i havent played that much KI, but i figured its the strongest combo strategy when you are able to randomize your own combos on the fly without confusing yourself?
Not really. There are some characters where that's a thing (cinder comes to mind with a zillion routes), but i'd say most aren't really like that.
The "core" of the combo system is (summarizing A LOT)-
- Get a hit
- Auto double (basically a normal)
- Linker (basically a special move)
- repeat 2-3 a few times
- Ender (While each hit in the combo does damage, landing an ender cashes out the bonus damage the combo has built up and has extra effects like building meter or wall splats).
Both auto doubles and linker's can be done in L/M/H varieties. Auto doubles hit twice and are slower the stronger the button used, linkers hit 1/2/3 times depending on L/M/H. Obviously the H versions do more than the L, and they also build up more bonus damage. Worth noting you can basically always do a L/M/H after a previous move. It's not like a L linker will only combo into a L or M autodouble or whatever. All 3 options are always available.
For the defender to break, they have to use the same strength as the move you're hitting them with. Lights are so fast you have to guess, mediums are reactable if a bit difficult, and heavies are absolutely reactable. Especially with linkers where you can just count the hits.
So there's a lot of baiting your opponents into trying to guess wrong and break at the wrong point or with the wrong strength. If you fuck up a break, you enter a lockout state, and cannot break for the next few seconds, so your opponent gets to rack up the damage and go nuts.
The final piece of this is that while you're doing a combo, you can counter break by entering the breaker command. It will drop the combo if your opponent does nothing, but if they try to break in a short window after you do that, you get a counter breaker. This locks them out and resets the combo meter (basically how many hits a combo can get), and often leads to a shitload of damage (60% minimum usually, often more).
So in short, you could only use one combo the entire match and still force the opponent to guess/mix them up by varying the strength of the attacks. You don't need to memorize a million routes to try and make sure your combos finish. Just knowing a few basic combos adds enough variety to play.
Now there are things like manuals (rather than using an auto double you link a normal. These actually care about frame data but are much harder to break), and a bunch of other mechanics, but with what I just explained (which is way simpler than it sounds) you could easily climb the ranks.