Tactics:Taking Towers

[Doppler]

Welcome gentle reader, since my previous posts on small unit tactics have been fairly well recieved I thought I'd give a new one a crack to try and clear up some definite tactical shortcomings.

For the purposes of my post we'll look at two difrent types of tower captures. Contested and noncontested. Noncontested are obviously those towers that show little or no resistance. Usualy one infiltrator can take these out. Contested tower assaults are against towers that a squad or squads are launching active operations against one of your facilities from. Or what seems to happen more often it's one faction or anothers last toe hold on the continent/area of operations, and you'd just assume move on to bigger and better things. Lets cover some basic rules:

1. High ground trumps all.

2. Friendly fire kills.

3. Teamowk wins battles.

The ideal way to penetrate a contested or heavily contested trower is via airdrop on top of the tower (see first rule) obviously this is easier said then done as any good tower defenders will be using those turrents for all their worth, as they should. When penetrating the ideal team is one guy to disable the door. A max ready to move into the breach, a decimator/sweeper man ready to follow the max and another squad member to cover them all from behind so they dont get bushwacked while performing their entrance. For the purpose of our excersize let us assume you dont have air transport for whatever reason and are breaching at the ground floor. The ideal way to do this it seems is to use the above breaching method and break off into two teams. Our base necleus for a tower taking is 5 guys. 3 to go upstairs, 2 to go down, obviously depending on your squad composition/number of guys free and handy you can have more. Your three guys going upstairs must at bare minimum include a hacker or better. One guy with anti-MAX weaponry. One guy with the ability to kill infantry quickly. The latter can be accomplished through jackhammer/thumper/sweepershotgun/chaingun or through an anti infantry max. I've found that if everyone on my tower clearing team uses surge the fight is generaly very decisive because they can easily use the corners of the stairwell as cover. The jub of the two man team is fairly simple. Both are hopefully configurations that can kill infantry quickly as they pop out of the spawn tubes. Simply move downstairs and kill anyone not wearing blue (ok i'm biased). Then hold the position for as long as possible. The team going for the CC fights there way up. One man posts near the central colum of the stairwell so he can still cover in the updirection with his gun while being ready to shoot downstairs if he has to. The other holds the line against attack fromb elow until the attack is completed.

Now obviously these tactics are soemwhat ideal, the biggest caveat of all this is no matter what strategy you use, dont go it alone, do communicate with yoiru squad/factionmates and watch your fields of fire.

Final notes will be on approaching a defended tower. I thought this went without saying befor eI manned a turrent on evening and got massive kills. So when approaching a tower,

1. Zig and Zag when on open ground.

2. Don't be on open ground in the first place.

3. Suppress turrents with antivehicular fire. Fire go to cover, move to another spot to fire again, repeat withf riends.

4. Watch for mines on the ground surrounding the tower.

5. Approach from the side away from the facility if possible as it is usualy the least defended.