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General / TheAdj UBAR COMMANDOR article

« on: December 20, 2004, 05:11:18 PM »

Even the best fades are defeated with some planning and understanding.  I know as I've beaten exigent and terror fades in pubs before as comm with only pub marines, it's very doable if you exploit  the weaknesses of aliens.

First look at what you're doing on marines.  Are you locking down hives and rooms with turrets or electricity?  When is your arms lab and/or obs complete?  When do you start upgrading your armory?  These are the most important tech questions you should be asking yourself.  You can do plenty of things, and each one has it's own risks and benefits.  

My normal build is this: IP > Armory > 2 RTs closest to base > Arms Lab > RT > Armor1 > RT > Advanced Armory.  This does Several things, namely I'm getting the longest build time in the game for marines (the armory up) going very early in the game, usually by 3 minutes at the latest, often by 2:30.  This means by 6 minutes I have HMGs roaming the map, which is VERY dangerous to fades.  Contrary to popular belief shotties aren't the best fade killer, HMGs are FAR better in almost every situation to shotguns versus any lifeform bar possibly lerks.  If you have an advanced armory you shouldn't be dropping shotties, you should be dropping HMGs as often as possible, they're absolutely devastating.

Secondary build is this: IP > Armory > 2 RTs closest to base > Obs > RT > MT > 2 More RTs > Arms Lab > Armor1 > Advanced Armory.  This gets the Advanced armory at 7-8 minutes but you have motion tracking, which is a superior map control upgrade compared to anything else.  Use motion tracking like this:  As the commander, watch where aliens are going and direct marines to where they WILL be, not where they are.  If you are on ns_tanith and see waste has half a bar left with a skulk chewing on it, don't send the marine at MS to waste, send him to west to wait on the skulk.  Prevent aliens from attacking your RTs by simply having marines wait on them.  Proactive beats reactive in EVERY situation.  Contain them near the hive by constantly annoying them so they ignore your RTs and getting a second hive up,  then push in with HMGs and end it.

Last build is : IP > Armory > 2 RTs closest to base > Advanced Armory > 2 RTs > Arms Lab > Armor1.  This gets an Armory at 3-3:30 gametime and absolutely dominates aliens.  The increased availability of HMGs usually shreds fades, which tend to appear just as HMGs push out of base, usually resulting in them being shredded on the first run-in since they expected LMGs and met the first HMG push.  If I do this build I almost always go Armor2 instead of Weapons1, because what will happen is a skulk gets a lucky ambush and gets in 3 bites, which kills an Armor1 marine.  With Armor2 skulks take 4 bites to kill a marine, 6 with 2 medpacks given anytime after the second bite.  So if the marine has ANY aim at all he'll kill the skulk and continue pushing on, which is what you have to do to keep marines in the game as commander, sac res to push them forward.

Notice that all of my main build orders rely on an early advanced armory and armor1 fairly quickly.  That's because these 2 things will destroy aliens faster than any other upgrade combo in the game.  Shotguns are heavily upgrade dependent while HMGs are not.  Shotguns work this way: They deal damage based on pellets that connect per shot, not overall damage from just hitting a skulk with a shot.  If you wing a skulk with 2 pellets it will chuckle and chew your face off.  The shotgun has 5 inner pellets and 5 outer ones, both groups of pellets representing a pentagon shape.   It is very difficult to get all of the inner pellets and an outer pellet to hit a skulk, so what you want to focus on is getting the inner pellets to land.  The problem is this:  At certain upgrade levels it takes 6 pellets to kill a skulk.  This is why sometimes you shoot a skulk in the face and it still chews your face off, you simply didn't do enough damage with 1 good shot to kill it.  This is how it works:  

6 lvl0 pellets at hive1
5 lvl1 pellets at hive1
6 lvl1 pellets at hive2
5 lvl2 pellets at hive2
6 lvl2 pellets at hive3
5 lvl3 pellets at hive3

You should always keep the upgrade level at 5 pellets for a shotgun, which is why I prefer the HMG.  It requires less end-user skill to drop skulks, which resuilts in a higher reliability for HMGs.  As a commander, reliability and common sense are your best friends.  

Fades are far easier to prevent than to kill.  This is the easiest way to rape fades:  Do one of the build orders I posted above.  When those marines have gotten up their RTs, have them make their way straight to alien RTs and proceed to cut them down, even the hive rt.  It's often easy to simply walk into the hiveroom and shoot down the alien RT given enough marines usually 3-4 (1-2 usually results in people crying spawncamp because they have no clue what you're doing).  Use this method of determining alien economy: .5*# of aliens players = Good Economy.  Anything higher early game is a gamble, and anything less isn't very good.  If they go for higher you should immediately stop capping excess RTs and push their nodes, because what they're doing is dropping a lot of RTs so they can all go higher lifeform and get the second hive up that faster, which means most likely early on you won't have but 1 fade at the most.  Shredding the RTs before earn the res back for them effectively stops them from accomplishing their plan, plus aliens are forced to attempt to defend their RTs with just skulks early on instead of killing your RTs and harassing MS.  If they got less than the equation, then have people cap RTs while you pressure their RTs.  This way your economy gets exponentially stronger while theirs weakens under marine attack.  If they don't defend their RTs they don't have much res, which means if they even manage to get the second hive up, it won't be replacable.  If they have around .5, pressure their RTs really hard with most of your marines and use 1-2 to cap the map and defend the built RTs, this keeps the aliens busy while the tech is going and your economy just gets stronger and stronger while the alien RT withers on the vine.

The entire point to this post is that if you combine the correct build order with the correct early game strategy, by the time the midgames comes around you have this:  A strong marine economy,  an advanced armory and at least 1/1 or 0/2 upgrades, an obs going up or up, a weak alien economy, delayed fades, and a second hive starting after 5:00.  What this means is you have HMGs against Hive1 fades and skulks, which  usually results in marine wins if you simply do something not enough commanders do: PUSH THE SECOND HIVE BEFORE IT GOES UP.  Often marines respond to the second hive only once it's up, you have to push on it before it's done.  If you can't win by brute force, use wit.  I'll use bast as an example here.  If you can't get down a building refinery hive, simply keep aliens busy by saccing marines on it, get some res together and shotty rush engine while they're still stroking each other off after beating that refinery attack.  Often after one attack aliens will simply not think another one is coming, or they sit around and don't even hit RTs.  

Getting in a full Shotgun/LMG salvo in a hive usually drops it 30-40%, depending on what upgrades and exactly what weapons are available.  Pay attention to what weapons ups are out and what weapons are hitting the hive, then calculate how much damage they did.  Shotguns and HMGs do 20-25% per clip, while LMGs do 1/14th per clip.  LMGs alone won't do much damage, calculate them in pairs.  Each pair does 1000-1500 damage together.  Use these numbers to figure out damage over time, and relay that to marines so they have a clue how much damage the hive can take.  Keep in mind hive healing + dcs won't do anything but really repair single LMG damage, they don't heal very fast.  A gorge will heal a hive 1% per spray, which means it takes 20 sprays to heal 2 LMG clips/1 HMG clip/1 shotty clip.  They can only slow damage to the hive this way in time for aliens to kill them, but it won't survive long if you can keep battering the hive with bullets.  

Generally if a fade is within healing range, don't focus on killing it, and it's generally useless to shoot an onos in the hiveroom anywhere unless 2+ HMGs can focus fire on it for 10+ seconds, which will always bring it down even when being healed by everything possible (Regen, DCs, hive, healspray).  Skulks are easy targets, even with a REAL shotgun rush at least 1 marine should be picking off skulks, they're so easy to kill and once they die it starts to drag the spawn queue.  I can't think of a reason to not have 1 person shooting skulks, unless no one on the team has above average aim, in which case they're probably better off shooting the hive unless they have an EASY shot on a skulk.  This is why HMGs are powerful:  A hive attack with HMGs will shred aliens almost instantly, and then it's easy to kill them as they spawn will working the hive down.  Shotties aren't as easy to do this with, it's much more difficult given how the shotty works.

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General / Pancaking, The Definitive Guide

« on: October 25, 2004, 10:33:40 PM »

Lightning_Blue told me to start a discussion here after I was banned tonight, and to explain what I told him to the community.

Pancaking is exploiting the lack of a vertical speed cap in such a way as to make the lerk unhittable by conventional means, which means the lerk moves so fast as to be untrackable by anyone or practically unhittable.  In order to exploit this, a lerk must fly vertically only (This is important later) and move as far up and down as possible as fast as possible.  In larger rooms, this results in a speed that can top over 2000, and renders the lerk difficult to hit.  However, moving up and down doesn't mean a lerk is pancaking.  Any horizontal movement adds a cap which prevents the lerk from continually gaining speed, thus it's no longer pancaking.  Avoiding marine fire by moving in a fashion that renders the lerk difficult to track is not pancaking, it's smart flying.  In small hallways, pancaking is impossible by definition because the lerk can't break the speed cap due to the lack of vertical room to move.  Pancaking is not moving up and down from ceiling to floor, it's moving vertically from celing to floor in an effort to lag the hitboxes enough to make the lerk impossible to track by regular means.  A small room doesn't allow for massive speed (in fact you rarely break default cap speed in hallways), thus making it impossible to lag the hitboxes.  Please understand this difference, and amend the rules to reflect this ackowledgement.  "OMG PANCAKER" doesn't apply to lerks that kill you with bite and were difficult to hit, it applies to lerks that fly up and down and do nothing else in order to lag their hitboxes intentionally.  Diving at you isn't pancaking, as the lerk will eventually have an uncapped DESCENDING speed, but not climbing speed, which is the actual exploitive part of the physics.

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General / Lerk Tactics - Lame Or Not?

« on: August 05, 2004, 05:04:34 PM »

So lately I've regulared on the Lunixmonster due to one fact: I haven't been kicked for pancaking.  Every other server that has the admin presence that lunixmonster does that isn't a clan server has either permanently banned or continually kicks me until I stop going lerk.  Not cool when I'm trying to get my practice in for the next CAL match or random tournament.  

I've also had people in at least 1 game a day complain A LOT about my playing style as lerk.  I thought I'd define why and how I do what I do to minimize the crying from the people that read this forum, which in general are the only ones that count.  I discovered that the reason a lerk dies is one of three reasons: It stays too long in combat and gets whittled down, it takes a direct hit or series of them and dies instantly, or it gets ambushed in some way.  These are common to all aliens, but the lerk has special circumstances.  

The first example is usually because the lerk finds one lmg marine and tries to kill him, yet can't do it fast enough, and either that one marine eventually kills the lerk or backup arrives for the marine and picks you off from the doorway.  I solve this with my diving attack flight style.  Marines have a hard time tracking a vertically moving target, so constantly changing my height makes it impossible to track accurately.  I stay hear the ceiling, then dive down, attack a few times, the go back to the ceiling and repeat.  If more than 1 marine or larger weapons are around, I try to force them to unload ammo.  This is what generally makes people angry, as I fly around the room acrobat style and force them to expend ammo trying to kill what would otherwise be a very easy target.  The power of the new flight model is the possibility of flying around in an impossible to follow manner, while keeping tabs on where you actually are.  It's easy to lose focus and forget where you are in a room and die trying to leave the wrong way.

Second example is mainly for shotguns/GLs/HMGs.  A single shotgun blast with all 8 pellets connecting will drop most lerks dead, and is a #1 killer for lerks.  I avoid this in two ways.  First I get carapace, which makes 1 shot kills with a shotgun impossible at full health.  Second is my flight style once again.  shotguns are less likely to get a full 8 pellet hit the further you are away from them, so the least amount of time you spend close to the marine the better.  The preferred tactics are either diving in a random pattern to minimize damage (the higher the angle the better, its hard to track when you have to look all the way up and rotate around that point) or what I've done lately vs solo shotgunners.  Dive to their feet, bite, then hop over their head and bite from behind.  It's hard to flip around and shoot something and continue doing it.

Third example is the one you really have to watch for.  A good ambush is impossible to detect and difficult to escape.  It involves either baiting a lerk for the "easy" kill or doing something sure to draw the lerks attention.  Once it's in position, the doors are blocked in some fashion to prevent easy escape.  Avoiding the ambush is usually difficult to achieve, and escaping isn't much easier.  Usually reaction skills keep you alive, the moment you see or hear something suspicious you change your flight pattern so whoever was trying to hit you can't follow you.  If anyone has ever shot at me from behind with a shotgun, you know what I'm talking about.  I immediately switch directions and weave up and down, which makes it hard to get a good shot on me.

GUIDELINES
For some reason people feel the need to get angry at me when I play like this, so I started this thread to ask one question: Why?  Why does this bother you so much?  This is for the people that don't like my style of playing for whatever reason to say why, and for general conversation about the lerk and/or pancaking in general.  Don't flame me (flame the playing style), don't flame each other, and stay on topic.  Flame away.