Fast Push
Ardesco
Join Date: 2002-11-09 Member: 7831Members
Join Date: 2002-11-09 Member: 7831Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Aggressive Marine Tactics</div> One theory that I've worked out that has brought a great deal of success for marines I've commandered is the aggressive marine push. This can take many forms, but its basic premise is simple: There should always be a great deal of pressure on the alien team at any given time. This can take form 2 ways:
a) By taking 1 or more hives and actively pursing another with extreme vengeance
b) Destroying their resource nodes and capping your own nodes with extreme speed.
What my strategy gains with its early-game weaknesses, it more than compensates for a much easier late game strategy. Basically, the more marines you have to perform this strategy, the better.
You also need a team of marines that can work well and efficiently with you.
There are a couple of ways to go about the marine push:
Hive run: Map a path out to the hive. On the way, drop down lots of resource nodes along the way, foregoing standard defense and instead leaving a marine or two for defense. Once you reach the hive, plop down a base. The problem with this strat is that unless you get phasegates super early, you're gonna have to rely on troops walking back and forth from main to the hive--so if even one node along the way gets taken over by aliens, that represents a significant delay. (Even with phasegates, there's always the chance that the aliens could rush the hive and take out the phasegate, leaving you vulnerable while trudging all the way over across the map).
Mindless middle run: Head straight for the center of the map, and start expanding outwards from there. For most maps, the center of the map represents the smallest distances needed to go to cap new nodes, and also lets you reach hives a lot faster. The problem with the middle run is that if you don't take a hive soon enough, you'll be killed when the aliens take all 3. Also, a second problem is being able to hold two locations simultaneously--the center of the map, and a hive.
HMG push: The sooner you get hmgs in the game, the faster you can dominate. This starts out as a push, but with a fast armory upgrade. Once that's done, drop hmgs freely, and have your marines push to a hive. The major weakness with this one is that the enemy can get the second hive before you get hmgs, which is bad.
Also, the most useful first upgrade for any kind of a push is armor. It lets your marines take that extra bite without dying, which is critical, since you'll be relying more on building stuff than upgrades, unless you're doing an HMG / (insert your weapon of choice here) push.
The biggest downfall to the push is coordinated skulk attacks. No sane marine commander can stop aliens from attacking the horseshoe, alpha station, south loop, sub-junction 3, and eclipse command all at once on ns_eclipse <!--emo&:0--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wow.gif' border='0' valign='absmiddle' alt='wow.gif'><!--endemo--> . The key is to coordinate your defense with your marines, and having a bunch of marines who listen to orders well and can shoot decently.
(Yay! the forums are back up!)
a) By taking 1 or more hives and actively pursing another with extreme vengeance
b) Destroying their resource nodes and capping your own nodes with extreme speed.
What my strategy gains with its early-game weaknesses, it more than compensates for a much easier late game strategy. Basically, the more marines you have to perform this strategy, the better.
You also need a team of marines that can work well and efficiently with you.
There are a couple of ways to go about the marine push:
Hive run: Map a path out to the hive. On the way, drop down lots of resource nodes along the way, foregoing standard defense and instead leaving a marine or two for defense. Once you reach the hive, plop down a base. The problem with this strat is that unless you get phasegates super early, you're gonna have to rely on troops walking back and forth from main to the hive--so if even one node along the way gets taken over by aliens, that represents a significant delay. (Even with phasegates, there's always the chance that the aliens could rush the hive and take out the phasegate, leaving you vulnerable while trudging all the way over across the map).
Mindless middle run: Head straight for the center of the map, and start expanding outwards from there. For most maps, the center of the map represents the smallest distances needed to go to cap new nodes, and also lets you reach hives a lot faster. The problem with the middle run is that if you don't take a hive soon enough, you'll be killed when the aliens take all 3. Also, a second problem is being able to hold two locations simultaneously--the center of the map, and a hive.
HMG push: The sooner you get hmgs in the game, the faster you can dominate. This starts out as a push, but with a fast armory upgrade. Once that's done, drop hmgs freely, and have your marines push to a hive. The major weakness with this one is that the enemy can get the second hive before you get hmgs, which is bad.
Also, the most useful first upgrade for any kind of a push is armor. It lets your marines take that extra bite without dying, which is critical, since you'll be relying more on building stuff than upgrades, unless you're doing an HMG / (insert your weapon of choice here) push.
The biggest downfall to the push is coordinated skulk attacks. No sane marine commander can stop aliens from attacking the horseshoe, alpha station, south loop, sub-junction 3, and eclipse command all at once on ns_eclipse <!--emo&:0--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wow.gif' border='0' valign='absmiddle' alt='wow.gif'><!--endemo--> . The key is to coordinate your defense with your marines, and having a bunch of marines who listen to orders well and can shoot decently.
(Yay! the forums are back up!)
Comments
Oh how I pine for this.
BlueGhost
I don't like your ideas of a 'middle run' 'fast-tech to HMGs' though.
If you run straight to the middle and build up from there, you're focusing on a (usually) non-important part of the map. Aliens can now attack you from all sides, can still get to their other Hive locations, and slowly start controlling the map. If you secure this area, great. You've got an area that may be of no tactical importance at all.
The fast-tech to HMGs is tough to pull off because you will start running low on resources QUICK. You drop an HMG, lose the resources that could have been spent on something more important, and the marine using it still only takes 2 skulks before they go down. :\ Wait on HMGs until the aliens have Fades - LMGs are more accurate, which is perfect for fast-moving skulks.
Agreed. 'Nuff said.
The middle rush tactic is actually a must on some maps such as tanith and hera. Given the fact that both holoroom and reactor room are major junctions towards both the marine start and at least 2 hives on either map, capturing the middle is vital because it plays the role of both chokepoint and a path to hives. This is also why it's so important for aliens to capture these chokes as it is for marines--it cuts off more paths to hives, and provides double the resource value compared to other locations.
Also, given control of the middle of the map, it's a lot easier to change your momentum to catch the aliens off guard. If you're trying to push from 2 different directions from the marine start, you're splitting your resources too thinly across areas that cannot provide easy reinforcement towards one another (unless you actually spend 60 for 3 phasegates).
However, with controlling the middle of the map, any expansion outwards from the middle is guarenteed to take a marine no more than half a map's worth of walking to get anywhere. Considering that aliens already have the advantage when it comes to speed, capturing nodes that are all within walking distance of one another. Nodes that you capture in a radius around the center of the map are faster to get to and easier to support logistically than if you captured a long string of nodes and the middle node got attacked.
Finally, as an example of the necessity of this strategy, ns_nancy requires you to take mess hall before seiging the subspace array hive, simply because it happens to be along the shortest path to the hive.
Just my thoughts. Granted, not all these strategies work ALL the time, but I've used them enough to feel them worthy of a good posting.
HMG's are a big waste in the early game. First of all, if you really need a bigger a gun, a shottie will do. Anything else is far too expensive and is also overkill. Secondly, it means that you don't get an observatory until late in the game, which is also suicide. As you need phase gates to properly secure an area, and you need an observatory to get phase gates (as well as the oh-so-important motion tracking), you will find it very difficult to secure areas without significant resource waste on destroyed structures and killed marines that couldn't escape with their lives.
HMGs are not a waste of money early game if you know what you're doing. It catches most skulks off guard, scares the crud out of them, and can lead to quick hive kills if you know what you're doing. By all means, if you are uncomfortable with the idea of quick HMGs, then don't get them. I only mix in a quick HMG rush about 1 every ten games I command, but every time I pull a victory off thanks to it, it feels a heckuva lot more satisfying than the standard "2 hive struggle" win. Shotguns cannot cut it compared to the hmgs for sheer firepower--their attack rate is too slow, and is relatively ineffective for the strategy I outlined (since the main goal of the HMG rush is to actually take out a hive, and HMGs are the best weapon for it).
I am by no means promoting a n00bish means of commandering. Far from it; instead, I am seeing a terrible trend of commanders following the exact same build setups that they used the game before, the day before, the WEEK before, without any variations. It's so predictable that whenever I go alien against a such a commander that I want to scream at the commander to try something new. Scare us. Surprise us. Heck, even if it doesn't work, at least don't pull the same crap over and over and expect to always win.
The premise of natural selection was such that a good commander can only go so far towards victory on a standard, set build alone--an able crew of aliens should be able to stop him. The lesson learned? Be unpredictable. Try something different. Just don't make the aliens go up against the same thing and expect to lose time and time again.
I don't always do the 2IP>Armory>Obs>MT route either. It utterly fails with a team of n00bish marines, and I feel insecure without a TF and at least three turrets (far, far away from the CC - protecting that is always the job of the commander).
Still, nabbing the "center" of a map won't always work, due to the reason Flat described. It's also better to go after concrete objectives than a generic plan of "keep them down." Marines can get lost without good comm support if given such a vague task, and this can put uneeded pressure on the commander. Unless your idea of "keeping pressure on" is simply aggressive expansionism, it is very prone to fail, especcially with green NSPlayers. If your strategy is simply aggressive expansioism, then you are right on the ball. Take note that unless you sux0r, you really should not need anything more than an LMG for the majority of the game.
This goes back to what I was talking about a few weeks ago about how NS would start to see a division between elite (clan) play, and regular pub play. Strategies that don't work for noobs don't work for pros, obviously, but hey, for a frontiersman strategy forum, I think we already have plenty of reference guides for starting commander tactics.
Also, the center of the map usually can be a concete objective in relation to a hive in and of itself. A good commander should always keep murphy's rule in mind. When phasegates fail, running makes the bail (yeah, I know that was bad <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' valign='absmiddle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo--> ). Mother interface on nancy is so much easier, for example, to capture, considering its close proximity to an enemy hive if you have mess hall setup. A quick teleport, and the running distance between skulks and marines to mother interface is about equal. When push comes to shove for the hive, and marines don't have adequate upgrades or resources to push the hive via superior arms, superior coordination comes into play. Given that most skulks can run to mother interface from the nearby hive faster than marines can run from main base, it makes sense to setup mess hall as a strongpoint to give marines only a few walking steps to mother interface.
Also, in a worse-case scenario when you lose the phasegate to mother interface, by controlling mess hall, you can easily launch a counter-attack. Control of the center of the map is frequently a game winner precisely because it reduces the amount of time marines have to move from hive to hive. The faster marines move--the faster your momentum carries, which is the precise premise of the offensive push.
Also, I too despair the state at which commanders will sometimes have to switch to "newby" mode in order to play on a server full of inexperienced marines. But, hey, when you've got the right marines (or the proper "charisma" to get them to do what you want if they simply lack cohesiveness), try something new. The only thing you lose is your inexperience.