Thread: 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.