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im taking suggestions for this weeks training that will run wednesday to friday, weeknights PST as per usual. (plus other training times according to the other AFS instructor's hours as posted at the end of training announcement)

any burning desire to get a particular question answered?

good at something but want extra practice to be come great at it?

ill start things off and give my suggestion for our next training topic: con d (constructor defense / escort)

ill take additional suggestions until tomorrow, then i'll come up with some training games revolving around the chosen topic and go from there

btw, after this post im going to accept any new afs applicants. so if you applied anytime after this post, you should personally let me know either here or in game so i can add you individually.

With R6 up and coming, it will be more difficult to find miners with no automatic He drop. Might be an opportunity to teach how to find, hunt, bounce and otherwise harass mining operations.

Just a thought.

cool good thinking moose... having an intuition on where miners are at is something that a lot of vets take for granted when they play. even though it helps, i've personally relied less and less on that he3 drop trick... its just more fun sometimes to enjoy the entire process than to take a shortcut like that.

we can collate a set of basic instructions on where miners can generally be found. that's the reading assignment part.
then on a more practical level, how to effectively bounce/harass miners without getting killed is also a valuable skill to have.

keep the suggestions coming, even if we dont use it this time around, we can queue them up for later dates.

I was going to suggest miner hunting, but that's already been mentioned. Hmm.

At this point in my fledgling Allegiance career, I think my biggest concern is knowing what would be the most useful thing to do for the team after the initial alephs are scouted and a few probes are placed. I keep finding myself flying my pod back to base, and then seeing so many different ways to launch again. I watch the minimap, check F3 in base, and see a couple friendly constructors traveling, miners moving around without cover, a few sectors still aren't adequately probed, an enemy constructor was just spotted, and the commander is telling the team he wants some miner offense. I'm bewildered at the choices. Any general advice along those lines would be great.

White Owl wrote:QUOTE (White Owl @ Feb 27 2012, 06:52 PM) I watch the minimap, check F3 in base, and see a couple friendly constructors traveling, miners moving around without cover, a few sectors still aren't adequately probed, an enemy constructor was just spotted, and the commander is telling the team he wants some miner offense. I'm bewildered at the choices. Any general advice along those lines would be great.

Miner offense is always the correct answer.

ah yes.. finally a real question.

it is very situational. but lets answer it with a more concrete example. if your comm went tac or intends to go tac, then, if sfs arent available yet, your best course of action is to probe those enemy sectors that are adjacent to yours (cuz bbrs is the typical response to opponents going tac). did the enemy push their opening op next to your garr? (could be a bomb rush). is the enemy commander someone who is likely to bomb?


there are a bunch of other tell-tale signs of an impending bomb rush, i'll rattle some off the top of my head, other afs instructors can chime in if they so wish.

1. we killed a full miner or two at the near the beginning of the game (before enemy has bought tech con, cuz they dump their first two miner loads into bbr research instead)

2. we are bios and they try to take advantage of our slow research to bomb us before we get any tech up

3. they are belters cuz belters with their fig nans make up a superior early bombing faction

4. what is their team make up? do they have a bunch of newbies? or a bunch of vets or some of everything? typically a bunch of newbies arent going to do a whole lot of miner o, so their comm might buy a bbr just to keep everyone focused and together doing one task. if they have a bunch of vets, you probably wont see any bomb rushing as their comm will probably rely on their vets to do miner o instead of occupying them all on a bomb run that may/may not work (its a big gamble and if it fails, its a lot of money wasted early on). if they have some of everything.. its kinda hard to tell, but you can look at my monthly top10 to see if you can spot some people who are particularly high on the base_kills category.

5. what are the team sizes? smallish games, ie. 5 or so per side... makes early bombing nearly unstoppable. early on, before you get any tech up, you'd be pretty hard pressed to d vs a nanned and turreted bbr, esp if they come in uneyed, without giving you a chance to prox the aleph.

ok this is starting to feel like a wall of text so ill stop here. miner o is often a good task to take on but again its pretty situational, if you hear a teammate calling for help on miner o, go ahead join him. again, you can refer to the top10 to see who the miner killers are. the main thing to get better at for you at this point is how not to get podded. esp. far from home. podding sux... if you cannot help getting podded, at least do it where you can suicide your pod. like say next to their con (that hasnt built yet) or next to their miner that is still on the rock mining. or even fly straight up or straight down (before gettin podded), that way you can reach the sector edge in your pod faster.