Quinc3y

Champions League final night, I won't be there for the PUG.

3:38 the best plan... obviously it worked

Good games overall. Mesa and Complex were much more intense than Eyes. If you ask me why... it's been months and Eyes still needs a vehicle limit of at least 12. Neither of the teams could pull out a proper rush with such a small vehicle limit. I killed one of the hotwires, but the other killed me and had about 10 seconds to disarm the nuke (it was on the roof, not hidden in any way so I'm sure she saw it). I'm not sure how long it takes for an adv. engi to disarm a nuke (and whether veterancy helps with it), but it must have been very close.

That was actually Yagi solo infiltrating HoN and dealing perma with a grenadier. By the way, that was one of the best executed APC rushes I've seen. Airstrip was already mined, but we had exactly one engi suicide on the mines (Ryz) and other 3 engis run in and use their remotes instantly while the 5th engi (me) was blocking the door with APC. That's the kind of thing that's never going to happen in a public game cuz either you're gonna get a grenadier/officer/whatever inside your APC or more people will die to the mines, or people will die before detonating remotes etc. Xeon, who planted the ion, was SBH spy and we wanted to combine that with the sydney rush, but the coordination was bad. Xeon then lost the SBH spy to out of borders bug... We actually risked it and instantly went for 12 gunners instead of meds, which I believe cost us the game. I wanted to see if we could at least deal some perma to strip (you can hit it from just outside WF) and in worst case kill some arties, but it didn't go too well.

I sometimes use foul language.

Saturday PUG's small recap: Field Nod lost the first harvester battle and got locked in base by meds & mrls shooting from long range. Nod PP went down first. Lakeside flying Early apache rush destroyed WF and Nod went camp mode. GDI first tried orca rushing with the orcas that they had left and then sydney rushing hon...both were close but HoN survived. In the meantime Nod finished the job with apaches/stanks/nukes. Islands Nod once again not finding the answer to med spam. GoldRush 3 humvees rush in to the obelisk while a Sydney gotten from crate sneaks into the HoN. HoN went down. Nod still tried to go for tank mass, but without tech repair they couldn't hold their ground. Med rush destroyed Ob, then stank rush destroyed AGT. Still, Nod had no techs left and ref & strip died to infiltrating sydneys & hotwires, GDI won. Complex Med spam killed HoN and ref around the 10th minute. Nod answered with a tech solo destroying ref. But it was too little too late. 4-1, ~14v14. Was fun for me even though teams weren't balanced and I played on the losing side. I had some luck and overall it was one of my best performances in a PUG (except for on Lakeside maybe, there I played bad). Sunday PUG didn't happen because of not enough people showing up.

I think light tanks can be useful in some scenarios. Obviously 8 meds will destroy 8 lights, but if you mix lights with other Nod vehicles, they can work. I wouldn't use them in choke-point maps like Under or Islands, but on Tunnels or Field where there's a lot of room to maneuver, a smart light tank can be a real pain to deal with. A small buff to make them more useful (especially in the late game) could be welcome though. I don't feel like they gain much with veterancy.

@LavaDr4gon Yes, especially the first one going through was a shock to me. The second one was placed at the farthest possible spot that will still destroy a building I believe and was hidden well. I wasn't in the base in both cases and I thought there's no need to suicide for a solo nuke with so many teammates in the base...

lol. Was the stank FU loser team guy?

Cool

@Quincy wrote that long time ago (yep, there are other people besides me on the wiki). But yes, "struggle" does not mean "lose". I I wrote that a good couple months ago back when Patch's grenade was OP. Now he's more sane as a character, Mendoza should be able to deal with him.

Unbelieveable one... I just have to tell the story of this. Lakeside flying, I played Nod. ~25 v 25 for most of the game, 30 v 30 by the end. 0:00-0:15 Nod with a small advantage, dominating the field. GDI attempted 2 chinook rushes, failed. Then Dot (Arc.Knight.Dot~) was transported to our cliff, sneaked in and placed Ion by the rock near ref container. Miraclously, no one could spot it (even tho it wasn't blended in, just very smart beacon placement). We lost our ref to a solo nuke. 0:15-0:30 While SBH placed nuke at WF and a raveshaw EMP'd bar, I used the decoy and sneaked in & destroyed GDI ref with a tech. Nod took back field control easily and it looked very good for us and then guess what... Dot placed another ion, this time inside a bush by the end of strip (near where the turrets were). Despite having 15 people looking for it we lost second building to a second solo nuke. 0:30 - 1h We turtled HoN and GDI started camping hard, too. It took me a while, but I finally made it to barracks and just as I was about to start disarming mines, I met hackerham with a shotgunner who seemed to just be waiting there to help me. We infiltrated the bar and I was sitting at MCT with 40hp scared to move because of so many hidden mines. Fortunately hackerham covered me and killed 3 people. Then I made a mistake... my own timed killed me before I detonated remotes, but fortunately we had 3 timeds on mct so barracks got destroyed. 1h-2h So it all came down to HoN vs. WF + 1 GT by GDI ref. Fortunately I managed to hunt down the last hotwire as SBH while she was mining the WF hangar and then suicided to remove front door mines. But since GDI started turtling super hard, we needed to coordinate big rushes. First we tried 10 SBH run into WF via front door...failed. Then we tried to brute force it with 15 lcg+sbh+techs etc., but failed although destroyed a lot of GDI vehicles. Another mass SBH attempt, fail. Then we went for a rocket rush for the last GT. We jumped from the cliff and went via the main veh entrance... looked epic. Destroyed the GT and got rid of the mines on WF backdoor. We tried mass SBH once again, but GDI physically blocked both WF door with vehicles and were scanning for SBH like mad. Then - one last try with SBH. We literally got ~23 SBH and wanted to outside c4. Meanwhile no one warned that 2 elite mammoths and a med are approaching our almost empty base... when we saw HoN armor going down like mad we just ran in and shot MCT. WF went down and we won, but HoN went down just as the end game screen popped up. tl;dr : 2 hour game with a lot of miracle turn arounds & teamplay & individual skill decided by 2 seconds. Even though both teams played without refineries for most of the game, it was bearable thanks to the silos and the amount of crates. Big shoutout to my teammates: ThunderElemental, Coredeath, NodCommander, the famous "FU LOSER TEAM" guy, Ukill, Hackerham, ds14, GI Jose and many others participating in rushes and defending. Also to poi and jpj who were on the other team but left after like 30 minutes GG

Complex 10 minutes in and Nod is getting destroyed by meds. Tomb Long back-and-forth vehicle fight on both silo and harvester sides. Nod with the advantage early on, then the more meds on field, the stronger GDI was getting. Nod PP went down to meds around 20th minute while hotwire caused distraction in HoN, but Nod was still holding on for a good 15 minutes. The rest of their base was destroyed as Nod attempted a desperate rocket rush through the tunnel. Goldrush 2 early soldier rushes by GDI - 1 going for ref from the front entrance, the other for hon - were fended off, but GDI managed to take control of the field anyway. Being pressured by meds from the front and sydneys/infantry from the bridge was too much for Nod. HoN went down first. Walls 3 humvees filled with 6 engineers destroyed the not-yet-mined HoN and it was basically game over. 2-2, ~15v15, good games, balanced teams. Meds stronk.

These two combined, pretty much. Few small things here and there, but these two are the main reason why so many public games turned into boring slugfests.

Honestly the more I play PUGs the more I think they actually ARE about individual skill. Obviously it feels nice to play in an organized team - dedicated defender, dedicated sniper, dedicated repairmen and tankers. Clear comms on teamspeak is also very helpful & pleasant to play with. Other than that, there's not much commanding and teamwork needed. Just get tanks and kill the enemy harvester while protecting your own, works 90% of the time. But this is all for nothing if the enemy team has better players. No matter how good your teamwork is, if the enemy team has an insane sniper that you have no counter to, if the enemy team's infantry will win 1v1 duels more often than your team's or if the enemy team's tankers are more effective than yours... you will lose. Organization won't help. Tricky tactics/random rushes will fail most of the time. After all I think this game is about how much credits you can accumulate and how effectively you can use them. Players like Xeon or Denuvian will buy an arty for 450 credits and with the help of a 350 credits technician they destroy 3 meds, 4 harvesters and 2 hotwires worth 3100 credits +4 harv dumps. And they will accumulate tens of VP, while giving none to GDI. Meanwhile poi will buy a Sakura for 1000 and kill infantry worth 5000 before going down herself. How do you counter this with organization and teamwork? Against a sniper, you literally can't do anything. Against tank mass you can try to group up with 8 meds and push out at once, yes... but count the amount of credits you will need and how many meds you will lose in the process. That's just a general theory, obviously there are some cases like when a 350 credits hotwire manages to sneak in and destroy the priceless airstrip and turn the game around. But then again, that's about individual skill (and, in this case, luck) and not teamwork. tl;dr: I think balanced teams are more important than organized teams and a team with better individual players will win over a theoretically organized team with lower skill. Which btw makes people who keep complaining about lack of organization and "no plan" when their team is just getting blatantly outplayed individually (whether in pugs or public games) even more annoying to me.

About 80% of my deaths on Walls - whether I was playing sydney, sniping, repairing or desperately sneaking - were to Jeff's apache/canuck's black hand sniper or LCG / poi's Sakura or Raveshaw I'm not saying the rest of Nod played bad, but these 3 players had the most impact.. along with the repairmen on plateau.

Ah, I probably should have also mentioned jeff, who's aim is comparable to bibi's and canuck's and who's apache was wrecking us on walls. So that's 3 against 0. @SMayhew With all my respect & sympathy to ks.ol (of which I have a lot), he's nowhere near these 3 aim-wise. I complained during games because 1) I wanted to rebalance before PUG ends, 2)I was annoyed (sorry) 3) I wanted to highlight how stupid the rule that some players are not allowed to play some classes are. Yes, I think the "deal" we had was stupid for the reasons you mentioned. A much simplier fix would be to swap canuck to our team... Also, players with amazing aim don't have to snipe to give their team a big advantage. It's enough if they run around with a patch/lcg/officer (not to mention mobius/mendoza) or drive a buggy/apc/apache. In the beginning of the game, even soldier is enough. Cuz how are we supposed to win the first harvester battle on walls if we face jeff, bibi and canuck and have no answer to them? Obviously each of them will take down several enemy soldiers before going down themselves. @yosh56 "You didn't lose to snipers" - see last paragraph above. Well goldrush was mostly all right... but even before the sydney rush, we were already pinned in base. It would require a lot of struggle (or luck) if we actually wanted to win that one at that point. @YagiHige But I wanted to play the game

One of the worst PUG experiences that I had. Teams imbalanced from the start - for some reason two players with the godly aim are put in one team with no counter on the other team. I point that out at the start to avoid this situation but am assured all will be fine. Then when my team gets outplayed and I am raped by these two and complain about it Im told by enemy team to "stop bitching" and that im "mad cuz bad". Ridicilous shit. Zero team morale and we couldnt even take control of field with 3 players advantage. Felt terrible.

I was commanding the losing team.

Whiteout GDI loses the harvester battle and gets stomped by arties while bibi snipes every GDI repairman who leaves a building. Mesa Nod loses the harvester battle, but still manages to take control of short side and take ref down to 20 health. Quickly gets pushed back by meds & mrls, loses 2nd harvester and while Nod refinery is under great pressure, hotwire takes down PP. 20 headshots by bibi later, Nod base is destroyed. Lakeside Flametrooper rush destroys barracks while both harvesters survive. GDI is left without any hotwires & mines for the whole game. Orca rush destroys refinery while stank rush gets spotted & dealt with. A few orca/apache rushes/SBH nukes later GDI is left with only 1 AA tower while Nod still has 2 turrets and a sam site by strip and HoN is badly damaged. One more orca rush destroys HoN, but meanwhile something (SBH?) destroys WF and it's down to strip vs. ref. GDI rocket rush gets intercepted by 5 apaches who in turn get intercepted by more rocketmen. Finally, Nod went for ground vehicles and destroyed GDI ref while another rocket rush was approaching airstrip. 3-0, ~10v10.

I liked the vehicle warfare on Tunnels. The field is really nicely done, no side with any sort of advantage. No easily-campable spots for arties like on most maps. Killing the harvester is neither too hard nor too easy. Can't really lock any team in base, because of 2 entrances. It's been a while since I enjoyed driving my med this much. It's just the opposite of Under, when I think about it. There I just really have to force myself to buying a tank... A small fact I found interesting: on Under, just before airstrip got destroyed, I got a marksman spy. Since I thought it's rather useless in the current situation, I decided to just run in the Nod base from the main entrance. I made it in and that was just when airstrip started going down. I managed to kill one of the technicians running to airstrip and it barely - really barely - got overpowered and destroyed. I can bet that if I hadn't gotten that crate, made a fast decision and hit these few shots, airstrip would have survived (at least for a while, since Nod's situation was grim by that point). Details, luck, luck, details.

Why's that? Ok, Patch > LCG, but SBH > gunner. Also Mendoza and Mobius relation is similar to Chem and McFarland. Mobius has high dps, but lacks range and speed compared to Mendoza and it's the exact opposite for Chem vs. McFarland: the latter is more dynamic. I'd say infantry balance is in a really good state right now.

Thanks for the recap, Luhrian. Really good PUG. It was weird to me that we first got stomped by mass tanks on Walls and later that evening we stomped the enemy team with tanks as well on Mesa. May it be that GDI tanks are so much better? Hmm. Lakeside was the best game and a very close one. Had GDI destroyed Airstrip with that push where they sacrificed all tanks to take it down to 3 health, they would have probably won. Nod forcing a comeback despite being on a big veterancy and economic disadvantage felt amazing.

I've been getting those long freezes on Walls every now and then ever since I can remember. Yes, it's something with exploding vehicles.

Im not home this weekend