Tactically Speaking Part 1

I have a gun, and it shoots bullets, virtual bullets they may be but bullets none the less. You may not really die from it permanently or go through a rehabilitation process, but you go through a respawn time, which could make or break the match. Initially you may think duck and cover, dolphin dive, or just walk crouched is enough to keep you going for a round of public players, but lone wolves don’t live that long, or have as much fun.

Offices go paintballing for teamwork and communication development, well video games can do that as well. The reason Hardcore mode was enabled was not for faster kills, but for the ability to make a more team oriented game type. Some methods differ from others on tactics, each have their own offensive and defensive abilities, however all of them have one thing in common, teamwork. I’ll try and share some of my CAL-M and TWL experiences so others can benefit from what I came up with in the past for Counter Strike: Source and Americas Army.

Slow moving squads can get “ganked” easy. There’s ways around this, since you are slow moving, you don’t have to worry about running into a trap, since you basically move into an area after inspecting it, if it has blind spots, you can either flash or stun grenade the room, have someone poke in and take a better look, or if you have the exits covered, smoke it. Now, in Modern Warfare 2, there’s a nice additional item for guns that makes the “hotbox move” (as me and another teammate labeled it) a little easier is the Thermal scope. Useful to have one on the team with an Assault rifle like an M4, AK, M16, SCAR or something similar with one of those on it. Commonly when you smoke a room you run into a number of things, which are:

• People changing positions to hold the doorway(s).
• People leaving the room through a different exit than the one the smoke came into.
• Staying still and/or fortifying the doorway(s)

Now, with each of those scenarios, we come into an issue, most commonly it’s people changing positions or leaving will be on the ready and looking out for you, if they aren’t looking, they’re either trying to move undetected or spraying everything they have. This typically results in scattering or backing away, which is what they want. With the thermal scope we can end that quickly and cover movements, along with the original tracing the line of fire. Also, if you don’t mind the extra noise, a quick flash, stun or smoke, then grenade fairs well if you’re really unsure. Most of the time a flash goes off, people move to try and get away, same for stun, and we’ve already covered what commonly happens in smoke. If you toss a grenade, c4, or even blast a 203 in there, you catch them with their pants down, essentially, while eradicating and scattering their defenses against you overtaking that room.

Now, since I’ve covered entering rooms, in the most average sense for a slow moving group, slow moving in general can have issues, and these are getting jumped on quickly. Guerrilla tactics are the most efficient against slow squads since anticipating where they will be when they reach you is easy, so you need to mix up the movements, keep things random, tight, and keep eyes on all angles, keep scanning the surroundings. This can prove quite tiresome, but it will pay off in the end. This constant scanning never stops regardless of the circumstance, and nobody’s a hero, call enemies and show where they’re moving, if they are no longer in your section, let the other people know, they can check theirs quickly, which sometimes catches people trying to sneak up on you. Once you reach the objective, while you capture it keep the scanning up, and make up for the guy working on the objective (if it’s a bomb plant) which can make it a little more tiresome, but if you’re in a room, it’s easy, and you can sparse out to watch the room better if you’d like, but try to keep it unpredictable, if you do it once, do not do it again for a couple of rounds at least. And changing who was in that position is not changing it up…

More to come, including group rushing, reacting to new situations, defending objectives, and what to do when you’re the last man standing.

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