I feel like when people use the word "fundamentals" they're often just referring to slow-paced, Street Fighter-style footsies and whiff punishing, and not any of the other fundamental skills that carry over in all fighting games, like oki, anti-airs, reactions, reading your opponent's habits, etc.

Like you said, it will depend on your character, opponent character's reversal speed, combo, screen position, opponent tech pattern, etc. There are too many variables to make a general comment. If you are playing Merkava though, I do plan on making videos for his set ups. If not, I suggest going to UNI Discord and asking the character specialists there.

@@SeaLeafDojo discord fellas a tad too pretentious. Can't really get useful info besides them saying the game is like jazz or some ethereal concept. I'll just check how you structure it in your merk guide when that comes up and see if anything is applicable for me. I have found ways to finesse it, but I was trying to see if there's any general rules of thumb that I can use as a base since I've more or less self educated in uni. For example in sf6 there's a knockdown frame advantage that guarantees a safejump with a majority of the cast with vs OD reversals. Same thing in most other fighting games I've played, dbfz, kof etc. I'd be surprised if uni doesn't have something similar, but it isn't impossible.

It is definitely more of a read, but you can cover multiple options. There are certain situations where you can either limit the options, like forcing a ground tech by knocking them down in a way that doesn't allow air techs. Character dependent which options lead to that, and combo scaling can affect the knockdown durations. Generally if you do this ground knockdown in the corner they can't tech past you/over you and they can't go backwards any further. They can still delay their wakeup to try to get you to whiff while they're invincible, but you can time a jump in that will either meaty or you'll land and recover before they can act. Just a basic safejump into checking what the situation is, but as you can see from my other thread finding info on safejumps is gonna depend on what your characters online resources look like. Depending on character you might have more luck than me 😭

A vast majority of competitive games, not just fighting games, center a lot around risk reward rps. Idk what to tell you.

There's so much more to the game before the knockdown even occurs and even then okizeme is a lot about baiting and conditioning and reading your opponents habits. It's not always just pure luck. Yes there's alot of rps but the better player will on average make more better decisions that's how every fighting game works.