Hello! I'm a very new player on Warlight and decided to play a Strategic 1 vs. 1 game. It turned out as a loss for me. I'm wondering what my mistake was in this game. Any tips for my improvement would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

http://warlight.net/MultiPlayer.aspx?GameID=1764022

ME and Caucasus are rarely good picks just because of the difficulty to capture/hold them

The Middle East and the Caucasus are two of the hardest bonuses to defend. If anyone starts near you, you will almost certainly be unable to hold them. I would say that picking those as starts was your biggest mistake. Everything other than that seems to result from your starting locations.

Also, if you are going to bunch your starting positions together, then make sure to use troops from both to go for the same territory, like your opponent did. For instance, you could have attacked Iran instead of going into the Caucasus. This is more efficient, and getting early bonuses is a huge benefit.

Thirdly, you continued to fight over a spot you could not hold isntead of expanding. You should have kept fighting to make sure he didn't complete the bonus (or free up troops for him to expand as well), but you should have given up on completing it. You played right into his hands by attacking to get your bonus or directly break his. All he had to do was put troops down in your path, and let the 70% kill rate of defense do the work for him. If you had been able to move around him into neutral territories, you could have made him defend more places. Or, you could have simply backed up and force him to try and defend a big open bonus, or try to take numerous spots at the same time, like he was doing to you.

the secret is playing more games