I'd like to have a short dojo mode for each character with Bnb combos, frame traps etc

General Discussion
#1

Hy everyone, new KI player here, i have not been interested in fighting games for a really long time, but i received the game for free with Gwg last month and i’m absolutely having a blast!
FIrst thing i did was the dojo mode, i grinded through it several times, i did the last few trials more than 20 times, learning each Jago combos till i had a mechanical memory and also did the character story several times.
Then i went online, i used all the dojo knowledge i had and managed to rank up to gold in less than a week.I consistenly did >50% combos, juggles and frametraps!

Then the season restarted, and i tried changing character, but i’m having such a hard time finding out how the other characters works without some kind of trials/dojo mode that goes trough each of their skills, frametraps,juggles, tips etc…
This also stops me from purchasing the season2 because learning a new character without a tutorial brings me too much frustration.

My suggestion was to create individual short dojos for each character, that explain the characters strengths, shows how to use their instinct, a couple of handy frametrap and lets you train 6-7 combos, tips etc…

7 Likes
#2

We been asking for this since day one… hoping S3 brings this to the table. We shall see soon!

3 Likes
#3

This has been requested since season 1. The devs have said that they would like to implement something like this if I remember correctly, but it’s just a matter of resources and priority. We will have to wait and see if it comes with season 3.

I would suggest in the mean time you go to training mode and turn on the frame data, hitboxes etc. You can find out all the info dojo mode teaches you for yourself there with each character. Especially after dojo teaches you how to read the frame data and all the other basic essentials.

#4

It is awesome that you are having fun with the game. If you want to branch out with characters, though there isn’t (but probably should be) a dojo mode for each character, you can look at Infil’s KI guide…

KI.infil.net

This is a great resource, and will get you up to speed on any character that you want to explore.

I’d also say that the Shadows mode is a great place to practice in general on top of playing online.

#5

Glad to know i’m not the only one asking for this!
I can see this being time consuming for them, but i can’t see this as a budget issue…it’s something that should be doable by a small group of expert players and a couple months of works!

I’ll gladly take a look at Infil’s guide this evening.

#6

Welcome to KI.

@Infilament’s guide is fantastic, and he also posts on the boards. Together with some of the other folks on here, there is a ton of great matchup knowledge and advice to be found. Certainly I would recommend reading through the character specific threads if you have the time.

The other truly helpful thing to do, in the current absence of character specific dojos, is to pull up tournament footage and watch people play. Even if you might not be able to figure it out at first, you can get a lot of good ideas and matchup advice from seeing what other good players do.

I’m a guy who hates spending time in the practice mode, labbing things up. But I have watched a ton more KI footage than for any other fighting game I play, and, not surprisingly, I am much better at KI than other games.

#7

Really glad you’re liking KI! I’ve been playing fighting games since the beginning and while I was excited to see KI return when I saw the E3 teaser, I never thought I’d find a game that I enjoyed this much. It’s definitely up there among my all time favorites.

As far as the dojo issue, I agree 110%. They do an awesome job of introducing you to the mechanics of the game as well as the general language of fighting games. But while they go further in depth with Jago, his move set, his combos, and more advanced techniques, it’d be great if they could do that for all characters.

At this point, I don’t know how in-depth each character would need to be in terms of their dojo. I think there are what, 36 lessons, or something along those lines? If they could find a way to whittle that down to maybe 10-12 per character.

I like your suggestion. Maybe early lessons that show specific traits the character has and why they’re good or bad, special moves, instinct, etc. Then perhaps moving on toward some more advanced stuff, higher end tech, more difficult combos, juggles, etc.

I think that’d be highly beneficial to a lot of players.

#8

Where can i find video footage of Jago/Orchid players?

Is there any way to download replays of top players direcly ingame?

#9

Sadly, right now there is no way to look for particular players replays. You just have access to your own. However, you can look up people’s shadow characters and fight them.

I would probably start by looking up streams for tournaments and then when you see good players finding out if those people stream.

You might also post in the character forums for Jago and Orchid “anyone know a high level streamer?”

#10

Dojos for all characters have been requested for a while. I think Adam Isgreen meekly answered “yes” in an interview when asked if they’re in the plans for season 3, so there’s hope I guess.

Notable Jago players include Thompxson and JagoBlake, though a lot of pro players have pocket Jagos. Orchid players include CrazyLCD, Pretty E, Gnarly Feats, CharlieBoy, Bastfree…actually there are a lot of Orchids. I think there were four or five Orchids in the KI World Cup bracket.

In fact, if you’re looking for match footage, I’d probably check youtube for KI World Cup top 32 footage. A lot of great matches happened there.

#11

Check out Grimmmz in Youtube. He’s not in the KI scene anymore competitively, but when he was competing, he was arguably the best Jago player.

#13

Yeah this game has no “BnB” combos. It’s all free style, a lot of those Jago combos in the Dojo are near impossible anyways.

#14

There are BnBs for juggles and some Hisako Instinct only stuff. But yes, the grounded combos are all freestyle.

#15

Oh, I forgot to comment on BnBs!

KI has probabilistic or “mixed” BnBs, which can be derived mathematically, and basically dictate tendencies (i.e. how often you should do certain things) rather than specific combos that you can run out each time (which’d be easily predicted and broken). I’ve been planning on building a web resource to solve for BnBs for each character (or even matchup, because things like punishment for whiffing a counter breaker differ), but season 3 changes are around the corner and I’ve been busy with other things. Nevertheless, some rough rules of thumb:

  • Linkers: due to the reactability of heavy linkers (more on this later), you should split the majority of your linkers between lights and mediums. Actual solutions suggest you should do the occasional heavy, but you’re not changing the outcome much if you don’t. Mind, if you notice your opponent can’t, or struggles to, react to heavies, then you should do all strengths more-or-less uniformly.
  • After light linkers: you want either a light (again, manual preferred) or a heavy auto double most of the time. In practice mixing up the auto double between heavy and medium may throw off your opponent’s reactions and force a mistake, but on paper the damage is more important and an opponent trying to guess-break light or heavy is in unfavourable enough of a position as is. More on this later, but whilst the reactability of a heavy double makes it worse in expected damage terms than a manual, it’s still good enough to be an option here, and helps make the light linker a viable strategy alongside the medium linker.
  • After medium linkers: your main options are medium manual, and either light manual (preferred) or light auto double. You basically want to split your medium linker follow-ups evenly between unreactable mediums and lights. The availability of unreactables in two strengths after an unreactable linker is what makes medium linkers strong – and also makes learning medium linker into medium manual essential. The reactable (medium, heavy) auto doubles aren’t worth enough in mathematical terms to show up as viable alternatives here, though you can probably expect the occasional reactable to work here in practice.
  • After heavy linkers: you get your choice of manuals. Like in the medium linker case, the manual options are too strong to make auto doubles worth the hassle. You can maximize the value of this option by mixing in heavy manuals if you have them, but guess-breaking between two possible strengths is already unfavourable enough for your opponent, and you shouldn’t be doing all that many heavy linkers anyway, so learning heavy manuals is pretty optional.
  • If you do a medium or heavy auto double: this is the only place where it makes mathematical sense to counter break (guess-breaking wrong hurts more than guess-breaking right is worth, so you should only be counter breaking manuals and linkers if you have a good read), and you should only be doing this a quarter of the time (again, unless you have a good read). Not often enough and your opponent can just break everything, too often and your opponent can just do nothing and punish you. You’re looking to catch a reaction break attempt, so you’re placing the counter ~15 frames into the double. Mind, if you’re TJ Combo, then you’re actually better off barraging instead, which is why auto barrage is still the best combo trait in the game.

As for if you’re defending against this? tbh, I wouldn’t attempt a break against any of it unless I had a read (e.g. “I can tell you’re always doing medium linkers after light linkers”), with the exception of medium/heavy auto doubles, which I’d break half the time. It’s better to let your opponent do a bunch of mild-impact manuals and cash out 25% than to lock out on the third hit and eat 40+%, even if the allure of guessing right on an early break and only taking 15% is rather tempting. In mathematical terms, the expected value of a guess break is not favourable for the defender most of the time.

You’ll note that both heavy linkers and light linkers entail doing a reactable thing – the heavy linker itself in the former case, an occasional heavy auto double follow up in the latter case – so why are light linkers preferred to heavy linkers? The answer is partially that you’re not always doing reactable things after light linkers, and partially in that light linker into heavy auto double does big damage, whereas heavy linker into manual is just doing manual damage (although heavy manuals, if you have them, do a reasonable amount of damage). So the risk is comparable, but the commensurate reward is only truly there for the light linker option.

So, to summarize, BnB stuff you should be grinding out in practice mode:

  • Medium linker into medium manual is essential. I’d consider this the most BnB thing in KI. Without this you may as well just be doing auto doubles, and with it you’ve cleared pretty much the only timing-related execution barrier that matters in KI. The other hard links aren’t nearly as relevant: light manuals can be replaced with light auto doubles, and heavy manuals are so infrequent and offer so little benefit as to make them very much optional. If your character has one-frame medium manuals after medium linkers (cough Riptor cough), then life is super difficult.
  • Get used to doing medium manual into light linker, light manual into medium linker, etc. Many new players probably struggle with negative edge here giving them a manual into a linker of the same strength, or get heavy linkers accidentally by holding down a button for too long. You can cut down on that with practice.
  • Get used to the “flow” of combos that use both medium and light linkers, light auto doubles if you’re not doing light manuals, and light linkers into heavy auto doubles. Try to pick up on habits you get into and explicitly try to change them.
  • Learn to capitalize on lockouts and counter breakers. Infil’s guide gives optimal counter breaker combos, so you should at least take a look at those. The guidance I’ve given above only really works out if you take advantage of every lockout that a guess-breaker hands you – if you don’t, then guess-breaking is like taking the same damage as if they didn’t guess-break but with the opportunity to get out for free.

Things this doesn’t cover include manual options after openers (which vary from character to character), pressure and combo conversion (switch counter-hits to “always” in practice mode and practice picking up links on counter hits after frame traps), and resets (which are usually dirty and should be abused).

3 Likes
#16

What a great post.

I could work for a year and not get half of this stuff, but still. What do you think of the fact that a lot of people see a linker and mash mediums? Does that affect your recommendation of medium linker or does that disappear at higher levels?

[quote=“Fnrslvr, post:15, topic:5390”]
The guidance I’ve given above only really works out if you take advantage of every lockout that a guess-breaker hands you – if you don’t, then guess-breaking is like taking the same damage as if they didn’t guess-break but with the opportunity to get out for free.
[/quote] This is, in my opinion, the single most overlooked aspect of the game. If people understood this better there would be no one suggesting the game was about guessing…

#17

Sorry, only just getting around to this.

Well, no and yes.

No, in the sense that it doesn’t invalidate that strategy. To get technical about it, that strategy is derived via a minimax approach (which pretty much make this, and not one-chance break combos, the definition of conservative play), and it also happens to be a (subgame-perfect) Nash equiibrium because of the way the math works out. Less technically, the solution has the property that all strategies your opponent can use against it have the same expected outcome in the long run – that is, your opponent is indifferent about how to play against this.

As an example, let’s say that for whatever reason you decide to do opener -> heavy auto double. We’ll assume that

  • you can find 40% (ignoring opener damage, so this might be 50% with a typical opener) off of a successful counter breaker;
  • your opponent can deal 30% if they punish a failed counter breaker attempt;
  • a combo breaker is worth 0% damage to both sides (which’ll be more-or-less true in season 3, but is pretty close to the truth now tbh);
  • if both sides let the auto double rock then you’ll find 20% on top of opener gamage (i.e. 30% total).

The advice was to counter-break with probability 1-in-4. So, let’s say your opponent always breaks the combo. Then you’re getting

(10% + 0%) * 3/4 + (10% + 40%) * 1/4 = 20%

damage on average by following the advice. Way over on the opposite side of the spectrum, let’s say your opponent never breaks. Then you’re getting

(10% + 20%) * 3/4 + (10% - 30%) * 1/4 = (90% - 20%) / 4 = 17%

damage on average by following the advice. These numbers are a little ad hoc, and the precise solution would involve the kind of precision that we’d struggle to assign meaning to (what does it mean to counter-break 27.9% of the time?), so I’m not expecting them to exactly line up – but hopefully you can see that your opponent can’t change their outcome by much by even radically changing their break habits. It’s not like there’s some magical strategy for your opponent involving breaking with probability p that lets them push the expected outcome below 17%, either: for any value of p, the expected damage looks like

20% * p + 17% * (1 - p)

i.e. they’re going to get a value somewhere between the two (not very far apart) extremes.

Going back to the question of what happens if they’re mashing mediums when they see a linker: well, hopefully when you do a light and they lock out you’re getting something like 40% from the combo, and you’re probably over 10% before they break a medium, so that averages out (assuming you’re evenly split between light and medium linkers) to 25%, which is roughly where I expect it to be.

Anyway, yes it affects my recommendation because if you ignore an opponent’s predictable behaviour then you’re leaving damage on the table. Don’t forget that you’re playing a two-player game. Notably, a Nash equilibrium basically never capitalizes on an opponent’s suboptimal habits, unless they’re doing things they should never be doing (technically, using strategies that aren’t in the support of the equilibrium strategy). So if you want to take advantage of your opponent mashing medium breaker every time they see a linker, then you have to leave the safety of the “optimal” solution and start throwing a lot of light or heavy linkers, or even counter breakers out there to punish their bad habits.

I mean, I guess I set out to find this strategy (to win arguments on the internet, and) to provide a baseline, for new players and also for players who have been doing the same opener one-chance launcher sweep garbage for two years, for whom it might be fair to say they are struggling to find their way to the baseline naturally. Similar baselines exist for oki and footsies in any game, although they’re a little messier to identify, and fighting game vets come in with a sense for those things and tend to adjust to the risk-reward details of the specific game fairly quickly. That doesn’t mean they start ignoring their opponent, it doesn’t mean they don’t develop a unique playstyle or try to make reads based on all manner of things. As far as I can tell, the breaker system in KI is no different.

1 Like