Special Operations and Squads vs Platoon gameplay.

[LoliLoveFart]

With the Nexus and eventual MLG intergration I have been noticing a few more people interested in Special Operations and smaller scale combat. This is awesome news because honestly starting out as a small squad is really unfun until you find your feet.

That is the purpose of this thread (at least I hope). I want to share some things my outfit has taught me about how to be an effective unit against larger numbers.

The first thing you are going to want to do is throw out all notions of dedicated leader, anyone can put a waypoint down and say attack this. You do not have numbers on your side so you cannot afford to have critical beacons go down and have no way to put down another if your leader dies or theirs is on cooldown. The next thing is you cannot always rely on sunderers. Finally I am going to say it and feel free to debate this, defences are a lot easier then attacks.

I'll start with defences because they are my favourite. First thing you want to do in a defence is identify the enemies sunderer location and what it is running. If it has ammo on it, it is not running blockade or mine guard form your strategy off of that. Once you have located their sunderer and formulated a plan on how to deal with it, you will need your leader to drop a beacon as close as possible and drop almost immediately. You CAN play it safe and put the beacon farther back but that has its own risks like not being able to actually reach the sunderer. If the sunderer is running blockade drop as engineers and mine it, if it is running mine guard drop as light assaults and heavies. Hit it with a rocket and detonate the c4. If the person placing the c4 dies try to hit their c4 with the rocket. That is how it should go if it all runs perfectly, however more often then not something will go horribly wrong, such as the beacon going down as most of your squad has just hit redeploy so you are left with a few guys alive, how do you deal with that? Easy actually, get squad lead to give someone else squad lead and they can place a new beacon.

Sunderers are very easy to deal with the trick is making sure they do not have a horde of guys sitting around stroking their guns waiting for your pod to land amongst them. The only real way to stop that is push the point as far away from their sunderer as possible or start skirmishes at choke points drawing their forces away from the sunderer defence, (90% of the time you do not even have to worry about sundy defenders).

Squad beacons are actually the hardest part of defending, assuming max level beacon, every 2 minutes there will be 12 attackers scattered somewhere throughout the facility. Getting beacons down as soon as you see them is a priority right behind sunderers. Basically you NEED to tunnel vision spawn points as soon as they show up or you could end up being overwhelmed. After their spawnpoints are dealt with it is just a simple case of cleaning up. Most likely they will bring up more sunderers but if you call them as they approach and deal with them quickly is just a matter of time before they give up or run out of resources. You can also use your squad leader as a drop beacon, you can drop on their corpse once every 5 minutes. Now if you have both a drop beacon and a squad leader near the sunderer, if your first attempt fails you can chain attempts. (It is worth noting squad deploy is on a hard timer so swapping leader will not get rid of it)

I feel this next section is needed because a lot of squads I have run with do not know or do this. Squad beacon cool down is tied to the specific persons beacon, this means once your squad has dropped on one persons beacon you can swap leader and have a fresh beacon to take out another sunderer. This does NOT remove the cool down to place a beacon so you can place 12 beacons quickly however if you lose them almost immediately you have to wait for the cooldown to place another. That leads us onto attacking.

Sunderers are big, loud and hard to hide so if you are a small group lugging them from base to base is far from ideal. They do help for getting a foot hold though. I am not saying do not use sunderers just keep in mind they are easy picking for defenders. If you are using a sunderer make sure you leave at least one person with it to repair it and defend from the hordes of people gunning for it.

The key at least in my opinion for attacking is to always, always have a squad beacon up, if it goes down change lead and throw down another. So long as one person is alive you always have a spawn. Once you have your spawns set and suitably defended, you are going to want to move in groups. Always have a buddy. Also medics, 2 or 3 medics in a squad makes you rather hard to root out. The amount of cap points should determine your group sizes. This next part works sometimes and depends heavily on your server. On Briggs at least once you have all points and the initial struggle is over it is not uncommon for the defenders to leave or sit in spawn shooting out even if they outnumber you. If you can have radar up you can easily see when someone makes a break from spawn and just gun them down.

Other then defend your spawn points and have radar up there really is not much to attacking a base other then positioning, but that is something you learn with experience.

Most of this is yes heavily dependant on people having a lot of certs invested in leader and vehicles as well as medic. Again you can do this sort of stuff if you are new to the game it is just a hell of a lot harder. Another thing I cannot stress enough is learn base layouts, learn choke points, take note of the common sunderer locations. After a while it just becomes second nature to spot the sunderer tell your squad or platoon its heading and what it is running.

The final thing and arguably the most important is comms. You want your comms to be clear and concise DO NOT rabbit on about utter garbage when shit hits the fan. The only comms should be sunderer locations, troop movements and composition, their vehicles if any and confirmations of the destruction of their spawn points.

I will be sure to update this thread if I have forgotten anything but I think I got all the basics.