The rules of engagement

[Cyanide]

Here are some rules that one should follow while playing PS. These rules form a structure that will give you maximum enjoyment from the game without interfering with another person�s fun. Follow them and you will be successful in PS.

Foot soldier / everybody rules:

1) Join a squad. Not being in a squad is stupid in this game. The benefits are too great to play solo.

2) As an infantry man you must be aware of your surroundings at all times. Use your mini-map when ever possible and constantly check your surroundings, even while running. Look left, right, forward, and backwards every once in a while so that you know where your allied soldiers and vehicles are. This prevents you from missing opportunities for kills as well as keeping you out of the way of friendly fire/vehicles.

3) When assaulting a base or tower you should attack as a group. Spread out to consume the entire width of the hallway or room you're moving through. This prevents infiltrators and anything else from escaping your sweep. Also, if you're traveling through tight places where you have squad members behind you, crouch when you engage the enemy. This not only gives you better accuracy but it allows your teammates behind you to shoot over your heads. Thus increasing your squads total damage dealt per second. The importance of this CAN NOT be stressed enough. If you are in the front of an attack squad crouch when you engage the enemy. If you are not in front, stand and shoot over your teammates.

4) If you are a max unit stay behind your front line troops during inside base/tower assaults. Your troops (assuming they follow these rules) will crouch and add to your fire power. If you are in front of them you will block their view and will decrease your squads total used fire power. You must learn that just because you as an individual have more armor and fire power than one other squad member, you do not pack more power than the entirety of the squad. You or any other soldier as an individual are an easy target for an organized squad who follows these rules of engagement.

5) When traveling on foot outside, stay in places where vehicles do not go. The center of base courtyards, the center of roads or bridges are where vehicles MUST travel. You on the other hand are a foot soldier and therefore you are not forced to travel in these places, so you should not. Stay on the side of the road or completely off of the road when possible. Hug walls when moving around the base courtyards. Do not stop on bridges and stay to the sides of the bridge so that vehicles may pass, without running you over. Always give vehicles the right of way. They are bigger and harder to control so you must stay out of their way whenever possible.

6) When clearing a room you should enter as a group. The first person to enter picks a side to sweep to and you following behind them should go in the opposite direction when you enter. This insures that the room is quickly and easily cleared with minimal friendly fire incidents cause by twitch reflex.

7) Create chat macros that assist you in common communications. Macros are created by typing the following into your chat window.
/macro crh /s Down in front!
This will create a chat macro that you can attach to F1-F8 in your HUD. This macro will have the letters crh to help you identify it and will tell your squad members to crouch if they are in front of you. Create macros that are conducive to your roll in the squad. Leaders, maxes, hacker, engineers, etc will not all have the same macros. Everybody should have macros for North East South and West. Giving directions is VERY important in many different situations.

8) Just because you can not identify somebody at range does not mean you should shoot them. If you are unable to ID them, they can not ID you. Do NOT EVER shoot at something unless you see that red name.

9) Most important of all. Follow your squad leader. The squad who thinks as one person is much faster and more deadly than the squad who votes on everything. If success and fun in battle is your concern then do what your leader tells you as fast as you can. If you think your leader is an idiot or you do not like his tactics there is always the option for you to leave or form your own squad.


Squad leader rules:

1) Be decisive in your decisions. Even if you have no idea what you're doing, people will follow you if you're 100% sure about that decision. There is nothing worse than a democratic squad leader. You are the leader for a reason and your squad members have agreed to follow you. You make the decisions. They follow. The faster your squad is the more combat effective it is, and voting on every little thing is not conducive to speed.

2) Either be the transport driver or know the transport driver personally. The last thing you want as leader is to be stuck with an unskilled or disobedient transport driver. The most effective way to avoid this is to have both galaxy and sunderer certs yourself. This also minimizes the amount of communication about where the squad should go, thus preventing errors in communication.

3) On the note of communication errors. TYPE YOUR ORDERS IN ALL CAPS. As you can see, sometimes it's annoying, but it is annoying because it stands out from the other crap that is on your squad members chat HUD. Missed orders are a primary cause of combat failure.

4) Use voice chat as much as you can. Though the in game chat has problems as of now, and not a lot of people have good mics. It still helps the squad organization and speed tremendously. Even if your squad members can't respond via voice they should still be able to hear your orders. Which is much better and faster than having to read them on the often fast scrolling chat HUD. Also, you or a trustworthy person should run the server. It's a bad thing to have your server cut out on you unexpectedly.

5) Surprise is your friend. Since we only have 10 man squads, the amount of fire power you bring to the battle field is limited. This means that stealthy attacks are a big must. Hot drops are NOT stealthy or surprising for the enemy. Dropping into a hot zone WILL result in near instant death for you or some of your squad members. The sunderer provides a much stealthier and more versatile attack platform. It allows you to team with tanks and AMSes to create an effective assault force. The Galaxy should be used more for quick insertion into undefended areas. Right now its novelty is making it the troop transport of choice when in fact the sunderer is much more versatile and powerful.

6) If you must use the Galaxy transport for your assaults. DO NOT drop into hot zones. Land away from the hot zones, unload your vehicle from the gal and move into the hot zone as a squad. Dropping into hot areas separates your squad and reduces combat effectiveness. Not to mention it eliminates any surprise or flanking opportunities and throws you the commander directly in harms way. Which is bad because you're the one giving orders and the squad is much less effective without you.

7) When you are trying to cap a base your first priority is securing a nearby spawn point. If you're using the sunderer, get an AMS to tag a long with you. If you're using a gal then you must cap a tower first. In an assault on an undefended base it is best to send 2 maxes and a hacker to secure the CC of the main base (using the side wall entrance as the insertion point) while the rest of the squad assaults the tower. Simultaneous capture prevents the enemy from respawning nearby in hopes to thwart your effort.
7a) An adv medic in the squad slightly changes these needs. If you have an adv med in the squad, tell them to remain in the back of the group and inform all other squad members who the medic is and that they should not respawn without asking the medic if he can revive them. It would be good to have a chat macro asking if the medic is nearby to revive you.

8) Diversify your squad. A squad must have diversity and some overlap in its abilities. The more versatile a squad is the more powerful it can be.

9) Use the side base entrances. Nobody uses these in squad assaults. Most squads run straight through the front door. This is stupid. This is where the most defense is. This is where you will die. Your objective is either the CC or the spawning rooms and those are inside. Your first priority therefore, should be getting inside, and the side wall entrance is the easiest way in. It also usually leads to the main floor of the base.

[Cyanide]

Ground vehicle piloting rules:

1) Do not drive at full throttle through a quiet base. This is an unnecessary risk and will only get you grief points. There is no reason to be in such a big hurry that you kill more of your own people than the enemies. Drive at 50% throttle or so.

2) DO NOT stop in the middle of a bridge. This is a choke point and there will be other troops wanting to cross the bridge. Stopping on a bridge provides NO strategic advantage for you. It puts in an immobile position, it leaves you in the wide open, it blocks friendly troops from passing. Only bad things come from stopping on a bridge. If there are foot soldiers in your way, preventing you from crossing, run them over. They are not following the rules and they are hurting their faction by stopping troop movement. 10 grief points is definitely worth keeping your own squad members alive.

3) Stick to roads in larger or less agile vehicles. Even though it may seem that cutting off road is faster, it is not. You will be forced to slow down substantially off road or you will take damage from the terrain. Staying on the roads whenever possible will get you there faster, and in better shape.

4) Lighter more agile vehicles should go off road when possible. They need the cover and stealth of staying off road and they can handle the rough terrain much better than larger less agile vehicles.

5) Never stop moving in a hostile environment. A non moving vehicle is like a dinner bell for reaver pilots. Staying still too long WILL get you killed in a hot zone. Either deconstruct the vehicle so it can't be hacked. Or hide it away from the action.


Galaxy pilot rules:

1) Fly at maximum flight ceiling. People won't shoot at you if they don't see you.

2) DO NOT take off without at least 2 of your 3 gunner seats filled. Tell your passengers to fill in gunner spots first.

3) Do not allow reavers or mosquitoes to get in front of you or above you. Your gunners have a fair amount of downward rotation but they can not rotate their guns upward very well. This is another reason to fly at maximum height. Also, your gunners can not shoot what is in front of you. So if you're being attacked, rotate your gal so that the gunners can fight back.

4) When dropping into undefended areas use your radar to position your squad to drop onto a tower or upper floor of a base.

5) When dropping into hot zones approach the base from the angle that puts you in the action for the smallest amount of time. When a gal flys over a hot zone EVERY enemy will shoot at it. Even your galaxy's heavy armor can not withstand this.

6) Lock your gal for squad only. You don't want other people taking up your squad's passenger space.


Reaver/skeeter pilot rules:

1) These are not planes. They are VTOL aircraft. Which makes them more like attack helicopters than anything else. Fly them like this and you will have success. Fly them like F15s and us vet pilots will enjoy shooting you down.

2) Use strafing keys to rotate around your target area. Again, a still target is an easy one.

3) Be an engineer. The aircraft take damage easily in this game and it is a must that you be able to repair your aircraft in combat.

4) Carry extra ammo with you so you can land and re arm for that one last kill before you need to go back to base.

5) Never try to refill your reaver/skeeters trunk manually. It's 100 times faster to simply spawn a new one. That is unless you've run out of ammo in less than 5 minutes. In which case you probably need to work on your aim.



I think this thread should be made sticky so that new players can read it and others may add things if I have forgotten anything important.

[Destroyeron]

Great Posts! It really made me think about somethings...

[Cyanide]

*bump*

[MilitantB0B]

Actually, thats really more of a slap then a bump, but it is the best I could do.

[SpongeBob]

^^^

[HS Warwolf]

1. Conceal yourself in any way possible. Try to hide behind brush or even behind a tree.
2. ALWAYS carry a backup weapon. There's nothing worse that being discovered and having no way to defend yourself.
3. Check your surroundings every minute or less. A foot soldier could creep up on you and put a bullet in your head and you wouldn't even know it.
4. Work in pairs. Take turns sniping while one of you watches the others back.

[Nekota]

As an addition... don't use tall grass as concealment since it's controlled in the flora setting of the graphics. If someone is using no flora you're just as out in the open as anywhere else if that's your only concealment.

[HS Warwolf]

One thing I forgot, ALSWAYS stay as low to the ground as possible when moving. WHen moving through empty builigns, stay next to the wall with a window and out of site.

[HS Warwolf]

1. don't stop moving unless you have to. A stationary target is a dead target.
2. Don't wast ammo on infantry. Just run over them. Unless they are in a tight group, save your ammo for hevier tartgets.
3. take out the biggest threat to you first. While your concentrating on that squad of infantry with pee shooters, A larger tank could decimate you in a fraction of the time.
4. Use transports whenever possible. Don't waste half your time looking for a hot spot driving your tank around.

[NightWalker XI]

Thanks for the Galaxy tips, one stupid newb question though, how do you lock it for squad only?