Hi everybody... You guys don't know me, but I'm working on an in-depth tactical guide to Tremulous. I'm an avid fan.
Mastering this game takes a lot of effort, and pulling together all the bits and pieces of information you need to be good takes more effort than the average new player wants to spend. It's a shame for us as a community if new players are put off by the alienness of the aliens, all the yells of "NO FLAMER FEED!", permbans from deconstructing the reactor etc. Tremulous is the best open-source game, and learning it should be easy.
So I'm trying to gather enough of the relevant information in one place, so that a newbie can learn the important stuff quickly and actually pull off a headbite one of his first games. How do you kill fast with dretch? How do you pounce efficiently? What is the best close-combat weapon combination?
I'm aware that I'm posting this in the General forum, but I figured the Strategy forum only has hardcore players. I want to see what a more general audience thinks. I hope you'll post any comments/thoughts you have. There are no creditations yet, but they'll come. Long post ahead.
Introduction
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Tremulous is a deep and complicated game, and if you don't know what you are doing, you will be a liability to your team. This guide will teach you the intermediate-level tactical and technical skills required to do well on a public server.
I am going to assume that you know, or are able to figure out the basics on your own: key bindings, game flow and victory conditions are not treated here. Read the official manual if you are confused.
Tremulous is a team game, and a victory is almost never a one-man effort. That said, complicated strategies cannot be executed unless each team member knows exactly what (s)he is doing. Just as with any other game or sport, high technical skill is a requirement to do well. This is what I am going to teach you here. Happily, technical ability in Tremulous is a lot deeper than in, for instance, Counter-Strike (where being good usually equates to being able to point quickly with your mouse).
On each stage in the game, there is a small number of plays that are a good idea. We will treat each of these in turn. You should only deviate from them once you are good enough to spot new opportunities. You will always want to fully exploit the advantages that each stage gives you. Building is outside the scope of this guide, but keep in mind that a bad builder can kill your entire team. Read up before you try anything dramatic.
Since you have probably played any number of FPS games before, we will treat the alien class first. It is better to get the strangeness out of the way quickly.
General notes
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Many tactics are expensive and dangerous to practice in a live game. To set up a local server start Tremulous, hit '~' to bring down the console and type '/devmap transit' (or atcs, or niveus, or arachnid2) to start a local server. Join a team and get to stage 3 by typing '/g_humanstage 2' or '/g_alienstage 2', respectively. Get evolve points or cash by typing '/give funds [amount]'.
Alien tactics
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The most important thing to remember when playing alien is to use your mobility. You are always much faster than the humans...you have to be, because they can hurt you at a distance and you can not. Move perpendicular to the human's sight line to dodge. Get close. Run away before you run low on hit points, both because death will cost you valueable evolve points and because feeding the enemy team is bad. Use your eyes, with a little practice you will see instantly what weapon and armor your enemy is using. This will let you decide if getting into a fight is worth the risk.
Stage 1
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The Dretch
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It is very important to be good at playing Dretch.
A good dretch attack will kill an unarmored human in two bites, and in less than a second. The key insight is that your attack is directional - there are no crosshairs, but your bite will hit where they would be. Aim for the head - if the human isn't wearing a helmet, a headbite will do 96 points of damage. After this, any hit (including a stray bullet from his teammates) will kill him and net you an evolve point. Avoid jumping at first - if the ground is level, you can headbite just as well from the floor.
Approach from behind if you can, and always use cover and subterfuge. Use the radar - blue dots are humans. Never charge down a long corridor if he is backpedaling; you will die before you can close the distance. Learn to use wallwalk right away - it is confusing at first, but you quadruple the area your enemy has to aim for. If he is good, wallwalk madly while he is firing his rifle and close and bite while he is reloading. Hitting a moving dretch is very hard.
You shouldn't take on more than one human if you are alone - it becomes nearly impossible to move perpendicular to both of them, and the one you miss will kill you. Once the humans get better weapons, you have to be more careful. But remember that until they get helmets on stage 2, you can still kill them with two bites. After stage 2, look for the ones who aren't wearing helmets. The newbie ratio on public servers is usually 30-50%, which you should exploit.
Every time you jump as dretch, you get a small speed boost. This will let you traverse long corridors very quickly, but will also give up your position and make your movement predictable. Humans have no radar on stage 1, so if you stay quiet and hidden, you are invisible. The wall-jump is a strategy you can employ to make your movement unpredictable: wall-walk and jump to launch yourself away instantly. Hiding in the ceiling and silently dropping down behind a lone human is very effective. With a precise headbite he will be dead before he knows you're behind him.
Make sure you listen to the agonized groans the humans make as you bite them. With a little practice, you will know when you have made a successful headbite and can take a little more risk to finish the kill.
The dragoon
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Most skilled players prefer the dragoon to the marauder on stage 1. There are three essential skills to master: head slashes, offensive pouncing and pounce-moving.
In close dragoon combat, always aim for the head. A slash to the head kills a human without helmet in a single hit, regardless of how good his weapon is. A body hit causes 80 damage if there is no armor. Slash at your target while circling around it, being ready to pounce to safety if things go south. Dragoon slashes recharge slowly, so it is important to be precise.
A correct offensive pounce is almost like playing dretch, only faster. Charge up a pounce and launch yourself into the air. While you are airborne, you behave like a dretch: you damage your target by getting close and just looking at it. This means that when you pounce correctly, you keep moving after you've dealt your damage. A popular technique is to pounce slightly over the head of the target and look down as you fly by. A full pounce deals 100 damage, killing an unarmored human instantly.
Moving with pounce, the Dragoon is the fastest unit in the game. Start charging the next pounce the instant you let go of the mouse button. Remember that you have to look in the direction you want to pounce, which is usually a few degrees up from the floor. Practice this on a local server - you can move unbelievably fast by pouncing again the moment you hit the ground. Beware that you will kill your teammates if you hit them in the air. Don't worry too much about this when fleeing - but remember that you only do pounce damage if you aim and touch at the same time.
If you're brave and skilled and the enemy base is poorly constructed, you can sometimes do the 'reactor jump' to end the match. Make sure that there are no armed humans around and pounce so that you land *on top of* the reactor. Unless the turrets are placed just right, the reactor will shield you from their fire. It takes 12 hits to destroy the reactor, or approximately 10 seconds. If you are able to pull it off, remember to announce it in the team chat.
The Dragoon is a big target and draws fire easily. Don't engage more than one or two humans at a time, and be precise if you have to pounce to safety - if you fly into a wall, you're dead. Eat newbies and the guys not wearing armor/helmets.
Stage 2
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Make sure your builder makes a booster the instant you hit stage 2, either in the base or in a forward location. Use it - the poison forces your enemy to use their medkits early. Team play becomes more important as a different group of aliens finishes off humans weakened by poison and earlier attacks. You must be more careful not to hurt your teammates, since stage 2 battles can often get quite congested.
If you have to evolve from an "advanced" class, it will cost you an extra evolve point. Make sure you keep this in mind.
The advanced marauder
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The marauder is arguably the hardest alien to kill, because it moves so fast and unpredictably. This same mobility makes the class difficult to play - if you're a newbie, it might be best to practice dragoon instead. But the marauder is very exciting once you master it, because you can confidently take on a group of three humans at once. You move so fast that most of their bullets will only hit other humans. It is a good assist class, because the lightning attack will never hurt a teammate - and most of the time you will be airborne and out of the way. The lightning will bounce if the humans are close, and causes 75% more total damage with two bounces.
Always jump, jump, jump and walljump. You move much faster while you're airborne. Look down on the heads of the small and feeble humans and slash at them while you're flying past. You don't have to hit every time to cause a lot of damage - and you won't, because things move very fast. Watch your hit points, and always know beforehand which way you will retreat when you have to bail. When you first enter an engagement, figure out in the first two seconds which weapons the group is using. It's the instant-damage weapons which are most dangerous, because they can hit you while you retreat: the lasgun and mass driver. The flamethrower is also worrisome, because it causes 100 damage per second.
Learn how to plan your jumps if you have to get away - walljump on intersecting walls to climb. It is preferable to engage humans in large hallways which don't restrict your movement but still allow you to walljump.
The dragoon, revisited
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You can still play dragoon when you hit stage two. The major difference is that your enemy will practically always wear armor and helmet, and will usually wield a pulse rifle. In a tight location, a dragoon and an armored pulse-rifle human are about evenly matched. You arguably have an edge if the location is open, because you can pounce to safety when things turn sour. Just make sure your attacks are precise, and be ready to bail if the enemy is owning your ass. If there are many newbies on the server, seek them out and kill them. Every kill brings you closer to stage three and the endgame.
Lower classes
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If you don't have enough evolve points on stage two, go with dretch. Try to find helmetless humans, and make sure you don't stand in the way of fleeing teammates. Use wallwalk profusely. On many servers, you will also get free evolve points if you don't die over a period of a few minutes. Try not to die too much, or your enemies will hit stage three and redecorate your base with lucifer cannons.
Stage 3
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Teamwork is essential to be successful. Attack in shifts, fight in shifts. Get out of our teammates' way when they flee and dive in to finish the fight they started. Coordinate assaults. No one wins a late game by themselves. Battlesuits reduce all damage by 80%. You will rarely make a difference on stage 3 unless you play advanced Dragoon or Tyrant.
The advanced dragoon
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The advanced Dragoon is an assist class, mainly used for besieging the human base. You get 50 more hit points, higher pounces and most importantly, a high-damage ranged attack. Don't even bother walking normally. Pounce-move is the only effective way to cover any distance quickly, especially when assaulting. You're a huge target. Practice looking away quickly in order to avoid team pounces.
Don't waste barbs on humans, except the unarmored ones. Two barbs will destroy a machine gun turret, five will destroy the armory and nine will destroy the reactor. A reactor snipe requires the coordination of three or four goons, but can end a stalemate in a pretty spectacular way.
Good base sniping is often essential to end a stalemate where humans are camping in a corner. If the humans use tesla generators, sniping the defence computer is easier and just as effective as killing the reactor. Pounce in, shoot two barbs and pounce away, preferably in shifts with a teammate. The advanced dragoon doesn't have good odds against lucifer cannons or chainsuits, so don't bother with grunt fighting. Surgical strikes.
The tyrant
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This is what you want to use to fight on stage 3, but it is harder than it looks. You're so big practically anything will hit you, so you have to be fast and precise.
The Tyrant is a tank: 400 hit points, 100 base damage (or 200 if you hit the head), up to 110 damage if you charge and hit something. Fear the following: Groups of two or more stage two-armed & armored humans (pulse rifle, flamer, mass driver or las gun). Battlesuit + chaingun combination, lucifer cannons. Anything smaller shouldn't be a problem, just hit it once or twice and it will die. Two headshots kills a helmeted human, two headshots and a body hit kills a battlesuit.
Against prepared humans, Tyrant combat is like a slower version of Dragoon combat. Aim for the head, be precise, stay focused. If you charge into the battle and hit a human, you get a little bonus damage to start you off.
Fleeing with a Tyrant takes a long time, and you are so big you will take damage constantly until you get behind a corner. This means that you often have to 'commit' to a battle; choosing to fight to the death. It takes so long to kill an armored human that there is often a few unnerving seconds where you are guaranteed to die if you try to escape. This risk can be offset by only fighting in groups of two, where you attack in shifts. Circle around the human and beware that the human will try the same. It is easy to get disoriented.
Be very careful when 'helping out' teammates who are locked in a battle. If you hit your teammate instead, (s)he will usually die.
It takes two hits to kill a machinegun turret, and you can usually kill one and run away or kill two or three and die.
