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I would struggle to call that a good session towards the end of last night, but what was amazing about it was the fact we won an alert on Woodman while being comprehensibly outnumbered on the server. I’m posting this for posterity because I see arguments often stating that you can’t do anything versus numbers, but this alert proves my point that yes you can, if you play well and organise yourselves well.
The Alert started with us already in the middle of an assault at Allatum biolab on Indar, which was held by the VS who traditionally overpopulate this server, and we stayed here for a while since the goal of the Alert was to capture as many of the 9 biolabs across the 3 continents as we could. We actually almost capped this with our 2CA platoon of approx 48 outfit members and some randoms, but at the crucial moment the Vanu turned up in their droves and forced us back to square one. The 2CA squad was being supported by assorted randoms, plus Paddy, Ben, Gary, and myself in our own separate squad but following the lead of 2CA as Alex was in there and relaying the commands (there wasn’t enough room for all of us in the main squad).
Anyway, Biolabs are the worst kind of alerts on this server because it is almost always a numbers game with the Vanu and NC often crashing our disorganised line with more MAX units than we have people, and at Allatum this is exactly what happened. We were fighting 4 to 1 odds at one stage, with 48+ players on our side (so at least 200 enemies), yet even against that we almost capped it. We didn’t though so the plan was to just tie as many Vanu down here to relieve pressure elsewhere.
Meanwhile on Easamir we were in the process of being warp gated by both the VS and NC pushing from two directions. The VS in particular were trying to create a buffer between a biolab they had managed to capture from us, and they were using 60-80 guys to do this. This meant that when our squad decided to switch our focus to Easamir so as to stop the Vanu and push them back, we were already outnumbered approximately 60% to 40%. At the first base this wasn’t obvious, perhaps because they were sleeping and hadn’t expect us to respond, but when we started our push back the shit really started hitting the fan.
It was the kind of fighting where you could barely move, and barely see anything either because there was smoke everywhere. The vanu used the smoke but it seemed to hurt them as much as us because twice I was caught in the middle of the smoke but in a corner, so ended up inside the crowd of vanu and just emptying my mag in the crowd around me like a maniac, dropping bodies while noone was able to tell who was doing the shooting. Those epic moments oversell the situation though because it was a grinding fight for the most part, although there were some big swings in fortune as on at least two occasions it honestly seemed like we’d been pushed back ourselves, having been seconds from securing the win, and then we’d somehow claw ourselves back into contention again and eventually managed the win.
This carried on for about half an hour as we slowly won back our territory from the Vanu and secured the base which we could then use as a launch pad for our own assault on Andvari biolab. We must have toiled at this for another half hour at least but the Vanu defense was very strong. Since I was still in the lead position in a squad with Paddy and Gary I could hear the calls going out on the leadership channel trying to rally the randoms across Indar to put pressure on the Vanu’s line so as to keep as many of their squads tied down there as was possible. Despite this they still outnumbered us 2 to 1 on Andvari.
We tried one final MAX push, to try and hold the shield generator room before trying to take down the SCU. We succeeded certainly in this first part of this, holding the shield gen for well over the 2 minutes it took to kill it, but the waves of Vanu trying to push us out prevented us from moving onto the SCU. Very gradually we managed to do this though by working the flanks, distracting the herd, and pulling them out of position while we pushed very slowly forward towards the SCU and finally took it down. They were still able to launch themselves into the Biolab from their next base and from several mobile spawn points they’d setup up underneath the biolab, but taking out the SCU broke the back of their defense and we capped the base. I happened to be dead at this point and noticed that the population was 64% Vanu vs 36% Terran, or what I’d estimate as approx 60 Terran vs 107 Vanu. I can’t recall whether I’ve ever seen a biolab taken against such odds, since the design so heavily favours the defense.
We did it though and pushed on to secure the biolab by creating a buffer of territory around it, and beating back a medium sized NC zerg who never really established a foothold. We win the alert with 4 Biolabs vs 3 for the Vanu, and 3 for NC, and we then celebrated by carting 2 or 3 Terran platoons in about 10 galaxies to a hill outside the Vanu warp gate on Indar, where we sat and trolled any Vanu aircraft trying to fly out of there on their own.
Although the session felt a bit like watching a team grind out a 1 nil win in football, the result was still fantastic, and just to illustrate this further, check out the graph below showing the population on the server as the alert progressed. The Terran republic are represented by the red line:
http://ps2alerts.com/alertdetail.php?AlertID=2534
I know this will interest very few people here, but as I say, I’m most just posting this so I can reference the event in later arguments 🙂
It was a fun evening. I’m starting to get the hang of the basics now, it was a bit difficult without knowing the basic layouts of the bases or even how to get into them at some points so I found myself getting left behind a few times 🙂
Played infiltrator for almost the entire time, I tried going engineer at one point to repair the max’s but I just couldn’t get any kills with the engineers weapon. Infiltrator was a lot of fun tough, especially inside that biolab at the end. I was basically sneaking to the vanu’s flanks and then assassinating anybody who stopped for a second with 2 quick headshots from the stock semi auto rifle before recloaking and repeating. The semi auto is also very good for hip firing in close range.
Overall though I was still mostly confused haha. Didn’t know why we were attacking the places we were attacking, no idea how outnumbered we were and no sense of any kind of large tactical manoeuvres going on around me or anything like that.
I was surprised when you said you were doing ok as Infiltrator tbh, but I guess you’re on a one man mission to change my perception of sniper’s in games by actually being useful 🙂 I obviously play a lot of the class as well, and while 99% of the time I’m equipped with a SMG, if you’re playing in CQC you might appreciate two tips which I found very useful in learning the class.
1. Use recon darts as often as you can and upgrade them to at least level 3 (higher if you can) asap. If you’re on or near an ammo pack, resupply and keep spamming those darts everywhere. Not only does it massively help both yourself and your team mates in terms of situational awareness but you will also rake xp in at a fairly steady rate, especially when it’s a huge fight like several last night, and at that tech plant on Miller the other night. The upgraded darts are well worth the investment, especially if CQC is your thing, as they increase the duration of the darts and range at which they detect enemies, while also adding to the amount you can carry each level after lvl 3. It’s one of the most important class traits but often underused.
Oh and before I leave darts, you can move around cloaked when enemy darts are out and not show on their minimap, although obviously they’ll hear your cloak, and they can do the same vs your darts.
2. Understand how the cloak works. You’ll have noticed yourself that the cloak is not entirely invisible (the exception being the new stalker cloak which is very difficult to spot – but you can’t carry a primary weapon if using it). In daylight it’s easy for most people to see the other cloaks if they’re paying attention, and it’ll be visible out to about 40 or 50 metres at times (obviously the further you are the harder it is) so use cover when you can and if you can’t avoid moving in front of people, try and keep in their peripheral vision. When you slow down your movement or stop, the cloak becomes less visible (by design), and the most invisible state you can achieve is sat still crouched.
The base layouts are easy enough to learn and that obviously comes with game time, although perhaps we should play more on Amerish while you learn the other game mechanics, as pretty much everyone is learning the lay of the land there again with the update which more or less completely changed it last week. Great map for infantry btw.
In terms of tactics, there’s a good bit going on across the whole server at any given time, and especially during the alert, but you’ll not hear or see the chat unless you’re in a leader position within the squad or platoon, and also have the command channel unlocked (100 certs – and believe me it’s not a priority investment so leave it until level 25 or 30 at least). The channel is quite often a pain in the ass tbh as too many people on it have they’re microphone’s set to transmit at too low a volume, so I have to whack up the volume just to hear them, but then when others talk, I can’t hear squad chat or TS – which is why you may hear me say something then cut off for a few seconds. The best thing last night was in having Alex in the 2CA squad as that way we could follow what is normally a half capable squad who try things like MAX crashes and operate quite effectively. The one draw back with not being in the main platoon was that we couldn’t hear the organisation of the MAX crash, and so had to largely rely on our own experience in knowing what to do. Next time we’re on Woodman, we can get in to the 2CA squad itself and you’ll see what I mean.
The overall strategy was obviously to take biolabs, so the territories we attacked or defended were all on the path towards a biolab, which the lattice system means we have to cap before we can make our move on the biolab itself. This is fairly straightforward, but getting around the various obstacles we encountered along the way is where subtlety is – eg in finding our way around that tank battle in order to cap the base before the biolab. That was actually a very simple move but worked so well that we had most of the capture timer progressed by the time the masses of Vanu out on the plains even had a notion of what was happening behind them. By the time they did, few wanted to get out of their vehicles, and those who did soon died vs our guys on the point since they were trying to move in drips and drabs.
Anyway, better check what’s going on tonight instead of turning short replies into walls of text.
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