From: hde+@cs.cmu.edu (Herbert Enderton)
Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek
Subject: Elements of teamwork (long)
Date: 1 Jan 93 00:01:28 GMT
Article-I.D.: cs.C05EqG.LuF.1
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon

Okay, here's the first draft of a guide about teamwork.  Comments
are welcome.

  -- Red Shirt

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Roles

Tell your team that you'll be playing a certain role, such as
scout-bomber, ogger, or escort, and then stick to it for a long time.
That way they know what to expect from you, and thus can coordinate
better with you.  Roles provide an easy way to manage the division of
labor, helping to ensure that everything gets done, and helping to
avoid redundancy.  You can make up your own job description, but here
are some good ones I'm familiar with:

Bomber.  Two types of bombers are the "passive bomber" who avoids
fights and just tries to stay alive deep in enemy space to bomb any
unguarded planets, the "aggressive bomber" who goes to bomb, but if an
enemy was guarding or trying to pick up the armies, he'll often og.

Ogger.  Attack the carriers, the potential carriers, and for good
measure crash planets that the enemy is trying to guard.  They'll
probably start to run away from you after a while, but you can use that
to your advantage, e.g. scare everybody away and then bomb a planet.

Escort.  Tries to achieve space control over an enemy planet that a
teammate wants to drop armies on.  More about this in a later section.
It's great to have somebody who essentially does nothing but escort,
because then when I carry armies I can look for him, and have confidence
that he isn't going to run away at the crucial moment.

Planet-taker.  Because this requires having a kill, it often makes
sense just to have everyone take planets when they can.  But if your
team has lots of ships with kills and few armies, you really don't
want to have everyone waiting around for armies and then racing each
other to grab them.  So if you want to be the one guy who's waiting
to grab armies that pop, tell your team.

Front-line fighter, a.k.a. (passive) space controller or Brick Wall.
This is most appropriate in even or near-even games.  Hang out near the
front-line planets (both yours and theirs), prevent enemies from
orbiting, help friends, kill carriers, cripple oggers, clear planets,
and deal with front-line armies as the opportunity arises.  Good ship
choices for this include CA, BB and SB.  Sometimes it's helpful to
specify whether you'll hang out on the left side or the right side
of the line.

Anti-bomber, a.k.a. Lumchan mode.  Scum a kill off an enemy bomber,
pick up armies and either use them or shuttle them to a hoard.
A scout seems to work best.

Army-guard.  If your team has a hoard of armies, say on the homeworld,
and they have bombers threatening to strike it, you want one person
within range at any one time.  This is a good way to get kills (if
you're not a starbase), so I like to trade off with somebody:  whoever
has fewer kills guards the army pile.  The army guard can also help
intercept oggers for teammates who are limping back to pick up.
Bases are adequate army-guards, but they can't use the kills they
get from it.

In our most successful games, TWNN led by Mucus Pig used one passive
bomber, one aggressive bomber, one ogger, three front-line fighters,
one planet-taker, and one army-guard.  We found it disruptive whenever
we tried to switch roles mid-game.

If the enemy team has many armies and our team has few or none, it
behooves our planet-taker, anti-bomber, army-guard and escorts to take
a minute or two off from their usual duties to help us bomb and ogg.
Similarly, if both teams have armies but the enemies have many kills
and more planets than us, then we should probably try to ogg all their
potential carriers before taking any new planets; i.e. just hoard the
armies for a couple minutes, because until we get the "kill list" down
to size we're not going to be able to protect any planets you take.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Escorting

Some basic facts to bear in mind:

(1) A ship can't dodge when orbiting.
(2) Enemies killed reappear near their home world, refreshed.
(3) A ship in place has a huge tactical advantage over an enemy
    rushing towards it.
(4) All cloakers look alike.
(5) The enemy probably knows if you carry, but doesn't know where
    you're going or when.

The proto-typical good escort is the guy that gets to the target planet
a few seconds ahead of you (even though you go at maximum warp), kills
the nearby defender (if any), and positions himself between the planet
and any onrushing enemies so they can't get at you while you orbit.  
It's like a screen in basketball, except for the part about killing.

It's much less important to have escort by your side to deal with
oggers as you fly towards the planet; you can often dodge and evade
while flying at high speed, the problem is going to come when you
get to the target planet and have to slow down.  In fact such an
escort may hurt your cause if he kills an ogger you had successfully
evaded and the ogger can return in time to defend the planet.

Fakes and feints can be extraordinarily helpful.  E.g. say we're Feds,
we own the Rom front line, and I'm trying to take Sirius.  I naturally
send a distress call when I pick up, and I write "SIR".  Then I might
head towards Draconis pretending that's what I want, and hope that the
Romulan near Sirius bites on the feint and comes over to stop me.
Meanwhile my escort is probably confused because I called for escort to
Sirius, but with luck he'll position himself roughly between Drac and
Sir, and when I turn and lock on Sir I fly past him and the Roms
chasing me can't follow.  (In basketball I think the analogous concept
is called the "total motion offense"; move the ball around to force the
defense to shift, because their motion enables your screen tactics to
work.)

A faker is a ship that doesn't carry, and might not even have a kill,
but cloaks and pretends to be trying to take a deep planet, in order to
draw the defense to it.  This works best if the faker goes in well
ahead, before the enemy is even alert to the real threat, and attacks a
deeper planet, e.g. Tauri in this case, and stays alive and cloaked as
long as possible.  This stuff really works, even against very clued
opponents, and anyway it's good for a laugh.

In typical pick-up games the main benefit of the escort may be simply
to give the enemies somebody else to shoot at.  As long as the escort
can stay alive uncloaked somewhere off to the side of the planet, the
carrier has a good chance of success.  Sometimes an escort will nobly
det torps and die to try to save me, and I'll wish that he had just
dodged and lived a while longer.

If you're a late arriving escort, i.e. your carrier is already trying
to orbit by the time you get within range, there's very little you can
do.  If you spray torps over the planet you'll likely kill her.
Occasionally you can still usefully tractor and perhaps phaser a
defender.  Alternatively, you can try to clear a neighboring planet in
case your carrier wants to change her mind and cut over there, or be
ready to intercept oggers if your carrier wants to escape.  In general
you can't do much to help a teammate unless she flies towards you.
And since escorts do well in bigger ships and carriers do well in
faster ships, the escort should try to start pretty far ahead on
any attack run, and may have to decide for himself what planet to clear.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Synchronization

When the enemy is down to a few core planets and are mostly staying in
their own space, you can't just go in at a random time and hope to get
anything done.  Whether you're ogging, bombing, or carrying, if you're
the only Fed in the Rom core you're just going to die.  Most pick-up
games look like that:  each Fed ship takes a minute or so to fly up to
Rom space, then they go in one or two at a time and they die.  What
you want is for all the Fed ships to fly up to the perimeter of the danger
zone and wait, and then all go in at about the same time.  Then
for 20 seconds or so, you've got even odds tactically, e.g. eight Feds
against eight Roms.  You might even get better than even odds if some
Roms come out to og or bomb and you can "trap them up ice", i.e. get
past them without killing them.  It doesn't really matter that all the
Feds go to the same place or are trying to do the same thing; some
could be ogging, some carrying, some looking to bomb, and some
hopelessly crippled and just hoping to distract the enemy.  As
indicated in the section on escorting, practically anything you do deep
in enemy space is likely to help your planet-taker, even if you're at
one planet and she's at another.  It's the timing which is the
essential ingredient.  And unfortunately this ingredient is lacking 99%
of the time.

One way to synchronize such an attack wave is to designate one player,
e.g. F2, to synch with.  Then all the other Feds should ideally keep
track of F2 on the galactic map and plan to go in when he does.
(Fakers and escorts might go in a little before, and carriers a little
after).  F2 might signal the beginning of the attack run by sending
"go" and/or cloaking.  It's way cool if all the Feds cloak for a
few seconds at this point.

Note that scumming kills is harmful when your teammates are going in.
If you kill a Romulan and run away, you put him back on Romulus with a
fresh ship, and abandon your teammates.  If both you and Romulan die
that's probably even worse.  But of course scumming kills is an
essential part of the game, so the idea is this:  let the whole team
work on getting kills and armies for a while, and then when one or more
of you is carrying and ready, then you set up the synchronized attack
wave.  Of course your team might want to do the attack wave even
without a carrier if there's important bombing or ogging to do.

Also note that it's unrealistic to expect to get all your teammates to
join in any venture.  But I've been in some games where we had just two
ships synchronized, and after a while a third ship was convinced to
join us, and our other scummy teammates would occasionally use the
openings that we were naturally creating.  A little bit of coordination
is better than none, and may lead to more.

----------------------------------------------------------------------