AFS/Camping

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Camping in Allegiance - What is it?

Oh no! An enemy bomber is spotted heading towards one of your bases! It is still in the adjacent sector! What to do?!

"'Camp the aleph!" someone yells. All ships in the sector start rushing towards the aleph from where the bomber is expected to enter. What they are about to do is called 'camping' - one of the deadliest tactics, one that can annihilate a bomber run with multiple nans in a matter of seconds.

The purpose

The purpose of a camp is to concentrate maximum firepower in the smallest space possible to kill enemy ships of significant importance. In other words, it's an ambush. The ship can be a bomber, a heavy troop transport, capital ship, constructor, anything that is a huge threat to your bases or that helps the enemy invade your space.

How and where you set up for a camp is determined by the ship you are in and what weapons you are using. As a new player we strongly suggest a scout to start with.

The scout

A scout devastates an enemy attack with well placed prox

Scouts carry the most deadly weapons in the entire game: proximity mines. These are the most effective at an aleph as there is no way the enemy can avoid a properly placed prox. A single scout can completely obliterate a nanned bomber run if the bomber pilot is foolish enough to go through an aleph at full speed.

LANS has made a short video on how to drop mines at an aleph. It can be viewed here

Prox decays the older it gets so you want to time your drop such that they are armed at the same time the bbr comes through, for maximum damage. To do this drop your proximity mines when ordered to (usually a simple word 'DROP' typed by someone in-base on the chat, sometimes 'Deploy mines!' or 'Need some mines!' VC's are used). To doubly ensure you get the timing right you can ask on team chat for someone to 'Call drop'.

Once the bomber enters, fire off a few dumbfires at whatever is in front of you. Keep yourself thrusting backwards using reverse thrust. Keep dropping prox! As some marauder nan scouts may still come to aid the bomber. That is, of course, if the bomber didn't go 'BOOM' already. Your primary job is mine deploying. Let the Ints and fighters do the rest.

The fighter

Your main weapon against easy-to-hit targets is the Dumbfire missile. It lacks the tracking abilities of other missiles, but packs a huge warhead. It's quite hard to land a dumbfire at something moving, but... the bomber won't be doing much moving when it makes it's entry. It'll pop out of aleph and head dead straight for a few seconds. Those few seconds will allow you to pound a rack of dumbfires into bomber, before it's nans can get their bearings and start repairing it.

When setting up for camp in a fighter, position your ship facing the middle of the aleph at 600m on the line that the entering ship will be flying. At 600m anything that comes in is in your gattling and missile range.

Note The best way to make sure your dumbfires hit is if there is a scout to prox the aleph and make the bbr slow down. That is why it is essential that every camp contains 1-3 scouts.

The interceptor

This ship is all about brute force: it's miniguns are designed to inflict maximum damage, but to do that you have to get all close and personal with the target. Positioning in an int is quite different than other ships. Your miniguns have a pathetic range of around 400m which means that turrets will have you at pointblank. To make their task harder don't sit directly in front of the aleph, instead place yourself on the side about 300m from the middle of the vortex. That way turrets will have to look for you, buying you time to kill the bomber.

How an effective camp by a team works

To make the camp most effective combined arms are usually used. Scouts dropping mines to slow (if not kill) the bomber and it's nans. That turns the bombing party into sitting ducks for the fighters or interceptors. A stationary target is an easy target for those few seconds.

Prerequisites

The only thing you need to form a solid camp is an advance notice. That means having an effective probe network and usually a scout shadowing the bomb run to call the drop. Remember you can not camp for something you don't know is coming! Worth repeating, "READ THE CHAT"! All the information you will need to make a real contribution to the team, and it's camp, is right there in front of you.

Stay Camped!

Until your commander says it is okay to leave, do not leave the camped aleph! Many times the incoming bomber crew will clear all the probes in that sector. You lose eye on them and the flashing warning goes away. Do not leave until either your commander or one of the vets has checked it out and said it is clear. Many a base has been lost to the camp getting bored and leaving. In some games the stalemate of the camp will go on for 5 to 10 minutes, the bomber refusing to come in but the defenders not having the strength to counter-attack and destroy it.

Advanced concepts

There are also advanced camping techniques, like using bombers and other medium class ships (or even capital class ships) to camp, camping red doors, and many others. All of them are covered in the Cadet II course.