CommunityFortress

It was a wise man that once said, make a man a steak and he will have a great meal, teach a man to grill and he will get laid.... or something like that. To that end, I am going to write a small series of articles based on the concepts that a team (especially its leaders and callers) need to keep in mind when making strategies, watching demos and other things that they need to remember while doing the things that keep a team improving and running.

In this edition, I will be going over the basics of making a strategy for your team. When I am mentoring, one of the biggest things I hear is “SHAAAAADOOOOOOOOWWWWWW, wee suuuuuuck, share with us your eternal glory and mind numbing brilliance. We need a strategy.” And they are right. Without a strategy, a team is only going to descend into chaos as it meets the enemy on the glorious field of battle. So today, we will be going over the ins and outs of making a strategy for your team. Get all the goodness after the break.

This article will be geared towards teams that are in the lower end of the skill spectrum. I will be going over how I synthesize a strategy from scratch as compared to stealing one from a demo (I will go over that in a later posting to this series, hopefully when I get the ability to do videos again).

The Basic Outline

Before a strategy can be forged in the fires of your mind, you first need to understand how the process works. A blacksmith is nothing without a blueprint, and neither are you, fledgling strategy-smith. The basic process can be broken down into 6 main steps.

1. Identify and state your goal
2. Identify individual goals for each team member
3. Listen to preliminary feedback
4. Focus test
5. Refine
6. Implement into your game plan

It is worthy to note that the most important part of the process occurs during the recursive Focus Test --> Refine stage.

Step One: Identify and state your goal

This step is not one to skimp on as it serves as the foundation for the rest of the entire process. It will probably be easier to go over examples of what is and isn’t an acceptable strategy.

- Kill them all at mid and roll onto last.

For starters, how are you going to wipe them at mid? The second problem for this plan is one of scope. A strategy should not be confused with an overall game plan. A strategy should be small enough in scope that it only encompasses one area of the map. Mid for instance, or attacking last on granary. Lets see another example.

- Our scouts will each get two meatshots while our soldiers secure crates, each of them getting at least one airshot to deny jumpers on our medic while our demoman lands consecutive pipes.

This one goes way in the other direction and introduces an important point. Your strategy should never rely upon your team massively out DM’ing your opponents. A certain expectation of success with jumping or hitting shots is ok, but even the best players wont be able to do the aforementioned every single time. You will come against teams that are harder than you, all the time. Your strategy should still be able to hold up against a team that is superior to yours. The strategy is also too vague in the sense that while everyone has a job, it doesn’t say where they are going to be doing those frags or how they are going to get into that position. Now let us take a look at a well defined goal. This will also be the platform for which I base the rest of the article’s examples.

- On snakewater mid, our demoman will get out spam, call the damage numbers so our roamer and scouts can apply focused pressure while our combo moves up onto the point to secure the cap.

Notice how specific that is without actually assigning direct paths for each player. The demoman and roamer clearly have a job. The only problem is that the other players don't have directly assigned duties. That is ok, merely blocking out the major key points in a strategy are enough in this stage. Now I can just hear everyone asking “well what if everything doesn't go as planned? Well that is why it is important to stage out your strategies. If you notice, the above strategy is two-fold.

1. Demoman puts out spam to open up pressure opportunities and roamer + scouts run in for focused picks.
2. Combo + Demo moves up onto point to secure the cap and the area.

Note that this strategy doesn't account for the very real possibility of not winning mid. This is a problem that can be avoided by breaking the second step into two distinct steps.

2.1. If going to win middle, combo + Demo moves up onto point to secure the cap and the area.
2.2. If lose too many players or otherwise not going to win middle, fall back to defend second.

This makes sure your strategy can handle the changing dynamics of a fight.

Please note that just because I am talking about a middle, doesn't mean that this cannot be applied to other tactical moves throughout the game. Other examples of great two staged strategies would be a roamer suicide fake push onto granary last or an uber in, get sentry, back up, push back with whole team gravelpit B attack.

Now that we have a goal, we can move onto step 2.

Step Two: Identify individual goals for each team member

If this were a single player team game like Starcraft, step one would be all we needed. But because there are 6 players on a team in TF2, we need to introduce one more planning step in order to coordinate all the players. This step is of course individual goals that are assigned to each player (alternatively, you can give one to the flank and one to the combo, this is better for a pushing mechanic or something you might want to do when down a player. For things like mid fights, it is ok to assign each player a job)

Lets take a look at the previous example of snakewater middle. If you recall, our basic strategy is as follows.

1. Demoman puts out spam to open up pressure opportunities and roamer + scouts run in for focused picks.
2.1. If going to win middle, combo + Demo moves up onto point to secure the cap and the area.
2.2. If lose too many players or otherwise not going to win middle, fall back to defend second.

Working within that framework, it is important that everyone’s job reflects the goals of the team. If your goal is to have the demoman put out spam to open pressure, your roamer’s job should not be to suicide himself into the combo. Now lets go through what I would assign each player’s job to do for the middle.

- Demo: Get to Mid on time and output massive amounts of spam without committing across the point. Wait for the call to move up then accompany the medic and pocket across. Focus on putting out damage, not chasing kills.
- Medic: Focus heals on scouts and demo to ensure that demoman stays alive. Watch for the opportunity to move up and make the call to either go down path 1 or 2 when the time comes. (assumes medic is caller)
- Roamer: Watch for opportunity to jump in, wait for the call to jump or until you think there has been enough damage for you to clean up. Until then, deny jumpers and keep upper clear.
- Pocket: Protect demoman and medic from over aggressive scouts and jumpers.
- Scouts: Until soldiers arrive at mid, deny aggression across point and help demoman focus spam. When soldiers arrive, get ready for the push across and focus down targets as called.

Note that every job follows the SMART Principle that the main objectives did (for those who didn't get this inane BS pounded into our brains in grade school, SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-based). Let us analyze only the medic’s job.

Focus heals on scouts and demo to ensure that demoman stays alive. Watch for the spam and kill count to present an opportunity and make the call to either go down path 1 or 2 when the time comes.

- Specific: The job is very specific (mentions who to heal and what specifically to look for)
- Measurable: How well the task was executed is objective. Did the demoman and scouts get heals? Was a call made (regardless of whether it was the right call)?
- Attainable: The goal does not ask the medic to do anything that is particularly difficult or out of the range of skill for a player of the caliber this article is aimed at.
- Realistic: Make sure you take into account the capabilities of the class before setting a goal. A medic cannot be expected to rocketjump (or for that matter, get up on top of the point on snakewater. It is possible with medic, though not something that can be expected to be completed in a mid fight.
- Time Based: There are specific times at which the medic is expected to do things, though granted, the times are not clock based, but damage output based.

At this point in time, you have a strategy. It started out a wee fledgling piece of shit idea, but with love, encouragement and a hefty shot of something foul smelling, it became something greater. Its too bad you are only at the very beginning of the process. Yep, that was the easy part. Anyone can make a strategy, only the best know that the secret is in refining and practicing it over and over again until your team hates you almost as much as you do.

Speaking of your team, time for step 3.

Step Three: Listen to preliminary feedback

This step is super ultra important because it represents the first time you expose your strategy to your team. It is, in effect, the first time the bastard child of your drunken ramblings will be exposed for the flawed, easily countered and impossible to implement farce it is. No strategy is perfect the first time. For most plans, perfection is found in the whittling and honing, in the proverbial shining of the not so proverbial ball of utter shit.

Go over what you want to do with your team. Make sure they are listening and understand what you are telling them. Then ask them what is wrong with it. If you are anything like 99% of TF2 players, you know why the strategy will work for your class, but there may be gaping holes in it for the rest of your team. Listen to what your team has to say about the plan, if your scouts have a problem with how they need to be in 2 places at once, analyze what can be done about it. Often times, your players will understand why their part of the plan will fail. You can save yourself a lot of headache and a lot of hate from your team if only you pay attention to their needs and concerns. Implement their ideas, compromise. This is your last chance to make changes before you actually test it out, for real, against a real team who may or may not utterly and embarrassingly destroy your faces with the shining, golden glory of their sheer superiority.

This is also where part one of this article ends. I hadn’t originally planned on making this a two part-er but it is getting quite long and complex. Part two will be out a little later this week.


Feedback is appreciated, and as always love and brownies.
Alex “shdwpuppet” Williams