Fighting Irish Forums

:FI:Moog wrote:----TRACTATUS CALLOFDUTAE----
...or, Random Spurious Thoughts About Multiplayer Team Matches.

What follows is simply a complex rant about what one 'Toonie (Your Humble Narrator) thinks about while he should be working, and about what may or may not help the FIP to fight better as a team and therefore have more fun during competitive online matches... read (the whole thing) at your peril!!!

We should all stay on the same TeamSpeak channel most of the time during 'formal' matches aginst other squads (FI Platoon Default channel). Some members could temporarily split off onto Alpha or Bravo channel (so that the main channel didn't get clogged up) and then report back to FIP Default to keep the others informed. The important thing is that everyone tries to keep the main channel as clear as possible so that information gets through when and where it is needed. Use compass bearings and elevations to report contacts, issue warnings (especially when using explosives! , coordinate group movements and flanking maneuvers, but try to keep the chitchat to a minimum... all within reason, of course! After all, the aim of the GAME is enjoyment.

Also relavent to communication, each member should become familiar with Quick Chat (the in-game voice command system). You can change the default Quick Chat key by going into Multiplayer Options. You can also use Multiplayer Options to configure keys that let you type private messages that only your own team can see, as well as public messages that can be seen by everyone on the server. Quick Chat is handy because it indicates who is giving a particular command. For instance, if there were a group of FI soldiers close together and someone issued a command via Quick Chat, that person would appear on the radar as a flashing exclamation mark (!), their soldier would shout the command in-game, and text would appear that was visible to teammates but not the enemy. Sometimes noise discipline is important though. As QuickChat commands are actually shouted in the game itself, they can be heard by both sides. TeamSpeak has the advantage of being private but memorising a few QuickChat key sequences is very handy when things get hectic in the game or too noisy on TeamSpeak. For instance, I have Quick Chat configured so that I can quickly press 'C' followed by 3 and then 1, so my soldier will respond "Yes, Sir!", or C - 2 - 1 for "Follow me!"

There shouldn't be any one individual leader but no member of the platoon should be afraid to issue commands when a situation calls for leadership. This dynamic leadership is a *sort* of command system (although it's NOT a chain of command! No rankers here and might be messy for a while at the start but should naturally evolve as we play more matches against other squads. It is difficult to develop a command system if we're only playing or practicing against ourselves on Dutchman's server but, in time, each member of the Platoon will be able to identify opportunities to apply particular team tactics or to improvise new ones, and with flexible leadership of this kind any one of us can quickly communicate and coordinate a command that the whole team can then carry out.

Depending on the number of players, the Platoon should split into one or two squads. A typical squad should be composed of at least five soldiers who should stick together as much as possible to multiply both their attacking and defensive power. Each squad should consist of elements (one, two, three or more soldiers) categorised according to primary weapon, role or skill. Typically the squad will have a good balance of sub-machine guns, heavy support weapons, and rifles, depending on the type of map and the fighting that is to be expected, and all agreed before the match begins.

In a 5-man squad, a good balance would be 2xSMG, 1xHMG and 2xRiflemen (maybe one boresighted and one sniper rifle). As far as respawning with a different weapon during the game, I reckon this is fine as long as each member of the platoon knows what every other soldier is carrying at all times. If you've been using a rifle but soon find out that all the fighting is taking place in confined spaces then of course it makes sense to switch to a machine gun. Just be sure and let the others know that they've no rifle support any more if they need it. Likewise it's handy to pick up alternate weapons from dead soldiers. If someone is trying to coordinate an attack, they should always be able to request at least two riflemen, or a Heavy Machine Gunner, or whatever, for support.

(If we had an entire team consisting Thompson SMGs there's still a good chance we could *win* a match, but it robs the game of any sense of immersion or proper team play, and that's bad, kids!)

Ideally the SMG soldiers (Thompson, MP-40, Ppsh) will lead an advance or reconnaisance movement and actively seek out close-quarters combat, leaving the longer-range fighting to the rest of the platoon (always use the right tool for the job!). One important function of the assault team is to draw fire from the enemy and thereby causing him to give his position away so that he can be attacked by them and/or by the rest of the platoon either directly or via flanking maneuver.

The support weapons (B.A.R., MG-42, .50-cal) should be deployed in cover behind the assault team and in a position to suppress any enemy soldiers who try to attack the assault team. And by cover I mean GOOD cover! HMGs deployed in the open present easy stationary headshot targets to enemy marksmen. As soon as you open up with that big gun you're gonna be seen and heard for miles around unless you have your angles covered. Even if you're in a bush and can't initially be seen, the enemy can simply backtrack your tracer fire to pinpoint your location. As soon as the assault team is out of range of the HMG they should pause, take cover, and give the HMG time to redeploy. Obviously the B.A.R. is more mobile than the MG-42, but the MG-42 has a much higher rate-of-fire (think: laser-beam!). Take factors such as these into account and use the individual strengths of each unique weapon to it's maximum advantage.

The rifle team should remain either near the HMG (but split off to either side to increase the total field-of-fire) or else they should remain even farther back, and if possible at a higher elevation. Not only can they provide pinpoint support fire from long range, they can also act as spotters to relay information to the rest of the platoon. For instance they may see a friendly assault team enter a building from the front and enemy units enter the same building from the rear. Rather than give away their own position by risking a shot, they could inform the assault team and thereby provide them with the upper hand.

The two most important aspects of team play are the advance-to-contact and subsequently the weight of fire that can be brought to bear on the enemy. The platoon should move as a group maintaing 360-degree awareness as well as the capacity for mutual support. In most cases movement will be performed from the crouched stance to minimise sound. As soon as contact occurs, the decision must be made whether to attack immediately with each soldier attacking from his present position (or from the closest available cover) or to displace and coordinate fire as a unit (with the possibility of attempting a flanking maneuver).

The concept behind this sort of displacement is that one soldier or team makes the contact, draws the fire and ties the enemy up with return fire, while other members of the team maneuver or flank the enemy for the kill from a new angle either from the sides or even from behind. However in most cases there won't be enough time for complex maneuvers so it will be important that the entire team can bring as much effective firepower to bear on the enemy in as short a time as possible. Effective firepower doesn't mean every weapon firing mayhem in the general direction of the threat; rather it is firepower that accomplishes such effects as killing or suppressing. This may even mean one lone rifleman who is able to make a distant sniper take cover, thereby allowing a teammate to move into position. Remember though, a smart enemy will be attempting exactly the same flanking maneuvers so don't fixate on one target and always attempt to maintain situational awareness.

For instance, a SMG soldier may turn a corner and draw fire from up the street. The rest of his platoon might be lined up behind him, behind the corner, unable to immediately fire at the enemy because they cannot see him through the wall. In this situation the lead soldier could find cover and pour some fire on the enemy position to communicate it's location while the rest of the platoon deployed into cover nearby (able to fire immediately at the enemy - i.e., in his line-of-sight) or attempted a flanking maneuver (staying out of the enemy's LOS for the time being).

(by the way, 'deployment' is when you or your teammates set up in a position from which you will attempt to fire on the enemy, and 'displacement' is when you give up your current position so as to move to a new position from where you can redeploy)

Ideally when contact is made, every availble weapon will be in a position to fire on the enemy if needed, but in the situation above this simply isn't possible because bullets don't usually curve around corners If any one soldier draws fire, the entire team should be able to return the fire immediately and as a cohesive unit. Obviously this is difficult in congested terrain such as street-fighting but it boils down to this: don't go it alone! Instead of turning the corner and sticking to the closest wall, the first soldier could instead sprint straight across the open street towards cover at the far wall while the next solider popped his head around the corner to observe any fire.

While advancing up a street try and move inside the buildings themselves or, when this is not possible, stay close to the external walls and any available cover. Split the team up so that half the soldiers advance up one side while the other half advance on the other side - don't walk right up the middle of the street unless you have a lot of support nearby and are trying to get an enemy to expose his position!

Maintain a sensible distance between soldiers - too close together and you risk arguing about why the grenade that was just thrown at you has no pin - too far apart and you'll be unable to provide effective mutual support. No golden distance here folks, just experience and intuition that we'll pick up as we go along. If we're playing with tripwires, always stay far enough apart so that even if one soldier dies, those around him will not.

It's important to talk a little bit about formations, types of formation, and the pros and cons involved in using them. I'll use text symbols to illustrate formations so to keep the orientation consistent, always consider that the friendly platoon's axis of advance is from bottom-to-top, or towards the North, of the text. Finally, while knowledge of formations is important, Call of Duty does not really allow for them to be employed properly so a good team will be one that can mix and match formations dynamically without having to think about what it is doing.

Imagine the following: your 10-man platoon is advancing in a straight line-astern formation (one man behind the next as if in a queue) and you make contact with an enemy platoon. This enemy platoon is also in a straight line except that they are in line-abreast formation (side-by-side) so that when you meet them head-on, the whole thing looks like a T from above, with your platoon as the vertical line and the enemy platoon as the horizontal. All of the enemy's weapons can be instantly concentrated on the lead man in your platoon, then on the next man, and so on and on down the line until your entire unit is 'rolled up' one-by-one, or 'piecemeal'. Most of the weapons in your platoon immediately have their field-of-fire restricted by whichever teammate happens to be standing in front of them in the formation, so as a platoon you have no way of concentrating any sort of effective fire to the front. It's a bit better to the sides (you could theoretically concentrate all ten weapons to one side or the other), but if ten men are walking North and facing East, they're open to the West, and vice versa. If half the men face East and the other West, they've instantly reduced the platoon's effective initial firepower by 50%, and left themselves prone to frontal attack.

In another instance you may have an advance element or recon team (even just one soldier) slightly ahead of your main formation. Imagine that they spot the enemy in time to relay information about his position. Your men can redeploy to the side and flank him from 90 degrees so that the situation is reversed: your platoon can now roll the enemy up - and you will do this even more effectively because his troops won't be facing towards you initially (remember they're still facing towards the direction from which they originally expected your attack). This will look something like: (enemy>) - | (<your platoon) with the enemy facing South and your platoon facing West.

If you tried the same flanking maneuver on an enemy who was also using line-astern, your two platoons would meet longways head-on, like two parallel lines: | | ...this involves nasty, consused fighting and is tactically useless because neither side has an initial advantage. As usual there are exceptions: the enemy might consist of ten riflemen whereas you might have ten SMGs, so you'll want to get as close as possible to get down and dirty using your higher rate-of-fire. But remember, the whole point of tactical maneuver is to create an advantage BEFORE a fight, and to carry a plan of continued maneuver into that fight. To simply maneuver without planning during a fight is mere improvisation, and this is the difference between a bunch of skilled individuals and a cohesive, skilled team.

...So, advancing in line-astern provides little or no frontal protection and negligible defence but decent potential firepower to the sides. In contrast, line-abreast provides superb frontal fire but almost zero to each side. Now imagine that instead of your line running from top-to-bottom | or side-to-side -, it ran diagonally or corner-to-corner like this \ or this / . These are called Echelon Right and Echelon Left respectively. If you're advancing in Echelon Right and meet an enemy head-on, you can bring significant firepower to bear on his left side (remember, his left side appears to the right from your point of view as you look towards him), but your soldiers will be restricting each other's fields of fire towards his right side, just as they were doing towards the front in line-astern. This looks like:
____ \
\

Needless to say, the reverse of all this is also true when using Echelon Left:
____
/
/

Okay, you should have the basic concepts in place. Come to think of it, you've probably had them in place for years, it's just that they might not have been spelled out like this before. Just because ten friendly soldiers make contact with ten enemy soldiers, that doesn't mean that it will be ten effective weapons versus ten effective weapons. Any soldier that is put in a position whereby he can be killed by an enemy without being able to return effective fire is completely useless.

All we've seen so far are straight lines:
| line astern
- line abreast
\ echelon right
/ echelon left

Add a few of these together and you get:
V vee, or 'vic'
/\ wedge
◊ diamond

These are slightly more defensive formations which combine the strengths of line and echelon but trade firepower for good all-round vision and maneuverability. If you drive one of these formations into an enemy line-abreast, you'll instantly double or triple the effective frontal firepower that can be immediately brought to bear, and as an extra strength these formations allow the platoon to hinge or change it's shape according to unforseen circumstances. If your platoon's wedge met the left flank of an enemy line abreast it would look something like this:
____
/\

If the situation allowed for it, the right side of the wedge could shift around using the wedge's point as a hinge. The enemy could then be rolled up like in the earlier example. The result would look like this: ____ |
/

There are many variations built around these basic units and concepts but for our present purposes, the important factors of any formation are:

1.) The potential defensive and attacking strength during the advance-to-contact. If you don't know where the enemy is then you will need a formation that provides good all-round vision and defence (to observe and hopefully neutralise any surprise attacks), and one that is flexible enough to adjust to a wide range of situations (equally capable of exploiting a weakness in the enemy's defence as it is in allowing for your own soldiers to stay alive if you do not hold the advantage). If you know exactly where he is and how he is shaped, you can tailor your formation to exploit the maximum advantage, which brings us along to...

2.) The effective firepower available upon contact. If you're surprised (and maybe suppressed, too!) by an enemy then you'll want to have lots of lead flying in his direction as soon as possible. If you're the one doing the surprising, you have a little more time to arrange just how much and what sort of lead you'll be sending his way. This is the tradeoff between a formation with decent all-round defence and attack, and a formation with very strong and specific attacking potential but very weak defensive capabilities.

3.) The ability to sub-divide and maneuver whilst maintaining cohesion and strength. Alright, this is where you finish reading the book and throw it out the window. The theory and all the diagrams are in your head, and it's time to put them into practice. Any soldier in formation who expects their static line or vee to meet another static line or vee will very soon make the transition from cadre to cadaver. For those of you for whom English is not a native language, this means that HE'S GONNA DIE!!! When any formation enters a fight, it should always allow for some of it's soldiers to displace and flank the enemy. The remaining soldiers can fight from where they are, or they can also displace or maybe redeploy under mutual protection. If your platoon bumps into an enemy platoon and neither one was expecting the other, use half your strength to keep the enemy pinned so that he has to concentrate on you, while the other half sneaks around the sides or back and finishes the job.

Maneuverability is by far the most important factor in terms of Call of Duty. If the truth be told, formations will not be rigidly employed in the game... this much is obvious enough. However, the basic principles behind using formations apply in full effect. These are the Four 'F's: Find, Fix, Flank, and Finish the enemy. Whether it's 2v2 or 200v200, it makes no sense if the entire team stays still only to fire wishful thinking at the bad guys. There is no longer just one of you serving your own purposes - use the multiples to the best advantage! Even if it's just 2v2, the two of you will both make contact and attempt to suppress the enemy, then one of you will continue suppressing while the other maneuvers to flank and then roll the enemy up.

There is absolutely no point in performing maneuvers or actions piecemeal! In every situation no matter how many soldiers are involved, the platoon should be generating options and alternatives, evaluating them, selecting the best one, and then PERFORMING it aggressively. In the above example the TeamSpeak communication would be simple:"You flank right, I'll continue suppressing." "Roger" Bang Bang Bang!!! That's it. Coordination! Teamwork! Job done. Here are some more examples:

"Support weapons deploy either side of the road and cover the front. The rest will advance with me along the right-hand hedge line and deploy at the next tree. Support follow up."

"Rifles, keep an eye on the first floor above ground. Suspected enemy sniper. I'll attempt to draw his fire. SMGs cover my sides at ground level."

"SMGs with me, we're gonna cross the street. Rifles pop smoke for us and cover. SMGs on me, three-second intervals to that doorway. Go!"

Yeah yeah I know, it's getting a bit serious and it won't turn out like this, but the right impression is there at least. Plan, communicate, coordinate, and perform most if not all actions whenever possible.

And finally...

Your life and the lives of your teammates are more important than the life of the enemy. Staying alive and NOT getting the kill is more important than dying while attempting the kill. These should be every soldier's priorities:
1.) Keep yourself and your teammates alive.
2.) Kill the enemy.
IN THAT ORDER!!!

If the team enters a medium or large structure with lots of rooms, the lead soldier should enter the first room either using caution ('slicing the pie' - peering bit by bit around the doorframe) or else he should make a definitive movement fully into the room and away to one side so that the next soldier, following immediately behind, will not shoot through him if an enemy appears. This second soldier should then be the first one in to the next room and so on... if we decided to get REALLY serious we could arrange specific room-clearing teams with one soldier carring a SMG and another ready to lob a grenade around every doorway and corner.

Tight spaces make ideal ambush points. If an enemy is waiting silently on the other side of a doorway, it pays to be aggresive. Obviously most of the time you can't know whether or not there's someone in the next room until you actually go into it. Don't stand in the doorway and present an easy, stationary target! When you sense that an ambush might be possible, burst in and be ready to fire at all times. While you won't have the advantage, you sure won't have as much of a disadvantage as you would if you were standing still. Remember, the enemy will have his weapon pointed at the doorway, so if you burst in and stay mobile he is forced to re-aim. Always make things as difficult as possible for him.

Another tactic for room-clearing is to have a grenade armed, then run into a room and run backwards straight out again. If you draw fire, it won't be enough to kill you (hopefully!) and now you'll be able to toss a grenade in and switch to a SMG to kill the enemy either just before the grenade goes off (risky, but he won't be expecting you to come back in so soon with a grenade in there already!), or else you can wait for him to come running out of the doorway into which you just threw the grenade. OR you'll get lucky and the grenade will turn one big enemy soldier into five or six much smaller, less effective enemy soldiers (and shoulders!)

Theory is all well and good but it's practice that counts. Real-world infantry tactics are helpful most of the time in CoD but then again there are differences between the two so it pays to develop tactics that would only work in CoD and not in real life. However, the principles are the same: Find the enemy, fix him, flank him, and finish him.

:FI:Moog wrote:Yeoman,

after reading your last post, looking at the medals you guys awarded yourselves on your forum, and recalling some of the snide comments your teammates made during the game, I'm led to believe that you guys may be taking the whole thing a little bit too seriously.

You're entitled to go as far as you like on your own boards by all means (your patriotic graphics are very impressive), but please bear in mind that the FI are far less concerned with who wins or loses, or racks up the most kills, as we are with the intention that as many people as possible have as good a time as possible.

If we decided to win a competition match we would field a team of knee-jerkers who would in all likelyhood crush any and all opposition but to do this would be to undermine the fundamental reason underlying what makes the FI one of the best online communities that there is.

In summary, friendly competition is always welcome but if it's high scores and gloating that you're after please look somewhere else. Or at least keep it to yourselves (far be it from me to tell you what to do on your own turf).

Don't midunderstand me on this. I enjoyed the game. I just suspect that the HG may desire something other than what it is that the FI have to offer.

Play It Cool

-Moog