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G3 Heathen, on 27 June 2016 - 07:24 PM, said:
In conquest, a player with tier 5 skill but a good grasp of team play can have a good game. Be productive and contribute to a win. It's as close to the old mechwarrior 2 mercenaries missions as we are gonna get as well.
Malachy Karrde, on 27 June 2016 - 07:28 PM, said:
I choose conquest because it usually requires tactics. I usually don't have to take on more than a quarter of the enemy force alone, and it allows for some epic 1,2 or 3 on 1s. It also pretty much eliminates the snipe fest, and meta tards really suck at it lol. I also like the cbill bonus. I'll always vote conquest over the other choices.
There is essentially one strong strategy for conquest.
And that is to coordinate your movements and capture points only for the purpose of the plan on a whole.
First you need to grasp the value of a cap point and the resource points they grant.
If you ignore the caps and go straight into skirmish mode to try to win by fighting here is the most common back fire on that plan.
You win the battle leaving only the enemy team's fastest mechs (2 or 3 light mechs or ECM mediums) The battle took long enough that the enemy has all or nearly all the caps and your scores are like 0-500 by the time you begin to try to hunt down the most elusive enemy mechs the red team had. Unless you have enough mechs in good enough conditions that are close enough to cap all the points you are essentially boned at this point.
You won the skirmish but lost the conquest.
So clearly completley ignoring the game mode's victory conditions is a poor strategy.
But so is ignoring the enemy mechs and focusing to much on capture points.
You need to use the cap points as a strategic resource either to buy time at the end game To hunt the last few enemy by not having your resource counts so low that the enemy lead is insurmountable in the time remaining or by forcing or distracting the enemy to spend mech resources to counter your resource gains.If the enemy is deploying mechs to uncap your points they are not in the fight and this is an advantage. If you have no caps to take it's less tempting for the other team to expend resources to cap.
So how do we set this up?
Match begins you are just being dropped onto the map and this is when you use the VOIP to ask the two fastest mechs in your drop to cap. ONLY those two cap. Everyone else is moving to the capture point that is the contested cap.This is the one furthest from either team's deployment or the point you will most likely encounter the enemy.This is a map by map case so know your maps.
You two capture mechs (and only those two) are to do the following.
One takes the closest cap point to your drop point.and immediatley reforms with the rest of the team after capping.
The faster of your two (or the one with speed + ECM) goes and takes the next closest cap point.After taking that cap this mech goes and swings wide and deep to the enemy rear and takes their first cap. After this the mech is to rejoin the fray and be in the fight.
You now hold three caps with most of your mechs in a tight deathball rolling towards the largest concentration of enemy mechs.
Now your enemy probably did this instead.
All ran to the closest cap point and sat there until it maxed out and then a few more ran off to the next closest cap point and maybe some were thinking "screw conquest let's skirmish" and ran to find the enemy.One of their lights says "hey I'm gonna run way back there and take sigma from the enemy" and this mech is out of the picture for a while.
The enemy team has probably split into two or three sub groups while your team has one deathball and one very fast (Maybe ECM) mech in the enemy back field.
Who is going to win the fight? Deathball vs out of formation strung out ramshakle mess with a couple of their lights running off to where ever. I put the smart C-Bills on our deathball team.
So you stomp a mudhole in the red team with as unfair of a fight that you can muster and now it's clean up time. Because you captured three points and contested one early you will either have a hefty point lead or be very close to the enemy points because the enemy chose to cap instead of fight (further improving your odds in the fight)
Really the only way this fails is the enemy team outright wins the fight and crushes your team. And if this does happen then they desirve to win they just played better.
An important note I feel is important to make at this point.The smaller the map is the less important the cap points become.
If you steam roll the enemy team early on then it doesn't matter if they have a surviving light mech or two to try to run the clock for victory points.
Smaller maps create a match where the battle happens within seconds of the deployment and if played aggresivley you can beat the other team before cap points have accumulated enough values to be worth anything.
You can easily move your survivng mechs to retake lost caps in the end phase and simple cap everything.
So for Canyon just skirmish it and cap later.
