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.