There was a time when I was a poor commander (gasp! oh noes, the invincible Rapier7 admitting that he himself was a 'nub' at one point in time!), and I had the shameful vice of locking down hives. It seemed to work most of the time, so I kept to it.

And then I actually faced good opponents. And I had standard marines, no stellar 2+:1 ratios on my scoreboard. I soon started commanding in a style that would assure me a win even with 1:1 marines. (When I say 2:1 or 1:1, it's a Kill to Death ratio)

The best way to gauge your competency as a commander is your ability to win a game with the lowest kill:death ratio possible. And even though it is not the most perfect of gauges (as alien cooperation can also hugely affect this), it's better than, "oh look, I turret farmed two hives without getting upgrades and I won, I better stick to it!".














If you won, check your scoreboard, if the early game (5 minutes>start) had marines over 2:1, that victory is void and null. If it's around 3:2 or 1:1, you did a good job.

Any particular stategies, or are you just putting down the 2-hive lockdown? Not that I have a problem with that.....

Anyways, I ask my marines right from the start, "Do you guys want a normal game or a weird strat?" If they say normal game, I upgrade rush armor-weps-weps-weps-armor-armor, throwing pg in there somewhere and mt if we have the res. If they say weird strat.....let's just say if they do EXACTLY as I say, it'll be an interesting game. Otherwise, it'll be an incredibly short game, ending with our loss. But it'll still be interesting!

When I command, its all in-field. I have no set tactics. What works where I'm at and at what time I'm doing it is my strategy. My marines follow my orders to the letter, unless they **** around and say "HMG comm... JP comm... comm, Shotgun..." etc... at that, I just boot em out of the game. But, I win more games then I loose, not all of them taking 10 minutes. However, I finished a game in 14 minutes, and we still had 1 minute on the time limit left before the next round. Good stuff.

I stroke my ego while commanding, and if it purrs and acts aroused I consider myself competent :rolleyes:

So basically this strategy is about putting down people who think they're good, but aren't really that great?

with low killing ratio, which means

1. you didnt med accuately
2. you didnt ammo

ehh med more make it 2:1

i am able to command a victory.

but its a hell lot easier if u have even 1 good player on your team. an extra rt keep him on 100% health. but never ever forget the other marines unless theyre whining idiots. like yesterday(?) when i got ejected for ignoring a guy's rt requests while i was listening to music and medspamming a pg builder in port at the same time. oh and i suppose that beacon+pg rush (i sold all other pg's) musta **** some of my marines off as well.

commanding is fun, try it.

as a comm u know what to do.
distingush who needs the med who dun needs the med.
meding accurately is your duty.
but distingushing noobs and the-one-who-really-needs-a-med is another thing.
thats why we have a PLAYER comming, not an auto-comm.

by the way, i dun mean med spam but meding accurately.
1 metres away from the med is the difference between life and death.

you dont need to check your scoreboad, jsut check the map to see how good your rines are: poor=base average=nearest rt good=hive pro=keeping chokepoint

Edit: Yepp I`m very competent commander.

This is stupid.

yes it is. but ++postcount u see ^^

Don't waste the entire 1 res to give your rines ammo! That's my philosophy, just hand out welders. Infinate ammo, plus the benifite of range, hive melting power, AND armor healing capibilities!



Whoops I think I mixed up a couple versions of NS

^^^^^^^LOL^^^^^^^^

let someone else command and screw up the game, then

take over, and win

no pre-arranged gimmes, no disconnects, no excuses. earn the win, and then you can call yourself a good commander.

the less res nodes you have, the better

Maybe I'm not just understanding this correctly, but basically your saying that if:

IF

Your Marines = Good then You = Suck
and
Your Marines = Suck then You = Good

Provided in both scenarios that a victory for your team has occured?


Thats just jacked up in all sorts of ways.


Not to mention what if your competent at supplying your marines, and your presence sways the tides of battles, thus ensuring a 2:1 or possible 3:1 KtD ratio, your victory point is all of sudden null and void because....why?

Maybe I'm just wrapping my brain around this to far, but its still screaming all kinds of stupid in my head.

Again I could be misinterpreting this orignial thread.

I don't think a commander can influence a kill:death ratio by more than 1/2.

If you normally have 1:1 marines without assistance, most you're ever going to influence is around 3:2. You can't force your marines to shoot better, but you can at least let them take one or two more hits.








To put it succinctly, if you have a 3:1 ratio early game or higher, any moron of a commander can get a win. If you lose with a 2:1 ratio early game, you are not a good commander.

But when you can't control every RT, when you have attacks of skulks chewing on all of your peripheral RTs, when you have the responsibility of knowing when the second hive goes up within 4-5 minutes of the game start, when you have to med your marines to inch out a win. That's when you know you are a competent commander.

everyone knows K:D ratio matters!

No, score matters, you can figure out who's better at holding down the +use key

It's possible to win even with 1:2 or 1:3 k/d :-) PG shotty rush!

And no, you cannot improve k/d by medspaming that much.. I do this all the time, and sometimes, rines are just slaughtered by ambushing skulks and fade enter game at 2:50 with rines having 2 RT :-)

Of course medspamming increases K:D unless you're playing on a right crap factory of a server. Most people can kill a skulk or two with his lmg or pistol if they're kept alive. This is the shittest way to measure how good a commander you are, it shows nothing.

i am really. really. sick of these posts where you claim to be the best commandor ever rapier. how does kill:death ratio at all judge how good of a commander you are? depending on the situation, your marines may die several times without a kill in a siege, for example, or clock up a 20:1 ratio just spawn camping. christ, saltzbad at least admits he's a bad comm

this thread is a pretty thinly veiled disguise at boosting someone's ego and putting down everyone else's.

it dosent matter how much of a 'pro' commander you are. on public servers its all down to what map your playing and how **** your marines are, your build strat dosent change anything cos if your rines cant aim then they will die even with meds. If your rines can aim they dont need to be commanded as they push the alien RTs and then move to hive and spawn camp. For example, i commanded a game on eclipse pub afew days ago and reloc to a random place on the map. 5 rines moved out of base to the reloc point getting 1 or 2 RTs on the way. When they got there they built base and played their normal game of ns. 2 of the rines decided to stay in the MS and wait for me to build a base there. They kept spamming in chat telling me to build stuffeven after i told them several times to goto my wp as we had relocated. After 6 mins of play or so i had to drop a phaze gate next to them so they could phaze through to our relocated base and start playing the game. There were 2 good rines playing this game and they carried to whole team because i kept them med/ammoed up. If they were average players we would have lost the game for sure.

Rapier usually wins on my regular server, maybe you need to re-examine the servers you play on.

I'm not a compotent commander, because with 6 FPS in the chair the interface seems a bit unresponsive (Read: I have to bash the hotkeys out of my keyboard to actually drop a medpack). But I seem to be quite succesfull at ignoring the map and just sieging their starting hive

Its amazing how eefective that is
Tbh if your marines can survive long enough to get a couple of rts up then you may as well go seige the hive, keeps em busy.

No, it's more like a thread started because it kills me when I see some idiot in the chair with marines that rack up up to 10:1 ratios and win the game for him, and at the end, I see a "gj comm" message from an equally stupid player.

Posting here won't help that. People that do that aren't going to frequent this forum (frequent being the key word here). Sometimes people also try to be nice Rapier, something you may or may not understand. Saying something doesn't necessarily mean that you meant what you said. "GJ comm" might translate to "wow you're the worst commander ever, but at least you got in the chair and won with uber marines doing the work for you' by whoever said it.

I think the general consesus is that K:D ratios isn't a useful way to tell if you're a good com or not.

In my opinion a good com isn't about having the uber elite build order, or the strategy that works everytime, it's about adapting to the abilities of the marines, playing to their strengths and covering their weaknesses.

If you've got someone with a 5+:1 K:D ratio then sure use them in the most effective manner. If you've got a bunch of guys with 1:2 or whatever you can use them in different ways, get them to build stuff and make a slow push towards your goal.

Hopping in the com chair mid-way through a game is no indicator whether your a good com or not either. When you get in to find that the last com spent all his res building turrets in base, didn't drop an arms lab or anything else for that matter, it's usually game over unless your playing with very terible alien players. Then if you win that, what have you shown? You beat an unorganised alien team!

Regarding medding: I love it and I think it's worth the res in a whole lot of situations. I often get told that I spend a lot of res on my marines in the field, but guess what, they get to the critical locations I want them to get to, they set up the pg, the siege or whatever else I need. Res isn't your only resource in NS, time is too and this saves a lot of it!

Finaly to round up, I do find it stressful being the com, you have to put your best efforts forth and even then sometimes they aren't appreciated. While some dude is off getting 10:1 K:D maybe the com was actually getting the other marines in the game and then, yes, it's "gj comm".

You know you're a good comm when your marines compliment you even on your loses (sincerely) because you did your best and gave them a great game.

-Meto

*ahem*

An elite comm never gets weapons 1 first. You know who you are, you sick people, and quite frankly you make me sick.

Im a completely incompetent commander but people will want me to comm because 1). Im crazy. 2). I make things interesting.

i dont do interesting i just want lvl 1 armour and level 1 weps b4 fades on a pub and thats all

Rapier since you talk about how great you are, why not try competitive commanding? Enough of this pub allstar garbage you keep throwing out, I want you to get 5 of the best players that frequent your server, and play my team Terror.

I want to see how your strategy is affected, and since you are so great you won't have a problem beating us. I may even get some education out of it.

Drop me a PM on the forums or stop by #terrorns to let me know when you are ready, you can pick the map, we have a private server.

Commanding on a public server is the worst way to tell if you're a good comm or not, in fact I doubt you can accurately tell if the comm is good or bad. On pubs, you can win games with awesome marines, you might even win games with crappy marines. Before FW's post, I was gonna suggest joining a pug on #nspug and comm there since the skill levels of players even out a lot more on pugs than pubs. Scrims work fine too like FW posted.

I'd pay to see that.

HLTV, anyone?

I wouldn't worry about that. I almost can't wait to read his excuses of why he doesn't want to play Terror, or any competitive team for that matter.

Its really easy to talk when you don't have to back up what you say.

waffles...

Rapier really has some sort of fixation to K:D

keep it up thou! maybe one day board will have only KD rate and that other nothing else.

I know how it all works when I'm in the Chair, but doing the right thing appears to be hard to me..