Sentry/whip placement
FireGryph
Join Date: 2013-01-10 Member: 178745Members
Join Date: 2013-01-10 Member: 178745Members
Just looking for some discussion or advice on the subject matter of defense for both sides. Such a topic being... placement of the defensive structures around your bases and the map in general. Im not talking about the validity or viability of actually spending resources on these structures, but more the BEST use of them.
On marines, one sentry battery can be placed per zone, and 3 turrets per battery. All 3 turrets must be placed within a radius nearby the battery. Correct? Okay, what is the best kind of placement for the turrets around the battery, in order to cover themselves, each other, and whatever room/extractor/power node youre hoping to defend? Ive seen placements that involve all three turrets placed in a triangle around the battery, facing it, in order to cover the battery but is that always best? How about against a wall or in a corner with all three turrets?
What is the vertical range of turrets, anyways?
Then, for the aliens side, are whips best placed right around corners? Obviously you dont want them out in the open, as they can easily be shot down at a distance, but what IS the most effective placement for a whip? Directly around the hive to dissuade ninja-axing and grenadiers?
Thoughts? Help? Just trying to be a better commander! :)
On marines, one sentry battery can be placed per zone, and 3 turrets per battery. All 3 turrets must be placed within a radius nearby the battery. Correct? Okay, what is the best kind of placement for the turrets around the battery, in order to cover themselves, each other, and whatever room/extractor/power node youre hoping to defend? Ive seen placements that involve all three turrets placed in a triangle around the battery, facing it, in order to cover the battery but is that always best? How about against a wall or in a corner with all three turrets?
What is the vertical range of turrets, anyways?
Then, for the aliens side, are whips best placed right around corners? Obviously you dont want them out in the open, as they can easily be shot down at a distance, but what IS the most effective placement for a whip? Directly around the hive to dissuade ninja-axing and grenadiers?
Thoughts? Help? Just trying to be a better commander! :)
Comments
Love to hear how others use them.
On marines, one sentry battery can be placed per zone, and 3 turrets per battery. All 3 turrets must be placed within a radius nearby the battery. Correct? Okay, what is the best kind of placement for the turrets around the battery, in order to cover themselves, each other, and whatever room/extractor/power node youre hoping to defend? Ive seen placements that involve all three turrets placed in a triangle around the battery, facing it, in order to cover the battery but is that always best? How about against a wall or in a corner with all three turrets?
What is the vertical range of turrets, anyways?
Then, for the aliens side, are whips best placed right around corners? Obviously you dont want them out in the open, as they can easily be shot down at a distance, but what IS the most effective placement for a whip? Directly around the hive to dissuade ninja-axing and grenadiers?
Thoughts? Help? Just trying to be a better commander! :)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Placing Whips around important structures such as Harvesters, Shifts and of course Hives can improve defenses a lot. Otherwise stick to placing them right around cornes/behind clogs. they deal ridiculous damage and could fck your day up with ease as a Marine. Later on in the game when the Marines are starting to use Grenade-Launchers, you should already have a couple of Whips at every point they could attack, for flinging them back. It's also important to have some whips upgraded to Bombardment, both defensive & aggressive, takes Exos/Arcs down pretty fast.
You could also use them aggressively, cysting to an active Power-Node/Extractor and place 1-3 whips around it, they take it down pretty quickly. Or making couple of whips and Shifting them inside a base, if you know how to do that.
I can't help you much with turrets though, never used them and never will. Most pointless trash in the game right now.
well, its too bad youre missing those 20 res later to get upgrades and jetpacks before the aliens churn out oni.
Also, a single decent lerk player turns all your turret batteries into trash.
Most aliens will go for the sentry battery first, this gives marines time to phase through and defend the area. Also, marines will not have a skulk right at their feet when they phase.
And a sentry battery is cheap to replace at only 5 res, compared to an observatory or phase gate which is 15.
but it keeps newbs out of certain areas and stalls the rest of the players for several seconds. but i agree getting sentries early in the game will surely end out to be a disadvantage if the alien team isn't all too stupid. at least i'm always happy when i'm alien and the commander builds a robo first followed by sentry battery and turrets. that always means i got plenty of time to obliterate his team without having to fear shotguns or weapon or armor upgrades any time soon.
Yea, there's really not a great use for whips IMO. Generally everything you need from a whip you should be able to get from your team aside from being able to knock grenades back. The only time I use whips is at the end of the game when I'm bored.
You joking, right? Battery block sentry's LOS, another sentry blocks setnry's LOS, any world object and any structure blocks sentry's LOS. You can get past this waste of res whenever you wish, it can barely cover one object at a time, don't even speak about area denial.
Rule number one for placing sentries: don't place sentries.
I'm not changing my thought on Sentires, they're the most useless thing in the game right now.
Getting sentries before you even get an armory, you might aswell just pull your pants down and bend over. And you're wrong on Gorges & Onos only being able to kill them, I've managed to kill them as any lifeform, you just have to study which way they're facing as a Fade & a Skulk. Sure they're sometimes placed in a way where they all cover the sentries including the battery, but there's always a way.
<!--quoteo(post=2059107:date=Jan 11 2013, 03:10 AM:name=Mestaritonttu)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Mestaritonttu @ Jan 11 2013, 03:10 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059107"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Whip bombard is not good against exos. The reload time for bombard is HUGE, only shoots in line-of-sight, and the moment exo sees a bombard whip he'll gun it down. 25 res down the drain, 2x bombard whips would have been a Fade.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Placing them behind Clogged walls or in dark corners could help a lot, even have them beside a Shade. Despite the slow attack speed, it still helps when being used with Alien players or other whips during an attack.
<!--quoteo(post=2059108:date=Jan 11 2013, 03:17 AM:name=Davil)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Davil @ Jan 11 2013, 03:17 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059108"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Yea, there's really not a great use for whips IMO. Generally everything you need from a whip you should be able to get from your team aside from being able to knock grenades back. The only time I use whips is at the end of the game when I'm bored.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Are you joking?
2 Whips around the corner could seriously fck your day up as a Marine, otherwise I refer to my first post, there's plenty of use of them. Both aggressive and defensive, you just have to know how.
Ye, they could deal 50 damage to you when you walk around the corner. Then you just unload three clips and kill 30 res worth of structures.
The Sentries make no sense at all "TSF tech" wise. You got endless marines as cannonfodder and then you develope some dumb as ###### stationary turrets, no really. For one, they should at least deployable by marines, to move them around when needed, they just lack movement and dynamic use. You could as well just place armories to block the entrances and have more success with it. The powerpack theory is working fine, but the radius for that giant battery is laughable as well, when you got powered nano-teleporters and siege-tank-workshops right around the corner.
I think it should be the job of the commander to get them into the game, but the marines role to place them fitting the situation.
Three clips doesn't even kill 1 Whip.
I think 3 or 4 Whip hits actually kill you without any armor upgrades, so 2 whips could easily fck you if you don't react. Even if you do survive, and actually start killing them, it gives the Alien team a lot of time to react and go there.
Troll post? It's hard to tell these days if someone is obviously joking or just plain dead serious.
In any case, please don't encourage new players to build sentries. Especially not in the early game.
1. Place sentry battery against a wall (corner is acceptable too).
2. Place a turret on each side of the battery facing outwards diagionally.
3. Place a turret directly opposide battery facing back at the battery.
4. Congratulations you have a full proof sentry setup. Use this setup near phasegates, powernodes or resource towers to discourage aliens from chomping your base.
<u>Offensive sentries</u>
Setting up an early sentry battery at a break in a cyst chain can be very effective. Normally a marine would die after a few skulks come by and thus not make an impact on the broken chain. By setting up the battery skulks won't be able to kill the marine and thus won't be able to recover their cyst chain, which could cut off a lot of the map. A good example map for this is veil.
But I wouldn't use sentries outside of classic pub action, they are largely useless and the only scenarios where I use them is when I cannot rely on my team at all.
Whips are marginally more useful, but please PLEASE not early on in the game. Played on a map yesterday where a newish comm placed 2 whips within the first 2 minutes of the game to defend the Warehouse hive from 3 marines attacking from Ore Processing. Needless to say we lost that game HARD.
If placing whips, 2 around the corners and one ro two further back in a room is quite effective. It's a huge res cost, but hey in those games where you've already won it's a bit of fun for the comm to do. I resent spending tres on onos eggs: if we have that much map control and res, we should be able to win with pres oni! Might as well making late-game commanding more fun for the alien commander with some echoing, and marching in whole lines of whips to the marine base. It's silly, though - the game should be finished at that point really :)
Uhh... That is absolutely wrong.
But first of all: Sentries are not supposed to make an area secure without marine attention. Think about it. If they would be able to completely shut an area down, you would increase your overall-manpower. This would lead to very boring and unfair matches as the beta has shown. A sentry nest that is not guarded, should and is nothing a single skulk can't overcome. So, after we got this wrong believe sorted out, that sentries are area defense, what are they than good for?
Many people believe they are useless. But I think they can work as marine support in choke points. As long as marines are near the sentries they won't go down easy. And skulks that are attacking marines in front of sentries are dead skulks. That leads us to the "how-to-place them" question. I think they are best placed when 2 are looking in the direction the choke point is. The 3rd should look in the other direction. Mostly covering the armory, phasegate and powernode. This will slow the skulk-from-behind down. Do not try to cover the battery completely with them. (aka. circle-of-wasted-res) Also remember, that sentries are costly. Even the robo factory is mostly not neaded until mid game. Upgrades for your troops are a much better idea, because every marine gets an advantage and they can't be destroyed. Building sentries for a singe RT is the most stupid res-wasting you can do. All in all, they are very situational.
TL;DR: Sentries are useful to support marines while fighting at a choke point, (e.g. near an hive) and cover the outpost near this choke point. They are NOT and should never be able to defend an outpost alone (without marines). This would completely destroy the meta game and make skulks useless.
When I use whips I almost always set it up around a corner like whip crag crag in a line along the wall. 1 whip with 2 crags is infinitely more effective at delaying marines then 2 whips. Sometimes if I'm particularly swimming in res I'll do 2 whips and 2 crags, but the thing is, only really dumb marines every die to crags so the only point of the second whip is to prevent marines from just running by the single whip.
I typically use this kind of formation when I'm wanting to hold a vulnerable RT and I'm worried my aliens are the type that don't really react quickly. This of course won't hold off a couple of experienced marines for long, but it will delay them, and it will stop less experienced marines in their tracks as you can spam the +healing ability to keep that one whip up for a long time if they fail to target the crags first.
Their other major use is for defending against GLs attacking a dug in position, they are obviously totally OP at the moment for doing this.
As for sentries if you ever catch me using them its because I am really committed to taking a position and I am not very confident in my marines ability to hold the forward phase gate. Pretty bad sign to see an experienced commander using sentries.
Definetly yeah...
Everytime i hear the distinctive noise in the background (which does totally not sound like a GL btw) i simply place 1-2 whips next to 1-2 crags at the front.
Marines wasted 20 Team Res on research and atleast one marine wasted his personal res too.
Its kind of sad really, i know that whips could only fling back grenades once when they were mature, which was really fair, but for reasons i cannot fathom they changed that.
2 Whips around the corner could seriously fck your day up as a Marine, otherwise I refer to my first post, there's plenty of use of them. Both aggressive and defensive, you just have to know how.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No i'm 100% serious, you're trying to say that an immobile object that takes 4 hits to kill an armor 0 marine with 2 seconds between each hit is going to win you the game somehow. Your TEAM wins you the game. Decent players know to just kill a cyst near the whip and let it uproot so they can knife it quickly. And even though you'll say oh well you can just move it and root it again, well that's great but now one marine is taking your attention off the rest of the map and probably drawing your team away from an actually important area. Generally whips are noticeable and when you get hit by it once you probably won't get hit again unless you're just straight up bad or being suicidal. Either way you took 15 res that could have gone towards, a shift, lifeform eggs, crag, upgrades, a full set of drifters, or really anything useful, and then placed it into one useless object because you don't know how to direct your team.
<!--quoteo(post=2059215:date=Jan 11 2013, 03:02 AM:name=Xnm)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Xnm @ Jan 11 2013, 03:02 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059215"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Three clips doesn't even kill 1 Whip.
I think 3 or 4 Whip hits actually kill you without any armor upgrades, so 2 whips could easily fck you if you don't react. Even if you do survive, and actually start killing them, it gives the Alien team a lot of time to react and go there.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
3 MAGAZINES will indeed kill a whip they have 650 health and 175 armor unmatured. Assault rifle has 50 bullets per MAGAZINE, and 10 damage with w0, so that's 500 per magazine. Since armor is reducing the damage by 1/2, effectively the whip can take 1000 damage, so really only 2 magazines. How much ammo does a rifle have, 5 magazines, so capable of 2500 damage, so 2 whips can easily be killed by 1 marine and probably more if you count the pistol. Point is this, how much did the marine life cost? 0. How much did the whips cost? 15 each. The math does not add up.
Same for sentries, get w3 a3 and jetpacks before getting sentries. In most cases you'll be massing arcs, so sentries should rarely be seen around good commanders. If you need to set up defenses, build an armoury wall instead. Armoury walls are good against any lifeform, especially onos. Sentries are only mildly useful against skulks. Keep in mind that against anything but the most worthless players, any static defense is nothing without your team around. Whips/sentries can easilly be destroyed by a single marine/skulk.
There's nothing wrong with blocking the entrance to a room with a whip. I put one in lockers at one or the other entrance to slow down the marines as they try to ninja into the room. Either they will bypass it with some minor difficulty but suffer enough damage to make skulking them down fast and easy, or they will stop to shoot it to death which buys you time.
Whether or not that is 15 res worth of time is debatable and often hard to predict.
Sentries I will place with a thought in mind. Either they are supporting marines trying to negotiate a hard area like the 90 degree turn at east wing on docking with 2 facing the marines at the corner and one covering the battery/escalators or they are built in an inward facing triangle formation to slow down harrassing skulks near important PG's. Thats pretty much it... you can't use them for static defense as even a rookie skulk will figure out where the blind spot is and take them all out, so don't try. If you do, expect to lose every one of them without a marine running in to save them... and then it's a question of whether or not the sentries are cost effective for the job you've given them.
Think about it this way... if you build a full SG farm to defend an RT, how much longer does the RT have to live to pay for it's sentries. Keep in mind that the RT itself is a shield against the sentries, so as long as the skulk can find the side of the RT that is blocking the sentries, then they have failed.
The team would most likely win without them. The only really effective thing about them is they guide new players towards an area that they'd ordinarily not want to go, kind of like leading James Woods somewhere with candy.
Right here.
Turrets aren't effective, they just let marines play lazier.
Yes, even their ONOS were terrified by them...
When noob commanders get results like that, its easy to see why there are very wide differences in opinion out there on the actual value of sentries.
In general, I consider them far to expensive for what they do, but thats because I know how easy they are to counter... not everyone has that down yet, so I think its fair to just give people the best advice you can short of "don't build them".
I think this is one of the more annoying things sputtered out in these threads right now... everyone wants to show how smart they are by pointing out how you should never build sentries, but some people will build them anyway, and thats why they are looking for advice on how to work them into their game... how about we answer their questions rather than crap on them for trying.
Also, remember that no matter how good a commander you are, the day you find yourself leading a team of greens, you're going to have to shelve that pro ###### and start pooping out SG's and going exo before JP because expecting them to perform without the crutches in the game ignores the skill level of the players you have to work with... that doesn't make you a better leader, it makes you an elitist who would rather lose than play with the team you got.
Yes, even their ONOS were terrified by them...
When noob commanders get results like that, its easy to see why there are very wide differences in opinion out there on the actual value of sentries.
In general, I consider them far to expensive for what they do, but thats because I know how easy they are to counter... not everyone has that down yet, so I think its fair to just give people the best advice you can short of "don't build them".
I think this is one of the more annoying things sputtered out in these threads right now... everyone wants to show how smart they are by pointing out how you should never build sentries, but some people will build them anyway, and thats why they are looking for advice on how to work them into their game... how about we answer their questions rather than crap on them for trying.
Also, remember that no matter how good a commander you are, the day you find yourself leading a team of greens, you're going to have to shelve that pro ###### and start pooping out SG's and going exo before JP because expecting them to perform without the crutches in the game ignores the skill level of the players you have to work with... that doesn't make you a better leader, it makes you an elitist who would rather lose than play with the team you got.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
tl;dr version, you said they are useless unless it's against complete noobs...
I mean that's pretty much what we're all saying. But I don't think anyone is saying don't build turrets for fun or don't experiment. What we're saying is, it shouldn't be the first thing you build. And when you do build them don't expect fantastic results.