Unusual strategies that have worked
Stoneburg
Join Date: 2002-11-11 Member: 8174Members
Join Date: 2002-11-11 Member: 8174Members
I like trying out different things and for me the times you try something unusual and it works is much more satisfying than getting a win with the "standard" or "optimal" strategies. To encourage this I thought we'd have a thread where people can post out of the ordirnary strategies and tactics that have been successful. This is for public games only, which adds the difficulty of getting a team of pub players to agree and follow an unknown idea, which makes it evern more challenging (and fun!).
Quick Gorge train with Bile Bombs
The strategy is pretty simple and gets its effectiveness from the scaling advantages of healspray, the surprise and confusion factor, and the effectiveness of bile bombs. You need to get at least 75% of your team (ie: 6 out of 8 or 9 out of 12) to agree for it to be successful.
Tell your team that the plan is to go for carapace, adrenaline and bile bomb as fast as possible, then have the whole team rush the marine base and bile bomb it to oblivion. As commander you only cyst towards the nearest hive and only cap the res node in that hive as well as the one between the hives.
You can either upgrade your first hive to crag and get carapace upgrade, then save for the second hive, or save for a second hive immediatly and get the carapace upgrade when the hive is building. Which path you chose depends on whether you will have a gorge or two available to speed build the second hive, in that case you can get carapace first because the hive will get up quick enough, and with fewer skulks out you need them to have a bit more punch.
You don't spend any more res than this, so when the second hive is up you immediatly upgrade it to shift and start researching bile bomb in your crag hive. Let your team know that this is happening and that they should be ready to go gorge soon, preferably together in the same hive (to mak it easier to get a train going). The second bile bomb and adrenaline is ready, your train should be on its way to the marine base.
Here it is important to keep telling gorges to use healspray all the time. There should be a 5:1 ratio at least of healspray:bile bomb and absolutely no spitting. The only time this has failed was when I wasn't clear on the "No spitting" rule. It's the healspray spam that makes it effective. The gorges need to stay extremely close together and should be jumping around in a huge pile of gorge love, spraying eachother and lobbing the occasional bile bomb. By keeping close to eachother and jumping around you make it impossible for the marines to single any one gorge out, so marines will be wasting ammo trying to kill a massive blob of carapaced gorges that are healspray spamming eachother. This early in the game they won't have GL's or shotguns, so if the gorges do it right they are practically invincible.
Once the gorge train is on the way, you can start expanding and upgrading as usual, so if the attack somehow fails, you're still in the game. The time this strategy didn't work, due to half the gorges spitting rather than healspraying, we still won the game later because while the marines were focused on fending off the attack, we got leap/celerity and some map control going. So it is not a one-shot strategy either, making it a completely valid choice in my opinion.
You can't shoot what you can't see
In one game the teams tended to get quite stacked in the marine favor skill wise, and the top marine shooter at one time had 3 times the kills of the entire alien team. Needless to say, we lost. Next game (same teams) the Com decided to go for a shade hive and *immediatly* evolved a shade hive and upgraded camo. This of course slowed down our expansion, but with marines winning all the one-on-ones and playing very aggressively, we weren't able to defend any expansion with the previous tactics anyway. This way, we instead started winning the one-on-ones, since even very good shooters have problems winning the early confrontations when skulks get a bite in and start all the confrontations at melee distance.
The composition of the Marine team was such that while some Marines were very skilled, the commander was average. And in early game, you can't afford to keep scanning everywhere. And with the Marines running off on solo mission, relying on their individual skills, it's impossible to cover them.
Of course this counterstrategy is itself easy to counter, but it takes a competent commander AND the marine team being willing to adjust how they play the game. I don't like going shade hive first, but I found this to be an effective counter against a more skilled and aggressive opponent, and we did end up winning since they didn't adjust quick enough.
Main focus after getting the camo up should be to get a second hive (and a third) as quick as possible, so you don't get stuck with higher lifeforms having only silence and camo to keep them alive.
Forcing defense of an important location
This is a bit of a mean strategy towards your own team, since it basically forces them to play a certain way, but in love and war...
Some hives and locations are more important than others, and if you want your team to take and hold them, one risky strategy is to put a massive investment in the area right at the beginning. For example, yesterday I started the alien round by announcing that I had just dropped the Crossroads hive (we started in Flight control) so if the team wants any chance of winning, they better get over there and defend/build it. If you get the hive up, you've got a great strategic location, if you don't, you lose.
On the Marine side I often do this on double node areas. I will announce that I'm going to put our tech in Nano grid or Central drilling, so if you want shotguns or whatnot anytime soon, you better not let the armory in Nano/Central go down. This is pretty much always a win/lose strategy that it is hard to come back from. If you hold it, you will have lots of res as well as a good momentum and forward base, if you lose it you're pretty much screwed. I will usually drop an armory and then an observatory, then research PG's and link them up, then start upgrading the armory (mines, shotguns, upgrade).
Try them out and see if they work for you, and post your own suggestions or experiences so that I can try them out next time.
Quick Gorge train with Bile Bombs
The strategy is pretty simple and gets its effectiveness from the scaling advantages of healspray, the surprise and confusion factor, and the effectiveness of bile bombs. You need to get at least 75% of your team (ie: 6 out of 8 or 9 out of 12) to agree for it to be successful.
Tell your team that the plan is to go for carapace, adrenaline and bile bomb as fast as possible, then have the whole team rush the marine base and bile bomb it to oblivion. As commander you only cyst towards the nearest hive and only cap the res node in that hive as well as the one between the hives.
You can either upgrade your first hive to crag and get carapace upgrade, then save for the second hive, or save for a second hive immediatly and get the carapace upgrade when the hive is building. Which path you chose depends on whether you will have a gorge or two available to speed build the second hive, in that case you can get carapace first because the hive will get up quick enough, and with fewer skulks out you need them to have a bit more punch.
You don't spend any more res than this, so when the second hive is up you immediatly upgrade it to shift and start researching bile bomb in your crag hive. Let your team know that this is happening and that they should be ready to go gorge soon, preferably together in the same hive (to mak it easier to get a train going). The second bile bomb and adrenaline is ready, your train should be on its way to the marine base.
Here it is important to keep telling gorges to use healspray all the time. There should be a 5:1 ratio at least of healspray:bile bomb and absolutely no spitting. The only time this has failed was when I wasn't clear on the "No spitting" rule. It's the healspray spam that makes it effective. The gorges need to stay extremely close together and should be jumping around in a huge pile of gorge love, spraying eachother and lobbing the occasional bile bomb. By keeping close to eachother and jumping around you make it impossible for the marines to single any one gorge out, so marines will be wasting ammo trying to kill a massive blob of carapaced gorges that are healspray spamming eachother. This early in the game they won't have GL's or shotguns, so if the gorges do it right they are practically invincible.
Once the gorge train is on the way, you can start expanding and upgrading as usual, so if the attack somehow fails, you're still in the game. The time this strategy didn't work, due to half the gorges spitting rather than healspraying, we still won the game later because while the marines were focused on fending off the attack, we got leap/celerity and some map control going. So it is not a one-shot strategy either, making it a completely valid choice in my opinion.
You can't shoot what you can't see
In one game the teams tended to get quite stacked in the marine favor skill wise, and the top marine shooter at one time had 3 times the kills of the entire alien team. Needless to say, we lost. Next game (same teams) the Com decided to go for a shade hive and *immediatly* evolved a shade hive and upgraded camo. This of course slowed down our expansion, but with marines winning all the one-on-ones and playing very aggressively, we weren't able to defend any expansion with the previous tactics anyway. This way, we instead started winning the one-on-ones, since even very good shooters have problems winning the early confrontations when skulks get a bite in and start all the confrontations at melee distance.
The composition of the Marine team was such that while some Marines were very skilled, the commander was average. And in early game, you can't afford to keep scanning everywhere. And with the Marines running off on solo mission, relying on their individual skills, it's impossible to cover them.
Of course this counterstrategy is itself easy to counter, but it takes a competent commander AND the marine team being willing to adjust how they play the game. I don't like going shade hive first, but I found this to be an effective counter against a more skilled and aggressive opponent, and we did end up winning since they didn't adjust quick enough.
Main focus after getting the camo up should be to get a second hive (and a third) as quick as possible, so you don't get stuck with higher lifeforms having only silence and camo to keep them alive.
Forcing defense of an important location
This is a bit of a mean strategy towards your own team, since it basically forces them to play a certain way, but in love and war...
Some hives and locations are more important than others, and if you want your team to take and hold them, one risky strategy is to put a massive investment in the area right at the beginning. For example, yesterday I started the alien round by announcing that I had just dropped the Crossroads hive (we started in Flight control) so if the team wants any chance of winning, they better get over there and defend/build it. If you get the hive up, you've got a great strategic location, if you don't, you lose.
On the Marine side I often do this on double node areas. I will announce that I'm going to put our tech in Nano grid or Central drilling, so if you want shotguns or whatnot anytime soon, you better not let the armory in Nano/Central go down. This is pretty much always a win/lose strategy that it is hard to come back from. If you hold it, you will have lots of res as well as a good momentum and forward base, if you lose it you're pretty much screwed. I will usually drop an armory and then an observatory, then research PG's and link them up, then start upgrading the armory (mines, shotguns, upgrade).
Try them out and see if they work for you, and post your own suggestions or experiences so that I can try them out next time.
Comments
Its a high risk/reward, and usually results in a fast game win or lose.
Skulk Wave is another one I've participated it. Pretty much you stay as a herd of skulks (5+) and just swarm every location outside of marine spawn. Skulks that die just join up with the group, and if you all get wiped out preset a meeting spot to continue from. Since most rines split up into groups of 3 at the most, it can easily overwhelm most and result in an early lockdown letting the Khamm expand with ease. This works very well if the Khamm puts out drifters early for intel.
Next time try it as marines. Generally I have 1 marine got to the adjacent RTs and everyone else go XR. Drop the CC, RT, 2 IPs. then get armory and mines ASAP. Once you get rolling, pressure thier exits from the Alien main. Cut the cysts. kill the adjacent RTs. Make sure they don't slip a hive behind your back. Whe you pull of an XR relocation, you can really put the hurt on the enemy fast.
Well, we took out two hives in about 3 minutes and won.
Total fluke imo, though.
As opposed to going for second Hive first and then upgrading Camo when Marines already hold 3 Tech Points with Obs and Gates.
I did this yesterday, my team literally went right up to the Marines in their base and nibbled them to death (their Comm went Arms Lab first so they didn't have an Obs, but even with Obs they would never get to hold a RT outside their base).
Only thing that can go wrong is your team having no idea what to do (like snailing around, or sitting somewhere cloaked far away, waiting for some Marines to show up like they would play their usual spread-out strategy).
(Not that I would ever do such a horrible thing.)
For me, as individual, it always worked to cloak gorge into the enemy base,bile the obs, and watch marines firing furiously at the air while breakdancing through their base. Makes me lol everytime. If now one would get it i'll take the IPs next, otherwise just hiding in yo vent, clogging anyone following me. Can't wait to clog em and then spit babblers at them 'rines.
As Aliens:
1) everyone lerks at 30 res.
2) no lifeforms above lerk.
3) gorge hydra rush
4) a harvester can only be placed if an extractor has been destroyed somewhere.
As Marines:
1) pistols only (mines + welders permitted)
2) shotgun hive rush
3) 2nd cc only allowed after killing a hive.
For anyone reading who happened to be a part of these shenanigans, I hope you had fun! Marine strat #3 was actually really great for encouraging pub marines to be aggressive.
Also tried OP's bile-bomb-rush strat twice, which has yet to result in a victory for me as commander. My idea was to use the quick bile to kill marine start cc and hope they don't have the res to drop a 2nd ghost cc. Failure on both counts, but I think the alien team had fun both times
8/8 in wins with this but the whole team is pissed at me the entire game lol
I like your rules, gonna try some variation of those.
When the gorge-rush fails, I find it is because of one of three (or a combination of them) factors:
1. Gorges don't healspray enough. This is the big one. The strength of the tactic is the massive healspray spam which makes it almost impossible to kill a gorge, assuming the next thing doesn't happen...
2. Gorges spread out. The Gorges need to stick together basically in one big blog. That means that healspray will hit everyone, and it will be almost impossible for marines to singke out anyone.
3. The rush is too late in the game. Once marines get grenade launchers and other advanced tech, the risk of failure is much greater. My tactic is to go *immediatly* for the gorge rush (2 RT's, hive, cara, adren, bile bomb --> rush!), so this shouldn't happen.
Unusual strats that work often end up illustrating how poorly public players play. Insta-hive drop has it's uses, but that was distinctly not one of them. The guy commenting on your over-cysting and lack of RT dropping is proof also. You had almost 2 straight minutes of being potentially permanently res locked. That game, replayed 50 times will result in 49 losses.
More importantly though, you spent far too much on cysts before getting any RT's down and it hurt your early game economy to the point where the only benefit the instant 2nd hive gave was eggs in a forward location.You didn't get any upgrades till near the 7minute mark by which point you should already have a 2nd hive up through normal strategies.
Your team won by outplaying the marines rather than any tactical edge.