I have had my own share of command experience, more often than not being forced to withdraw from the colony. I at least have a sense of the basics such as talk and listen to the radio, quick callouts, coords etc. But I still fail to understand how to actually win. Most of the time I was either lucky that the bugs fumbled or I was able to delay the inevitable at best. So I ask the more experienced commanders, how do you win as a commander? And I mean what do you actively do to achieve victory rather than leave it to chance.
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In my opinion, if there was a way to consistently win that didn’t cause your team to literally writhe in agony (See: Prime Queens winning by ordering everyone to sit in hive and not engage, or aCOs winning by ordering everyone to cadehug from the get go), then it’d have been used to death already.
If you’re already very proactive at giving call-outs and being talkative (as well as actually giving orders to fallback or push X), then I honestly dont believe there’s much more you can do to influence the marines from CIC.
Like it or not, an aCO’s influence over marines is dramatically less than the Queen’s influence over xenos, so stuff outside your control is going to be bigger contributing factors then how much you “excel” at command. Whether it be xenos literally just being stacked as fuck with all the robust marinebros from last round transitioning to prime xenos, marines losing all their braincells and ignoring you, or just sheer bad luck. Individual marines groundside are the ones who’re calling fire support, getting kills and saving one another.
An incompetent XO certainly fucks marines over by not communicating, but an ultra-competent XO in the end is still just a guy sitting shipside, praying that PVT McChungus listens to them.
COs do a lot more given they basically deploy every time, and thus can directly influence the round with good OBs, and coordinating marines to a degree that shipside CIC would never be capable of achieving.
Look at a shipside CO, and you’ll find that marines will do about as well as they would with a competent XO.
TL;DR if you’re already competent at XO, there’s no golden rule that lets you win significantly more often. At least, that’s my two cents.
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pretty much on the mark.
peak commander competence for me is being the most useful, informative, precognizant presence in the round and you still have to watch marines die in the same ways time after time, in specific locations or manners, and know there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. i’ve seen the same rounds play out on maps on different days, same eyes in different people etc. etc.
there are definitely ways to make the whole deal worse, though, as herb pointed out lol
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Draw arrow on map
Pray unga dont die
lol
In more serious note if you got competent SLs that UNGAs will follow you could send them on flanks
Such as repair sensor tower them have em raid hive when its undefended and withdraw right after. Possibly stealing eggs and sending the entire xeno special build structure system offline for 5-7 minutes
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Order Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta to build FOB
Order Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta to move to comms
Order Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta to unga
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Yeah it’s why I don’t like SOing. It’s just… kinda draining, just watching people wipe even though you told them the literal reincarnation of fucking Alexander the Great playing Queen was about to pincer them so hard it’d make Cannae look like a clown show.
I’d much rather be SL and have a stronger impact on the round- Actually falling back, directly rallying people to push, calling in fire support and seeing it happen. Still draining of course, but it also feels good- Whereas as SO, even if I try and multitask and be as active as I can, calling everything out, giving information- I just can’t help but feel kind of empty, like I’ve done jackshit. Which is honestly probably peak soul- Lieutenant Gorman would be proud.
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Command at the end of the day is about as important as any other department. Can marines win without requisitions? Can marines win without medics? Can marines win without engineers and comms being set up? Can marines win without robust Specialists? Can marines win despite MPs arresting 5 Delta?
Can marines win without command?
The answer to all these questions is yes, it has happened before plenty of times and it will happen again in the future. One of the main reasons I even play on this server is that there are so many variables in each round that it’s impossible to control it all which makes it fun, interesting and unique each and every round. The skill level and experience varies so drastically across multiple important roles you start recognizing names simply because you see them putting in so much extra work compared to those before them.
A big issue many new aspiring command players come across is taking too much pressure on themselves and believing the entire round lies solely in their hands. At the end of the day you’re just a cog in the machine and even the most experienced plat medal COs doing a standard play to win strategy have lost for one reason or another.
Command players primary purpose isn’t to “win” but to facilitate the marines and support them as best they can while role playing and acting like a officer would. Things like giving a good long briefing with lots of words talking about the colony and plan of action (think Greg Lauffer brief) might be a waste of time to some robust marine players, but that’s honestly proper roleplay and commanding.
Command’s main responsibilities asides from good roleplay and brief are honestly very easy and simple: Update tactical map, ensure OB is loaded and dialed on good cords, ensure someone is sitting at the requisitions desk with updated access if no cargo wake up, ensure power on the Almayer doesn’t go down, respond to marine requests/questions over the radio, communicate with everyone and pay attention to chat constantly, ensure brig appeals are handled as soon as possible, ensure someone is handling intel, raise the ship to code red incase of larva burst/etc, ensure that the Alamo is going up and down to ferry marines, using announcements to call out dead marines and xeno activity/locations, ensure survivors be approved for ID edit/access if needed, ensure medals are given out for soul.
In terms of “command tactics” at the end of the day the more role play your orders are, the less tactical advantage marine are going to have. Trying to ignore the fact you’re 100% going to face xenos when you land is counter productive to “winning” and we’re at a state in the server where people are ordering paradrops for the “fun, lols, memes” despite it making negative sense from a role play point of view. Some would argue that command create and almost dictate the fun in each marine round while others would say trying to role play proper orders just screws the marines over.
TLDR; You wanna win? CO deploys with UNGA death ball army with 1 good OB. But is that really the purpose of command?
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The command meta has stayed largely the same for CM’s whole life, and the principles remain the same:
- Momentum.
- Efficiency.
- Fallbacks.
Momentum is the top dog for a reason. You will never have more ammo, more Squad Leaders, Specialists, Smartgunners, ammo, and just weight of bodies than the moment of the first deployment. The first moves you make in the game are the ones that will last throughout the rest as your forces lose supplies, the enemies grow stronger, and yours are dealing with increasing amounts of injuries and fatigue.
Efficiency is also key. There’s some bullshit business mantra about 20% of people doing 80% of the work. Maybe it’s true, I don’t know: what I do know is that the majority of players are going to grab an MK II and walk directly into a chokepoint and die. Therefore, you need to ignore those people who have never read a word a day in their life and pick your favorite children. This is typically
- The Commtech/MT that know what they’re doing with the FOB (Get that motherfucker a phone stat and make sure they never run out of metal).
- The Squad Leader(s) that let you know how the front looks (Keep their squad well-fed with ammo, and make sure they’re supported).
- The Robusto meta-squad that could probably beat a Rav with a throwing knife while actively bleeding out. They’ll be obnoxious but if the same Specialist who was begging for ammo at the start of the op is begging for it an hour and a half in, then they’ve made it further than most.
This doesn’t mean neglect everyone else. Even the people on their third fracture can make use of extra MKII mags and slugs, but typically don’t provide as much useful information or achieve the same results.
Fallbacks are absolutely critical. The easiest touchstone for this is the Hydro FOB. Tough fighting at the beaches? Fall back to Hydro. Tough fighting at t-fort? Resupply at Hydro. Queen push you out of caves? Get reinforcements from Hydro.
One of the most common faults of both Command and Players is dedicating 100% of their resources to one move. A murderball carving through the hive may achieve glory and a 30-minute round, but a failure means the remaining quarter of the force that survived a botched hivedive and a bloody retreat will be camping out in the FOB waiting on a nuke. You’ll want somewhere or someone to catch them, if at all possible.
From there? Fill in your own techniques and strategy. The core tenants aren’t techniques that lock you into an inflexible meta, and can accept some tweaking and characterization on top of them. They’re moreso the strats that you can’t live without if you want a solid chance at winning, and are the same things that work terrifically for Xenos!
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@The_Swatter If you don’t mind my asking: What is your character?
I don’t know about the how to win part but there is something always mentioned that is the flow of combat. The notion of wether youre wining or losing.
I think everyone knows what I’m talking about and everyone feels it too. To many people though, this is not accurate.
It comes from playing many games. To seeing the effect of certain plays happening and similar results appear. I’m not saying that I have a great sense, by the way, only a passable one.
All the way up in CIC is hard to gauge how the flow is going correctly. People on the ground though, specialy those looking at the bigger picture, using binos, etc, will be more acurate with this feeling.
By using this feeling you know if its safe to push or to pull back way before it is an emergency. It is intermingled with morale too and morale will fog your sense of flow, to either too good or too bad than it really is.
You will see people returning to FOB that say “Front will colapse in 4 minutes, that choke is bleeding us”. It could mean that the front will indeed colapse soon or the marine morale is so low that even a sustainable fight will seem lost.
Sometimes , when I’m in CIC, I need to ask some trusted marines that I know that have a good Flow Sense of how the situation is. I’ve made bad or wrong calls before due to a bad read.
Having said all this, my tips are:
- Play more to have a better feeling of Flow Sense.
- Know when and by how much you are getting affected by morale.
- Ask others when you’re not sure.
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My character is Dante Norton. I can see the flow you speak of. I just get moments where there’s little I can do to change it. That was the whole purpose of this post. I wanted to ask if anybody knows any way of turning the flow in your favour by acting. Any that I am ignorant to at least.
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I feel like this is a question that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer but rather that victory doesn’t depend solely on Command.
You can have the perfect plan and fully competent CIC staff but the operation can go horribly wrong because one to four people groundside didn’t bother to listen to a big red announcement. Sometimes you will have the perfect marines that listen to your orders but the xenos have very skilled players that work together to hinder the efforts of the marines. Victory is highly situational and depends on several factors that are beyond even Command’s reaches.
What I recommend to you is just be yourself. Roleplay as your character and don’t worry about the bigger picture. There is a reason why some COs don’t seek to win rounds, if you play the game just for the victories rather than the fun roleplay interactions with others and yourself, your rounds will become increasingly more unfun. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t try to secure victories (who doesn’t love to wipe out these bloody xenos) but that by doing so every round can make them repetitive especially if you stick by the meta.
I do split drops, paradrops, mega FOBs, no FOB and several other strategies per round to make them unique in some way. In the end it doesn’t matter to what strategy you do, just remember to be your character and assist marines the best way you can even against all odds.
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although i don’t have a great deal of command experience. There are a few things i have taking note of… that is even when able many of time a good number of Marines will not follow orders no matter how much you beg or scream.
Some times i have found that its better to just go with the flow and not battle the will of the marines even if they kind are being dumb. A example of this is the rush to cave on LV, most of the time its better to not push too hard up the beach’s up to the caves. but instead pound the xenos into dust with mortar’s and CAS.
But the marines if they start to take ground they many of times will just keep pushing even if you order them back to the river side. all the order will really do at that point is split the ungas from the marines. making it all that more easier for the xenos to counter push and take caps and kills.
really what i am saying is try to keep the marines on mass, even if it may not be the best move.
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Yeah, like others said- You can’t, not really. Even when the XO judges the flow of battle correctly and predicts that the frontline WILL collapse unless it’s GTFOs, 75% of marines will literally sit still and refuse to move even after 4 announcements. You need SLs who listen to you to actually get your orders pulled off. People listen to the big text guy spamming SHIFT+LMB, not the disembodied voice.
And then after they wipe, they’ll just repeatedly blame you for not telling them to fallback 
Honestly? In my opinion, having good SLs who listen is key. If there isn’t an SL, slap anSL onto someone you know is competent instead of whatever mute FTL is next in the CoC. Besides that, you kind of just gotta pray people listen.
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The game incentivizes marine murderballs. Splitting Marines up is a high risk-low reward move, as usually what happens is the minor marine force is detected and pounced on by the xenos, who are better coordinated.
There is no higher strategy, the best you can do is try to maintain the cohesion of the deathball and call out useful information.
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a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan
This requires:
- Command have a plan
- That plan is communicated effectively
- Those executing the plan trust command
There are a few really good CO’s who lead a plan from the front who execute this all well, not because they have the best plan - but because marines trust them and therefore execute that plan violently.
Winning in conflict is often about having the initiative. Think about all the times you’ve seen a xeno or marine front suddenly fall when it seemed fine - because the other side broke their initiative. It is possible for marines, say, to recover from a “fallback to fob” but it’s very risky once they have lost the initiative.
Initiative in the combat sense is about being able to pick the place (and ideally the time) for engagement. The contact is then on your terms, in your space.
I disagree with Steel a little bit that the game incentivizes murderballs - but only in so much that it doesn’t always apply and it is quite easily countered. Marines are extremely susceptible to a flank that cuts them off from fallback or takes out their triage areas at the front. Simply establishing a flank alone can be enough to break the frontlines and cause a rout. The only antidote to that is a… a strong command who violently executes a good plan now.
So when someone says the game incentivizes murderballs, what they really mean is the game incentivizes good leadership and a bit of luck. Which is does.
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The game demands a high level of coordination, but it does not provide the best possible tools to do this.
This is not Natural Selection 2 where the Commander can directly tell any single Marine where on the map to go or what to do.
The game’s design is intended for Marines to act in a realistic manner by communicating orders and instructions verbally. But this system is being implemented akin to trying to corral a bunch of quickplay, team deathmatch, Call of Duty players.
We will never see high level and coordinated actions being taken on any regular basis on this server by the Marines unless there is a radical change to the development side that would precipitate a change in the kinds of communications tools that Marine Command has access to.
Whether this is a good or bad thing I leave to you.
I have to wonder if the concept of “good Commanders who are trusted” is less a case of the community actually ““trusting”” them, and more so you have 5 or so people who are loud in comms claiming the Commander is good, and then you get the 50 other people who are not really following anything who will just go along with what the more loud people are saying.
In that case, it’s not really the Commander being “good” that is triggering the Marines to follow a plan, it’s just you have enough people being loud AND saying the same thing that convinces everyone else to follow the plan.
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Beign LOUD definitely helps on groundside.
When I’m SL or aSL and have the loud bubble chat voice I constantly yell orders to try and keep marines in synch with one another and try to form some sort of cohesion. Sometimes I even take the megaphone to get the REALLY big font and try to organize the marines on some sort of objective.
To try and bait the screech, to wait for them to come over the river, to make a firing line, to retreat and to counter push.
Wich reminds me:
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deploy as xo
assemble everyone into deathball
frag
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tactics? try to win? you’re not playing command right bud.
its gorman larp or the highway. My CO has never stepped foot outside of a training simulation and almost shot 3 junior officers in the head with his side arm after tripping trying to go to the mess hall.
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It’s important to silently get your m46c, deploy without ever speaking a word to someone, and get solo screeched and capped within 10min of your boot shitting the ground.
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