I found these TG guides through a link on EG’s website. Very good for players who have experience but are wondering how there are still players who are better. This was done by Crux, who I don’t know personally. I’d rather pick guides from player I know, however, this is very good.
Infantryman's Guide Part I: The Definition of Insanity
Crux's Infantry Guide Part I: The Definition of Insanity
Learning how to learn.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Or to put it another way, "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten."
This concept is the focus of the entirety of Part I of this guide, because it speaks to the core of why people hit a glass ceiling in this (and any other) game, where they cease to improve and get better. In this section you will not find specific combat techniques. You won’t find any nifty locations on maps. What you will hopefully get is the correct mindset necessary to take your game to the next level. Some of this may be rather verbose, but stick with it!
Little Robots Everywhere
We all play BF2142 like robots. Yes, that’s right. Robots. Every robot is governed by a system of AI that tells them how to react to any given situation. In human beings, we call them habits. Essentially as you play the game, your brain is computing its way down a decision tree. If X then do Y. You see a certain circumstance and react a certain way. But how do we develop our own personal AI? How do we develop our own playstyle?
Most player progress through the following basic model of improvement (or lack thereof!).
Stage 1: Learning basic game mechanics. The player learns which keys move them around the game, and how to shoot the various weapons.
Stage 2: Learning basic map layouts. The player learns the basic layouts of the maps - the location and names of the various flags, and where the super-big hotspots are.
Stage 3: Refining Motor Skills. Accuracy is improved as the player calibrates to their mouse settings and becomes used to the weapons. The speed of basic game mechanics such as swapping weapons and changing stances is increased.
Stage 4: Establishment of routines and habits. This is the stage where the player plays lots of rounds on the various maps, and develops their own playstyle. They find their favorite locations on each map, and their favorite kit loadouts. They get into routes as far as movement patterns, actions at enemy contact, actions when taking fire.
Stage 4 is where the average player runs into trouble. The AI patterns they develop are basically arbitrary in nature. This is because human beings have one great failing: we tend to remember and glory in our successes, and brush aside and forget our mistakes. If we are successful doing action X once, then we tend to keep trying to reproduce action X even if we are unsuccessful far more often than not.
So unfortunately when most players hit Stage 4, they have already begun to form habits and routines from their earlier stages. Except these habits and routines tend to not be very good because they were formed when we had a poor understanding of the game from both a skill and a tactical perspective.
In short, the habits most players have are bad habits, but they repeat them because they are occasionally successful despite their bad habits not because of them.
What Just Happened?
Bob runs around a corner and sees four enemy soldiers. He drops to one knee and begins shooting. He takes one down, gets killed. They revive their fallen man and move on.
Five minutes later, Bob runs around a corner and sees four enemy soldiers. He drops to one knee and begins shooting…
Bob’s AI is not very sophisticated. This is because Bob doesn’t ask that one critical question: what just happened? And because Bob doesn’t ask this, he cannot evaluate his combat actions for effectiveness. In essence, Bob isn’t stopping to consider if there isn’t a better way to react to this circumstance. One time, six months ago Bob probably came around that corner and managed to kill all four. Never mind that they were all snipers at 20% health, in Bob’s mind all he recalls is watching those bodies fall to the ground. He spends the rest of his gaming career trying to recreate that moment of glory.
To become a truly skilled player, you must constantly evaluate your actions. You must accept that the way you react to any given circumstance is probably not the best way possible. Accepting this, you must search for a better way. If Bob were to do this, the next time he runs around that corner, he might just turn around and flee. And while fleeing he might drop a grenade at his own feet, which blows up right as the first of the four guys come around the corner, killing two of them. Bob has survived, saved his team a ticket and delayed the enemy’s advance. This is a higher level of sophistication AI. An even higher level of sophistication might lead to Bob single handedly killing all four of them on a consistant basis. But it can only be developed by questioning and attempting to improve upon our basic actions in every circumstance.
Creating A New Decision Tree or AI
So you now accept you are in essence a robot. How do you become a better robot? In essence what you want to do is replace your existing AI or habits with better ones. Warning: this doesn’t happen automatically. It also doesn’t happen easily. You actually have to try. The single biggest problem with most people is they just play the game. They don’t think about what they are doing, and they don’t actively work to get better. It doesn’t mean hours of drilling (although that can help). But it does mean actually thinking consciously about what you’re doing.
So the next time you come into a situation that ends poorly for you, stop and ask yourself these questions:
1) Was that a bad decision on my part, or a good decision that I just got unlucky in or executed poorly?
2) If it was a bad decision, what should I have done differently?
3) How does player “X” react in this circumstance?
And don’t be afraid to actually ask player X. If you gave me almost any situation in game I could tell you specifically what I would do. I won’t pretend that *everything* I do is 100% the best thing, but most of the patterns I have are successful, because I developed them through critical evaluation.
The hard part is this: realizing that not only do you need to do this for every circumstance as it happens, you have to constantly be re-evaluating even the ‘improved’ version of your AI to make it even better.
Now that we’ve covered that, in Part II I’m going to write about some specific things to focus on in-game. Specifically Kill/Death ratio, how it relates to soldier efficiency and the snowball effect it has on capturing flags, holding flags, saving tickets and hence winning rounds.
Infantryman's Guide Part II: Soldier Efficiency
Crux's Infantry Guide Part II: Soldier Efficiency
Why Not Dying Is Good (No, Really!)
Talking about Kill/Death ratios is sometimes frowned upon as being ‘Un-TG’. And when pursued for selfish grandstanding then I suppose it is. But the truth of it is that K/D ratios are a great measure of soldier efficiency. K/D ratios are a way for people to evaluate statistically a HUGE effect they are having on their team. And I say ‘huge’ because it is huge. Dying has a snowball effect on your team that is much overlooked in favor of selfless flag capping, however many tickets and however much time you might throw away in order to do so.
Math Is Fun: Revive Rates and Time Wasted
Although there is some variation, in more than 80% of games on the TG server between 20 and 30% of fallen soldiers are revived. On average, 1 in 4 times a soldier goes down is he revived. That means 3 in 4 times a soldier dies, he is not revived. That is to say, the vast majority of the time you die on the TG server, you will not be revived. Wrap your head around that for a second.
The average round on the TG server lasts about 19 minutes. The average player on TG’s server dies about 11.25 times a round. This means they actually ‘fall’ about 11.25/0.75 = 15 times a round. 11 times they are down for a full 15 seconds, which adds up to almost 3 full minutes of playtime. Add in the extra 3-4 times they go down but are revived, and you’ve got at least 3 full minutes of a 19 minute round a soldier is out of play.
Now consider this: of those 15 times you go down, 4 are the number of successful revives. That’s 4 times a soldier had to stop shooting, stop defending, stop attacking… stop contributing to accomplishing a team goal of capping or protecting a flag, and revive you. Then there’s other times in the 11 you die where they try to revive you but don’t manage to in time. Every revive, successful or not, exposes your teammate to a highly elevated chance of getting killed also. One of the first things we teach any new member of the 3rd to do is always grenade or rocket dead bodies to kill any would-be reviver.
Now I know this is getting bogged down a little bit in math and details, but I’ll sum it all up here in a second. In the average round, due to your getting killed or critically wounded, you are taking yourself and/or teammates out of the playing field for a minimum of 1/5th of every round. This is time you spend lying there waiting for a revive. Time a teammate spends reviving you. Time a teammate spends lying on the ground waiting for a revive because he was killed trying to revive you.
The average player spends 20% of a round’s time dying or reviving.
MythBusters: BF2142 Is All About Capping Flags!
Here’s an interesting fact for you: on the average round on the TG server, between 50 and 80% of the ticket loss is due, not to ticket bleed, but to soldier deaths. Sometimes that number is close to 90%, but it is practically never less than 50%.
People often become fixated on capping flags, and throw away dozens of tickets in the process. A single gung-ho squad leader who isn’t calculating the cost of his efforts can throw away 30% or more of his team’s tickets trying to cap a flag. Oftentimes this happens in situations where capping the flag has no impact on ticket bleed.
Scary eh?
If everyone on your team played more conservatively and cut the number of deaths by even 1/3, that is typically 60 or more tickets. “But wait,” I hear you say. “If I play more cautiously, I won’t kill as many of the enemy.” You are at once both right and wrong. You will kill less of the enemy per unit of time. However because you are dying less, you spend more time actually playing and hence able to shoot (rather than counting down from 15 while critically wounded). This extra time on your feet typically more than makes up for the difference in a little caution.
Moral to the story is this: even though people might feel like superior teamwork players sacrificing themselves to capture a flag, oftentimes they are doing more harm than good.
Survivor: Don’t Get Voted Off!
So step one to become a death-dealing machine is understanding that if you are dead you can’t be killing people. And if you are dead you are pulling a teammate away from killing people also in order to revive you. It’s really a double-whammy! Dead men also can’t cap flags! Knowing this now, start focusing on your death counts in a round. Try to bring the number of deaths down through a more careful playstyle. I’m not saying play scared for the rest of your life, or hide in corners. Just be more careful with your virtual life – be less eager to throw it away.
Once you understand better how to survive, you can then bring your aggression level up to your comfort level and still die less frequently. People who play with me will tell you I run around like crazy, but I die on average 4.8 times per round, compared to 14 kills per round. And those stats are almost pure infantry – I’ve never spent hours in a roflcopter or apc racking up ludicrous kill numbers.
One of the major concepts to improve your survival rate is this: don’t fight if you cannot win. There are times you will have to sacrifice a ticket to delay the capture of a flag while help arrives. But most of the time people throw their virtual life away in the middle of nowhere for no real reason. Discretion is the better part of valor. Retreat if you must, and live to fight another day. You’ll be amazed what an effect it can have.
Infantryman's Guide Part III: Save a Ninja, Save the World
Crux's Infantry Guide Part III: Save a Ninja, Save the World
Controlling Your Engagements
Learning to control your engagements is probably the single biggest step towards tactical proficiency. BF2142 is war, and as the saying goes “All is fair in love and war.” Without Arithea in your squad, love is a forgotten dream, and war is all we have left. So given this, understand a critical concept: your job is to destroy the enemy by all legal means possible.
You aren’t dueling with rapiers, or drawing cold steel at 20 paces. Your intent should be to engage your opponent at every instance in a circumstance and environment that stacks the odds as heavily as possible in your favor.
I want you to imagine for a moment two soldiers, A and B. They have equally fast reflexes, and are equally accurate with their weapons. Now picture the following three scenarios:
A and B stand facing each other and try to kill one another
A and B stand facing each other, but B is behind cover
B is standing at A’s back
In the first scenario, A will walk away 50% of the time, and B will walk away 50% of the time. In the second one, B will walk away between 50% and 100% of the time… just how often depends slightly on luck and largely on the quality of B’s cover. In the third scenario, B should win 100% of the time.
How do you engage the enemy?
Just Walk Away
If we harken back briefly to the scenario presented in an earlier segment of the guide, where soldier Bob comes around a corner to see four enemy soldiers. Being the average player, Bob opens fire and tries to kill them all. Is he controlling the engagement, or is the engagement controlling him?
You must never be afraid to walk (or run) away from a bad situation when the engagement is not taking place on your terms. In essence, if in any given situation you have a 50% or less chance of surviving, then you need to change the situation. Rather than open fire, retreat. If you see trouble ahead and you are situationally aware to know that there are more bad guys there than you can stop, find another route. Find another position. Find friends and come back to kick their asses!
Just because you have a weapon in your hands doesn’t mean you have to use it all the time, every time. The gun is just a tool. Your mind is your true weapon. But if you are not using your mind to outmaneuvere your opponent, and avoid bad situations then you are letting your biggest weapon go to waste.
Be a Ninja
Ninjas kick ass. We all know it to be true. Special Forces soldiers such as Navy Seals, Delta Force etc etc are simply modern-day ninjas with guns. When you think about it, their mode of operation is the same. They work in secrecy. Their goal is to avoid detection as much as possible, and strike unseen. Even though they are better warriors than their opponents, they still seek to engage them at as big of an advantage as possible.
Do you play the game like a Special Forces soldier? Or do you play it like a Civil War soldier, advancing in plain sight hoping you shoot the other guy before he shoots you?
Your every focus should be, not on out-shooting your opponent but rather out-thinking him. Make it your constant goal to shoot your enemy in the back before he can see you. Work yourself into situations where you can kill your enemy without him knowing you are there. If you want to win more than 50% of your engagements, you must constantly seek to control the terms of the engagement. You must always be looking for the opportunity to put yourself in a better position than your opponent(s). This might mean engaging behind cover when they have none. It might mean approaching them from the rear. It might simply be the element of surprise.
In summary, if you cannot fight your enemy to your advantage then do not fight him. Wait and work until you have a decisive advantage and then strike!
It takes only paying attention and a willingness to walk away to avoid bad engagements. In order to consistently engage your enemy to your advantage you must be able to predict his actions. This is what we will cover in Part 4!
Infantryman's Guide Part IV: Know Thy Enemy, Know Thyself
Crux's Infantry Guide Part IV: Know Thy Enemy, Know Thyself
So you understand the importance of engaging the enemy in situations that are to your advantage. How exactly does one go about doing that? In order to shoot your enemy in the back, you have to know two things: his location, and the direction he is facing. Given the propensity of people to move around, and the fact that IDS and UAV are not always available, this means you have to be able to predict with some measure of accuracy what his actions will be.
So exactly how do you predict someone’s actions? First of all you have to understand their motivations. If you know what they are trying to do, then you can reasonably predict how they will go about doing it. If I know someone is going to try to cap the flag at
This is merely one example, and more of a complex one in many ways because it entails a larger-scale prediction. First we are going to talk about small-scale interactions, and soldier ‘personalities’.
Pick a Number Between One and Three
In basic terms, there are three types of play styles. Aggressive, Defensive, and Adaptive. There are sub-styles within these three major categories, (Defensive-Adaptive, for example), but to get you started on the right track we will deal with just these three as they provide the over-riding motivation for predicting your opponent’s movements.
Aggressive players are driven by the need to kill. They care little about their own ‘life’. These are the players who, despite being at 20% health will charge into a building in pursuit of an enemy who is at full health. Who will throw himself into a blockage again and again, dying a ton but not caring because he is driven to get kills. Aggressive players tend to be highly mobile, and eschew specific locations in favor of wherever the action is. His driving motivation is simply the satisfaction he gets from killing others, and having a high kill count and score at the end of the round.
The Defensive player is risk averse. They will go out of their way to avoid dying, and are happy to camp locations. Many of your Support users (not shotgun whores) are defensive in nature. They tend to have favorite locations where they will set up, and kill people who travel through. They often care less about their score and more about their kill/death ratio.
The Adaptive player is someone who has a sophisticated decision tree. They are typically capable of recognizing Aggressive and Defensive players, and have separate reactions to the same scenario based on which player-type they are facing. These are the ‘advanced’ players. They often have a tendency towards aggression or defense, but have learned to modify that to circumstance (ie they started out as an Aggressive or Defensive player, but then expanded their decision tree/AI over time to build on their natural tendencies).
It is important to be able to recognize which of the three your opponent is, because knowing their playstyle you can reliably predict how they will react in a given situation.
Climbing the Decision Tree
Remember when I spoke about everyone being a robot and having AI? I also used the term “Decision Tree”. Everyone’s actions are really driven by their decision trees in game. And most people’s decision trees are very simple in nature. The better the player, the more complex and sophisticated his decision tree has become. If X then do Y. For an Aggressive player, Y will be designed to get them a kill as quickly as possible. For a Defensive player, Y will be designed to allow them to live.
Your goal when encountering someone should be to swiftly recognize their player type, and then climb their decision tree. If you can successful climb their decision tree, you can know what they are going to do. This allows you to control the situation. For example:
You come around a corner and there is a support player in the rocks with a Ganz. He opens fire and wounds you, but you duck back behind the corner. If this were an aggressive player, he would come out of the rocks to pursue you. But he’s got a Ganz, which is not a very mobile weapon. This is your first clue. He was waiting in the rocks for you to come. That’s your second clue. So you realize you are dealing with a defensive player. Now the trick about defensive players is that they tend to be patient, and will wait you out. But, the moment you have the upper hand, they will run.
As a simple example, you put a grenade in the rocks. Now an aggressive player would leave the rocks and come towards you, but he is defensive. He is going to move away from you. Now before you throw the grenade, you already know what his reaction is going to be. You can use this to jump his decision tree. So you duck out, throw the grenade and duck back behind cover for just a moment. This is to make him think you’re staying put while he runs. Then you leave cover, sprint around his previous position to catch him in the open trying to get to a new camping spot. Of course if your grenade is off-target, Jthen none of this works, but you get the picture
The point being if you can predict what your opponent will do, then you can control what your opponent will do. If X then do Y. So you give them X in anticipation of Y, and kill them.
Early Recognition
Of course, all of this is predicated on the ability to recognize their playing style. How exactly do we do that? Experts suggest that 90% of human communication is non-verbal. Although the graphics in 2142 are not good enough to show facial expressions or hand gestures, you can still read play styles by physical movements. Do they move forward or stay behind cover? Is their weapon choice suited to aggressive or defensive play styles? How “gung ho” do they appear in their firing patterns? A bunch of very small clues can give you the ability to ‘peg’ someone in a moment.
This is probably the single hardest skill to master, but doing so will take your game to an entirely new level. However you simply will never become good at this unless you go through the steps described in part I of this guide. What just happened? You HAVE to break down encounters and evaluate what occurred in order to learn this invaluable skill.
So get working!
Infantryman's Guide Part V: Devil is in the Details
Crux's Infantry Guide Part V: The Devil is in the Details
So by now if you’ve read the earlier parts of the guide, you have an understanding of the psychology of combat necessary. Competency at it however requires dedication and work. Mastery of it takes that, plus perhaps some innate abilities – quickness of thought, the ability to resolve complex tactical situations at a glance, and the reflexes to act upon these. That said, this part of the guide will focus on the minutiae of being a superior soldier. A sculptor might know what type of sculpture lies inside a block of stone or wood, but it is only through dedication to his craft that he gains the skill to actually bring it out. Likewise knowing where to be and what to be looking for on the battlefield is of paramount importance. But what carries you through when you cannot gain the advantage? Or if someone has managed to gain the advantage over you? When you cannot gain a tactical advantage, the Devil is in the details.
What follows is a list of things you should work hard to make habits.
1. Know how many bullets you need to kill two people in CQB with your current weapon. Whenever your ammunition count drops below this number, find a safe place and reload
2. Expect an enemy around every corner
3. When you know you’ve got your target cold, fire rockets in salvos of two
4. If you must fire three rockets, fire a fourth for good measure – one rocket in the chamber will only wound a healthy soldier, and then you’re reloading while he is killing you
5. Multitask. If you must retreat to heal, take the opportunity to reload. If you must stop to reload, drop a medkit and heal while you do it.
6. Put grenades on the dead bodies of enemies you kill. If you’re out of grenades, put rockets there instead
7. Never reload out in the open. Find a safe place to do so.
8. Don’t stop in the middle of an open space to shoot an enemy unless you must (ie he is shooting you and no cover is nearby)
9. If you don’t practice shooting, throwing grenades and using rockets you won’t get better at any of these important skills
10. Every time you have a safe chance to do so, look at the big map. Watch which flags are held by whom, and look for possible or likely troop movements. This will stop you getting enveloped unawares
11. If you find yourself standing next to, or running directly alongside a squad mate, move. You’re more likely to shoot each other if surprised in CQB, and also more likely to both get killed by the same rocket or grenade
12. Move from cover to cover. Every time you hit cover pause and survey the area for 1-3 seconds before moving on
13. Plan out your cover-to-cover moves 2 or 3 steps ahead. That way if you get caught by surprise and need to find cover quickly, you know what your options are
14. Everything is a weapon. When surprised by an enemy while healing I’ve thrown my med kit in his face and used that moment to dodge to the side and get my own weapon out
15. Always be alert. Surprises are only good when they happen to the other guy!
Show Them Something With One Hand…
And perform your magic trick with the other. Feinting is an incredibly valuable tool and should be used constantly. There are many ways to make your enemy believe you are doing one thing while you are actually doing another.
1) If you get slightly wounded, duck around a corner and drop your med kit right at the corner where he can see it. He thinks you are easy prey and usually will sprint forward. Duck out from behind cover and shoot him while he’s in mid-sprint and cannot fire back
2) If your opponent gets behind cover and cannot see you, throw a grenade in his general direction and sprint to a new location, preferably to approach him from behind
3) Wounded people expect to be chased. Throw a grenade after them and then move in a flanking direction instead. If they stop the grenade gets them. If they keep going they run into you and are surprised. Either way the grenade exploding behind them gives them the sense of being chased directly
4) If you and an opponent are both behind cover, ducking out to fire at each other, set them up. Duck out and fire twice, then the third time either sprint directly at them or leave the area. Firing twice gives them the feeling of being in a rhythm of exchanging fire, and lulls them into not expecting the movement
5) If you are being chased, drop a grenade in your footsteps with a right click throw. This will hold them up momentarily. Use the opportunity to keep running… in a big circle so now you are the chaser instead of the chase
These are just some examples, but will hopefully get you thinking the right vein. Take the time to work on your craft. It doesn’t require a lot of practice to dramatically improve your shooting, rocketing and grenade-throwing skills. Always shoot from the knee – going prone is the suckers’ beat and just increases the chances of being headshot. Kneel, zoom in while kneeling and open fire. Short bursts of 2-5 bullets, depending on the gun (2 for the baur, 5 for the engineer smg).
Practice, practice, practice.
A list of different guides put up by Tactical Gamer can be found using the link above. Great stuff from a great clan with many skilled players.