Greyed

All you need to do is hold 3 flags and win. And yet we've pushed the other team to a near capout twice. What you're missing is that if you're holding 3 flags and they are pushing on those and leave the other two defend you get them automatically.

Then it is neither of these and until you get in on that squad and see what it is and how it works I think it is futile for you to continue to criticize that which you're not familiar with.

LordKelvin

I'm going to pop in here and just say that I, Mixa and Flik can accomplish all that Anderson's squad does, and a lot more, while only utilizing three people instead of six. We run a ROFLcopter that is at the whim of the CO, not the other way around. If the CO tells us he needs us somewhere, we fly over opposing armor and immobilize or destroy it with mines, we clear flags so ground troops can move in, and aggressively search for and destroy enemy transports and gunships. A ROFLcopter in the air above another squad is a great asset, and can be set to defend back flags or buggy routes, etc. It can intercept enemy buggies, armor and transports heading there, and only requires 3 people. Ideally, we'd like to use 2 people, but as our skill improves, perhaps that is possible too.

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Zoraster

Near cap-outs (I assume you simply mean owning all five flags... or potentially opening the base up in tampa) do increase ticket bleed somewhat, but armor maps really are about "slow and steady wins the race." I've been in games quite frequently where one team has held all five flags at one point during the map, but within a few minutes is suddenly fighting off bleed, and loses the map because they're unable to recapture the bleed.

I'm not sure I get your other point. If I've got three flags and they're attacking me with one squad and defending with another two (one on each flag), then I don't "automatically" get anything. I think maybe I've misunderstood what you're trying to say here.

I appreciate that you feel I'm attacking what you see as an effective tactic. However, the purpose to the tactics forums is to discuss the merits of various tactics. Others will have differing opinions than you have. First-hand knowledge of every player is helpful in these discussions, but it is not necessary. I have played with others who have tried various ways of utilizing five or six man roflcopter squads, and I have judged each of them to be a waste of manpower and a net negative for the team as a whole. It is, of course, possible that Anderson's technique is so far superior than any of the people who I have played with before or witnesses in the game at all. But even given this, the question is whether his roflcopter squad is a superior use of players versus having ground based squads.

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|TG-Mth| Zoraster | .

Mr.Ander50n

Ok, I'd like to clarify a few things:

Thanks greyed for the support. I do enjoy the occasional ROFLcopter round now and again, and I do not just fly around just happening to cap a flag here and then. My strategy was built off of Martha_Hyer's rofl flying.

I squad bomb a back flag, or an undefended enemy flag, and leave it in about 7 seconds. That flag is ours for at least 30 or 40 seconds until someone realizes and fav's over to it to retake it. That is, what, 3 or 4 tickets bled from their team if we have a majority of the flags? We find armor and lay motion mines on them, either immobilizing or killing them, and we lay ground fire on heavily-assaulted positions to help our team with the attack. Even if we don't kill many, the dust flicked up from the machine guns, as well as the shock factor sends enemy's scattering, and the dust can act like a miniature smoke grenade (The walker guns can do this as well).

Having two guys with SAAW's in my copter is usually a must, since the enemy gunship likes to try and eat me, however the saaw still needs to be fixed.

people in 5 and 7 are constantly ready to repair, and we rarely go down. If I know we are about to die, my squad pods out onto a flag or somewhere else we can make it to, and help our team on the ground.

It is certainly not an ineffective squad floating above everyone else.



And I have had considerably more luck shooting things down in the air when I stayed aiming at them after I fired my second shot with the SAAW. I do not believe it is a fire-and-forget weapon, since I rarely got any kills with it in the past until I used this strategy, and now I at least get one hit each salvo using this method.

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Lorax74

Martha's transport squads are not exactly the same thing as the ROFLCopter squad of today. Martha usually works on capping flags with his squad while the ROFLCopter works more on harassing troops and armor.

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Mr.Ander50n

Yes, I didn't say I was cpying his strategy, I just used his idea of nuking flags from the transport then moving, and incorporated it into my style to create the way I fly nowadays.

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Nine.Thousand

I have no opinion on the chopper debate but I really have to disagree with Zoraster's tactics. They may work for him but when I've played with experienced armor-map players the last thing they do is play slow and defensively. Flag-hopping and hidden beacons are the most-used tactics. Tipping flags increases missile launch-rate (as I recall, the missiles launch whenever the flag turns, someone can correct me if I'm wrong).

Generally success is had by having many small, highly mobile squads which can quickly go from flag-to-flag the moment one is undefended. I'm not saying you can't win by playing a more conservative game but in my experience, attempting to defend more than a couple flags/silos at a time only results in ticket loss.

Zoraster

We rarely play titan here. Titan tactics are completely different. And you're correct about silos, they launch when turned and then wait 2 minutes. So holding a flag for 1 second is the same launching power as holding it for 1:59. In other words, it does its damage at discrete moments.

The same is not true of conquest. It bleeds tickets at a fairly constant rate (every X seconds). So if I hold the flag for 1 second, I'm getting far less bang for my buck than if I held it for 1 minute and 59 seconds.

And I'm certainly not always for only defending flags. If, say, the other team has two flags, I have three, and they're pouring 3 full squads at my squad on a particular flag, I may know it's going to go down anyway, so it's a far better solution to go after an open flag and then establish defense there. But it's been opened up because my squads were defending all the flags I hold, necessitating an all out push from the enemy that left them wide open to attack.

My points have been kept simplistic and rigid only because it generally helps clarify the main point trying being made at the expense of the necessary fluidity of a changing battlefield.

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|TG-Mth| Zoraster | .

Nine.Thousand

Ah, I'll concede your point on conquest/assault lines games.

Aumen1

Calling Jak (the one person I know that can shot down anything), also I hate fubar's pilum, I think you need to give it up, it does not allow me to do my cool gloating buzz by, no instead I become a burning flying screaming pile of dog poop that typically lands on the enemies doorstep and I all see is Fubar jumping up and down like a little kid.

I don't have much trouble taking it out the ROFL with a Gunship, I stay very high, wait for someone else to spot it and then move in for the quick kill, sending a TV rocket, then missiles and I don't stop moving.

When I am on the ground I just try to annoy it so it will stay away from my squad/objective - sometimes this is very hard to do and if it can't be done - it will be a long game.

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Lyramion

A good Gunship with a TV Gunner will roll over a Roflcopter like a train over a nickel. Period.

There is no SAWWing it down or scaring it off. It will be above you and you are fu*ked.



During our very active Roflcopter times me and reaper often would go to TBG Suez Titan. Kinda insane choice if you know the best Gunship pilots frequent that server. There was no chance in hell to kill the good ones. Only to kill bad ones that didn´t use their TV or tried to solo Gunship.

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Ponies need you !

Mixa

QFT
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I personally didn't think rofls were that bad, hadn't seen lyra + reaper do it much, and besides that those 6 man rofls didn't do impression unless I was fixing them and getting my silver engineer badge (which happened in first months of TG though). And later, dying 2 times into the reap + lyra transport in one round of Verdun later on mainly happened because I was acting stupid, not using cover etc.

Then Flik learned some of this antique master technique and we thought that we'd give it a go. Well first 300 kills were mainly training, later on it came much easier as flik learned couple spots etc.

One day we had a game where we lost 4 games in a row, until sidi came. We took our loyal transport and kept the infantry off our backs so well that the round ended with 100+ ticket solid win. They couldn't push far enough and if they did we either had ground troops ready for their saaw frenzied engineer squads. I lol'd when some1 was wondering how our team did so well (=stack) and then some1 cleared out that it was those ''damn 2 guys in the transport''.

I didn't think it as kill whoring, as for me, I can score double kills in air while making the enemy weaker because they now also have to defend against aerial stuff. It helps the team I'm playing very well, and felt very TG forced option too. Then I heard that rofling is actually kill whoring and I do it for my personal fun with cost of other players gaming, how great was that.

While I've seen 6man rofls do their work well, I would say 2 man in transport and then 3 man in buggy capping the flags, or just pushing the main front can do much more than 6 guys stuck in the air until they drop, and ''stuck'' in the ground until they're picked up. ts rather easy and reasonable to counter, as 6 guys with saaws keep those 6 other guys away, and they're still either attacking or defending a flag in the mean time!

-Thank you-

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Lyramion

I wanted to give a practical example of a Roflcopter defense. A while ago on Sidi, I specifically rushed to offices with a buggy at the start. Grabbed the walker the instnt it appeared.


Then I would place it to the south of the middle flag in the water. The enemy Transport wasn´t amused as a walker AA was guarding the middle flag from inside the water. The middle flag is usually the flag to get "farmed", so the enemy roflcopter had to work around me.

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flik2142

I've had Lyra in a walker when I've been trying to rofl and it's more than a pain, really limiting the area you can move safely in and if you risk it, you're dead. One problem is that too many walker users don't bother with the anti air turret. Too often, it's either empty and the solo pilot doesn't have the presence of mind to switch seats and look at the sky if they notice airships on the minimap (tunnel vision is on infantry and ground armour) and if there is a guy in it, they can often be ignoring the air and thinking they can get ground kills with the turret. Use the walker antiair as antiair!!!

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|TG-SC|Flik.

Greyed

Speaking of which, did you ever boot that one fellow in our Verdun Squad a day or two ago that kept trying to farm infantry after you VOIPed him to do otherwise several times? Or did he finally listen to you?