Commanding in Natural Selection

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The following guide was authored by RouterBox, who has graciously allowed us to host a copy of it here. Many thanks to Router.

Contents 1 INTRODUCTION 2 TACTICS 2.1 Commander Setup 2.2 Hot Keys 2.3 What Not to Do 2.3.1 Sentry Turrets 2.3.2 Electrification 2.3.3 Catpacks 2.3.4 Securing the third hive. 2.4 Start of the game 2.4.1 Getting in the chair. 2.4.2 Finding the hive. 2.4.3 Back to Base 2.4.4 Listening for nodes 2.5 Setting Up Marine Start 2.5.1 Infantry portals. 2.5.2 Armory. 2.5.3 Arms Lab & Proto Lab. 2.5.4 Phase gates. 2.5.5 Observatory. 2.5.6 Turret Factory. 2.6 Base Crisis Management 2.7 Rules for Phase Gates 2.7.1 Keep Mines on the Phase. 2.7.2 Make Sure you Have a Second IP 2.7.3 Never Have More Than 2 External Phase Gates 2.8 Setting up Siege Spots 2.9 Glitches in the Game 2.9.1 Silent Dropping. 2.9.2 Scan While you Research Phase Tech. 2.9.3 No armor wtf?! 2.9.4 Blocking life forms 2.9.5 Blocking nodes 3 STRATEGY 3.1 The Role of the Comm 3.2 Medding 3.2.1 Tracking. 3.2.2 Ammo. 3.3 Early Game 3.4 Res Flow 3.4.1 Clicks 3.5 Mid Game 3.6 Prevention 3.7 Deflection 3.8 Guns 3.9 The siege 3.10 Proto Tech 3.10.1 Proto Rush 3.10.2 Proto Recovery 3.11 Guide to Sensory Chambers 4 DEMOS

[edit] INTRODUCTION

There are few people in the world that have done as much comming as I have. I’ve played CAL (the league for Natural Selection in north america) for 6 seasons, and NS since the day it came out. My best estimate is that I've comm'ed well over 3000 scrims/matches, countless public games, two undefeated regular seasons of CAL and two Natural Selection World Cup tournaments for Team USA East. It is May of 2006, Natural Selection is in version 3.1.3, and CAL is a couple weeks into season 9. The naturalselection.com site has been down for 9 months (sorry couldn't resist.)

I’ve noticed a couple things over the years. One is that obviously, the commander is the most important player in the game, and the other is that there aren’t many really good commanders. I’m writing this guide to help people who want to command well, and who want to understand the game better. First we will go over a lot of “how to’s�? which will tell you about commander tactics. Later we will go over the broader “why’s�? of strategy. Tactics are how things are technically done. Strategy is very different. Strategy is the philosophy and execution of team goals. Lets go over the setup stuff first.

[edit] TACTICS

[edit] Commander Setup

First we'll talk about setting up your game. You'll want to download the knife gaming pack and make sure that you install the transparent commander HUD. This will apply a new skin to the commander view of the game allowing you to see more of the field. The next thing you want to do is bind your mouse wheel to jump if you haven't already. Since you press jump to go to alerts you want to be able to clear all your alerts. Also if you just casually roll your mouse wheel whenever you're not doing anything you will always be taken to the first alert that comes up, whether it is an RT under attack, a upgrade finishing research or a marine needing ammo. Keeping your view moving is one of the most important things you can do as a comm, and this helps you move to the right spot the instant needed. The last thing you want to make sure you do is get in the chair before you ready up and load all the sprites in the menu on the lower right. This is so there is no pause when you get in the chair when the game begins. Your computer will already have all those sprites in RAM. Just mashing 'q' 'w' 'e' and 'r' will do the trick. Which brings us to hotkeys.

[edit] Hot Keys

There is no thing more important than using hotkeys as a commander. You have to move way too quick to be doing everything with your mouse. This graphic shows how the hotkeys are laid out.

As you can see the menu in the game is replicated on the keyboard. As you press the top buttons to change through the menus the keys for the boxes still stay the same. So for example under the 'q' menu, 'a' is for a resource tower. Under the 'w' menu it's an observatory. Under the 'e' menu it's an ammo pack, and under the 'r' menu its mines. The button to queue all those things is a, because all those things appear in that box for 'a.' If you understand this then you don't even really need to memorize things. You'll just know with a glance that the equip menu is 'e' and the medpack is 's' in that menu. The most important thing you need to get used to as a commander is not touching that menu with your mouse. Not ever. For any reason. Never.

[edit] What Not to Do

There are a couple things that you just never want to do as a commander in NS, but sadly all too many comm's insist on doing. These things will usually seem like a great idea, but in the end, will lose you the game while not appearing to be the culprits to an inexperianced commander. Most of these things that you shouldn't do, shouldn't be done because they are defensive in some way. Marines are the offense in Natural Selection. As soon as the marines stop being wildly offensive, they start losing. Never for a second should a commander be concerned with anything but ruthlessly hunting and killing alien structures, and developing the upgrades and resource base to carry that hunt out.

[edit] Sentry Turrets

Turrets are dumb. Many turrets in the same place are dumber. I don't even know where to begin this topic rages me so much.

First off, each turret costs 10 resources, and thats after you have a turret factory in place to activate them. There are many other things in the game that you can spend ten resources on that will protect a place just as well or better. The first is a shotgun. A good player with a shotgun will wreck any skulk, any diving lerk that isn't pro, any mediocre fade and just about any alien structure. The second is a pack of mines. Believe it or not, mines are more effective at protecting your base and your phase position than a turret farm. This is because, not only do they save your position and structures from aliens, but they actually kill the aliens. A player has to be very very very dumb to die to a standing turret, but many really amazing players will die to mines regularly. Since you get 1-3 res from every alien killed, a pack of mines even pays you back for buying it. The last good example of an alternate investment is a beacon. For the price of three turrets you can beacon twice. I doubt you'll have more than 2 big huge major crises at any given place you would turret, and in those cases, I'd rather have 5 marines on the scene than 3 turrets.

The next big concern about turrets, is that they don't work. They really don't. Any fade with the help of regeneration or a gorge can take out the biggest and most expensive turret farms without marine support. Any 2 hive gorge bile bombing from a nearby vent can wreck a turret farm. An onos makes damn short work of them. The only thing that turret farms stop are low level aliens working alone. Put a pack of mines or two on your phase or infantry portal and guess what, skulks will never be able to get near it without getting 'asploded.

You should always rely on marines for defense if you have to, but better yet, you should rely on a good offense. If you're attacking and killing things the aliens have, they wont be nearly as worried about places on the map they don't have. If you don't believe me about this, download and watch some of the demo's on this website, you'll never see me use turrets.

[edit] Electrification

If you have a turret factory on the map somewhere you have the option to electrify it and any resource tower on the map. Since resource towers are always going down many commanders feel that resource towers should be electrified if the res opportunity is there. Other times a resource tower very close to a phase gate will be electrified to protect the position. Electrification costs 30 resources.

Which means it is three god damn times dumber than turrets!

The resources required to elec a node far outweigh the benefit of having that node blue and sparky. Think of it this way. It costs 15 res to build an rt, and that rt produces one res point every 4 seconds. Therefore, that rt needs to operate for a full minute before it produces a full return on investment. If you electrify it, you add another 2 full minutes to that time. Most ns games are all but over in ten minutes. Three minutes in competitive NS is an eternity.

It takes 45 seconds for a skulk to kill a resource tower. So just about all of your rt's will net a positive investment without electrification. You can replace an rt twice for the cost of electrifying it. What you should be doing, is putting that enormous amount of resources into arms lab upgrades, and guns, and dealing with the second hive. Keep an eye on your nodes and send a marine to recap them when you need it.

If you read the section up there on turrets you should realize that unless you're seiging a hive, you shouldn't even have a turret factory, so you shouldn't even really be able to electrify things even if you wanted to.

On top of it all, electrification doesn't even keep your nodes safe. If you spend res on electricity you wont kill the second hive I garuntee you, and if you don't kill the second hive, an adrenaline gorge is going to go around the map bile bombing your precious rt's as focus fades box your un-upgraded men back into marine start. You will lose.

[edit] Catpacks

Cats cost a fortune to use and they don't even do anything really worthwhile. They are fun if you've maxed out everything else, and have a jillion res, but they have no practical application for their cost. I really can't make it any more obvious. There are no practical situations that justify using them. Trust me, many people have tried to come up with interesting ways to use them. None of those ways make any sense in a game you're trying to win.

[edit] Securing the third hive.

Often times an open hive location will create a reflex in commanders to spend a lot of time and res securing it. By this time you should know that this impulse should be limited to a phase gate with some mines on it at the most. However, even this much attention to the third hive is usually bad.

The third hive is the hive that the aliens are not going to choose to drop second. On most maps there is a clear third hive. If the aliens don't get the middle hive the third hive will obviously be the one on the opposite side of the map. If the aliens do get the middle hive, they will usually tell you which one they want as the second hive by how they drop their rt's, thus defining the third hive.

The reason you shouldn't spend time on this hive is because the aliens will never have any interest in it except for killing your rt there untill the second hive is either up, or compromised. Any resources you put into securing this hive are a waste unless the second hive is already up and active. At this point, if you think the aliens will be able to drop the third hive in the immediate future like minute and a half, you should phase gate it.

[edit] Start of the game

[edit] Getting in the chair.

You generally want to get in the chair and get the first stuff done as quickly as possible. But first, you need to get into the comm chair correctly. How you get into the chair is how you'll get out of it. The game remembers your exact position and orientation when you get in the chair, and you get out it puts you in the exact same spot facing the exact same way. Therefore it is important to get into the comm chair facing where you want to be facing when you get out. This is going to be looking at where your obs and armory are going to be dropped.

There is a sequence that will be the same every single game. As soon as you get in you drop an armory and an IP. Drop the armory first because your base builders will always tend to build first what you drop first. Since you need the armory to drop an advanced building you want that built first, and the advanced building built second. There is no need for an ip in the first 30 seconds of the game, but getting armor 1 or whatever going earlier will make it finish earlier. While your base builders are putting the armory up, find the hive.

[edit] Finding the hive.

Press L (impulse 105) to select all marines so you can set a waypoint. Set a waypoint at the first hive, right over where the hive should be. If the waypoint is on the ground it's not the hive. If the waypoint is hovering in the air above the hive would be, the hive is there. This waypoint trick will also work on rt's. This is because the waypoint is an entity in the game, and it can't occupy the same space as another entity. So when the waypoint is dropped from the position of the commander into the map, it gets blocked by the hive.

I personally drop ammo instead of waypoints. This is a less reliable method than waypoints, but I've been doing it for so long. The idea is the same, if the ammo drops then the hive isn't there, if an ammo pack does not drop when you tell it to its because the hive is blocking it. The problem with this method is that some maps naturaly disallow you from dropping ammo in the particular spot the hive would be but for other reasons. Examples of this are subsector on veil, where for some reason you can't drop anything in the hive chamber, and computer core on eclipse where there is water that you can't drop stuff in. You just have to know where in which maps dumb things like this happen, and use a process of elimination on the other two hives to logically determine the hive. Needless to say if you're just learning to command you should use the waypoint method.

You should not use sound to find the hive. This is because alien resource towers don't make noise if it's in the first 45 seconds of the game, and by the time you get your view anywhere to hear anything you wont be in time. Skulks are fast and they are on a mission to get out of the hive and do stuff, they will be in neutral territory, or in the territory of another hive very quickly.

However sound is a very good method of telling which nodes they are dropping and which nodes they have at any point in the game.

[edit] Back to Base

You should be able to find the hive and get back to base by the time your builders are finishing the armory. Drop them either an arms lab or an obs depending on your strategy. Also drop them weapons like mines or a shotgun if your strat calls for it. Now zip over and drop your first node or two if your cappers are there. You're next move should be back out to the field to find which and how many nodes the aliens are dropping.

[edit] Listening for nodes

This is something you should do at every point of the game. The alien team will drop 2 nodes on average, but where they drop them, and if they drop a third one is the information we're after. From every hive there are obvious nodes for the aliens to drop and nodes they never would drop. They usually drop the closest node to their hive, and the second hive node. Now pay attention to this. The aliens will always tell you what hive they want by which hive's node they drop at the beginning of the game. Understanding that in the first 15 seconds the aliens choose which hive is designated as the second hive and which hive is designated as the third hive. Usually the aliens will drop their "closest" node on a direct line to the second hive. You need to make sure that you check all alien nodes, don't be satisfied after you find two, but instead make damn sure there isn't a third. Direct your pressure team towards a node to take out and direct your capping team on a path towards the third hive. Back to Base Again

Start your first upgrade as your marines finish the Arms Lab or Observatory. Make sure the IP got built or is being built All of this should have taken about 20 seconds, and at each stage you should have been waiting on your marines, not the other way around. Your marines should not have to call for stuff and they should never have to call twice. The last thing you want to make sure you've done is set all the buildings in your base to a hotkey. This is done by selecting the building and pressing control + 1-5 (+duck + slot1-5). I usually set the obs to 1, the arms lab to 2, the armory to 3, the proto lab to 4, and the first ip to 5. Now you can beacon or scan, or upgrade without ever needing to go back to marine start. The ability to start upgrades from the field is something you need.

So in review, the initial checklist at the beginning of the game goes in order:

1. Armory
2. IP
3. Find the hive
4. Arms lab or observatory
5. Weapons
6. Resource Tower(s)
7. Listen for Alien Nodes
8. Get your first upgrade
9. Make sure your hotkeys are set

[edit] Setting Up Marine Start

How you set up your base is very important. Each building has a set of rules that needs to be followed in its placement or you're going to run into trouble.

[edit] Infantry portals.

IPs need to be dropped as far away from the command chair as possible and out in the open. You don't want to put them against walls or railings because when marines pop out of them they can be pinned against those walls and railings by spawn camping aliens. There are some situations like ns_veil where you will have to choose one of these rules over the other. I drop the veil ip's on the other side of the railing which puts them in the corners of the railings next to the stairs. If an alien is camping those ips they have to come over the railing to get to you, so you can jump out much easier. In the case of a fade, you can even drop a shotgun on the ip right after someone dies, then jump out of the chair, the fade will come after you, but wont kill you before you put about a clip in him, your teammate then spawns with a shotgun while the hurt fade is up by the comm chair. As you can see, the rule about the ip's being far away from the comm chair is more important than putting it in corners. But both should be followed if at all possible.

[edit] Armory.

You might think that it's important to have the armory in the center of the room, or close to the IPs. This is not true. The advanced armory is the center of the marine tech tree, it is the most valuable building in marine start, and the one that hurts the most to lose. Its function as an ammo dispenser is completely secondary to the armory's importance in the tech tree and in dropping guns. Keeping it alive is more important than keeping it accessible. Therefore you always put the armory against the far wall opposite the comm chair and in a corner if you can. This is so that aliens can't take cover behind it from you as they kill it. If you can get it in a corner, then aliens need to face away from you to attack it. If there is one way to fight a melee weapon enemy it's having him facing away from you and on the other side of the room. You should also place it in range of the IP's. This is so you can drop guns on the IPs and between the IPs and the phase gate.

[edit] Arms Lab & Proto Lab.

These buildings are not usually ever primary targets for aliens. You want them against walls and out of the way, because they don't actually have a function in the field other than to sit there and research. You do want to make sure however that the range of the proto lab overlaps the range of the armory so that you can drop proto tech in sets with guns and welders. Marines should be able to walk over a pile of stuff and get everything, not walk all around the base picking up different pieces of the set.

[edit] Phase gates.

You want the phase gate to be close to the IPs. This is so marines can spawn and phase without having to go anywhere. You also want to make sure that at least the space between the IPs and PG is in range of the armory so people can grab a gun on their way through. Phase gates should also never be against walls or railings or in corners because marines come out of them and don't like getting pinned by aliens.

[edit] Observatory.

The obs is always going to be a main target for aliens because its weak, and it does that annoying beacon thing. Therefore you want this one in a corner or at the very least against the wall. The obs also lets you see stuff in its range. So you want it on the wall of marine start that the bad guys come from, so that you can see them coming, and aliens can't ambush marines from the doorways of MS.

[edit] Turret Factory.

You should probably put 2 turret factories in marine start just in case they take one out. I write funny jokes. Don't ever put a turret factory in marine start ever for any reason no matter what. Even if both halls out of MS are full of offense chambers. Just don't do it. No matter how good an idea you think it is. If you tfac MS, your team will eject you, your clan will cut you, and your mom wont love you.

[edit] Base Crisis Management

There is a skulk in your base and he is freely chewing on your stuff because you listened to me and didn't build a turret factory. This is how you deal with it.

First you get the news that your base is under attack. Before you do anything else you have to asses the situation. What is in your base? What is it taking down? Which side of the damaged building is it on? How many aliens are in your base? Are there any dead marines preparing to respawn? Are there any marines close to Marine Start? The most important question of all though, is "Do I have an Obs and IP." These are all questions you can answer, and need to answer, just by looking at marine start.

A common trick aliens will do is have one skulk chew on something in base and have the other one go behind the comm chair and kill the comm when he jumps out. You can not afford to die if you get out of the comm chair; too much relies on you out in the field for you to take the time to go through the spawn process. Therefore you need to observe strict rules for when you jump out of the comm chair to defend your base.

Don't jump out of the comm chair unless you have an obs. This is because if you don't have an obs, you don't know how many aliens are in MS. A skulk with silence could come while you assess the situation, or he could have gotten there while you were out doing other things. You can't see MS unless there is a marine or an Obs present.

Don't jump out of the chair if there is no IP. If the aliens have taken down the ip, don't get out. If you die then you're completely dependant on marines in the field making it back to try to save the day.

Don't jump out of the chair against a fade. If you jump against a fade, he will kill you. The only time you should ever jump against a fade is if you have marines coming back that can catch the fade on his retreat, and either you have a gun, or a teammate is spawning on a gun. Unless you are sure you can kill the fade, don't jump against him. Similarly don't jump against 3 skulks, and only jump against 2 if they are both on the opposite wall and you're a good shot.

So you're in a situation where you can't jump and base is going down hard? Well the first thing you want to do is cancel any research going in any buildings that are sure to die, or if the research just started, then cancel it if there is a good chance the building will die. This will get you res back in the same fraction as the research was complete. So if the research is three quarters complete you'll get one quarter of the res back. After this drop an obs to a marine you're fairly sure wont die. Once he builds it you can beacon from that obs. This "ninja beacon" is the most reliable way to save base when you are in the chair and you can't jump and your obs is dead. You could also consider relocating. You should only do this if it's early in the game, less than 2 minutes into it in fact, and your pressure team has really rocked the alien nodes and is all in one place and that place is the second hive or the second hive siege spot. Basically planets have to align for relocating to be the right answer. If you do relocate keep in mind that

If you do have an obs, and 15 resources you can beacon or fake beacon. A fake beacon only costs like 3 resources and is done by selecting the obs, and hitting 'z' to beacon followed immediately by 'v' to cancel. Don't hit 'v' twice or you will recycle the Obs. A fake beacon makes the same buzzer noise and goofy lights go off, but the marines never actually teleport back. The fade however will take off thinking the place is about to be full of marines. That's why when you are fading you should always wait to hear the sound of the marines warping back before you go to far away from marine start.

[edit] Rules for Phase Gates

Phase gates are probably the most important tool marines have. Marines claim dominance of a room as soon as a phase gate goes live, and destroying the phase is the method through which aliens take it back. Keeping pg's alive and keeping control of phase positions is often the top priority of the marines.

[edit] Keep Mines on the Phase.

One pack of mines will cover a phase, but if you have res to spend, another pack of mines is a decent investment. Remember that if a skulk takes off a mine, one whole side of the phase gate is going to be vulnerable. Think of the phase gate as a square. Each corner and each side of the square are vulnerable points. If the mines are placed well they will be underneath the model of the pg hidden from the eyes of skulks, so that biting the phase with one pack of mines on it is kind of like Russian roulette. However after that first mine goes off, a smart skulk will notice the blast mark that's left over, and choose that point to chew on it. So after you lose a mine or two, your phase is vulnerable. Keep the phase mined.

[edit] Make Sure you Have a Second IP

I can not stress this enough. When faced with time and res constraints its easy to forget this or discount it. You need a second ip to run phase gates. Often times the main thing keeping a phase position alive in a hot zone is the flow of marines. When you only have one ip, your flow of marines is only half what it could be when fades and lerks start to strain your team. This is especially true when you are fighting on more than one front. Some times it will be necessary to defend the third hive, and hold another position like double, or a central phase spot.

[edit] Never Have More Than 2 External Phase Gates

When you have more than one PG you may have to phase multiple times to get to where you want to go. This poses just as significant a problem as one IP, and with each new phase it increases. I've lost plenty of sieges because there was an extra phase in the loop. It is absolutely asinine to have more than 2 phases. Recycle old phases as you put up new ones.

[edit] Setting up Siege Spots

Sieging a hive is often times the method you use to bring it down. When and why to siege will be discussed later. Here, I'm going to talk about how you lay out a siege position.

Basically, the hive, or a gorge near it provides the support for the aliens in the area. Aliens spawn or mc into the hive room and fades and lerk heal between skirmishes there. The hive is the strongest alien point, and the farther away you go from the hive the harder it is for aliens to control your position. So you want your phase gate, the key to your presence in the area to be as far away from the hive as possible, but still be an effective point to attack the hive from. How do you tell where this perfect phase position is? The answer is that you build the siege position backwards.

Start with the last part, the cannons. You want the siege cannon's to be as far away from the hive as possible but still in range to fire on it. A good way to find out what this boundary is, is to start a local game on your computer, set sv_cheats to 1 and then go drop a siege cannon underneath where the hive would be. When you select the siege in comm view you'll see a green circle showing the cannon's range. What this essentially means is that if you drop a siege anywhere in this green circle, it's going to hit the hive. Anything outside the circle won't reach. If the ideal area for the sieges is near a doorway, you may want to put a siege or two in the doorway thus creating a block for fades.

Moving on, put the TF as far away as you can and against a wall or in a corner. Make sure that there it is possible to have 4 sieges in range of the hive and the TF.

Next put the phase down as far away from the tf, while still having a clear line of sight on it. The phase does not need a line of sight on the sieges, if anything you don't want it to. If marines can come out of the phase and pistol skulks off the TF that's good.

The reason you set up a siege like this is that you make each element of the siege as secure as possible. In the end you want to make it so that the phase gate is the last thing you lose. If you lose the phase gate you lose the sieges and the tf too. You want to make it so that from an alien perspective, it's too hard to attack the phase because its so far away, and too hard to attack the tf because you'll get picked off it. When the aliens get the chance to go on the offensive you want them to decide to waste their time killing sieges, which you have a couple of and can replace.

[edit] Glitches in the Game

Natural Selection is a deliciously buggy game. There are always little exploits you can use to your advantage if you know where they are and how to use them. Players that understand the science of how the game is built and how to work it can really use this kind of knowledge to their advantage. There are a few commander bugs just like this.

[edit] Silent Dropping.

The commander entity floats above the map and moves on a 2 dimensional grid, but how the commander interacts with the map is three dimensional. When the commander client sends the impulse to drop an entity, a line is drawn from the commander entities position to the target coordinates. A good demonstration of this is the subsector hive on ns_veil. Hover above the hive and try to drop ammo packs. It won't work because for whatever reason there is something there that blocks it. Now move your view so that the hive chamber is way off to either the right or the left. You'll be able to drop your med pack or whatever in the same spot, because the diagonal line that's drawn from the commander position to the ground goes under whatever the block is. Another good example of this is the ns_orbital marine start. I hate that Marine start.

Now in order to allow the commander to see into the map he has to see through all the ceilings. The ceilings somehow are transparent or null. But the walls and floor are different. When the commander drops something that has to pass through the walls, the noise and the sparkly little blue spark things don't go through the wall. The way to make sure that the line will go through the wall and block the noise is to make the center of your screen over the void. The way you do this, is by clicking on the little minimap on the void. The commander has a blank crosshair like an alien, but that doesn't mean the crosshair isn't there. When you click on that little minimap, it positions your crosshair over the real map at the same coordinates. Make sure your crosshair is over the void, and whatever you drop will be perfectly silent, whether it be med packs, phase gates, guns, or even a scan.

[edit] Scan While you Research Phase Tech.

Ever feel the need to scan while you're researching phase tech? If you select the obs, while it's researching phase tech, and spam the 'a' key a whole lot, a scan will appear on your mouse cursor.

[edit] No armor wtf?!

This is actually a bad bug not a good bug. If a lerk gases the command chair just once, your armor will go down to 0. So you get in the chair at the beginning of the game, and your team has armor 2, but a lerk gassed your chair, you'll have 100 health and 0 armor the first time you get out. It's very frustrating when a focus skulk or fade kills you in one hit. Be aware of this weakness.

[edit] Blocking life forms

This isn't so much a glitch in the game as it is thinking outside the box. The game requires that the commander be able to drop structures all over the map. However the nature of the melee based aliens requires nothing to magically appear in their path of escape. A fade or onos bumping into something that wasn't there a second ago can give the marines that extra second to take him down. Be aware: Comm chair blocking is illegal in most or all leagues. Usually you can get away with using an armory, turret factory or observatory though. A stomping onos has to run away backwards, so thirty res in little armory humps behind him is worth it to kill him.

[edit] Blocking nodes

Blocking nodes in my opinion even more of a jerk thing to do than blocking life forms. Essentially, the commander has to be able to drop any node on the map at any time. He can also hear whats going on everywhere at any given time. Most importantly though, you get 12 res back on a recycled rt if no one ever built it. Essentially the plan is that when the game starts, you drop your base stuff and find the hive. Then find a node the aliens drop that is usually hard to kill, like acidic on tanith or power sub junction on eclipse. Drop that node and then immediately recycle it. It will hang around for a bit while it recycles. While its there the gorge obviously can't drop the node, but he usually wont go very far because he knows its recycling. If you really want to be a dick, you can drop another node the moment that one recycles. It will be a button spamming contest between you and the gorge, but if you win it, you'll probably get a "F#@$ YOU COMM" over mm1. By this time the pressure team will definately be on the scene to kill the poor little frustrated gorgie.

People talk about trying to get this tactic banned from CAL, but without something built into the game by the developers, it would be hard to enforce any sort of changes. Essentially this tactic is the same as killing the res node, because the gorge can not drop it for a long time if ever.

[edit] STRATEGY

[edit] The Role of the Comm

The player in the comm chair alone has the ability to use marine resources to drop marine objects in the field and buy upgrades for the team. Dropping things into the field and researching are the only ways in which the comm can influence the physical game. However, the viewpoint that the comm has allows him to know more about the overall game than any other person on either team. Because of this the main role of the comm is to talk. He needs to be relaying as much information to the team as possible, while coordinating their movements and managing objectives. Certainly a marine trying to kill 3 skulks with one clip can't be managing the status of the teams res flow.

The commander's game is played as much in voice chat as it is in Natural Selection. Watching the demos on this site will show you the technical side of the comm game, but a recording of the voice-chat would really be more revealing as to how a good commander operates.

You are in charge of knowing the contents of this website and applying that direction to the game. This is done mainly through talking.

As a commander you should talk a lot. Don't spam the mic and there is really no need to say everything three times, but in order to convey everything you need to you'll need to talk a lot. You should also talk with enough volume and confidence that you appear to be in control of your team. You're mind could be racing and the game falling apart, but you don't want to give the marines the impression that they are more in control of the game then you are (even if they are). This is because marines need to stay focused on the team objectives laid out by you, and any deviation should be cleared by you. When you're giving out orders and two or three people think that they have a better plan, it always turns out that the four plans are not as good as if everyone just stayed on the same page. Tell people that in game what you say goes, and you can talk about differences of opinion later. Depending on how seasoned a commander you are, you may in fact be wrong about many many choices over the course of a game, but you shouldn't be debating these things during the round. Often times a marine has a great idea from his viewpoint, but he just doesn't see what you do, and as such, what he thinks is a good idea, and actually what anyone would think in that marine's position might be obviously wrong from a commander's viewpoint.

There may be times when you are on a team with players that are much better than you, for the reason stated above, these players are not always right. While you should evaluate the suggestions of the people who know what they are talking about, don't hesitate to issue contradictory orders.

Another large mistake that commanders make, is that they are moving so fast and they need to talk so quickly that they don't have time to look at the names of marines or find out who is where all the time. The thing you don't want to do is use the word "somebody." When you say, "Someone go do this or that" one of two things will usually happen. Either nobody will do it, or everybody will do it. "Someone phase back to base" can result in 4 people phasing back, giving the aliens time to sack your external phase position. You want to make sure that if you are giving a directive, it includes the name of a marine, or you refference marines by their location, as in, "I need the guy in c12 to go down to pipeline." You don't have to check who it is, but it certainly can't be anyone else.

If you need someone to do something specific you should look for the closest free marine in the field, then look for a marine without previous orders in marine start, then look for people in the spawn queue. Hitting tab will quickly give you the dead marine that is about to spawn with nothing to do. Make sure that as you drop additional buildings in base like the obs, the second ip, the phase gate and the proto lab, that you tell the next person in the spawn queue to do it by name.

In siege situations, tell certain individuals by name to build, namely people with lmg's. "Someone build" usually isn't good enough.

"I need a recap" isn't good enough. It should be "Routerbox, go build me the nodes at double." Keep talking and keep giving people orders by name. While you are getting used to talking this much you'll actually want to really focus on what you're saying for a couple games. Keep your mouth moving and your stream of consciousness going.

The reason that this is hard for a commander is because until you get used to it, being in the chair is extremely mentally overwhelming. Commanders suffer from a tunnel vision that is really hard to train yourself out of. Its very easy to be so into a siege that you don't notice that all your nodes are dying until you are down to the marine start node and you can't afford things. Another example is that if you're working meds for a team trying to kill a node, you might miss the fact that you need to start weapons 1 or drop an obs for up to a minute. You might spend so much res on meds that when you look up and see 6 res in the bank, you freak out thinking you have no res, when in fact you are sitting on top of a decent node base. Its not that the comm isn't paying attention, its that he's paying too much attention to any given thing. Keeping your mind above whatever is on your screen takes a lot of practice and experience.

The main point that you should take away from this is that the role of the comm is to keep their mouth, mind, hands and cursor moving.

After a game any good team will talk about what went right and what didn't. It is very important as a commander that you listen to the input of your team. Don't fall into the mental trap that because something seemed right at the time, it was right. Really entertain the ideas of your team or you will never improve greatly as a commander.

On the other hand, you can assign more influence to yourself than is reasonable. You didn't lose a game, the team lost the game. Think of it as half you and half your team (even though you are only 1/6th the team.) Certainly if you put your team in a bad situation, they aren't going to be able to win the game. However, you can lose plently of games because the marines didn't kill the aliens as much as the aliens killed the marines. Because of the nature of the game, aliens only have to break even in kill death ratio's to win. The marines are the ones that have to come out with significantly positive scores. Always remember that no amount of medpacks will keep a marine alive if someone can't kill the alien he's fighting. A commander can't kill fades and lerks, and those are some of the most significant events in the game. However I've seen one person command 5 guys for a week and lose 90% of their marine rounds, and then another guy come in and win over 90% of that same team's marine rounds. Its the same 5 guys, but the commander determines how effective they are.

In reviewing the game, you will often see in hindsight where things went wrong. "If we had done that differently we wouldn't have lost." The truth is that you should always look at all the factors that put you in that fork in the road to begin with. The real problems are often times further back in the game than they appear to be.

As you can see the commander of a team also has duties outside the round of figuring out what happened, and how to make the team's next game better.

[edit] Medding

Medpacks are the largest influence a commander can have in the game. You should stop thinking of medpacks as ways to make hurt marines feel all better, you should think of them as fluid resource power. A skulk's bite does 75 hitpoints of damage and a fade swipe does 80. A medpack heals a marine for 50 hit points. If you keep a marine above 80 health, nothing will kill him in one hit. Now fades and skulks have a cool down time between bites/swipes, but you can drop meds at semi automatic speeds. You can drop 2 meds on a marine before an alien can hit twice. The other thing to keep in mind, is that if a fully healed marine stands on a medpack, he doesn't absorb it, but as soon as that marine takes only 1 point of damage, he soaks up the med he's standing on. So if a skulk bites a marine that's standing on a med pack, all that happens is that the marine loses some armor. If it takes three bites to kill a marine, it takes four if he's standing on one medpack. Obviously you can see that whether or not a marine gets a medpack is so very often the difference between the marine dying or the alien dying.

Now the other thing you need to realize is that sometimes you don't want to spend res to keep a marine alive. Sometimes though, you want to spend as much res as you need to. The marine's position, armament, immediate objective, personal skill, and opponent(s) are all things you need to take into account when hovering over him with med power. I don't want to just say, "Use common sense" like every other commanding guide, but instead I'll try to point out some situations that illustrate what I mean.

If the second hive is up, and you know the fades have focus, don't med any marine against a fade unless his team mates are going to also weld him. There is no point, because the fade will still kill him in one swipe. The meds are useless without armor as well. This will usually not make the marine who is running around with 30 health very happy.

Don't med a capper on the weak side of the map that is not faced with an enemy if you are waiting for resources to drop him a tower, another team a pg, or start an important upgrade. If he doesn't need it that second, and you need to hold a couple clicks for res, tell him to wait.

Do med the crap out of your pressure teams if the aliens only have one hive. You should keep them at full health, and with enough ammo, but don't waste medpacks. 2 meds will heal any marine, so there should usually never be more than 6 unused medpacks on the ground for three marines. If the hurt marine has incoming, and can't reach the meds on the ground, it is smart to drop him more right on his head. But if the team is clear for a second, tell them to pick up the meds you already dropped.

Always med the crap out of anyone building you pg's, tf's, or sieges in the field. These building marines have first priority for meds because they can't defend themselves, and they need to keep building. The only way you are going to successfully siege a skilled alien team, is if someone starts building and doesn't stop. When skulks and the lerk dive on him, he's got to keep building and hope that your meds and your teammate's guns can protect him. If he dies, the next marine has to take his place without hesitation. The biggest factor in whether or not the hive goes down is whether or not the sieges get up in time to fire 22 shots at it. You don't have time for marines to be staring at corners waiting for something to come around it, or jumping off the things they are building when something does. These marines have to trust that you will med them faster than the skulk can bite them until their teammates shoot the skulk or faster than the gas can kill them (a good lerk will always gas un-built sieges.) Therefore, it's very important that you make your building marines feel like they have your complete devotion in this, otherwise they will take action to protect themselves, and that means not building, and that means the hive not dying. This medding priority goes for any structure in the field that's important to get built, usually pg's tf's and sieges, but possibly rt's, and observatories and in the rare case an armory.

[edit] Tracking.

You want to hit as many meds perfectly as possible, by this I mean, that the med never touches the floor, it appears touching the marine and is absorbed immediately. You should get it to the point where you can hit half your meds or more. It seems like a low amount, but trust me, it's not as easy as it sounds. Marines work hard to dodge aliens and move erratically, and the better a marine is, the faster and harder to track he is. As he dodges aliens, he often dodges you too. Also the higher your ping the harder it's going to be to hit your meds.

What I've found works the best is to track in front of the marine when he's walking and not in conflict, and track behind him when he enters a fight. By behind him I mean, on the opposite side of the marine from the alien. Think about your experiences. How many times have you been moving down a hallway, and you call for a med, and the commander drops it behind you, sometimes by even half a hallway, and you have to backtrack to pick it up. Marines under a good commander should never have to back track for meds or ammo. If that same ammo was dropped even half a hallway in front of the marine, it would still be off, but at least the marine isn't going out of his way to get it.

However when a ranged marine is fighting a melee alien, his main objective is to obviously keep as much distance between him and the hostile as possible. This means moving either directly away from the incoming hostile, or in a circle strafe pattern around it. Keep this in mind. When that skulk appears, your hovering med should switch to error on the opposite side of the marine from the alien.

This little movie will illustrate what I'm talking about.

Medding

[edit] Ammo.

The last thing I want to mention is that ammo calls are just as important as med calls. Without ammo a marine is worthless. Not having a loaded gun is even more dangerous than being low on health, because even a fully loaded heavy armor marine could easily be rocked by even a gorge without bullets in his guns. This has historically been one of my weak points as a commander, is that I incorrectly prioritize ammo low, and marines are kept without bullets longer than they should be. Keep in mind that marines unloading their guns anywhere are going to need more ammo, and keep it flowing to them.

[edit] Early Game

Most NS games are decided in the first four minutes of the game. How you play the opening is very important. The main thing you want to keep in mind is that if undamaged, the aliens will win. Strategies that focus on marine domination of the map, resources or tech are flawed. In order to win at NS you need to ruthlessly destroy and push the aliens back as hard as you can. You're primary objective in the early game is killing alien structures, and your secondary objective is making sure that your team is in a good position to fight the second hive.

Most teams split their 5 marines into a 3 person pressure team and a 2 person capping team. Throughout the game the capping people are the marines that you want to keep doing things like recapping nodes and building base, and in siege situations, they are the people that usually build. You want your best shots on the pressure team. They are in charge of killing things. Note here that judging the performance of marines shouldn't be based on kill death ratios. The people on the pressure team will always have much better scores than the people on the capping team. Mainly because they have to go through about 15 skulks to kill each res tower. By the time the cappers get into any real combat, they are fighting meaner things like fades and as such will never fare as well. People think that if you get put on the capping team that you're not doing important things or that its because the comm thinks your not as good as your teammates. Honestly, in a game between two top ns teams, its the performance of the 2 capping marines, and the three lower lifeform alien players that decides the game. At that level its assumed that the fades are godly and the pressure marines are amazing shots. Having a marine that knows when and where to build and recap, and do little things like make sure the phase gate is mined, those are the players that really win the game. You'll also notice that the really good alien teams are the ones that will attack your nodes, and have gorges that are always in the right spot doing the things that frustrate you the most. Obviously your "capping" marines are very important because they create and support the infrastructure of the team.

So after you have your teams assigned, you need to decide where they are going and when. The main thing is that base has to be built. Usually you want your pressure team out to hit nodes fast. If you're giving your pressure team a shotgun, then at least one of them has to lag behind a little bit to build the armory. I usually have the other 2 pressure marines pick up a nearby node while that's happening. Most teams are using a shotgun on their first pressure team. The idea being that a shotgun can kill a node in about 14 shells, or about 20 seconds. The problem with this is that you can't afford mines for base right away. If you aren't using a shotgun, then I would recommend sending the pressure team straight to the first alien node. Exactly how you do it is up to you.

The main choice you needed to make about your overall strategy is what building you're going to operate out of. The main choices are advancing the armory right away if you're trying to rush proto tech, an arms lab for upgrades to armor and weapons, or an obs for early phase gates or motion tracking.

The standard strategy that you should start with is an arms lab strategy. You should really only go a different route if there is some reason the map or your opponants give you. If your opponants are known for doing sensory chambers, then an obs strat is the counter. If you're playing on a map like orbital or caged, you might consider early phase gates in order to hold a choke point on the map.

The standard arms lab build order is ip, armory, arms lab, shotgun, a1, w1, obs, phase tech, second ip, base pg, aa/w2, exernal pg.

That's pretty much the order you want to go in. The main variable at the end there is weapons 2 vs an advanced armory. They both cost 30 res, and you usually get 30 res right around the time you should be heading towards the second hive. If you think that you aren't going to be able to kill the second hive, then an AA is a wise move because you'll need the hmg's to hold off the aliens untill you can get proto tech. However, nothing kills fades like weapons 2. There is no stronger correlation. You can drop guns like crazy and fades wont die, but within 30 second of weapons 2 finishing you'll start to see lifeforms go down. So killing the fade, might allow you to kill the hive. Taking that route though might not pay off, and if that hive goes up, w2 shotguns aren't going to cut it for the rest of the game. Giving your team weapons 2 and a bunch of shotguns and welders gives them the best chance at killing the hive and winning the game, but if you fail in that, the outcome is bleak without an advanced armory.

The main thing going through your mind during all the things that happen in the early game, should be when the second hive is going up. The res flow page will explain how to judge all that. Once the second hive situation approaches you've reached mid game.

[edit] Res Flow

The common conception is that the commander is in charge of spending res. This is wrong. The commander is in charge of way more than just spending the res. The commander is in charge of controlling the res flow of both teams. That might seem confusing at first, but it's true. The commander is the one player out of the 12 people in the game that is always in charge of both teams' res flow. Understanding this is what separates out great commanders. It is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING about commanding. Most people will disagree and say that the most important thing about commanding is dealing with the second hive. The truth is that in most games, you won't have a prayer of doing this without understanding how the resource system in Natural Selection works, and being able to control it in your favor.

[edit] Clicks

A click happens every four seconds, and is a point at which every live rt on the map produces one res point for it's team at the same time. When you finish building a res tower on either team is starts producing res for you at the next click. Now I'm sure you're aware that res is handled differently for both teams. On marines, it is dumped into one big pool for the commander. On aliens, the resources are split into a number of pools, one for each alien. This difference between the teams is massively important to understanding how each team operates. For marines, growth and advancement is a gradual constant flow. For marines, growth and advancement works in stages.

These stages occur because of the concept of "team clicks." A team click occurs for aliens when all the res pools on the team get one point from the res towers. So in a 6v6 game, one alien team click is equal to 6 marine res, but it only gives each alien one point. Now all aliens can spend their res in different ways and each alien on an organized team is assigned a job. To do this job the alien will need an amount of res. To go gorge and drop 2 chambers it's 30 res, but to lerk also costs 30 res. Since each alien starts with 25 res, you can clearly see that the lerk/chamber effect occurs 5 team clicks into the game.

The most important effect you need to be aware and in control of is the second hive and fade's team click. When this happens and what position your team is in when it does is everything a commander is concerned with in the first half of the game. The single biggest factor in this is the amount of res nodes the alien team successfully fields and then when and how many of them you can kill. This is why the main focus of the early game is always the marines' offense against the alien nodes, and the aliens' defense of those nodes.

Here are some tables of information about all of this.

Team Clicks*	Effect
2	chambers/early lerk
22	***fade/hive***
27	rt-lerk
32	re-lerk
47	rt-fade
52	a dead lerk has 50 res
62	2nd re-lerk
72	re-fade/3rd hive
77	dead lerk can onos

* After the first minute. In the first minute there are always only 3 team clicks because of the time it takes to get to and build an rt.

If there are 6 people on a team, and there is one click every 4 seconds then there is:

1 team click every	24	seconds	with 1 rt
1 team click every	12	seconds	with 2 rt
1 team click every	8	seconds	with 3 rt
1 team click every	6	seconds	with 4 rt

The most important team click is the fade/2nd hive click. This comes at:

~3:20 on 4 rt's	Which means the second hive finishes	at ~6:20.
~4:00 on 3 rt's	Which means the second hive finishes	at ~7:00.
~5:20 on 2 rt's	Which means the second hive finishes	at ~8:20.
~9:48 on 1 rt	Which means the second hive finishes	at ~12:48.

• These times are different than the ones that may be observed because of a randomized r4k. For each kill, an alien gets 1, 2, or 3 res, so all these times will be less depending on the amount of kills an alien has.

What you should be getting from all of this is that the time the second hive is dropped, and therefore the time the second hive finishes and therefore the timeframe you have in which to kill it, depends mainly on how many resource towers the aliens drop and successfully defend. If the aliens drop 3 nodes, and the hive skulk gets two or three kills defending them, he can drop the hive as early as 3:00. If the aliens drop only two nodes, and the marines manage to kill them both without the hive skulk getting any kills, the hive can be dropped as late as 9:00. As a commander I'm sure you would feel better having six extra whole minutes to research and gain map control. However, you don't often get that long. In a game during which you're really winning solidly, you'll knock the aliens back to their hive node, but it will take the better part of three or four minutes. You should realize that when the nodes die matters.

An easy way to work this in your mind, is at any point in the game, average how many nodes the aliens have had over time, then check the last table right there. If the aliens have averaged lets say 2.5 nodes over the course of the game thus far, you should expect a hive to be dropped at around 4:30.

Another easy way to figure out whats going on with the second hive is to watch for fades. A player needs 50 resources to fade. When that player gets 50 res, he needs to go through a gestation process which takes about 30 seconds. Then he needs to get out into the field and find a fight.

The skulk who drops the hive on the other hand can go gorge before he has 50 res, and then drop the hive as soon as he gets the click to 40 res. This means, the second hive can drop 30-45 seconds before you see a fade. If you see a fade, and think, "Oh damn, I have no idea if they've dropped the hive yet!" and when you check, it turns out they did, then you need to treat that hive as if its been dropped for 45 seconds.

Now thats not a pretty situation to be in. You want to have a phase gate go live in a siege location at the exact moment the hive is dropped. You want to get the full three minutes it takes the hive to build, to try to kill it. In order to get the jump on the hive like this you need to have a keen feel for when its going up, and you need to see or hear it happen. Additionally, you want to anticipate exactly when thats going to be so that you can either have a phase position or be seconds away from achieving a position. This brings us to dealing with the second hive.

[edit] Mid Game

The mid game is the part of the game dealing with the alien's aquisition of the second hive. It can be thought of as the fight for the second hive. Depending on how your early game went, you'll be in any number of different positions to stop the hive from going up. The outcome of the bid for the second hive decides the game in about 75% of games.

There are a number of ways for the marines to deal with the second hive. The main strategies I've developed fall into 5 different heuristics. Prevention, Deflection, Guns, sieges, or Proto. I'm going to devote a page to each.

[edit] Prevention

Prevention of the second hive is the most obvious and the most prevalent strategy on public servers. Clearly if aliens get much more powerful with each new hive location, marines would be wise to secure and "lock down" those locations before the aliens reach the 50 res team click. However it is my opinion that locking down hives is the weakest strategy regularly promoted for containing an alien team and dealing with the second hive.

The problem with going for a hive lockdown strategy is that you need to lock down both the second and third hive. A good way to think of it, is that you have to lock down both second hives. If you lock down the third hive only, (a thing you'll see on pubs regularly) the problem is that the aliens will always break it with their new found second hive powers. An alien team will always be thrilled to let you have a third hive to do whatever you want with it if it means they get the second hive without much of a fight.

The main problem, is that if you're putting your time, energy and resources into locking hives down with phase gates and marine presence, (remember no sentry turrets ever anywhere under any circumstances) then you're not going to really mount an offensive against the alien nodes. Since you'll need earlier phase gates than usual, you wont have decent upgrades for your marines or tech tree when the aliens hit their 50 res team click around 4:00.

A problem that is also unforseen by unseasoned commanders is that the hive skulk has 50 frustrated res in a lock down situation. The hive skulk is usually one of the team's best skulks, which also means, he's probably a decent fade. If he ends up fading, you'll be faced with three fades attacking 3 locations (both hives and marine start.) You only have 5 marines to defend these 3 locations and you will be streched thin. Keep this in mind, because if you don't see a third fade by 6:00, it means an onos is on the way. Protecting a location against an onos and one or two fades is hard unless your marines have some serious gear and tech, which you will be struggling for especially if you end up having to beacon a lot.

The other complication is going to be when a decent alien team hits your nodes hard with the extra 2 skulks on their team. You'll be able to hold the marine start node and the two hive nodes, but its going to be a struggle to hold any other nodes, and three nodes is not the best income situation to be in. Especially because if they do break one of the locations you are going to be looking at an immediate hive presence in that location and you're only going to have 2 nodes with which to do something about it. By the time you recap and set up an offensive to kill the newly dropped hive, you're not going to be in time, or have enough res, to prevent it from going up.

Those are all the main problems with a hive prevention strategy, but that doesn't mean that its not a strategy to use in specific situations. The main reason you would hold hives is in an attempt to out-tech an alien team. This is basically the tech comparison between one hive aliens and marines:

w0/a0 LMG Marines are better than skulks. w0/a0 or w0/a1 marines are not as good as fades and lerks. w1/a1 marines with a shotgun and welder can barely hold their own against a fade and a lerk. w2/a1 marines with guns and welders will outclass fades and lerks.

After the second hive goes up, Marines can hold a phase gate positions with hmg's and welders, but they will not be able to advance on aliens or take down existing hives without jetpacks or heavy armor, or preferably a 3jp/2HA mix. It will be hard to siege without heavies to build, and it will be harder to mobilize against alien soft targets, like chambers and to a lesser extent nodes, without jetpacks.

As you can see, you need to have tech and guns to deal with fades and lerks. If you keep your team without upgrades and guns, one hive aliens will overpower them. Keep remembering that sentry turrets are not the answer to this. You want to be relying on marines as viable tactical units, not the builders of them. If the hive alien decides to onos, and you don't have hmg's, shotguns aren't going to cut it unless you have weapons 2. Because of all this, your main priority is always in slowing down the aliens res flow and increasing your upgrades. You want to be as strong as you can be so that when they drop the second hive, you're too strong for them to defend it. Remember the problem of the hive skulk. Would you rather lull him into dropping a doomed hive, or instead try to fight a big alien force without enough upgrades.

If you are ever in a 2 hive lockdown situation, you're main priority is to tech up as hard as you can. Your secondary objective is to hold the hive locations, and your tertiary objective is to keep an extra 2 nodes up. When you get proto tech, recycle your two hive positions, and set up in the siege location for the first hive, and take it out. Always be willing to trade a hive the aliens don't have for a hive they do. You'll also be getting their chambers,a resource tower or two, and a phase position in the deal.

Commanders suffer from what I call the "Totality Syndrome." This is the feeling that you need to have both hives secure, and every node on the map capped and electrified, and you need every upgrade, and all your marines to have complete proto suits and abundant cat packs in order for your team to kill the first hive.

The truth is that if all the alien life forms are dead all you need is 2 shotguns. Have all 5 players walk in and have the lmg's spawn camp as the shotgunners work the hive down. If you don't believe me watch the demo of Team USA vs. Team Finland in the demo's section. We kill all their nodes, and then get the lerk down right outside the hive, since its way before fade/hive time, I just tell my guys to walk in, they couldn't possibly be stopped.

There are times when locking down hives is not a dumb thing to do, there are always situations where any rule of thumb of commanding does not apply, but for the most part you want to be taking the fight to the aliens, not the other way around. Hive lockdowns are defensive posturing and you want to avoid that as much as possible.

[edit] Deflection

A much more useful tactic than prevention is deflection. Usually on any given map there are strong hives and weak hives. Some hives are much easier to kill than others, some are much harder. Some are easier to siege and some are easier to walk into. Essentially, the tactic of hive deflection is that you're going to make the aliens drop the weaker hive, because it will be easier to kill.

2 good examples are ns_caged and ns_tanith. On caged, you can not siege sewer. Never do it. If you aren't willing to walk into sewer with guns, you're not willing to kill it. Sewer is a candidate for the most secure hive in the game, and by association, ventiliation is one of the best first hives. However, if you have a phase gate just to the right of the double nodes, and you get a phase gate in sewer before they can drop it, the aliens will drop generator every time. This is because sewer, for being such a good hive, is a death trap for fades. If you have a pg with some mines on it and one marine guarding it, fades will not be able to break it or they will die trying. If you leave generator clear, they will drop it instead of wait for a fade to take the sewer pg down. Watch closely for this, and as soon as they drop it, beacon, sell the pg in sewer, and put your marines through the double phase gate and up through aux gen to establish another position and fight gen.

What you've done here is create a situation where it was in the alien's best interest to drop the worst hive on the map, with you in a position to put marines on the scene within seconds of the hive being dropped. This is ideal for killing the second hive. A weak location and immediate marine presence.

ns_tanith is the other example. If the aliens have Fusion, you would much rather have them drop waste than drop sat comm. This is because sat comm has very narrow twisty tunnels as the only marine access. You will lose so many marines in those tunnels leading into sat comm. Its not so much the hive thats a marine death trap but the area between chem trans and sat comm. Waste however is a terrible hive for aliens, and the marines can fight it from both sides. A phase gate in central access tunnels or double and a phase gate in sat comm is usually enough to get the same situation as ns_caged.

This strategy of hive deflection should be used if all the alien nodes are down, and you have time working in your advantage. It can also work as a contingency plan to a bad early game.

If you do an early shotgun and the node fights are drawn out and expensive in meds, but don't result in the death of alien nodes, you need to recognize that you are behind in res and time. Around 2:00 if the aliens dropped 3 nodes,or around 2:45 if they only dropped 2, you need to make sure you have an obs up and researching phase gates. Realize, 2:00 is only 120 seconds into the game so it's important to know about that third node and the aliens' advanced res flow! In order to move your phase gates up in priority like that (you can't possibly attack a hive without a phase gate) you will be in bad shape with your arms lab upgrades and probably haven't thought about upgrading your armory yet. Even if you do get pg's up an running in time to respond to a hive you don't want to be doing it without some guns and upgrades.

At this point, if you can slide a phase gate into the strong hive position, most alien teams will realize that they have the advantage because they have all their nodes and lifeforms. They will spend up to a minute or two before they give up and drop the other hive. This in some cases, depending on how the aliens react, can give you enough time to cement your node base,and get the upgrades you're going to need to fight the hive successfully. A well placed phase gate can be as effective as killing nodes in delaying the second hive.

Do note in these cases that you haven't disrupted the alien res flow, and they will be able to drop another hive as soon as the second hive situation plays out. You need to realize that this could mean that if you kill the second hive another one might go up in the third hive location the moment the second hive dies. You will also not be able to keep the fades down, they will constantly be re-fading.

Basically the concept of hive deflection is just tactical use of phase gates to influence how the aliens drop their second hive, not really to prevent them from doing so. In fact if you're really kicking ass, its usually smarter to not attack the first hive and leave a hive open, and then destroy it immediately after its dropped. While your waiting for the aliens to make their play, you tech and hold nodes. If you have a lot of time, you can take 4 marines, with 2 shotguns and have them walk into the first hive. Tell them the target is the res tower. Have the lmg's cover the shotgunners and have the sg's rush the node. If they both get 6-7 shots in the node its going down. Losing 2 shotguns and 4 marines is worth putting the aliens on zero nodes. The thing that you want to keep in mind is that the longer it takes them to drop the second hive the easier its going to be to kill.

[edit] Guns

If you've ever played any combat maps, you know that marines with shotguns are perfectly capable of killing a hive if there is no significant resistance. Its even easier in classic maps because the aliens spawn one at a time, and not in a wave format. If you're fighting a hive that isn't built yet, there are a number of other considerations that make walking in with guns a very viable option.

First of all, aliens wont spawn in the hive, they will spawn in the other hive and have to at best mc over. This is a reason why if they aliens have any other chamber than mc's you should really know about it. Use the fact that they have to spawn at and travel from the first hive against them by walking in.

The second weakness of a building second hive is that it wont heal aliens in the area. The aliens must rely on a gorge for this. This gorge is usually the hive gorge or a perma gorge. Either way, he's not usually on top of the hive. If you can get that gorge out of there, you take away the source of healing for the fades and the lerk causing them to need to retreat back to the first hive for healing. This sort of retreat can take a lifeform out of play for up to 40-60 seconds.

The third and final weakness of a building hive is that when it is first dropped it only has half the health of a full hive. As it builds over the course of three minutes it gains the other half of its strength. So if you walk in on a hive when it is first dropped you only have to shoot it half as much as you would rushing a hive at or near completion.

All of these factors combine to create a tactical opportunity for marines to walk in with guns. The problem is that it takes a good chunk of res all at one time to do this, which requires forethought by the commander. If the commander is at all familiar with real time strategy games they will know that one of your standing objectives is to keep your resources going into things, and the bank low. Resources don't do anything sitting in the bank.

The cost of walking in is 5 shotguns, 2-3 welders, a phase gate, mines for the phase gate, meds, and a maybe a beacon to get that one dude thats capping the far side. All of this cost means that you're going to need to let your bank fill to at least 60 resources after the phase gate is live and the marines have been consolidated (perhaps by a 15 res beacon.) You need this much res so you can suit everyone up and put them through with the things they need.

As the marines walk in you're going to want to hit each marine with one ammo pack. Good marines wont hit the armory on their way through and you should be a good enough comm that they don't have to call for it. Make sure you remind your marines that lifeforms are to be targeted first. They do not want to hit the hive unless they are putting damage in a higher lifeform. After the skulks and gorge are dead, and the fade has been either killed, or rendered useless through damage, you're going to tell your marines to take a moment to reload and weld. Then you want to hit the hive once, and kill the one or two skulks bound to come through, then finally unload on the hive.

This tactic is devastating when the team executes it correctly, and only losing a good portion of your marines will stop it. This is why you want to be able to keep the marines literally bathing in meds, and you want everyone's guns to be aiming at "lifeforms first." It only takes about 40 shells to kill a full hive, it takes only about 25 if the hive is newly dropped. If you kill the lifeforms, and make the fade have to get out to go heal, you should be able to put that much damage into the hive with 5 shotguns without a problem.

So how do you know when to shotgun rush and when to siege? The things to take into consideration are time, opposition, and res.

You need more than 2 minutes to siege a hive without risking it going up in the middle of the fight. This means that your phase gate has to be up within 30-45 seconds of the hive being dropped. If you only have a minute left you simply don't have time to complete an entire siege. You will need to either do a shotgun walk-in, or position yourself for a proto recovery which I will talk about later.

The next thing to consider is opposition. If all the fades are dead, there is no reason to hesitate. Get as many guns to marines as you can, and let them blast their way through skulks who wont stand a chance. If there is a fade or two, or maybe an amazing lerk, you want to make sure that you do the walk-in right. You also need to scout out if the gorge is on the hive or on the ground. If there is a gorge or two on the hive it's basically like the hive can heal itself and lifeforms, and hit itself for incoming mc users. If you have very stiff opposition, a siege is a safer option if you have the time.

The last thing to consider is res. You need that burst of res to make the shotgun walk-in happen. You also however need res flow. You're going to need the clicks of res after you drop all that gear to pay for the ammo and meds of the attack. If you're down to 3 nodes or less, its going to be really hard to keep your marines healed and shooting, and you can count 15 spare res for a beacon out completly. A siege is more expensive in total price tag, but the thing to remember is that you have 2 minutes worth of res flow during it to help you pay for it. If I have 4-5 resource towers I can do a siege without any starting res essentially. A siege is also a good option in tight res situations because you can have a person out capping until the siege gets tense.

[edit] The siege

Make sure that you've read the "setting up siege spots" page. Now there are a couple things to keep in mind throughout the siege.

You need to know how many gorges are in the hive and where. You should have three sieges for a hive without a gorge, and another siege for every gorge on the hive. Those little buggers can heal almost non-stop with adrenaline and forever with the help of an mc. I play gorge for my team, and trust me when I say the gorge factor is important. 2 gorges will hold the hive near constant against 3 sieges and three gorges will actually out heal you when you have 4 sieges. And yes, I've seen plenty of games with three gorges on the hive. Usually if you do have 5 sieges up and firing you can take the hive down if your marines shoot it a little bit no matter about the gorges.

Gorges will also mean that at some point you're going to need your marines to spot the hive a little bit. This can be as simple as one person putting a pistol shot in it. Obviously the observatory can only scan 5 times when full of energy and only periodically afterwards. A second obs is never a bad idea if you can afford it and if the gorges are going to force you into the long haul. For refferance, it takes about 22 siege shots to kill a full health, unhealed hive. That number goes up a lot with each gorge pumping the hive with heal spray.

Another thing to consider is that you want guns and welders on the field and you want your guys welding each other. Usually 2 shotguns is good and one shotgun will suffice in a crunch.

Keep telling your marines to build. All too often 4 marines will be on the siege all staring at corners waiting for an alien to come through, or they are all shooting the fade who is too quick to really bring down. What you want to tell your marines is for someone to start building and not to stop. You want to keep one person at the very least constantly building. If a fade or skulk bothers him just med him as fast as you can and rely on your teammates to protect him. It is so very important that someone builds constantly. There is no greater factor in the hive going down than the time at which the sieges go up. The biggest variable in the time it takes to siege a hive is how long it takes to get the sieges functional. Good aliens know this and they will try to keep your men off the sieges. Expect your sieges to be gased almost 100 percent of the time. A good lerk can cost you 30 res in meds, or coutless seconds in time as your men don't want to sign up to stand in poison gas. Often time marines' instincts will be to stop building to shoot at a fade, even if the fade isn't going for them. There is no reason for this, your team has to trust each other, and its up to you to convince them to trust each other. It goes against everything in most people's instincts to play in ways that makes them die, they have a sense of self protection. The truth is a marine with an lmg is expendable. A marine with another gun is expendable if his gun can be recaptured. And anybody with anything is expendable if the aliens lose more than you do. If the marine building dies, they shouldn't be mad, its a dangerous spot, and the next person in line shouldn't hesitate one second to pick up the position and keep building.

Once two sieges are built scan the hive for the first time while the third siege is going up. Having sieges hitting the hive is an important psychological stress trigger on an alien team so you want to start it as soon as possible. It also obviously damages the hive which the point of the whole siege anyway. You don't want to scan on only one siege though, cause thats kind of a waste of energy, and the sound of one cannon firing is less impressive than multiple shots.

If you can, try to put a siege in the doorway the fade is using, needing to go over the siege is literally a big stumbling block that will often kill fades.

If the second hive goes up you should try to get hmg's through. You can complete a siege against a hurting hive that goes live if the marines have serious guns and welders. Make sure they weld or the aliens new found focus will kill them.

Keep mines on your phase gate and keep bile bombing gorges away from everything.

At the end, recycle your sieges and put the res you get from it into recapping your lost nodes. You will always lose a lot of nodes in a siege, because the aliens can spare a skulk easier than you can spare a marine.

Try to keep 4-5 nodes, if you have 3 nodes and one is going down you need a person to be capping somewhere immediatly. Five nodes is comfortable, Three nodes is terrible, two nodes is impossible.

Know when to quit. Know when you've lost your siege and the second hive is up and isn't going to go down. Being too persistant and fighting untill the death is going to make you miss your chance at a proto recovery. This doesn't mean recycle things as soon as the hive goes up. What I mean is that you have to have a sense for how hurt the hive is. This means you have to be keeping track of how many gorges are on the hive, how many siege cannon shots have hit the hive, where the lifeforms are and how many and what type they are, how much energy you have, how much res you have, how many res towers you have, if your armory is advanced, and if the aliens are going to be able to drop another hive soon. Thats an exhaustive list of things to take into account when deciding that you've been beaten. Some times its obvious, sometimes the commander has to make a call. There are so many factors that go into whether or not you can finish off that hive, that really it just takes experiance and a gut instinct.

[edit] Proto Tech

Proto Lab upgrades, even though they are the height of marine technology, are really only usually used in 2 situations. The first is a proto rush, and the second is a proto recovery.

[edit] Proto Rush

A proto rush is when from the first second of the game you are trying to put your men in jetpacks or heavy armor as fast as you can. A fully operational proto tech marine team is superior to hive 2 aliens. If you rush it correctly you can put proto tech on the board up to a minute and a half before the second hive is up.

What you do is put 2 teams of 2 marines out in the field and have the 5th man build the armory first, as soon as he gets the armory up, advance it. Drop as many nodes as possible. You want to hold an average of 5 nodes for the whole game, but 6 or 7 nodes is ideal. Now the problem with this strat is that it doesn't pressure the alien nodes, and they will drop their second hive on time. Try to put a marine presence, (no pg's) into the second hive around hive time to delay it another 45 seconds or so while your marines hold out. Your proto lab should be researching jetpacks when the aliens drop the second hive. Keep in mind that you need an arms lab to get a proto lab, and you certainly want to get w1 and a1 before you dish out proto suits.

Also keep in mind your res, the reason why its so important to cap so many towers is that you need to be spending all that res. You're going to need 75-80 res to drop the proto lab and get it reasearching. Then while its researching you shouldn't even be spending res on meds because you need 125 res to get each marine a jetpack and shotgun. You need more if you want them to have welders. You also are going to want to drop all the marines their gear at once, and beacon or something so that the first the aliens ever know about jetpacks is when 5 of them are zooming towards the second hive, which isn't quite finished building.

If the second hive is up and functional, your jetpack strategy isn't going to be to just rush the hive. You're going to want to hit soft targets like res towers and chambers. Aliens can't function without these and they wont drop a third hive if they have no chambers or no res towers. Use your obs to scan vents that commonly hold chambers and scan both hives. Find out where everything is, then direct your team in groups to take them out. If 4 marines fly into a hive and only shoot chambers, all chambers in that hive will die. It is then often times a good move to beacon them out as aliens will be all over them. When you beacon them out like that you're saving like 100 res in gear, and your giving them the chance to reload, and weld each other up before they hit the next target. If you keep this up, you will be able to suck all the alien res out of their team by making them drop rt's and chambers constantly. You also make the fades and lerk way easier to kill as they lose upgrades.

Heavy armor should also not be discounted. Heavy armor is a safer bet because it is harder to kill them. However an onos changes that right around. An onos with stomp will end any heavy train. This is why if you think there could be an onos on the board, or appearing soon, you need to choose jets over HA. If you ever plan on seiging a hive when the aliens have 2 hives, you should have HA, even if its only 2 to build everything while the jets cover.

[edit] Proto Recovery

If you are doing a normal strat, and things go bad, often times the only way to pull out of it is an attempt at a proto recovery. For any game, as soon as you think the hive might not go down, you need to get the armory upgrading if its not already. The hive takes exactly three minutes to build, but the armory takes exactly three minutes to advance. This means that if you fail to kill the hive, you needed to start the armory at the same time the hive was dropped or before. Not only are you going to need the hmg's to hold any position from here on out, but you need to be saving up for that 75 res jump to proto tech. Remember also that it takes time for the proto stuff to research, and that you need like 150 res to suit people up.

Here is the situation: You're seiging a second hive and you've been beat, or your shotgun walk-in failed miserably and its too late to turn it into a siege. You need to accomplish a couple of things fairly quickly. First, you need a phase gate in the third hive. Second you need a phase gate at a position on the map that will control at least 2 res towers, and let you cap a third. Once these two phase gates are up, recycle the abandoned phase gate at the second hive if it hasn't already been destroyed. Make sure that you get plenty of mines out on these phase gates and that all those nodes are up. As soon as you have these positions established you have many objectives, and if any of them are failed you will lose.

• You must hold the third hive. If you lose the third hive, and they drop it, you must rush it with guns. If the third hive completes at any point in time, you're done.
• If you lose your res phase gate you need to recapture it and save your towers from going down. If you can't hold 4-5 nodes you aren't going to be able to pull off the proto tech.
• You must not lose your advanced armory before the proto lab is dropped, arms lab, or base phase gate. Any of these structures lost will end the game.
• You must keep guns on the field at each important place. You must keep welders out or the marines will die to focus. When you get proto tech, you must make sure that the people that already have guns and welders get the first suits. You are trying to get proto tech on the board as fast as you can, so the normal rule about dropping full suits all in the same spot can be waived if you know a marine has gear.

Once you get your proto tech out you can start pushing the aliens back. Whether it be through geurilla jet pack attacks, or a heavy armor push. When you do start to push though, keep an eye on your nodes and keep an eye on the third hive. You didn't hold that stuff this long for no reason, and if they take out either it can still end the game without a proper response. At this point though, you really need to be turning the tides and focusing on putting the aliens back on the defensive.

Always keep in mind when working with proto tech that you never drop a jet or a HA without a corresponding gun and welder. Drop them in sets. Having 2 fully set up HA marines is better than having 5 HA/lmg's without welders. You should have set up your base so that the armory and proto ranges overlap so you can drop a suit, a gun and welder all in the same spot, so that when a marine walks over them he gets all three pieces.

[edit] Guide to Sensory Chambers

A couple people on the Cal forums requested a guide to sensory chambers. Sensory chambers are easy to beat if you change your tactics to deal with them.

The main reason a team would drop sensory chambers is to (ab)use cloaking. The focus fades aren't that scary because they move so slowly. All you need to do is give your team what they need and they wont have a problem beating sensory.

Your team should obviously be very sensitive to cloaking skulks, and they should inform you when they suspect sensory chambers, and again when they've confirmed it.

Early detection is key because you need to move towards an obs in your obgrade path. This is because you need an obs to scan, which is the main method to stop cloaking skulks. When you drop an obs it will only be able to scan twice on the energy it has to start with, and you will also need to be researching phase gates. I recommend coordinating your obs going up with the pressure team going towards the nodes (most likely this will be the second attack on the alien rt's.) Scan the path to the node for your team, and they will be able to smoke any cloaked skulks who think they are clever hiding on the cieling. Then once they are in the node room, scan them again, and position the center of the scan more towards the direction the aliens will be coming from. This should be enough to let your team take down the node. If the scan reveals things are clear then make sure all your dudes are putting damage in the node and not staring at corners.

About now is where you're going to run into your two main problems. You wont have enough energy for any more scans, and you'll need to research phase tech. What you should do is establish a second external obs near a strong node center. This obs position should be in line of sight of a future phase gate and it should also cover some center choke points of the map. The cover of the obs will keep aliens decloaked in its massive area of effect. While your team holds this position, nodes, obs and everything, research phase tech from your base phase gate and sneak up weapons 1 if you haven't already.

Your next consideration is attacking the second hive. What I recommend in most situations is to prepare for a shotgun walk-in. This is because dead or hurt aliens wont be able to mc over from the first hive and the gorges will not have adren to keep the hive healed even if they do manage to get on top of it. Keep in mind the down payment you need to start a walk-in, and save accordingly.

If you do decide to siege, make sure you get an obs up between the pg and the tf, and get some guns to your dudes so they can kill that slow fade. This is a time where you really want to make sure you follow the gun/welder rule. Where for every gun you drop you drop a welder. If your guys weld each other well the fade wont be able to get a single kill because he will never be able to stay more than one swipe.

Again though, the real way to take out a sensory second hive is by walking in with a bunch of guns and a scan. There should be no problem killing the fade or scaring him away for a good long time. Then the first hive is an easy siege if you put an obs up there.

The main thing to keep in mind is that cloaking is the main power in the sensory chamber set that will lose you the game, so you want to get scans and observatories out there to take that away from the aliens. If you try to fight cloaking without any sort of obs support, your guys will get shredded. Early detection and the correct response is the way to win.

Another important note is that you obviously shouldn't be med packing a marine that isn't going to get welded if he's fighting a focus fade. Even with full meds he will still die in one hit without armor. This is why it is important to make sure you get welders out, especially with your guns.

One last thing to keep in mind is that the aliens will place sensory chambers outside their hives more than any other chamber. This is because the sc cloaks aliens and provides scent of fear on any marines in range. So if a skulk gets focus, and chills out by a sensory chamber, he's got all three sensory abilities. If you find yourself with some free energy, try scanning around the map where you think they would hide chambers, and then send guys to take out the ones you find.

[edit] DEMOS

Download and view demo files of games which display many of the principles detailed in this guide. The demos require Natural Selection 3.1 to be viewed (using the 'viewdemo' console command).

• First Set
• Second Set