Unothadox commanding style
Narfwak
Join Date: 2002-11-02 Member: 5258Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS1 Playtester, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica PT Lead, NS2 Community Developer
Join Date: 2002-11-02 Member: 5258Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS1 Playtester, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica PT Lead, NS2 Community Developer
In my short experience of NS on the release night, I found that the commanders generally were not the people actually leading the marine team. Instead, one of the more skilled players (skilled in both killing stuff and getting people organized) would rise from the ranks and actually order the commander around. The strange thing is, this worked much better than the commander giving orders by themselves.
Because the marined footsoldier is actually "in" the enviroment of the game, they tend to actually have a better picture of what is going on; this often is only true of skilled FPS players though, possibly because they have some experience in DoD, such as myself. The commander, on the other hand, will often quickly get disoriented by the top down perspective and find it difficult to get a grip on things without someone telling them what is needed where at all times.
When I did have a commander giving orders, he was very arrogant and impatient with his troops, expecting single marines to fend off hoards of aliens (I did do this once, four knife kills in a row w00t! <!--emo&:D--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':D'><!--endemo--> ). They commander would then play sim-base, fortifying the main spawn area without even trying to expand. Eventually, we were overrun by 4 onos and a bunch of fades, despite the fact that our commander had built no less than 40 turrets in our base (I kid you not).
This rather strange and counter-intuitive commanding style usually works best when the marines have mics, especially the "lead" marine(s). It is pretty much pointless to try to attempt teamwork without a good mic. Without one, I pretty much ended up as the commander's handy-man (not a bad position actually, it helps to get stuff done fast), building and reinforcing random expansion areas that the aliens were not currently invading, or making sure base upgrades in the outposts we had were coming along well.
One last note to aspiring commanders - get a mic. Please. It is ridiculous for the commander to not be able to talk to his troops, and it hurts the Frontiersmen a LOT. Also, test your mic out on a LAN or with a friend to make sure it actually works; many commanders have failed because they didn't realize no one could hear them becuase they hadn't configured their microphone in the utillity that comes with HL.
Because the marined footsoldier is actually "in" the enviroment of the game, they tend to actually have a better picture of what is going on; this often is only true of skilled FPS players though, possibly because they have some experience in DoD, such as myself. The commander, on the other hand, will often quickly get disoriented by the top down perspective and find it difficult to get a grip on things without someone telling them what is needed where at all times.
When I did have a commander giving orders, he was very arrogant and impatient with his troops, expecting single marines to fend off hoards of aliens (I did do this once, four knife kills in a row w00t! <!--emo&:D--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':D'><!--endemo--> ). They commander would then play sim-base, fortifying the main spawn area without even trying to expand. Eventually, we were overrun by 4 onos and a bunch of fades, despite the fact that our commander had built no less than 40 turrets in our base (I kid you not).
This rather strange and counter-intuitive commanding style usually works best when the marines have mics, especially the "lead" marine(s). It is pretty much pointless to try to attempt teamwork without a good mic. Without one, I pretty much ended up as the commander's handy-man (not a bad position actually, it helps to get stuff done fast), building and reinforcing random expansion areas that the aliens were not currently invading, or making sure base upgrades in the outposts we had were coming along well.
One last note to aspiring commanders - get a mic. Please. It is ridiculous for the commander to not be able to talk to his troops, and it hurts the Frontiersmen a LOT. Also, test your mic out on a LAN or with a friend to make sure it actually works; many commanders have failed because they didn't realize no one could hear them becuase they hadn't configured their microphone in the utillity that comes with HL.
Comments
But I also experienced that, and it can work fine if the commander is going into this. Like one guy at the front organizing the attack and the commander giving ammo and health or building turrets to support.
Unluckily you won't see this in the first week very often.
A few hours ago I commanded myself for short time (noone would like to do cmd, so I hopped in). Well the game was in a pretty bad situation, and we lost. But there was an onos and a fade in the middle of our base, taking out buildings, but I couldn't see them on the screen. Some one knows why?