Tictacs Operation Blue Pearl

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these tictacical discussions, and since I can rarely be arsed talking about it in the middle of a game, lets do it during work instead 🙂 The question is how highly should we prioritise the harbour office and fish market on Blue Pearl when playing with no commander on an infantry only server.

From a tactical point of view the Harbour Office is almost exactly the same as the TV station on Sharqi, and the Gatehouse/Factory on Karki. The fish market is similar to the Construction site on sharqi, and Market/warehouse on Karki, except that the spawn points around the fish market are more concentrated in one area (specifically the buildings east of the yard) whereas the market on karki and construction site on sharqi have a wider range of spawn locations.

So, first of all, the tactical relevance of the Harbour Office is, imho, deceptive in these cricumstances, and I believe there’s a tempation to go for it because of it’s importance when vehicles are turned on. There are no resources there with these rules in play, and this leaves the points geographic location as the only factor to consider when deciding whether to attack/defend it. No control point is worthless, so don’t take my opinion here to mean that I think we should always leave it alone, but I honestly believe the time invested capping the harbour office is normally better invested elsewhere. The point is isolated, which means it takes a good couple of minutes to get there (and then again on the way back), and to take an entire squad away from the main battle arena is often a waste of resources, especially when it’s a supposedly one of the better squads on the team (given that we at least try to work together).

Amongst the chaos of a public server there is normally one squad on each side doing the rounds capping, and they’ll normally keep pace with each other until something interupts the pace of one group. If they meet head on, one squad will lose out, giving the other the chance to establish a control point advantage. The squad who lost then have to either win the next encounter, or risk splitting up in order to even things up again. You will of course have random elements in each team working on their own, and if they’re good/better than the random players of the opposition, they can come to the rescue of the main squad when this happens, but you can’t rely on it. Anyway if you lose pace in those circumstances, fair play, touch luck etc, but another way to lose pace is to go off the beaten track to a point like the harbour office, which hands the opposition the chance to cap two, sometimes three, points elsewhere on the map while you take that one, and where is the sense in that?

There are certain times you should go for it though, such as when trying to establish a foothold on the mainland while playing US, or when it’s the US team’s only point when playing as China (although you could argue it’s better to defend the bridges in this case). It’s also worth going for if the enemy has a sizeable squad up there, which you feel you can kill, as the game is generally won on tickets lost through kills, rather than ticket drain (of which there is none if either side holds at least one point). The harbour office is a great defensive position, and is a great Alamo type point of last resort from which China can hang on from if overwhelmed elsewhere. For that reason, the US team might consider capping it second last, to force the Chinese to spawn where they can be hit easily in the main town, and while they are likely spawning in the town anyway (to save themselves a walk), it saves you later having to attack against a large defence when china have no choice but to spawn there.

A hard decision is when you’re on the back foot as China and have already lost the harbour office. If you’re losing badly on the mainland, there’s a chance that an organised defence from the harbour office might just save you, but you need to cap it first. The problem here is that it could very well be the last throw of the dice, as you will be leaving the last point for the randoms in your team to defend while you make it all the way across to the harbour, and if you’re in this position, it’s not likely they’ll hold the last point for long. Anyway you don’t want your last roll of the dice to be made against the odds, so if the harbour office is well defended, you better be confident you’ll succeed. There was an example of this last night, when we were being attacked at the contruction site by two enemy squads, one from the harbour office, and one from the yard. I disagreed that we should attack the harbour because they were coming from there, and our priority at this time was to keep a foothold anywhere on the map. To attack the harbour office would have taken our squad away from the construction site which we were in the middle of losing, and could have left us in the position of an all or nothing scenario against a point being used as an active spawn point. The alternative was much better, spawning at our other point, the fishmarket (which would also be lost soon), and run like fuck to the undefended eastern points, capping each of them before returning our attention to the west and harbour. That they were spawning at the harbour probably assisted us in this.

Wall of text there so I’ll briefly have my say on the fish market. It’s a kill zone, a nade/noob tube spammer’s wet dream, and when the enemy team is full of said people, it’s a waste of tickets to cap it. They’ll just get it back cheaply anyway, since we’re not doing the same to them. If we try to cap it, we need to be covering the people on the point, and not loading the point with bodies. Granted it’s a central location and normally that gives you options in where to attack, but in reality it spawns you beside the yard, which is very predictable and allows the opposition to pick up a few cheap kills.

Anyway that’ll do, lunch is almost over. Just one final thing to say is that I’m not very entrenched in these views, so feel free to argue if you disagree, and my mind is open, but you’ll need to make a good case if you do 🙂