I've seen a few noob commander help posts and threads, but in those people tend to argure what the most important SINGLE thing a new commander needs to know. If you could tell a noob commander one thing before he starts commander for the first time what would it be?

Use your microphone to announce to the team that you are new to comming and need guidance but you're willing to work with the team and learn. They will take it from there, to a win or a loss.

Well that's kind of more of an actual action rather than knowing something...

But yeah that's true. In fact, sometimes it's good to do that even if you kind of know how to command but are up against a competent alien team. The only problem with doing that is your will have your odd individual griefer/whinner or thinks-they-know-it-all-but-don't/won't-shut-up-ever, but it's almost always worth it. Plus there's another benefit, if you take the advice of your team and communicate, they won't blame you as much if your team looses.













And for the newbies who may read this:

Deny means destroying enemy resource towers
(The only thing worse than your team having few resources is the other team having more)
Acquire means building your team's resource towers
(You must get resources, period. Failing to do so early and consistently will make the game exponentially harder to win)
Hold means defending your team's resource towers from enemy attacks
(It's inefficient and wasteful of time and resources to have to rebuild)

Often people think that the main objective is grabbing resources. Actually it's technically not. Don't misunderstand me, it is important, but more important is destroying the enemy spawns. That's why blitz tactics are so often overlooked, people are only thinking about "tech-ing up" and not the primary goal in order to win. If the enemy isn't expecting it and you can take out their ability to spawn... gather an assault and go for it. That's usually checkmate right there.

The number one thing any new comm needs to know is that his team won't respawn without a deployed and built Infantry Portal. Everything else is secondary!!!

It seems really obvious, but it's by no means intuitive for any new commander. All other FPS multiplayers have existing spawn locations when the game begins. Even other RTS/FPS games have these pre-built and they must be destroyed or sold before the team is unable to respawn.

I think maybe your advice is more: the number one piece of strategic information every new comm should know is...

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My advice (which also takes care of my first point) to any new commander would be:

If you haven't played Natural Selection on this map before -as a Marine and an Alien- get out of the chair and get to know the map a bit better. Get to know the siege spots, the safer PG locations, a good base setup, the typical Alien ambush spots, the weaker Alien Hives, the Marine-biased areas of the map, etc.

That knowledge will make you a more competant commander, imho. At the same time as learning the map, you'll also learn about how to time (and how not to time) your attacks. It's like that military quote that goes something like "If you cannot choose when to fight, at least choose where to fight". I.e. know your battleground and use it to your advantage.