hillary with a target without dodge or evasion that she can just hammer away at. Time will tell.
Veep picks are made primarily on the basis of movement ranges.
Noob-trap though. Obviously, a high movement range is useful, when it comes to the nitty-gritty movement ranges have a lowish winrate for a reason. People ignore more important things like synergy with the rest of your campaign. The classic example is McCain having what I consider to be a fairly tanky campaign, but instead going with a hyper-aggressive VP pick that was more of a liability than anything back in the '08 tournament. Terrible choice: forced to spend a lot of resources on defending a magnet for enemy fire when the whole point of his strat was to survive Obama's significantly more fragile build and string it out while poking holes in Obama's defense. And a high point cost to boot. Plus Palin's preferred terrain was terrible; Alaska? And all this for what? Her hyper-aggressive attacks played well enough on their own, but since she didn't fit with the rest of the campaign she was forced to go on her own to do any damage, but that left her vulnerable to counterplay and let Obama dictate the terms of the fight. Palin would have probably been better with Trump, for example, since he runs a hyper-aggressive lightening fast build that focuses on dominating the playfield and not getting bogged down in "fact on fact" fights that he never wins anyway. Biden, by contrast, was another unorthodox choice, but he synergized well enough with Obama's campaign that Biden was brought back for Obama's successful "aggressive defense" strategy as the reigning champion in 2012.
In any case, never pick a VP to dictate the terms of the fight, which is what you want with movement range. The Candidates' intrinsics are what define the battle; the VP's have intrinsics too, but again, it's a noob-trap. The only important stats for a VP are whether they have (USEFUL) favorable terrain bonuses or they synergize well with your build. Other than that you may as well go for a safe pick than one that will require you to go out of your way to utilize and may well do more harm then good.
This is how politics should be done, ok folks? I don't want to hear any more of that boring real world shit, all /tgpol/ all the time, got it?
Why thank you. I'll be here all week. I'd totally play a politics tabletop though.
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1387087 times)