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When the game will have hidden information, then we can talk wbout actually using bluffs, scare tactics and mental psychological manipulation of the enemy.

As of right now, only real thing that works is "hurry the shop is closing / I have to go to work/bed/school !!!"

 akaean wrote:
psychological plays, even basic ones, only stop working at the very highest levels of play.

It helps if your distraction is also a credible threat in its own right. It may be smarter to unload your fire at Sonic Dreadnaughts as opposed to the Defiler with smoke popped and Delightful Agonies that was warp timed directly into your front lines, but that doesn't mean it is going to hurt any less when the Defiler does in fact hit your lines and uses Daemon forge to re-roll all of its hits and wounds. You can say the same thing about a Gallant. Even if your opponent doesn't mind your distraction, they still get a knight slamming into their lines- which will hurt.

Ultimately, the most basic psychological weapon you see all the time is pressure. When you apply pressure to your opponent they are more likely to make a mistake, or make a bad decision. Taking an offensive stance and forcing your opponent to react to you as opposed to vice versa can do a lot to make your onslaught feel overwhelming. Indeed many players- including those you may find at tournaments- can mentally break when things don't go their way early on. Even where the game is far from over- a strong initial push will often times unnerve an opponent all on its own. Some may even prematurely forfeit a game to avoid what they believe will be a lost cause.

The sort of pressure you're talking about isn't psychological, it's tactical. You're talking about presenting multiple threats for the opponent to deal with and asking them to decide which is the right target. There's nothing particularly psychological in that tactic, it's simply a fairly basic tenet of good play - present multiple threats. If the "distraction" is a legitimate threat in its own right it's hardly a distraction at all. Sure, people can become despondent when they start losing but I've rarely seen anyone become despondent through some form of psychological trick, it's always been as a result of what happens on the table, and that's about tactics, not psychology.

Slipspace wrote:
The sort of pressure you're talking about isn't psychological, it's tactical. You're talking about presenting multiple threats for the opponent to deal with and asking them to decide which is the right target. There's nothing particularly psychological in that tactic, it's simply a fairly basic tenet of good play - present multiple threats. If the "distraction" is a legitimate threat in its own right it's hardly a distraction at all.

Exactly. Having redundant paths to victory isn't psychology, it's just good strategy. You take redundant threats, and each of them is a legitimate path to victory. If they deal with the unit(s) aggressively moving up to shoot then the units camped in the back on the objectives win the game. If they ignore the aggressive threat in favor of dealing with the gunline then the aggressive threat gets into combat, slaughters a bunch of stuff, and claims different objectives. In that situation you almost don't care which option your opponent picks because you're happy to win either way. And from your opponent's point of view it isn't a mistake to pick either option, both counters are legitimate paths to victory and it's just a matter of deciding which strategy you think is more likely to succeed and fits better with your own plans.

What people are talking about with "psychology" is using tactics that aren't a threat and trying to trick your opponent into believing that they are. The decoy unit is just a cheap decoy, not really capable of doing much, but you're hoping that your opponent is a clueless newbie and evaluates it poorly. Or you're hoping that you're facing someone who has never played IG and can't accept losses, so they panic and throw everything at the immediate threat instead of just calmly feeding it a sacrificial unit or two to tarpit it long enough to win elsewhere. The plan's success is 100% dependent on your opponent making a mistake, if they make the correct play then it all falls apart. That's why "psychology" is ineffective. Good players won't make the mistake, and you don't need tricks to beat a weak player.