7 replies to this topic

[Arianrhod]

I'm not claiming to be a tactical genius or anything, but the items on the following list are imperatives to a pilot's success, and to the success of the team.

1. Know your team (and where they are).

At the beginning of a match, you should take a look around and see what your team looks like. You're looking for mechs with like speed to your own, mechs with like weapon ranges to your own, and the ever-important and oft-neglected assault lance. You should stay with mechs with which you share speed or range, or stay with the assaults. Never, ever, ever be alone. Ever. Assaults are your shields when things get rough, and they also need your protection against faster targets.

Do not walk directly behind teammates. This blocks your ally's retreat, which could potentially lead to their bloody, lasery death. Most are familiar with this premise—and yet it still happens all the time. Additionally, following too close to your teammates can cause you to hit each other if the lead player hits the brakes. That might seem trivial at the beginning of the match when you have full armor, but I have in fact lost a leg due to a collision with a mech who followed too close on my heels. Only you can prevent legging. Keep some distance.

To that effect, you really ought not to follow directly behind allies at all—you should proceed in an echelon (staggered) formation, so that if an enemy appears in front of you, you can fire on it without shooting your buddy in the back. So stay to your teammate's shoulder, not their direct rear. Note that most PUGs won't assume or conform to this formation intuitively. You have to constantly reposition to make it work.

Aside from messing your allies up from being behind them, you can also mess them up by being in front. This is my personal pet peeve, and the main reason I'm writing this, so if you pay attention to one sentence, let it be this one: Do not walk in front of your teammates! Watch your minimap and keep track of where your teammates are. If you walk in front of them, you achieve three ill effects simultaneously. 1: Your ally's aim is disrupted, and their ammo/heat is wasted. 2: You expose your vulnerable side to an unholy amount of firepower at close range. 3: The enemy is spared the furor of your teammate's wrath, because you took the alpha instead.

I have had other players walk headlong into my lasers whilst they are firing—with their cockpits facing my lasers, so that they could clearly see them! Don't do it guys. It's hazardous to your health, and extremely disrespectful. Lasers cannot be unfired. The alpha strike key cannot be unpressed. Watch your minimap.

However, because people will always be dumb enough to walk through alpha strikes, you must also be watchful. Again, keeping track of your minimap, be aware of PUGs darting through your field of fire. When you do your review of the team at the beginning of the match, watch for trial mechs, which are always suspect. Whilst this is not always the case, they are most likely to accidentally mess you up. (Note that if they do mess you up, swearing at them over the VOIP or intentionally alpha striking their backs doesn't usually solve the problem, so please try to avoid that.)

Pay attention to how much of your team is left. Your playstyle should respond to your numbers. Be more conservative when the team drops below half strength. If you see that there is only a lance's worth or less of your team left, and you can't see your allies, you need to find them immediately and stay with them. One on three can still go to the one if you don't stay together. If you find yourself the last one left or there's only one or two teammates left, be especially aware of the terrain and use it to your advantage. The best thing you can do is back yourself into a corner so that the enemy has to come to you and approach you head on your terrain, which should either be level or give you the high ground. (This does not apply to lights, which, if backed into a corner, will just die if any larger enemy approaches.)

When playing at a marked disadvantage, some things are barred to you, mainly brawling and long-range DPS trades, which somehow always find a way to work out unfavorably for you. Midrange poking at a larger force is also not advised, and you should keep track of the enemy's numbers so that you know how much you can permit. Always try to have the element of surprise. This means moving in three dimensions (try to always be above the enemy and shooting down) and not doing things that might alert the enemy to your position, including but not limited to: firing into the air if you can avoid it, third-person view drone, or standing on top of tall things looking stupid.

2. Know the enemy (and again where they are).

When you find an enemy, please please please target it. I know, sometimes you forget. But how are us LRM boats supposed to help you out if you don't? Additionally, your simple R-pressing helps me know exactly what is in front of my slow, lumbering beast mech before my eventual arrival at the field of battle. This means I have time to figure out how to respond to their loadout and which components are already weak. My fellow heavy and assault pilots will thank you. Additionally, when you press R, my HUD beeps, letting me know you've found a new enemy. If you find a cluster of enemies, pressing R repeatedly lets me know that you've found a bunch of enemies. It annoys some people but it's worth it.

When you do have that enemy targeted, watch the target status feed in the top right. Captain Adams tried to teach you to do this because he even recognized how important it was, and he's only an NPC! That readout will tell you two critical things: how damaged the enemy is, and what weapons they have. Knowing what weapons the enemy has is critical. If you see a Jagermech with two AC/20s in front of you, facing it head on is not generally the best idea. However, if you see a Catapult that has ONLY LRMs, or like 2 medium lasers, the best idea would be to close distance rapidly so you can ignore those LRMs with impunity as they patter harmlessly against your windshield.

Likewise, enemy mechs with full armor and structure are not good targets, whereas limping mechs with one arm and smoke coming out the back are better prey. Your philosophy should be to target the weak ones first. You want to thin the enemy's numbers as much as possible. Think it through: if you target the full armor King Crab, the legged, CT crit Stormcrow next to it continues plinking away with its single remaining LPL for eighty additional seconds, causing you substantial damage that you could have avoided by putting it out of its misery. HOWEVER—avoid firing on lights when you could be firing on slower targets. Lights are generally a waste of your ammo unless they charge directly at you, and should be left to other lights or fast mediums.

Even without the target readout, it's still easy to tell which mechs are damaged. They will be smoking, have pitted armor, and may be missing arms. Most critically, pay attention to the ones that are limping and aim for the legs.

The target readout also allows you to do little, situational things. When fighting a mech that has a Gauss gun in the side torso, you would logically aim for that ST because as the tool tips should have informed you, Gauss guns explode in this game for some reason I don't fully understand (they're just electromagnetic coils, what there is so ridiculously flammable?). If a mech appears to have a ridiculous and/or ungodly amount of weapons for its speed and weight, it probably has an XL engine, so you could aim for a weaker ST instead of the CT. (Doesn't work for Clan mechs because of Clan XL magic.)

If you see one enemy assault mech, there's probably more than one. Be mindful of this. Instead of charging into it or blitzing with your ER large lasers, wait a minute to see if anything comes into view behind it. Wait until you're sure its buddies are out of helpful range before you engage.

When you sight the enemy team, and they're right in front of you coming towards you guns blazing, that's actually not the best time to engage. The best time to engage is when they're either moving perpendicular to you and haven't seen you yet, or if you're directly behind them sizing up their juicy, delicious 12-armor flanks. If you approach them when they already know you're going to, i.e. from the front when they can see you, they'll totally kill you until you die and then step on your mech's broken corpse (or worse, use it as cover). If, however, you are aware enough of their position to successfully go around and outflank them, you may throw the enemy into chaos as they all turn around to fight you in ignorance of your assault lance which is just now arriving to the party. This tactic requires you to, you know, let the team know what you're doing, and shouldn't generally be undertaken alone. By generally, I mean ever. Unless you're, like, the last person alive.

3. Know your own mech (and, you know by now, where it is).

Watch your damage readout. Avoid head-on fights if your CT is crit. Avoid falling or colliding with allies if your legs are crit. Don't give your back to the enemy if your rear armor is gone. DO give your back to the enemy if your front armor is gone, but your rear armor is undamaged. Distribute oncoming damage to less damaged portions of your mech. If you have them, use jump jets to transfer damage to the legs. If you are legged, don't pursue mechs. When your mech is badly damaged, hide behind your friends. Don't be ashamed of it—blatantly use them as meat shields. Your survival is critical to the success of the team, even if you suck, so if it means spending ten points of your neighboring Atlas's armor, they can spare it (they were getting shot at anyway). Your single remaining AC/5 matters. It could be the 5 damage between a Shadowhawk proudly slaying your Atlas friend and that same Shadowhawk having its dreams crushed beneath the crippling blast pressure of your high explosive shell.

Know your weapons. If your firing groups are messed up because it's a trial mech or you forgot to adjust them following your most recent stint in the mechlab, make sure you take a moment to redo them or you'll end up firing three small lasers and an LRM5 when you were trying for your AC/10. When you take a trial mech into battle, don't assume that the weapons will be grouped logically. Know your weapon ranges and synergies and group weapons accordingly. SRMs and ER large lasers don't line up well together.

Understand the ins and outs of the terrain. Don't do silly things like standing on top of buildings overlooking the enemy assault lance. Be aware that whilst the high ground is advantageous, it might mean that the enemy has a good vantage of your lance's position. Don't expose yourself if you can avoid it; always seek cover, even if you're not being shot at. You never know when you might need solace from a hailstorm of LRM misery. To that end, tall things are better cover than short things, and overhangs are safest from LRMs, as well as airstrikes. You should also know the layout of your hardpoints; if your weapon distribution is asymmetric and leans to one side, such as in the Hunchback HBK-4G, you should seek cover that allows you to move out to the right, thus exposing only your right side, which is where all the guns are. Arm-mounted or hip-slung weapons can't always fire over things even if you can see over them (knuckle dragging).

Have a good understanding of and appreciation for your mech's speed, armor, and heat capacity. Speed is unchanging during a match unless you get legged; don't get into fights with things faster than you unless they approach you head-on. Armor and heat capacity are essentially ammunition, heat being ammunition that magically recharges; like real ammunition, they each determine how long you can stay in battle. If you are in a Firestarter, you might want to consider not approaching that Banshee from the front. You know, because you have no armor. Generally, if the enemy has an alpha strike equal to or greater than your CT armor, you should avoid running at it. As for heat, always watch it. You should have a feel after a few matches with your loadout for how long you have before overheating, which should allow you to understand intuitively when to retreat (plus the nice computer lady starts shouting "heat critical" at you). If you find yourself constantly overheating after just a few shots, you are overgunned. This happens easily when you carry more than 1 PPC, when you blitz AC/2s, when you link brawling weapons like the AC/20 and SRMs, or any time you have an all-energy loadout. It can also happen when rapid-firing lots of LRMs. Just strip one weapon you don't care much about and add some heat sinks. On the other hand, if you NEVER overheat, you might ought to consider more guns.

4. Avoid doing silly things.

Some silly things to avoid doing:

-Sporadically firing your weapons into the air! Sometimes, you'll see players fire their weapons into a wall at the beginning of a match. This is either a misfire or an attempt to gauge the heat coming off their weapons with the map's temperature. It is NOT an invitation to aimlessly strobe the sky with your lasers. Why? Be aware of your situation. Firing a laser, PPC, autocannon, or whatever, really, into the air will leave a bright trace in the sky that the enemy can follow to your location. They now know what direction you're approaching from without ever having seen you. LRMs always give away your position with great accuracy because they leave convenient trails in the sky. This can't be avoided, but you should be mindful of it. It also applies to the enemy: their LRM trails tell you where they are.

-Firing weapons beyond their ranges. One part of being situationally aware is knowing your weapon ranges. Targets 600 meters away will not be affected by medium lasers. Firing medium lasers at targets 600 meters away does nothing but announce your position and make them look at you. They're not going to make the same mistake you just made, usually. They'll use large lasers. Additionally, without quirks and modules, SRMs do not detonate past 270 meters. So don't fire them past that range. It wastes your ammunition and heat, and again, makes the enemy look at you. Concurrently, LRMs detonate at precisely 1000 meters away from your launcher, so firing them at things 1250 meters away is wasteful. Inner Sphere LRMs do not detonate at ranges below 180 meters. Also wasteful. PPCs do not deal damage to targets within 90 meters. Wasteful.

-Overheating in battle if you can avoid it. Situational awareness is keeping track of your heat gauge and knowing which weapons, if fired, will push you over the edge. Furthermore, you should understand that sometimes the best thing to do at 95% heat capacity is to just run away. No shame in that. Also, don't alpha strike immediately after coming out of shutdown. You'll just shut down again, for longer. Longer shutdowns make you die.

-Getting into head-to-head confrontations if you can avoid it, and standing still during them if you can't. Brawling is the fine art of breaking people's faces at close range with high-damage, short-range weapons. It requires a sense of aim and the ability to adeptly rejigger the positioning of your mech's torso independently of the legs, and the difficulty associated with doing both of those actions at once causes many a mechwarrior to stand perfectly still during a brawl. This is folly. Especially against mechs that are bigger than you, being directly in front of them, standing still, is a great way to lose body parts.

-However, if you really MUST charge directly at an assault mech, use your SITUATIONAL AWARENESS (really trying to hammer that home here) and analyze the structure of their hardpoints. The tactic you're going for is known as facehugging. If you see a Dire Wolf and you can see that all of its primary weapons are mounted in the arms, then you should get as close to that Dire Wolf as possible. When you get right up in its face, those arms can't traverse far enough to hit you. Furthermore, mechs with fixed hip-slung autocannons or whatever such as the Atlas, Orion, or Cataphract can't murder you with those weapons if you stand just to the side of them. This is a boon if your weapons happen to be in the CT/ST/head, or if you're just smaller than the target.

-Don't get into brawls when your CT is crit. Watch your damage readout.

-Chasing lights! Oh my God does this happen in every single match! Here's the basic rule: You don't really need more than two mechs to chase down a light. You certainly don't need six. So if you hear the words "Base is being captured" from the nice computer lady, and you're in a King Crab, you don't need to go back and you shouldn't unless the base is literally right behind you. First of all, you're a King Crab and you can't fight lights unless they run directly at you, but more importantly, your 100 tons of molybdenum-alloyed murder machine are needed at the front line where they can actually be used for something. If an enemy sees you turning around, they will either 1: shoot you in the back (stone cold) 2: alert their team and push, and then shoot you in the back (stone cold AND a team player).

-Note that like most of these principles, this one works both ways. If you send one light to the enemy base, and their entire team turns around, that would be a good time to push. You know, when they're not looking at you or shooting at you.

-Repeatedly coming out from behind the same cover object! What do you think is going to happen? The enemy isn't stupid. If you appear from behind the same cover twice, they'll sense a pattern and be ready the third time, whereupon they will blast you with a facemeltingly awesome spray of lethal energetic discharge and high explosive shells. Whereupon you will totally die, or at least be severely maimed. When you appear in the exact same location multiple times, the enemy doesn't even have to aim—they just have to click. Furthermore, the entire enemy team now knows where you are, because your opponent target locked you and you haven't moved substantially since then. Cue LRM death.

-Getting into turning dogfights with faster mechs. This will result in a total existence failure on your part. Instead, because you've been watching your minimap and know where the team is, drag your pursuer back over to your main force where your teammates will beat them to a pulp, or else your pursuer will simply run away and harass someone less intelligent or slower than you.

-Assuming that the maximum effective range of your weapons is the maximum effective range of you. So your ER PPC has a max effective range of 1620 meters. That doesn't mean you can deal damage at 1620 meters. Not just because of damage falloff—even at your optimal range (810 meters), there are no guarantees. To hit anything at range, your aim has to be steady. At over a kilometer away, mechs look like blurry dark shapes that might even be smaller than the circle at the center of your crosshairs. That makes it very difficult to hit them. Furthermore, with a PPC or autocannon, you have to lead the target, or with a laser you have to keep the beam on the target for its duration. With an autocannon you must also account for projectile arc. At over a kilometer away, your hand is generally not steady enough for any of these things, unless you have the advanced zoom module (in which case, fire away, sharpshooter). Thus all you're really accomplishing is giving away your position and wasting your ammo or heat capacity.

-This also applies to LRMs. 1000 meters is not a good range for firing LRMs. Yes, they do full damage at this distance. No, you will not hit anything. Indirect firing LRMs at lights from 900 meters leaves little to no possibility of dealing any damage. If damage is dealt, it'll be like 1 point to the left leg or something barely noticeable like that. Not worth your ammo and heat. Try to fire LRMs with a line of sight on the target where possible, at targets 700 meters or closer, and at slower moving targets, especially those already taking fire from your team. These things will boost your accuracy.

-Becoming hyperaware of the target mech whilst engaged. The quandary here can be illustrated by the parable of the distracted driver. When some hooligan decides to walk all over the traffic laws and take a call on their cell phone whilst behind the wheel, they already know that talking on the phone whilst driving is dangerous. For that reason, they elect to pay extra close attention to the road to prove to themselves that they aren't a terrible person and a hazard to themselves and those around them. This causes the driver to become hyperaware of the lane in front of them, and only that lane. Meaning, not the adjacent lanes on either side. Meaning, any vehicle approaching from those lanes, god forbid in the car's blind spot, would go completely unnoticed by the distracted driver until it was too late. The same thing happens to mechwarriors. When you getting shot at, and you shooting back, you're determined to kill this guy and you're not going to let anything obstruct you from that goal—you know, until it does. Sometimes, your target has allies, and sometimes you have to back away and regroup.

If there's anything I didn't cover in this massive wall of text—then you're on your own. Most of these items can be summed up as follows: watch what you're doing, watch your readouts, and watch what everyone else is doing.

[Mech42Ace]

Good guide sir! Have bookmarked it for future reference.

[Mannson]

Should be retitled to "Mwo common sense 101". Sad that this need to be written, kudos for the OP.

People seriously need to learn that if your gausstoting assault mech has stopped dead in tracks and seemingly stares off into distance.. there is going to be firing. Same with holding a choke point.

Take the extra time go behind your ally in such cases! Or hell, flank. or be a flankguard or just wait for better chances. Ain't a race who can empty their ammo tons faster or shoot the most lasers anyways. If you must go to front, say to shufle tanking positions, type or use VoiceIP to make your intentions clear.

[NRP]

It's good advice, and definitely worth repeating from time to time. Thanks for taking the time to post this.

[Chocmaw]

Good stuff. Really useful for us shinies.

[butchly13]

This should definitely be part of the Google Presentation guide. I think of myself as a relatively strategic individual and watching a lot of SideStrafe's videos has helped, but by God you've hit the nail on the head and hammered it home. Most of these things are common sense if you think about them. Unfortunately most people don't think about them.

Awesome write-up though. Well done indeed.

[Bulletsponge0]

minimap reading is lostech

[Azzgaroth]

Great post good sir!