neoviper

I've seen teams with four or five demomen, and they seem to do fairly well. are there any weaknesses opened up by having too many demomen on a team?

Chewy

There are probably very few instances where having 4 or 5 demomen would be helpful, especially if the team has less than 10 people. I have found a team with 25-35% of any position seems to be about right. Anything more, anything less can be advantageous depending on the situation but otherwise can be hurtful.

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MagnaCentipede

The problem with too many demos is they are fishfood if a spy, scout, or pyro can get the ambush. Save crit-bottle, even with 175 HP, a demoes fall fast to any of those three; especially if they're caught right before a reload.

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Fish #641

The problem with any large amount of guys is simply that there are too many. I know that's worded like a 4-year-old with decent typing skills, but the point that TF2 makes again and again is that a team has to work together by putting together a bunch-a-crunch-o' different skills. There are many examples that I could put in here that would support my point, but Maggie has a good enough example himself.

neoviper

yeah, a good amount of the time as a scout I can get past the sticky traps, but that damn crit bottle

Most of the time I'm able to kill one or two of them, but eventually I will get killed either by lucky grenades or their team, and the rest of my team (in pub games at least) has a lot of trouble pushing forward on their own. that said, I'm sure in a game with equally skillful players on both sides, they would notice the abundance of demoman and start going spy and scout. also demomen are not very fond of snipers, they either get shot or cant see when to blow up their trap

TheFeniX

On Attacker/Defender maps, multiple defending demomen are almost a must on certain capture points. By working together and staggering their stickies and generally just spamming nades, they can usually keep any sort of heavy offense from setting up.

You just need a few heavies with dispensers to mop up the rest.

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Donagel

It's not really about killing the demo. As a scout or pyro, once your in close, you may get bottled to death, but while the demo men were scrambling to get you, the rest of your team can get past any stickies that were blocking the way.

A question I would ask is, if you HAD to field a single class team against a normal multi-class team, which class would be the best? Demo might be a good choice, though probably soldier would be top.

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"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." - H. L. Mencken

TheFeniX

Soldier by far. Your team is mobile in all three dimensions, has access to explosives (Rocket Launcher) and hitscan weapons (shotgun), and packs the most HP besides a team full of heavies.

The soldier is literally the most under utilized class in TF2 (as it was in TFC). Not even medic is less utilized in the long run because it's a support class and is situation dependent.

The soldier is the be-it-all frontline assault class and 6+ working in concert (name the last time you saw this) with a decent skill (nothing exceptional) should dominate any other combination.

I will grant that I have yet to see this in TF2, but when I used to game on 24/7 dustbowl TFC servers, I knew that if a 12 man attacking team fielded at least 6 competent soldiers: they/we were going to win unless DF was running 125%. One mistake or one guy not in the field caused a cap.

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Fish #641

WOAH WOAH WOAH! We already ran this. Anyone remember the 4th of February? Yea, I thought so. We did full teams of every single class. Most successful? Snipers or heavies, followed by demomen. Soldiers, if I remember, epic failed. It was cool at the beginning with us rocket spamming them, but open spaces kills them dead. Sg's and heavies hitting us in opposite sides while spies and snipers picked us off was bad. Snipers (for defense) totally dominated. The unspoken rule was that you didn't fire until you had charged a bit, so everyone was doing a good amount of damage, and the high amount of us was more than enough to make up for missed shots. The other unspoken rule was that spies can get no more than 1 backstab at a time, as everyone was really attentive. Fenfen should have the demos somewhere, I know I saved them to my computer.

MagnaCentipede

The problem is Soldier is being slow and BORING. It's not an attractive class to play since it really has only critstreaking in its favor. Demo is faster and more fun and more versatile with the explosives and he has a better blastjump. The +25HP is cute but any spy or engineer will knock that off of you in a heartbeat.

A soldier push is definately good against a turtle defense, since all the targets are close together, but a more-spacious defense structure will halt the soldier push because the soldiers keep stopping to spar, and without awesome medic support they'll be falling down before they get near the point because of sniper picks, spies moving in on engaged soldiers, even scout drive-byes will be enough to push them into the red where a blastjump is suicide and any class can finish them off.

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TheFeniX

Deficiencies in the soldier team were mostly likely chalked up to inefficient use of cover and/or lack of rocket jumping.

Granted, the change in capping ability in TF2 would play a role.

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neoviper

I play soldier a lot in TF2, and played a bit of him in TFC, and i've always thought that a good team of soldiers, playing seriously (IE: not fish's single class extravaganza) would do bad bad things to the other team. all soldiers would probably not work, but if you have at least 3 or 4 of them, and preferably 6, you're likely to do better than if they were all heavies or demo or something.

The thing magna said about soldier being boring unless you crit streak is not really true in my experience. I have plenty of fun running around blasting anything that moves to pieces, especially if a medic takes a break from his heavy uselessly spraying bullets everywhere to heal me back to full. crits are fun, but I get enough kills without them, that it doesn't really matter when it happens.

The way I see it, is that soldiers are the class that can really deal with anything, every other class with the exception of medic, who hardly fights anyway, is specialized to handle a particular situation well.

Fish #641

Or you could say that the soldier isn't good at dealing with anything. Whose philosophy was that?

neoviper

True, that's what the rest of the classes are for, to help him out with the situations he's unsuited to handle on his own. but with about 4 good soldiers, a couple demomen and heavies, maybe a scout or pyro, and the few obligatory medics, I'd be hard pressed to name a defense or offense they couldn't handle, in the absence of extreme skill differences.

In the end though, all of this theory, no real way to know how any of this would work out without trying it.

Fish #641

I think I'm thinking of the quote "Jack of all trades, master of none."