Talk:Capper
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[edit] Instructional video
Part 1 of the video is complete.
[edit] Transcript
[edit] Part 1 (finished)
Hey, this is Kryand, and I'm here to teach you guys how to play Tribes 2. The primary focus of this video will be strategies to use as a capper in capture the flag, but since this is the first instructional video for this game, we will start off with lots of basics. It would help if you play the training missions before-hand if you are a brand new player, but either way, we'll probably give you all the info you need to get started. I'm going to assume that you already managed to make your online account with TribesNext and are able to see and join servers. So, let's do that. We're going to join Goon Haven for a minute to show you a couple things.
Here we are. When you finish loading the map, you are placed into observer mode. Here you can fly around freely and look at things, or press spacebar to lock onto specific players. If you open the score screen, you can click on a person's name to observe them. When you want to join in, make sure you are in the free-flying mode by pressing spacebar if necessary, then click your fire button. Once you spawn, you can move around, shoot, jet, ski, etc. Players with red icons above their heads are enemies, players with green above their heads are teammates. Please do not shoot your teammates. The first thing you'll notice in this video is that my screen looks quite a bit different than yours will. Don't worry about that too much, I am simply running some heads-up-display scripts to rearrange all of my HUDs. Among them is the GUI keyboard, which I have set up to show the key that I am currently pressing. The keys you see are my personal controls, so don't be confused if yours are different.
As I said, I'd like to start off with some basics of Tribes 2, so let's talk about loadouts. The loadout we will be using as cappers is Scout armor, spinfusor, grenade launcher, chaingun, with an energy pack and flares. To acquire it, first set it up on the inventory screen, then save it so you can easily select it later. After that, find an inventory station and step onto it, and you will be given all of those items. The spinfusor, which I will hence force be referring to as the disc, is a must-have weapon first and foremost because of the mine-disc. In classic, mines can be blown up before they're deployed, and mine-discing is simply throwing a mine at your target, then shooting it with a disc such that the disc explosion blows up the mine, and your target takes damage from both the disc and the mine explosion. This is something that you should practice at all times no matter what position you play. For cappers it's used a lot to help clear the flag stand right as you grab, but we won't get into that for a while. The grenade launcher is used because it is a great weapon for bombarding the enemy flag stand as you approach. If enemy defenders don't get out of the way, you can easily kill them with grenade spam on your entrance. There really aren't any other weapons besides discs and grenades that will help you strictly in terms of running a route, so your third weapon should be chosen based on what you're doing besides just capping. The most common thing is to hang around near the enemy base and shooting deployed equipment as well as distracting enemies. I chose the chaingun simply because it is the most effective weapon in the game at killing people up close such as enemy defenders. Another choice could be the laser rifle if you prefer to keep your distance. Either of those two are good, and you should use whichever one you feel most comfortable with. However, any weapon other than those four, is pretty much a terrible idea for cappers, and worse in every situation than any of the weapons I just mentioned. As far as packs, the energy pack is a pretty clear choice for cappers, since most of what you'll be doing is jetting, skiing and moving fast, and the energy pack is designed to accommodate people with doing those things. The sensor jammer pack can be great on certain maps, like ones with thick fog, or in certain situations when you aren't capping, but for now, we won't get into that. Flares are pretty much a necessity, because without them, a single missile will kill you instantly, and any number of players or turrets could be trying to shoot missiles at you as you try to cap.
Now that we've covered what equipment we're going to use, let's move on to a skill that you can actually practice. We will be using mostly TWL and TWL2 maps for this video, since, in general, they are better than the maps that came with the game. Chances are you'll have to download them if you want to play them - and I highly recommend doing so. The map we're on now is TWL2-Ocular. The first thing you need to master is skiing, and the reason we've chosen Ocular is because it has very smooth terrain with really nice hills that make it very easy to ski. To begin, after you've suited up with the loadout we talked about, simply start skiing down a slope by holding forward and your jump button. When you hit the bottom of the hill, that's when you start jetting up the next slope, and keep jetting until you see the next slope after that that you want to ski down, and try to land on it. Keep skiing like this along hills for as long as you can. Don't worry if you go out of bounds, just keep going straight for now until you are comfortable with skiing. To help keep up your speed, always hold the forward key, especially when jetting and when you're skiing along the ground. It doesn't actually do anything if you aren't jetting or on the ground, but it's good practice just to hold the forward key anyway at all times while you're skiing. Another thing to keep in mind is that you don't want to jet after you reach your apex and start to descend. Ideally, you want to do all of your jetting in one long click during your ascent, and then free-fall the rest of the way. Obviously, this requires a lot of practice and good sense of where you are going to land long before you land there, so you might run into a lot of trouble trying to do that if you're not experienced. The most important thing is to make sure you land in the right spot, so if you have to do lots of jetting on your way down to ensure a nice landing, then do that. Just be aware that eventually you should practice jetting so that you don't have to do that. Another thing you've probably noticed is that I zoom in on the terrain a lot, and that's simply because it's always better to have a closer look at the shape of the terrain before you land on it. Practice skiing straight like this and trying to go as fast as you can until you are comfortable. If you can go thousands of meters at high speed without ever taking damage from hitting the ground, then you are making great progress. For an added challenge, you can also try practicing this without using an energy pack. That will really help you out with learning to use your energy wisely.
Onto the next step, let's try skiing and actually using the terrain to change our direction. Changing your direction just by jetting is usually a bad idea, since if you are going at any decent speed, it's barely even possible to do so even if you expend all of your energy trying. As such, your direction is mostly going to be determined by the ground that you ski on. A great map for practicing skiing in this way is TWL2-Magnum. Magnum is pretty much nothing but bowls all over the place. Bowl is the term that most people use to describe a big curve in the terrain that can redirect your momentum. Practice skiing around this map just like the last map, except focus on landing on the sides of the bowls, and using the curve of the terrain to change your direction. Ski down any slope to start, and then jet until you see a bowl that you want to land on. Remember not to try to change your direction in the air - find a bowl that you can land on without having to expend lots of extra energy trying to aim yourself. When landing, make sure you land on the curve of the bowl at an angle that is tangent - or close to tangent - to the direction you are falling. In other words, when you first come into contact with the ground, you want it to be a very smooth contact that won't instantly redirect you. The harder you land, the more speed you lose from the landing. Another rule of thumb is that it's better to slightly overshoot a landing than it is to undershoot it. If you overshoot, you might lose a little speed from a harder landing, but you will usually be fine other than that. If you undershoot it and bounce off the terrain too soon, that bounce will usually completely screw up your route and you might not even be able to recover it at all. I suppose there are lots of exceptions to that depending on the map of the specific hill, but the main reason I bring it up is: you are more likely to undershoot landings to begin with, because if you're inexperienced, you won't be as aware of your player's feet. It's your foot-level that lands on the terrain, not your eye-level. Be very aware of that as you focus on where you want to land. Continue skiing like this all over the place until you are comfortable. When you feel like you can land on bowls well enough, try to add some discretion to where you're going. In the last exercise we had you just ski forward out of bounds without regard for your direction. This time try to stay in the general mission area. If you go out of bounds, try to ski back in bounds using the bowls to turn yourself around. Also, just like last time, if you want to challenge yourself even more, ski around without using an energy pack. This will force you to decide much more quickly where you want to land, because you won't be able to jet as long or as far. Once you feel comfortable skiing around Magnum, there is another mission you could try called TWL-Deserted. The bowls on Deserted aren't as straight-forward as the ones a Magnum. At first glance, in fact, the terrain here appears to be just jagged and awful. However, pretty much every point on this map is a good place to ski to change your direction. Practice skiing on this map just as you did on Magnum, and it should help you develop a better eye for good places to ski.
Finally, before we move on to routes, let's talk about disc-jumping. Disc-jumping is simply a way to sacrifice some health in favor of speed. All you have to do is shoot the ground underneath you with a disc. It will take some practice to get the most out of your disc-jumps. Where on the ground you should aim for depends on how fast you are going. If you are moving slowly, you'll need to turn around and shoot behind you. If you are moving fast enough, you can just look straight down. If you are moving very fast, then sometimes you might even have to aim a tiny bit in front of you. The factor here is how far you are going to move in the time it takes the disc to leave your gun and hit the ground. Also, there are times when you won't even aim down to disc-jump, such as if you are skiing along a bowl or grazing past the side of a hill. You can only do one strong disc jump for each time you respawn in light armor, so they are mostly only used in emergencies or on carefully planned routes. In any case, you should practice disc-jumping while you ski until you can consistently execute disc-jumps that give you nice forward propulsion. If they send you upwards with too much force, you need to aim the disc more towards your rear. If they don't seem to do much at all, then you need to aim a little further in the direction that you're moving.
Once you're comfortable skiing around and doing the occasional disc-jump, it's time to introduce the key component of being a capper which is the enemy flag. Let's start by doing a basic setup route. For a setup route, the basic idea is to simply find a big hill somewhere that slopes down in the direction of the enemy flag. When looking for a hill for your setup route, also consider the location. The two factors you have to weigh out are: how hard is it to get to your hill, and how hard will it be to start heading back to your base once you've grabbed the enemy flag. Hills behind the enemy base are generally harder to get to, but they give you an easier path back to your base. Hills off to the side are usually somewhere in between for both factors, and hills in between the bases are generally easy to get to, but it's harder to turn back to your base after the grab. Of course, the factors are highly dependent on the terrain and whether or not there are bowls you can use to redirect yourself, but what I said is true in theory.
[edit] Part 2
For our first route, let's have a look at TWL-Feign, which is one of the most popular maps among competitive players. The first route we'll look at is a setup route that starts from behind the enemy base. I am on the Inferno team, and I'm overlooking Storm's flag stand. From here you have a good view of everything near the enemy flag, so if you are sitting here waiting to go in for a grab, you can try to shoot enemy deployed equipment or snipe people. You might also want to just hide so that the enemies don't know you're setting up for a cap, but it's up to you. If you choose to hide, a trick you can employ is using third person view to look over the hill so you can still see the enemy flag area even though they can't see you. Using third person view like this is an extremely important tactic in many situations, especially dueling, so you should have your third person view toggle key set to something easy to reach on your keyboard. We'll probably get more into that in another video, but for now let's run this route. We're going to land on this hill, and we need to try to jet like I mentioned in the last video. Jet up and forward, then free-fall the rest of the way. Obviously, you'll need to practice to know how much you need to jet. When you land on the hill, you'll be redirected forward at high speed. Disc-jump when you grab the flag to give yourself some extra speed for the flight back to your base. Fly completely over this mountain. If the enemy team has defensive snipers, they could fairly easily take you out now, but for now we'll assume their defense was disrupted. Once you are over the mountain, just fall onto your flag. Try to land directly on your flag, because that will minimize the chance that you will die on the stand right before capping.
Setup routes are cool and all, but it's definitely much better when you have a route that starts at your own base, loops around to the enemy flag, and then comes all the way back to your base. In our first case, and many other cases, you're effectively taking a setup route, making a route that gets from your base to the setup route, and combining them into one. So let's look at another setup route that comes in from the side. For this one, you'll need to get to the top of this huge mountain to start. Jet up a little and then ski down this slope to the large bowl below. It should redirect you straight toward the enemy flag. Go ahead and mine-disc their flag right before you grab even if there's no one there, because it's good practice. After you make the grab, you just need to find bowls that will redirect you back to your own flag, such as the ones that I am skiing on.
Now, let's run almost the exact same route, except start skiing from our own base without stopping on top of that mountain. In this case, because the mountain is also a large bowl, there's no need for you to jet to the top of it to get your speed. If you fly to the mountain at a nice enough speed, you can just use it as a bowl to redirect you towards the enemy flag and still keep all of your speed. When it comes to landing on the bowl, remember what you practiced back when we were skiing around on Magnum - make a smooth contact by landing tangent to the curve. From here, pretty much everything is the same.
Let's move on to the next level and put an enemy LD - light defense - on the flag. An LD on the enemy flag like this is commonly referred to as a "light on flag", or simple LoF, L-O-F. If you see an enemy LoF and ignore him, there are three likely outcomes. He might be really bad and fail to stop you, but this is definitely the least likely of the three if you are playing in a game with experienced players. The other two are the two most common methods of stopping cappers as a LoF - body-blocking, and mine-discing on the flag. A LoF trying to body-block you will fly towards you away from his flag, and he will try to get in your way. If you run into him, your momentum will be stopped completely and your route will be done. Additionally, a skilled LoF will also MA you - which is to hit you in the air with a disc - as you approach, adding yet another obstacle to dealing with him. In the other case, the LoF might try to mine-disc you on the stand as you grab. If a LoF is going to do this, he will float just above his flag and stare at it, waiting for the right moment to fire. This is harder for a LoF to do than body-block, but it will kill you instantly, and if you touched the flag before getting killed, it will allow the enemy defense to move it into a more secure location until it gets returned by the timer. Enemy defenders moving the flag and the flag timer are very important considerations you will face as a capper, but we will get to them later.
Rather than waiting for someone else on your team to kill the LoF for you, let's talk about what you can do to deal with him yourself. The first thing you can try is simply spamming the grenade launcher at the enemy flag as you approach, like we touched on in the first video. If the LoF isn't aware of your approach in time, this grenade spam could easily kill him or at least knock him out of position so he won't be ready to body-block or mine-disc you. This is a very effective method of dealing with LD in general, but you'd have to start shooting from very far off to get off more than about 2 grenades. Hitting grenades right on the enemy flag from that far off will take some practice. Additionally, the grenades are very visible, so if they defenders didn't know you were coming already, they definitely will now, so you should make sure you do enough damage that that knowledge won't help them. Now, it's possible that the LoF will be good enough to avoid all of your grenades and still be in position to body-block or mine-disc you. If it looks like he's going to body-block you, you need to switch to your disc launcher as soon as possible, because your best hope of dealing with him is MAing him before he MAs or body-blocks you. A mid-air mine-disc would be the best solution, because with just an MA, there's a chance his body won't be moved out of your path in time, whereas a mid-air mine-disc will kill him instantly, and his body will no longer be an issue.
Otherwise, if it looks like he's setting up to mine-disc you, your counter is to blow up his mine before he does. If you blow up his mine, then when he shoots you, you'll only be taking disc damage instead of mine-disc damage, and you'll escape with half-health instead of being killed immediately. You do this by discing the enemy flag at the right moment. The perfect moment would be when your disc explodes on the flag stand when the mine is just close enough to be destroyed by it. It's incredibly unlikely that you will actually be able to see the mine before you need to fire unless he throws it very early, so you'll just have to get a feel for shooting at the right moment judging by whether you live or not. However, let's not stop there. Rather than simply discing the flag before you grab, you should go for a full-on mine-disc. A well thrown mine and a well placed disc combined with the mine thrown by the LoF might actually kill the LoF before he even fire his disc at you. It depends highly on where he is and when he throws his mine, but with practice, you may eventually be able to kill the LoF when you grab a good portion of the time. This should always be your goal, because even if you escape with the flag, most LoFs carry laser rifles and will be able to finish you off before you go too far.
