Katya's guide to scouting

Katya · Post by **Katya** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 5:01 am

Greetings!

Just poking around the forums quickly I did not see a guide on scouting. I returned to the game and got to play some not too long ago, and noticed that, while most of the newbies seemed bright and eager to learn, they didn't really know how to scout.

SO!

The ultimate unsurpassed non definitive guide to scouting and using a scout!!!

All joking aside for a moment, games are won and lost based on scouting, I kid you not. Most people want to ride some hotshot Int or Fighter, get kills, rack up the points and the KB, kill miners, get those sexy Dreg ladies, we've all been there. However if there is no one flying a scout around and probing up the place, then that HTT is popping out of an aleph with only 800m to your base. Worse yet let's say that it is a Bios HTT that came through the aleph cloaked, it maybe only has 600m to reach your base when the cloak wears off.

The advantage that is gained if you are able to mount an uneyed assault is tremendous and is not to be discounted. A lot of people do not take the role of scouts and scouting seriously, do not make this mistake.

That being said, on to the guide!

Early game scouting:

Opening stages of the game, assuming that the comm has not ordered otherwise, you hop in a scout and want to go scouting, good for you! Things to think about as you equip your scout:

Scouts, for the most part, are not built to fight. Try to go uneyed. I would equip a shield, and typically I do not carry any missles. Once I get into the first sector and drop my first probe, my shield gets unequipped.

You are scouting, load up on probes.

Don't waste slots on ammo. Slap a Disruptor on that baby. The dis is there so that you can destroy enemy probes if you find any. Most comms will expect you to have a nanite gun mounted to be able to nan cons/miners. If I am a scout scouting in the early stages of the game then I will most likely NOT take a nan, and the reason why is quite simple. By the time a con or miner is under attack I will have picked up 2-3, if not more, pieces of tech. I WILL get killed, assuming the opponent is intelligent and goes after the scout healing the con/miner, and I will lose all of that tech. Now losing a con/miner is tragic, I tend to think that losing 8k+ worth of tech is even worse. Some people disagree with this, but this is something where I do not think there is any one right answer. Later in the game when there is less tech to pick up, I'll mount a nan in the hold, but not early game.

Now, you have your holds full of probes, and you've got your gun of choice mounted, and you're ready to go. Assuming the comm let's you scout freestyle, I find it helpful to pick a sector to go scout and say "Scouting Raiko" or something. There will normally be a bunch of other people getting into scouts and scouting, and you do not want 5+ people to scout Raiko.

You've entered Raiko, DO NOT EVER drop your first probe next to the aleph leading to your home!!! That is/was a very common newbie mistake back when I first played and us vets would be looking for where we had an eye, because that'd lead us to the aleph. Second newbie mistake when it comes to probing is that they never view the sector as a 3 dimensional area, they always view it 2 dimensional, making it very easy to find and destroy their probes. You have all of space to work with, don't just work with the either the Y or the X planes.

Take a look at the sector view as you are scouting. Generally speaking the space between alephs is equal. So that means if you know there are 4 alephs in this sector, and you found an aleph in the upper and lower left quadrants, and the lower right quadrant, that means the 4th aleph is most likely somewhere in the upper right quadrant.

Generally speaking, for the initial scouting dropping one or two probes per sector is good enough. It is not ideal by any means, but you are out there to find alephs, tech, cash, and drop probes in locations to maximize the odds of eyeing a con/miner/early bomb run.

If you are going to drop a probe around an aleph you think the enemy will come through, drop it somewhere between 600-800 meters around the aleph. Any closer and enemy scouts will have an easier time of finding and destroying your probe.

I always say that it is important to pick up cash regardless of faction, but for slower research factions like Bios and Technoflux it is critical. Your comm will be partialling tech due to the slow research times. That $500 floating out there could fund the next 3 minutes of your research, you just never know.

Pick up almost all tech. If you are a faction that does not use missiles, such as TF or Rixian, then I would say don't bother with missile tech with the exception of Aleph Resonators. Bringing an Aleph Res back to base will give you personally $1000 cash each and every time. Don't forget to donate that to your comm! However if you are TF, bringing back Minepack or Prox mine technology will give you the equivalent Pulse Generator tech, so do make sure to bring those in. Also make sure to say something like "Picked up nan2" or something along those lines so that your comm doesn't waste cash researching what you have picked up, but have not returned to base yet.

Tricks of the trade. If you are out scouting, your holds are getting full and you want to continue picking up tech, and you pick up say, gat2 or dis2, equip it onto your gun mount and drop your old gat/dis1. Find Small Shield 2 (ss2)? Equip and drop SS1. Picked up some fancy missile? Equip it. This will open up space in your storage. If you are getting to this point, always, ALWAYS, be ready to rip back to base rather than fight. You as a scout can easily be carrying $20,000 worth in tech in the opening game. If you are carrying so much valuable tech, why keep going you might ask? The answer is to prevent the other team from finding it. Remember, every tech you pick up is a tech you have denied your opponents from finding and getting for free. You might ask, with so much tech floating around, surely more people would go out and pick it up right? The answer is no! Even in bigger games with plenty of people, I will look at different sectors while in base and I will see valuable tech that would greatly benefit the team floating around IN A SECTOR WE FRICKING OWN! Your comm says that you're going Exp, and Mini2 pops up in your home sector, and no one picks it up? Unacceptable!

ALWAYS be looking at various sectors and seeing what cash/tech can be picked up. Always be looking to see what probes need to be refreshed or if deprobing needs to be done.

Speaking of deprobing, here's another tip. Always try to be consistently deprobing. If I see that an enemy team has not deprobed all game long, and I see that they suddenly deprobe the sector next to one of our bases, that tells me they are mounting an attack. If the enemy is constantly deprobing, it gets much harder to tell where the attack is going to come from.

I'm going to hit on this subject again, if you pick up one piece of tech, you are as valuable as a miner. If you have picked up more than one piece of tech, you are now representing a cash value greater than a miner. If you have picked up 4-5 pieces of tech, you are representing a cash value greater than an upgraded tech base. If you have picked up multiple pieces of tech, do not get killed. I've seen people carrying Booster 2/Dumbfire 2/Gat2/Nan 2 try to dogfight in a scout and die when they could have easily ripped out and run away.

I think that covers early game scouting, so now we hit up mid/late game scouting.

People will be actively looking to kill scouts by now. They don't want you to see where they are putting a tech base, or to hide their miners, or they might think you are a TP2 scout, or all kinds of things. So, I tend to like running around with no shields or missiles mounted at this stage of the game. I'll normally carry a shield in my hold that I'll equip to buy me an extra second or two if I need to rip out. Or I'll be using a scout offensively, and the shield will not be equipped while I am sneaking around.

It's in the later stages of the game where good probing/deprobing becomes especially important. I consider a sector adequately probed if it has 6+ probes in it, not counting probes around alephs. Yeah HTT/bombers, try to avoid being eyed there!

If you know your opponent has stealth bombers, heavily probe up both sides of an aleph with probes 100meters or closer on all sides. You want to get a warning if a stealth bomber just entered a system. If you know a SB is in the sector with one of your tech bases, heavily probe around the base to make it more difficult for the SB to get to the base uneyed.

Scouts in the later stages of the game, and early stages in some instances/factions, will be serving as the eyes of Ints to go kill miners/cons. If that is the case, bring along a Nan to heal the Ints with and carry ammo/fuel that you can drop, basically act as a mini tender ship for the ints.

Several interesting factoids about scouts that is somewhat core dependent:

TF scouts can act as fighters.
Hvy Bios scouts can equip a mini AC turret, and with a gunner, can go hunt miners and be all stealthy too!
Hvy Rix scouts can equip a mini AC as their main gun on the DN core and cause general mayhem and panic.

I kinda wanted to get into how to use scouts in certain roles, but it is late and I shall do that later.

fwiffo · Post by **fwiffo** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 5:57 am

cool thanks katya. did you know we have a wiki too? it makes better sense to put this guide over there or better yet read the existing scouting guide and improve it by combining the best ideas in yours.

the guide here while it may get a momentary exposure spike, will eventually get buried beneath newer posts, so if u want your contribution to last a bit longer, put it on the wiki, then make a post here with a link to it!

here's the link to wiki

cashto · Post by **cashto** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 7:00 am

I do have a bone to pick though. Tech is not as valuable as you think. Assuming you could pick up 20k of tech (not very likely actually) -- how much of that can you actually use? Not all of it is going to match your techpath. More to the point, though -- losing your initial op con is a big frickin' deal. You can always pick up that tech later. You cannot get those mining sectors back. You can't get that map control back. Lose your initial op, and there's a good chance you won't live long enough to enjoy that Retro Boost or Seeker 2 or whatever it was you picked up.

Also, it's much better to pack a gatt rather than a disruptor: disruptor doesn't use any ammo, sure, but it puts out something like half the damage of gatt. If you're just using it to deprobe, you won't run out of ammo; if you need it in an emergency to help finish off a miner of defend a base, it actually makes a difference. It takes a crazy long time to use up a whole rack of ammo in a scout. Nine times out of ten scouts don't live long enough to use it all up. And there's always powerups if you really need a quick reload.

One key skill is learning how to be a scout pilot rather than a pod pilot. It's not that hard to do most of the time: just don't get eyed. Or if you do get eyed, rip out before you get podded. Or if you get podded, ram a miner or prox or get picked up or bring a rescue probe. Make it a goal to never walk home in a pod again.

Using a low sig scout to stalk their miners is a super useful task. This is one of my specialties. As long as the team has two warm neurons to rub together, eyed miners don't live for very long. I wish I could teach it to other people so I could spend more actually being the one to kill miners. You'd think it wouldn't be that hard: get in the right sector, don't die, lose eye, and go get a frickin' cup of coffee. Sadly no.

Also, scouts are great for killing undefended miners behind enemy lines. If you can't them, you can at least bounce them, disrupt the enemy's mining, and make the enemy spend some resources defending rather than attacking. All of which is very valuable. Learn to do that and you can call yourself a bona fide scout whore.

notjarvis · Post by **notjarvis** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 7:31 am

fwiffo wrote:QUOTE (fwiffo @ Mar 30 2012, 06:57 AM) here's the link to wiki

Here's the part of the AFS guide dealing with scouts specifically.

MrChaos · Post by **MrChaos** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 10:58 am

On second thought... delete

I must of been channeling Deng

Honestly most it was already said

Katya · Post by **Katya** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 2:10 pm

Let my mistake be a warning folks, and look through the wiki!

QUOTE I do have a bone to pick though. Tech is not as valuable as you think. Assuming you could pick up 20k of tech (not very likely actually) -- how much of that can you actually use? Not all of it is going to match your techpath. More to the point, though -- losing your initial op con is a big frickin' deal. You can always pick up that tech later. You cannot get those mining sectors back.[/quote]

This is all true. I probably do give too much value to tech and while writing this I was thinking that in an ideal game a comm would have already assigned people to con defend cons in fighters and scouts with nans. But when was the last time I ever had an ideal game? The comm might also think there is a scout in that sector who can nan that con if the con needs it while it builds. So I'll take that back and say always carry a nan.

The point about tech paths is also a good one. I'd probably say that most of the games I've played it seems we've gone either sup or tac. I see mostly nan2/sup tech floating around, which probably ironed into my head that most tech you pick up is going to be used. But even then, how much of it are you going to use? QF2 I'll almost never use, Seeker2s are good if you don't have DF2, most times in a fighter I'll be using gats and not dis, so from a bunch of "useful" tech to pickup and use, to DF2/Gat/Boost2, and Dis2 which is still good to have.

Next thing to add! Take everything you hear from me with a grain of salt, and read the wiki

vogue · Post by **vogue** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 4:14 pm

I don't know if i agree with the idea of not packing missles and a gat at the beginning. I usually never bring probes at the beginning for the simple fact that you don't really know where you need to probe yet because your cons haven't planted and neither have theirs. I go gat, prox, 1xdumbfire equipped, then nan and rest dumbfires in my cargo. You'll notice that it's pretty easy to find a stray con/miner if you get past their con d, and despite what anyone tells you if you land all your bullets and dumbs (which you really should on a miner) then you can kill them pretty fast. However this only works at the beginning because the majority of the other team is 1) scouting or 2) on con D.

Also ALWAYS bring a nan! It's uses are well worth 1 cargo space no matter what you're doing.

Most of your other tips are spot on though. Especially the bit about cash, I never see enough people doing it.

cashto · Post by **cashto** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 5:01 pm

No worries, Katya. It's always good to see enthusiastic newbies -- or, in your case, enthusiastic returning players.

See you in game!

MonAG · Post by **MonAG** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 5:39 pm

I would add, that a scout should learn the: "Enemy miner found" and "Enemy constructor found" voice chats. You will be patrolling different sectors, and quite likely you will encounter a sneaky miner or a constructor. Maybe your commander is checking on you at that same instant, but most likely he is busy on something else, and the voicechat is a useful reminder to him. You don´t need the same precaution with bombers and HTTs, because they trigger automatic alarms.

As for missiles, I always prefer to pack them. Better have them and don´t need them, than the opposite. For stealth, move them into the cargo bay as soon as you have free space. Dumbfires are better in case you run into a miner. If at a certain moment you don´t need them any more, you have several alternatives: you can "burn" them into an enemy probe (it will save you the trip), you eject them, or just fire them away into space (though I think it will momentarily raise your signature).

Also: pack a nan and you will never regret it. It can make a difference, and you can never forsee when it will be needed. I use multiple configurations for different uses, and most of them include a nan.

White Owl · Post by **White Owl** » Sat Mar 31, 2012 1:56 am

Katya wrote:QUOTE (Katya @ Mar 30 2012, 09:10 AM) ...while writing this I was thinking that in an ideal game a comm would have already assigned people to con defend cons in fighters and scouts with nans. But when was the last time I ever had an ideal game? The comm might also think there is a scout in that sector who can nan that con if the con needs it while it builds. So I'll take that back and say always carry a nan.

If you're scouting at the very start of the game, then you're one of only three or four people on the whole team. There is nobody else available to defend.

Katya wrote:QUOTE (Katya @ Mar 30 2012, 09:10 AM) The point about tech paths is also a good one. I'd probably say that most of the games I've played it seems we've gone either sup or tac. I see mostly nan2/sup tech floating around, which probably ironed into my head that most tech you pick up is going to be used.

I see exp almost all the time, with occasional sup for variety. Tac is almost nonexistent.