A Highlander Draw, once more, For No Raisin!

The first game for For No Raisin! in Wireplay and not a bad result. A draw. We were playing The Fighting Mongooses; some of the player names I recognised from playing on the GTFO Lazytown server and from round and about in the TF2 community. I figured they’d probably be a pretty experienced Highlander team.

The first map was Gravelpit. I’ve never really got to grips with this one. It’s an Attack/Defend map with three capture points, A, B and C; you need to capture A and B before you can capture C. The map is generally played with Defense more-or-less conceding point A and setting up on point B. Graspable. The thing is, when attacking B, and then when moving on to C, I can never work out where everyone is going, there are several points of approach. So all I did this time, was try to find people, sticking up sentry guns where they seemed useful; I play as gunslinger engie on attack, and deciding where it might be helpful to put a teleporter and dispenser. But I felt I was guessing.

Anyhow, they had a good Demo who kept up constant pressure on our Medic and they managed to get some good co-ordinated pushes together. Gravelpit is  a map where, if the attacking team gets enough momentum, they can move from one point to another before the defending team gets their defense up. They also made good use of kritz (the Medic heals, building up kritz uber; when he discharges, his ‘patient’ attacks with critical hits). We ended up winning one round, but overall they won.

Our Lakeside game was stronger and The Fighting Mongooses only took one round from us. We’d played Lakeside in the ETF2L Community Challenge and it was familiar. It’s a King of the Hill (KOTH) map with a single control point that the teams battle over. KOTH maps seem to have a heavy reliance on deathmatching; kill everyone and hold the point whilst the timer counts down. This is something  FNR! appears to be good at. Our team was strong enough to let me place both dispenser and teleport near to the point and have them last long enough to be useful.

I’m still sometimes in two minds about wrangling mini-sentries. They’re useful focussing fire from a distance and the improved stats from the shield are good, but I find that they can keep me too static. Often it seems to play better by placing one, forgetting it (i.e. in my mind counting it already destroyed) and moving into position to ready place the next one, with shotgun back up.

Anyway, the result was entered, wrongly we suspect because it’s a bit confusing how to do it, but the spirit of it all seemed accurate enough.

We’re not sure when the next match is, they wanted last week with a start time of 6pm, but since most of us work, that’s not possible. It’s hard to tell what the standard will be in this League. ETF2L is the more prominent TF2 6v6 league and seemed to contain a fair few teams who mainly played 6v6 but fancied playing some Highlander for fun. Wireplay is lower profile and generally less popular so may comprise more teams who really like playing HL and so are pretty dedicated at all levels. I noted that in one of the teams, one player had clocked up 121 hours of Tf2 over 2 weeks. That’s a lot of TF2 and there were others approaching that. Not necessarily an indicator of skill, but certainly dedication.

Whatver, we’ll see.

Moar Highlander!!!!!!

Season 2 of the ETF2L Highlander Community Challenge for all the teams in Division 5F is now over. And the final results look like this:

Division 5F

#	Clan	Pld	W	D	L	Pen	Pts	Streak
1.	Pielander	8	6	1	1		20
2.	Keep Calm and Listen to Lefty	8	5	0	3		15	+4
3.	Hurmeesta herkistyvä hurmaava herrasväki	8	4	0	4		12	+2
4.	Rambase.ro Community Team	8	2	2	4		8
5.	Cats Don\’t Eat Haggis	8	0	3	5		5	-6
6.	Why U Try?! [Dropped]	0	0	0	0		-1

As can be seen, Keep Calm and Listen to Lefty came second with a pretty good set of results especially considering we’re a new team. Everyone who played in the Challenge will be getting an in-game medal courtesy of Valve, a really nice touch that. Coming second in our Division means that we’ll get silver medals.

My Engie will be wearing his with pride.

TF2 Highlander Draw

This week the team played against Rambase.ro Community Team, a Romanian team.

And it wasn’t as smooth as last week.

We played two maps, a King of the Hill Map (Koth_Lakeside) where each team aims to capture the point and hold it, and a 5 cp map (Foundry) where there are five points to be captured.

The games were pretty intense and I felt we were under pressure most of the time. We held up in Lakeside though and eventually won 3-2. One of the losses was just down to seconds, so close. The second map was no contest really. We lost 5-0. We just didn’t seem able to get our pushes right. Every round we won mid, but then just couldn’t hold it and were driven back.

To be honest, I don’t think we necessarily lost it due to differences in skill level, we’ve good players. But Team Fortress is a team game. Often the team that knows a map better and has played together longer/more, is the team that wins out. This is particularly true in 5cp maps I think which can be very dynamic, with teams both attacking and defending at various points and it’s easy to lose cohesion. This was only the second time our team had played together (plus one practice which involved the team plus WDG community regulars) and the first time the team had played Foundry. Foundry is also a relatively new map so has generally been played less often.

So it could well have been that the other team were simply more practiced and kept together better.

But no matter, we got our draw and we got our 3 points. And it was fun. And for the first time, on Lakeside, I truly found out the power of a wrangled mini-sentry aimed at the point.

Wrangled level 1 sentry

I also need to look at defensive and offensive building placement. To a certain extent on Lakeside and definitely on Foundry, I think I was building too aggressively, too near the front line, so my buildings were being destroyed almost constantly before they could provide much use, as our opponents pushed us back. It may have been better to set up a little further behind, particularly the teleports (though these can be less useful anyway due to the constant back and forth of the map), to provide a place to gather and move forward from.

And speeds got faster. TF2 allows you to have up to 4 separate loadouts which can be selected in-game which I have now set up, there was never really any need before for me to think about it. I’ve also assigned build buildings to my number keys, binding my wrench and wrangler  to new keys  so I can still switch quickly between the two for repair and activation. As time goes on, I’ll play with more settings.

Extra bit: tonight we had a practice session on both maps. Did much better, were much more together on Foundry. I built more defensively and it worked better.

A Team Victory and getting stuck in an Elevator (mod)

Last night Keep Calm and Listen to Lefty had their first match (Badwater) in the ETFL2 Highlander Community Challenge and; we won.

We played a Polish team, Why U Try?!  who gave up after losing the first round and defaulted the win. The server crashed and they never came back for the second, telling us they sucked. It was a bit of a shame really, if they lacked anything it was experience and that you gain by playing and learning; after all that’s where I am. I hope they carry on.

But no matter, it was a victory for KCaLtL. The final team line-up is linked below for the Readership, the leisurely perusal of:

http://etf2l.org/teams/14648/

The Readership will be able to see Berath there, represented by a small owl in a knitted hat. And also the teams KCaLtL still have to play. There’s some interesting ones, not least Cats Don’t Eat Haggis, a team comprising comrades from the UKCS community, a stalwart crew who’ll present fierce opposition.

I played Engineer equipped with jag, wrangler and shotgun on defence and switching to gunslinger on offence. I don’t think I did anything too disastrous but I need to improve on my speed, buildings need to be selected and placed without second thought and I lost seconds changing loadout during set-up which I’d like to look at. But I suspect I’ll be sticking to Engineer for the time being, that’s fine though since the class is up there with Demoman as a favourite.

After the excitement of the game and the somewhat unexpected ending, the team was in a state of slight perplexment and time threatened to hang heavy.  At this point someone mentioned Elevator: Source. Basically this is a multiplayer elevator simulator, built on Garry’s Mod and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. You wait for the lift, you get in the lift, the doors open at different floors, you look out and see things, people/skeletons/whatnots get in, muzak plays, you carry on. The game ends when you reach a chill-out lounge at the top where you can play pool, liquidize fruit and watch television.

Palpable excitement

As can be imagined the idea of playing this was greeted with great enthusiasm. I didn’t have Garry’s Mod but the allure of the game persuaded me to purchase. It was only £5.99, the price of a London snack. And after all given the choice of a cup of coffee and a cake in Starbucks or Pret a Manger and riding an online elevator simulator with half your TF2 Highlander team, what would anyone choose? Bit of a no-brainer eh!

Anyway great fun was had. The lift ride itself took about 45 mins (with probably 60 mins before that, for everyone to buy/download/install the game and for a server to be found). Then relaxation at the top before the game ended.

Prioritise, prioritise; Engineering in TF2

I’ve already said that currently Engineer is my favourite class in TF2. At the moment, I’m still learning how to make the class as effective as I can in-game. And I’m coming to various conclusions.

Basically, the Engineer can build three types of building; the dispenser, the teleport and the sentry gun. They are built using metal; picked up at spawn, from dropped weapons, or ammo boxes spawning at various points on  map. Often, the main key in a particular game for the Engineer, is working out which building needs to be prioritised, where.

The dispenser

This provides healing and ammunition/metal. In some games, at particular times, I’ve felt this to be the top priority. Placed just behind the front line, it allows the team to keep themselves topped up with ammo, sustaining a push (or maintaining a defence). It also provides extra healing; the medics can’t heal everyone all the time and it keeps the medics themselves healed up. Very, very important.

The teleporter

Moves the team from A to B. Sometimes this is the priority. It transports the team across the battlefield to the area of combat. It can be less important in defence when the spawn is near to the control point for instance, but when pushing and you need to keep up the pressure, it can be vital.

The sentry gun

In a strange way, the sentry gun can be the least important. It’s a shame that it’s the most ‘glamorous’  Engineer building, racking up the kills. With a sentry gun, I have managed to defend final points and block captures. But that was because the rest of my team wasn’t there.  A sentry gun provides back-up firepower, it can be a point a team can fall back to, but usually, without a strong team around it, it’s not that effective on it’s own, at least for any length of time.

So what to build first?

Building prioritisation…hmmm. First it helps to know the map; where the ammo/metal boxes spawn. I’ve found myself building a sentry gun to provide some defence, only to waste time running about trying to find metal to build everything else. So often for me, first priority, dispenser. Then, the sentry gun, but only to level 1 (unless there is a large ammo box nearby). This can just be enough to take out a roaming enemy scout or pyro.  Next, the teleport, but this depends on the flow of the game. You have to think about teleport placement. Your current spot may have little use. You may be better off focussing on levelling up the dispenser to provide more healing/ammo/metal and moving it to support the front line; listen to the screams from your team here. Once you’ve done that (maybe while you’re doing that), you can build the teleport, nearby in a safe spot, (and just hope that your team can hold the defence/attack long enough for you to do so or that your sentry gun provides enough support).

Only then, do I focus on my sentry gun. I build it up, and it can either defend the teleport and dispenser or be moved out to provide more direct team back-up.

Of  course, as the battle ebbs and flows, so sentry gun, dispenser and teleport have to be moved along with.

And, obviously, it helps if another Engineer is present, one that actually works with you that is, buildings build quicker with more Engineers working on them, and your buildings can reinforce one other.

Brink, now, and Engineering

Last week I bought Brink, the new  fps from Splash Damage. There are currently a lot of issues with it concerning general bugginess and lack of balance in classes and maps, but I’ve been enjoying it.

I’m only playing the single-player at the moment, mainly to get a grip on the game and to unlock all my abilities. And, since Engineer is my favourite class in TF2, I’ve been playing the engineer in Brink. In Brink, various abilities differentiate the classes, apart from these, all use the same weapons and can have light/medium/heavy builds. This is, of course different in TF2 where each class plays and handles very differently in it’s own right. In Brink, I’ve now reached level 10, rank 3. I can buff weapons and armour and I can use sentry guns or turrets, I can now use medium turrets. The buffing is straightforward but the turrets are more interesting. Reading the forums, opinion is divided over whether they’re any use. Some people feel they’re underpowered, others feel they don’t not lock on to their targets or track fast enough, or at least consistently. This last point, I think is fair enough. I haven’t really noticed it yet, but as I said, I’ve only played off-line up to now.

But saying they are underpowered, that to me is debatable. A lot of the time, the turrets are being compared with TF2 sentry guns. Now in TF2 there are basically two ways of playing Engie, defensive and offensive. The defensive Engineer will often build a level 3 sentry gun and with one of these, and a level 3 dispenser at his back to provide healing and metal, can pretty much defend a control point or hold a choke point on his own until taken out by an uber, a spy or a  focussed attack by the enemy.

TF2 Sentry guns (l to r); level 1, level 2, level 3

However, playing offensively, the Engineer needs to be able to move more, keeping up with the front line and is often a Gunslinger Engineer, equipping a gunslinger melee weapon, raising his health and allowing him  to build combat mini-sentries. Now these are totally disposable. The damage they give out is even less than a level 1 sentry gun and they are easily destroyed, so it’s pretty obvious that they can’t be used for holding control points. But they can be built very quickly for less metal, so the Gunslinger Engineer will sling one up where it can distract,  where it  take people out unawares, or where it can provide back-up and kill assists. And as soon as one goes up, the Gunslinger Engineer is already thinking about where the next one can go.

Mini sentry

So, is this how turrets should be used in Brink? They’re only under powered if you try and use them like a TF2 level 3 sentry gun, and that’s not  supposed to be their purpose. I’m looking forward to trying the turrets out under ‘live’ conditions, as it were, on-line. Like I said, interesting.

Turret from Brink