From today.
AS3 vs HS3, nano.
Humies chainsuits (few of them) camp on rets (literally) in human default guarded by teslas. I rage-insult humans for "camp all time". Some guy tells me to stop yelling and to "find a way to overcome(...)" humans camping.
I'm not a great player, but perhaps I may be able to shed some light on this.
Some granger builds forward egg with 2 hives above human exin on second floor in center map area. Humans yell - cornercamp.
An excellent way to overcome humans sitting in base is to build them in. Egg+hive (or two)+booster can give your team the platform it needs to attack, and keeps the humans camping (fruitlessly). The danger here is to make sure that everyone doesn't run out of evos because this will give the humans the opportunity to make a rush themselves (so if you can, keep a stack of 5 or so yourself just in case).
This works with aliens (usually tyrants) camping in base as well, though you have to be very careful that people don't completely abandon your RC for the forward. It works better on maps like niveus (sp?) where the alien base will often end up having only one exit/entrance.
Mara zaps once and dies from chainsuit chasing.
Goon snipes 1 ret, 1 barb left, retreat to get one more barb, comes back, ret is rebuilded.
Rant charges in, gets killed instantly.
The utility of the mara is situational, and in many bases is a one-way trip. Depending on how far you were chased, it may not have had to be that way. Rants are very useful to keep the humans in their base when you don't want them to go out. With the goon+, the ret may have been rebuilded, yes, but the humans are less at least 6bp (build points). Snipe the ret again! The human base will get continually weaker as the bp queue slowly gives them back one bp at a time. At least until you can get a proper mara+ rush going.
Rant's generally don't to a great job of taking out bases themselves (but are invaluable support for the success of goons and maras).
Maybe im not a pro, but ffs Trem needs something to discourage camping. Its boring. Humans can camp, aliens have to. Do something with it.
Perhaps I'm the odd one out here, but I don't find many camping situations to be boring. Firstly, a team camps when the other team tells them to. The other team has pushed them back into their base, and they cannot get out. If they were to go out and attack, they would be slaughtered. In the mean time the other team usually *is* trying to eliminate the base and the bp queue is getting steadily longer. I frantically grab a ckit and try to repair and build and fight all at the same time in a desperate effort for survival. You just can't plug all of the holes.
Now, fighting in (a good) base grants an advantage. Because the attacking team is stronger than the other camping team, fighting in and near base can give them a more equal or even advantageous battlefield. (IMO)
Utterly pwning people is generally not as fun as winning a hard won battle or especially a comeback. It is difficult to get teams that are perfectly evenly matched, camping provides a buffer that allows teams that are slightly weaker to survive, especially if they are down a stage. And if the team can get it back together and make a rush of their own, then camping has served its purpose for the good of the game.
Furthermore like the lack of the share command, camping helps contribute to a certain feature of tremulous that I very much enjoy: in general one player cannot win the game on his or her own. Killwhoring is easy, any good player can do that. Attacking a well-defended, decently-built base is very, very hard to do without help. Try it yourself. Get a bunch of people together, go to devmap, make both teams s3, take a good built base, stick a pair of chainsuits and a ckit or two on it (or a pair of tyrants), and give yourself unlimited evos and 15 minutes to kill the base (feel free to bankrupt the defenders in the process if you can). You'll probably just be feeding. You need to get people to work together in a way that you do not in a mere deathmatch style game. This is what I like so much about tremulous.
For this reason I think the outright elimination of camping (even if it is possible without changing the basic nature of tremulous) is folly. Camping is a valid tactic, just like RC hopping and psaw rushing. Could the effectiveness of camping be lessened? It certainly has since 1.1 IMO. And that was a good thing because:
There is a situation in which camping can create an impasse, where neither team can even properly *attempt* to make any headway if there is not enough teamwork on either side to overcome the defensive and killwhoring efforts. I believe this tends to happen in games where there is a great skill gap between the few (perhaps one) best players of each team and the masses. If camping is too effective, then this would happen, and I *might* get bored (though I was still learning a lot about the game when I was in 1.1). I don't believe this is the case for gpp right now. Games that stall like this end either in sudden death or in the timelimit being hit. According to Phase 4 statistics, 22% of games ended in s3 vs s3, and only 10% of games ended in sudden death.
