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Hi all,

This is my first post, so apologies if I am asking some really stoooopid questions.

I basically wanted to ask about accepting orders and wings. I've been reading through the guides on the allegiance academy webby and playing some games, I'm getting the hang of scouting and using some of the smaller classes of ships, but I still find quite a lot of the interface confusing.

Okay, onto the actual question - should I be using my judgement when it comes to accepting orders by the commander to the entire team?

At the moment I am sticking almost entirely to getting probes down in places that would be hard to find / destroy, but quite often I'll see commands come up to go to a sector miles away...thats really where the above question comes into play /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" /> Even though I am a complete noob, it seems to me that it would be better for my team if I make sure that we have an advanced warning of a sneak attack, where I might even die repeatedly trying to keep our probes deployed, than spending 5 minutes flying to a sector where I will be no use or die anyway /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" /> I suppose, really, just asking for a confirmation of my judgement /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />

The other question I was going to ask is if people use wings a lot? I thought it might be a good idea to say at the start of a game, "I'm going into so&so wing, I'll stick on getting probes down if thats okay?". That way I would be able to tell what commands were actually directed at me?

Thanks for any help and advice in advance /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />

Sanch

ps: Got to Novice(1)!, yay! /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" />

GJ on the probes, keep doing that.

Accepting comm commands or not usually depends. What you should do though is always accept commands he gives specifically to you (you see only your name at the command, not team's name or group).
Generally, if you fly a scout and you have no proxes (or don't know how to use them well to e.g. prox an aleph for an incoming enemy bomb run), you are too far away or there is no ripcord that will get you fast enough to where the comm wants you, it is *usually* better to keep doing what you are doing since you will be too late to be of any help.
BUT, if the comm screams for D (defense), your teammates are all podded and a threat is coming you should ASAP go for the rescue.

As you can see it depends.

Don't use wings until you get much better especially in working well with others, otherwise you might loose important info. Select command wing to get all the info and try to pay attention to what is said to the chat.

A GOOD NEWBIE!!!!

/mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" />

yes, use judgement on orders, people do them to the whole team because its easier than giving it to individuals.

if your in one place and comm says to team pickup gat 2 5 sectors away, ignore it.

but some are more important than others, if comm says, get home were bombing, or rip home and defend base, then he wants the whole team to do it.

its good to follow orders given to you specifically (read do them), though judge the order by who gave it to you,
comm pm's you specifically and tells you to do something - do it
some 5th year vet askes you to do something, do it, they know what their doing
newPlayer(0) tells you to attack rock a53346, ignore it, he probably doesn't even know he just gave you an order


wings dont get used very often, most people tell you to go to command wing so you can see where the comm is sending cons.

A probe oriented newb? You're going to be ok, as long as "they" know you're probing insead of flying in circles.

As to your first question, it has practical, and principal issues. You should always listen to your commander, each and every time, anyone else is more or less at your discretion, but if they have funny ascii chareacters in front of their name, they know what they are talking about by default, so you should pay close attention to their commands too.

The last sentence is difficult and cotradictory to real gaming needs because bomber runs (where You, Your Prox and Your Nanite want to be) are usually organised, not by the commander, but some random player. Sometimes by an incompetent fool taking your nan to you doom. You wont be making the correct call until you get some experience, so it's best to pay attention and accept. If a lot of bombers are spamming "need repairs" choose the one that has the most scouts or is withing the fastest reach or gets the endorsement of the commander.

Now, the most important call you must always heed is base defence. You can get to any base or teleport in less than a minute as long as the team has a home rip and you're in a rippable ship. Just rip home and switch bases of the base in question has no teleport nearby. Finding yourself stranded with no fuel in deep space in an interceptor equals to having your ass podded. Make sure you defend the rightbase. The one that the bold guy wants you to defend, not that doomed refinery by their home.

If you are probing/deprobing, you're loadout is gong to be purely utilitarian and not very scary. A gatling gun, maybe one prox, probes AND A NAN. If you're in a scout, you are probing and you have a nan, a lot of the orders become meaningful to you, even if you are miles away. If bombers are calling for nans (need repairs), they are usually doing so close to a rip or a home base. Get there immediately. All "Defend constructor" calls make sense, especially if you can intercept that constructor en-route, instead of trailing it. Sometimes even "attack constructor" is worth the accept since you can combat nan your teammates trying to kill the enemy constructor. The last kind of situations often happen far away from home and usually is not worth your time, which is better spent dropping your last probes at sneaky places in his space.

Commands like "Attack my target" (with unfortunately no sector information attached (yet)) and "I need a pickup" get thrown around in team chat a lot, and you should check the situation before answering. Often they are only meant for their respective sectors, which you can check by going to F6, finding the name of the player sending the order and checking which sector it was on. The the minimap - which you have enabled - will tell you what's hapening there.

Remember, even though aprés-game scores have little real value, picking up friendly pods is worth the same points as a kill (if I recall) and is immensly useful to the team. So if you hear "need a pickup" and you see a bunch of pods (E) congregating somewhere, go for them. Even if it's far away. Tell the pods where you're going to go and they should meet you there and point your pesky (but fast) scout that way. Score the points and bash in the glory of being there with the rest of them, come end-of-game.

Finally, if you do accept a command several sectors away and your autopilot points you in the right direction, check if there is no faster way. The autopilot will not calculate how long it takes to ripcord home, dock and switch bases. Neither does it lead your objective by the two minutes it takes you to fly wherever there is. The sectors might be 10k to fly across, you do about 120 of those in a second, so it'll take you a better part of those two minutes to get across the map. Ripcording home takes less than ten seconds and docking is usually done in another 20 seconds, switching bases is three seconds and you're off, the other side of the map, in a jiffy.

If you have the nanite repair system in your loadout, you don't even have to spend the (comparatively long) time in loadout screen finding the nan.

Longwinded, hopefully a bit useful. People will chime in, I think, at least by telling you to join the cadet program. This will make you a better player, but in the meanwhile: give those enemy probes hell.

Second question: Always use "command" channel. This way you get to know where commander or anyone else is sending the mieners and constructors. When the game grows, I'm sure wings will come back again (I'm new, I've never seen them in use). but for now it's just another logistical hazzle.

Edit: Took me too long to write this.

oh, about the piclup pods order "need a pickup", quick way to check this if you cant just see who asked and see their name in your sector, press insert, if the target display (the thing at the bottom with the 3d image of your target that says its hull ans speed etc) doesn't have a image of their pod, they are not in the same sector, so you can probably ignore it and go back to what you were doing, unless the sector they are in is one your going to (it says the one they are in on the target display).

Cool, thanks for the detailed replies guys, I know where I stand now /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />

I don't tend to use the mines at the moment, because I wasn't sure how they work (not deploying them, but how long they stay and if they degrade when you die), come to think of it, I am not too sure if probes decay after a while, but I keep putting them out anyway /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" />

The loadout that I use normally is to have a NAN in place of my spare missiles and to swap one of my sets of ammo for another probe. Probably not wise, I'm sure I'll get told off by the good fighters, but I've generally found that if I am in the situation where I need to use up that amount of ammo and missiles, then I am screwed anyway /laugh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":lol:" border="0" alt="laugh.gif" /> I was reading through the advanced bit on the academy about scouting, and it had a line in there saying how chasing scouts is futile and that rang home really - I'm not going to chase enemy scouts myself and if I can't get far enough away to ripcord home then I'm not likely to fight my way out of it either. I really only have the ammo for emergenies and taking out other probes.

Sorry, rambling, back to the question. I always obey direct commands from the commander; some I've played under are quite good at the micromanagement and have directed where they wanted probes, but the question came into play with the general team commands. Thanks for the replies, clarified a lot for me. I will keep an eye out for the defence and bomber calls, although I keep getting kicked out of / asked to leave turrets, cant think why /huh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":huh:" border="0" alt="huh.gif" /> Apart from being pants /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />

Thanks for clarification on the wings as well, I'll make sure I don't fiddle around with that /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" />

And since you're doing such a job of it, remeber to take a sanctuary/rescue probe to enemy space when you are flying a scout for a faction that has one (Belters, IC, ...)

Also, Rixian Unity has a Scout(SR) that you need to get bought by you commander. It's that factions greatest asset, so you don't want to pass on them just because you're afraid to ask for 500€. Find their home, drop some probes and run away. Spot some miners or cons and ask some vet to ripcord to you to kill them. Don't do this yourself, you're too valuable as a Rixian ripscout.

When you have a weapon needing ammo, it comes loaded with a clip. When probing/clearing, you rarely need more than that clip of ammo at all. Just a set of hot dumbfire missiles to take down/scare stray undefended miners, one prox for self defence, a nan and the probes. This is not set in stone, but there is no point in taking ammo back home.

Prox works wonders on newer playes, but you're hard pressed to kill, or even scratch, the more veteran playes with them. When you drop one, it'll create a minefield fairly substantial after an initial few (four?) seconds of priming and lasts about 10 seconds. This all depends on the level of prox tech. They persist after you're gone.

One basic and effective way they work with scouts is that you get chased - or you make it before another - through an aleph and you drop them immediately after clearing that hole. If the prox has time to become active it'll burn anything coming through that aleph resulting an a satisfying message of a frag while you're cruising out of harms way. Enemy miners and cons are prime targets, as are voobs thinking sanch(#) don't know better. Works the other way too: if you're contesting an aleph and you lose substantially, i.e. more than a few seconds, slow down or you're looking for yet another ride home.

Sanch, you would be a great candidate for our Cadet program. You've already realized the importance of probing and are asking the right questions. Be sure to get in to one of the next couple of classes. It will help you learn some of the finer details that you seek, and it will give you some specific things to learn.

http://www.allegacademy.org/community/cadet.shtml

Sanch wrote:QUOTE (Sanch @ Feb 5 2007, 06:15 PM) *snip*
I don't tend to use the mines at the moment, because I wasn't sure how they work (not deploying them, but how long they stay and if they degrade when you die), come to think of it, I am not too sure if probes decay after a while, but I keep putting them out anyway /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" />
*snip*

Proxmines take 4 seconds to arm. Minepacks take the same amount of time to activate, but they stay shorter and are much denser (area is low).

Sanch wrote:QUOTE (Sanch @ Feb 5 2007, 06:15 PM) The loadout that I use normally is to have a NAN in place of my spare missiles and to swap one of my sets of ammo for another probe. Probably not wise, I'm sure I'll get told off by the good fighters, but I've generally found that if I am in the situation where I need to use up that amount of ammo and missiles, then I am screwed anyway /laugh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":lol:" border="0" alt="laugh.gif" /> I was reading through the advanced bit on the academy about scouting, and it had a line in there saying how chasing scouts is futile and that rang home really - I'm not going to chase enemy scouts myself and if I can't get far enough away to ripcord home then I'm not likely to fight my way out of it either. I really only have the ammo for emergenies and taking out other probes.

Always carry a nan. Its one of those pieces of equipment that makes scouts invaluable. Always always always. Well, atleast until you can feel how the game is flowing and you know that you won't need the nan and the cargo slot if better used with something else.

Sanch wrote:QUOTE (Sanch @ Feb 5 2007, 06:15 PM) Sorry, rambling, back to the question. I always obey direct commands from the commander; some I've played under are quite good at the micromanagement and have directed where they wanted probes, but the question came into play with the general team commands. Thanks for the replies, clarified a lot for me. I will keep an eye out for the defence and bomber calls, although I keep getting kicked out of / asked to leave turrets, cant think why /huh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":huh:" border="0" alt="huh.gif" /> Apart from being pants /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />

You get kicked out of turrets because people think :

a) You might not have good aim.
b) You might not understand how important it is for bombers to go uneyed. Firing turrets drastically increases the signature of the bomber and may get it eyed, dooming the run.

Sanch wrote:QUOTE (Sanch @ Feb 5 2007, 06:15 PM) Thanks for clarification on the wings as well, I'll make sure I don't fiddle around with that /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" />

Our pleasure. Be sure to check out the Cadet program!

Welcome to the game /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />

I think we've impressed him/her