Countering The Ip Rush
Alias20
Join Date: 2003-04-05 Member: 15212Members
Join Date: 2003-04-05 Member: 15212Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Suggestions & Concerns</div> An IP Rush takes advantage of the marine ability to respawn as many players as they have IPs. Over time this will give the marines a numbers advantage that will overwelm early hive defenses and take over the first hive.
<b>Here's how it works:</b>
Comm determines where the aliens' first hive is located. He then orders everyone to a nearby location to build a Comm Chair and about 4 to 6 IPs. Marines cap any RTs along the way, but don't bother defending or electrifing them. Once the IPs are up, marines start pouring into the hive room attacking everything they see. Once the comm has built up enough res, he drops a TF and a few turrets for defense, then gets to work on some sieges. This allows them to take out any pesky towers and finish off the hive.
<b>Why its so effective:</b>
<i>Spawn advantage</i>
Marines can outnumber aliens quickly while pulling a 1:1 kill to death ratio or less. Once they build up enough of a numbers advantage aliens will have a hard time recovering, if they can at all.
<i>Logistics</i>
Marines spawn right next to the front line. This overcomes their slow speed disadvantage. They also tend to spawn in as groups, so you'll rarely be facing one marine at a time. Not to mention the fact that its nigh impossible for anyone on the marine team to get "lost." This allows the marines to exhibit a level of teamwork that allows them to commit everyone to one task.
<i>"Independance" from RTs</i>
Its relatively inexpensive for the Comm since he won't bother with arms labs or armorys. The marines also make a pretty good income from kills alone. This allows the Comm to keep up a pretty good build schedule without having to bother with controlling a majority of the map.
Which brings us to...
<b>How do we counter it</b>
<i>Stop the relocation</i>
Obviously, this is the most effective move you can make. Whether you get them as they're leaving marine start or when they drop the comm chair and try to establish a foothold, stopping it before it starts is your best chance at a counter. Overwealming them right after they've built the cc and committed a good chunk of res would be nice. But you're probably better off stopping them whenever you have an advantage. Either way, communication is key. Parasite the group so your teammates can track their location, and use voice comm to give everyone a heads up.
What can you do after they've already established themselves?
<i>Deprive them of free res</i>
The comm probably hasn't defended any of his res nodes, and will be hesitant to divert marines from the front lines to patrol them. If you can break out of the containment, taking down their res nodes will slow the marines economy and buy your team more time to root them out before they can siege.
<i>Lerks spores</i>
Since you're going up against vanilla marines with no upgrades, lerk spores can make a pretty powerful defense. Gassing the marines as they come off the IPs will make it easier for your skulks to finish them off. It'll also force the marines to scatter after they spawn in, again giving your team an opening. Since its early in the match you probably don't have any upgrades available. Therefore you'll want to stick near the hive for healing and duck out of the fight to recharge.
<i>Get a second hive as soon as possible</i>
If you score enough res from kills to hit the 50 mark, make a beeline for the next available hive and get it set up pronto. Not only does this provide you with some insurance should they kill the first hive, it'll give you another spawn point to help counter the marine's advantage. Since you're going up against groups of marines, fades will probably be less effective at this point.
<i>Upgrades to use</i>
So you went gorge before this new situation came up. What chambers should you drop for your team at the original hive?
O chambers can buy you a little time, but don't expect them to last long on the front lines. Marines can literally throw themselves at the chambers to take them down, and you probably won't get enough res to make a profit off the investment. A few near the hive will take care of any rambos that manage to break through and help cover your fellow aliens trying to heal. But you probably want to sink your res into something more worthwhile.
If your team is skulk heavy, d chambers are probably the way to go. It'll buy you some extra time should the marines get a siege up, as well as healing the hive between skirmishes. It'll also help your skulks who manage to disengage to heal up and get back into the fight. If you can, stick the chambers on the other side of the wall that the fighting is taking place. The chambers can heal skulks through the wall, prolonging their attacks.
If you have a few lerks running around, movement chambers are a good investment. Lerks can recharge quickly and keep dumping spores on the marines. It'll also open up celerity skulks who can run past point defenses and go right for the structures. Adren will allow you to constantly heal the hive should it come under attack. Also, should you get a second hive up in time it'll help bring reinforcements to the fight. Still, if you don't have any lerks, defense might be a better option.
Sensory is pretty useless as this point. You know where they're at making scent of fear and pheromones rather useless. And should they get a obs up your cloaking advantage is gone as well. Sensory would have helped you possibly stop them from relocating in the first place, but at this point it doesn't offer you any real advantages.
<i>Higher up life forms</i>
Marines have probably forgone upgrades in order to get a TF up. So if you can hold out until fades or even an onos you can easily rout them from their position. Fades can be tricky to use, since most relocation spots near a hive are pretty tight leaving you little room to manuever. This hurts your blink ability and one of your key advantages. Fades might be better off taking down any RTs the marines have established before focusing on the relocated base. If you get an onos, well, you've pretty much won. Get in there and smash everything you can.
The good news is that if you can successfully counter this tactic, you've set the marines back far enough that they might never recover. After you take out their relocated base you shouldn't face any trouble securing the other two hives and putting up RTs. The bad news is that it plays towards one of the key disadvantages for the aliens on pub servers: disorganization. If people keep doing their own thing after the marines get their relocated base up, you simply won't last very long.
<b>Here's how it works:</b>
Comm determines where the aliens' first hive is located. He then orders everyone to a nearby location to build a Comm Chair and about 4 to 6 IPs. Marines cap any RTs along the way, but don't bother defending or electrifing them. Once the IPs are up, marines start pouring into the hive room attacking everything they see. Once the comm has built up enough res, he drops a TF and a few turrets for defense, then gets to work on some sieges. This allows them to take out any pesky towers and finish off the hive.
<b>Why its so effective:</b>
<i>Spawn advantage</i>
Marines can outnumber aliens quickly while pulling a 1:1 kill to death ratio or less. Once they build up enough of a numbers advantage aliens will have a hard time recovering, if they can at all.
<i>Logistics</i>
Marines spawn right next to the front line. This overcomes their slow speed disadvantage. They also tend to spawn in as groups, so you'll rarely be facing one marine at a time. Not to mention the fact that its nigh impossible for anyone on the marine team to get "lost." This allows the marines to exhibit a level of teamwork that allows them to commit everyone to one task.
<i>"Independance" from RTs</i>
Its relatively inexpensive for the Comm since he won't bother with arms labs or armorys. The marines also make a pretty good income from kills alone. This allows the Comm to keep up a pretty good build schedule without having to bother with controlling a majority of the map.
Which brings us to...
<b>How do we counter it</b>
<i>Stop the relocation</i>
Obviously, this is the most effective move you can make. Whether you get them as they're leaving marine start or when they drop the comm chair and try to establish a foothold, stopping it before it starts is your best chance at a counter. Overwealming them right after they've built the cc and committed a good chunk of res would be nice. But you're probably better off stopping them whenever you have an advantage. Either way, communication is key. Parasite the group so your teammates can track their location, and use voice comm to give everyone a heads up.
What can you do after they've already established themselves?
<i>Deprive them of free res</i>
The comm probably hasn't defended any of his res nodes, and will be hesitant to divert marines from the front lines to patrol them. If you can break out of the containment, taking down their res nodes will slow the marines economy and buy your team more time to root them out before they can siege.
<i>Lerks spores</i>
Since you're going up against vanilla marines with no upgrades, lerk spores can make a pretty powerful defense. Gassing the marines as they come off the IPs will make it easier for your skulks to finish them off. It'll also force the marines to scatter after they spawn in, again giving your team an opening. Since its early in the match you probably don't have any upgrades available. Therefore you'll want to stick near the hive for healing and duck out of the fight to recharge.
<i>Get a second hive as soon as possible</i>
If you score enough res from kills to hit the 50 mark, make a beeline for the next available hive and get it set up pronto. Not only does this provide you with some insurance should they kill the first hive, it'll give you another spawn point to help counter the marine's advantage. Since you're going up against groups of marines, fades will probably be less effective at this point.
<i>Upgrades to use</i>
So you went gorge before this new situation came up. What chambers should you drop for your team at the original hive?
O chambers can buy you a little time, but don't expect them to last long on the front lines. Marines can literally throw themselves at the chambers to take them down, and you probably won't get enough res to make a profit off the investment. A few near the hive will take care of any rambos that manage to break through and help cover your fellow aliens trying to heal. But you probably want to sink your res into something more worthwhile.
If your team is skulk heavy, d chambers are probably the way to go. It'll buy you some extra time should the marines get a siege up, as well as healing the hive between skirmishes. It'll also help your skulks who manage to disengage to heal up and get back into the fight. If you can, stick the chambers on the other side of the wall that the fighting is taking place. The chambers can heal skulks through the wall, prolonging their attacks.
If you have a few lerks running around, movement chambers are a good investment. Lerks can recharge quickly and keep dumping spores on the marines. It'll also open up celerity skulks who can run past point defenses and go right for the structures. Adren will allow you to constantly heal the hive should it come under attack. Also, should you get a second hive up in time it'll help bring reinforcements to the fight. Still, if you don't have any lerks, defense might be a better option.
Sensory is pretty useless as this point. You know where they're at making scent of fear and pheromones rather useless. And should they get a obs up your cloaking advantage is gone as well. Sensory would have helped you possibly stop them from relocating in the first place, but at this point it doesn't offer you any real advantages.
<i>Higher up life forms</i>
Marines have probably forgone upgrades in order to get a TF up. So if you can hold out until fades or even an onos you can easily rout them from their position. Fades can be tricky to use, since most relocation spots near a hive are pretty tight leaving you little room to manuever. This hurts your blink ability and one of your key advantages. Fades might be better off taking down any RTs the marines have established before focusing on the relocated base. If you get an onos, well, you've pretty much won. Get in there and smash everything you can.
The good news is that if you can successfully counter this tactic, you've set the marines back far enough that they might never recover. After you take out their relocated base you shouldn't face any trouble securing the other two hives and putting up RTs. The bad news is that it plays towards one of the key disadvantages for the aliens on pub servers: disorganization. If people keep doing their own thing after the marines get their relocated base up, you simply won't last very long.
Comments
One other cool thing is that you won't lose any weapons the comm drops; with all your teamates pouring in, your shotgun will will soon be in good hands.
This won't really work though if the aliens have enough rt's and chambers for upgraded lerks or the gorges manage to get a few OC's up, which + skulks will kill the marines too fast.
#2 learn to ambush: find a place to wait for them along the way. Attack from multiple vectors.
You want them dead before they build anything.
If the marines get to a point where they have multiple IPs up, you've probably already lost. You may have a chance with a stalemate because of RfK (which you had no chance to build things early enough in 1.04), which might get you some chambers or a second hive. Chambers are probably better. You will need at least one lerk, or the marines will just wait you out.
Yeah, it's not nearly as bad as 1.04. High starting res + spores at 1 hive + the chance of relocating the hive (as odd as that sounds) thru rfk makes it much harder to pull off.
If you stay in healing range of the hive and flap frantically (easy to fly and spore at the same time with nearby movement chambers) the marines will be deprived of res , and die before seeing the hive or do insignificant damage. Once you have umbra it needs a gorge to drop a bunch of OCs near the IPs. Poor marines.
Not really. If you stalemate for a while, but are slowly losing, you might get a skulk with enough res to gorge and drop a hive. The res be better spent keeping the first hive alive, but if that isn't an option, you might as well drop the second. You don't really need much rfk to make up the difference between starting res and gorge+hive in 2.x.
As an added bonus, you might be able to get 2 types of chambers up with only one hive left (the second).
In an IP rush, the marines would have to be <i>really</i> incompetant for you to drop a chamber in their base. Don't even think about it.
So by the time aliens got back to the hive, it was already half-dead (it takes 14 clips from lvl0 lmg to kill a hive). By the time they managed to kill the empty marines, new ones were already coming in to finish everything off. See... all that is needed is one clip into the hive from each marine. You'd have to have at least 3 gorges healing it non-stop in order to keep up with the damage. And the proximity of the respawns to the hive, and their position in this case, made it very hard for aliens to do anything to counter the strategy.
In conclusion, preventative measures are always the best. We know this from all other discussions on similar strategies, both here and in marine strategy forums. Scouting is key.. in public games, aliens tend to make a beeline for the marine start, or go gorge for the nearest resource nodes. You have to know what the marines are doing always. Otherwise, everything mentioned before may help if the ip rush is not as perfect as it was in my game on ns_veil.
I know redemption skulks are kinda weak, but it might counter both the marine spawn rate advantage AND the marine res income from kills. Take out tthe remaining marine respoints and they'll run dry while skulks keep on pouring down on them, getting kill res and holding the vanilla marines off with sheer numbers.