Nasty Strategy
Every game has just a few flaws in the programming. Even Battlzone 2, (yeah right *snicker*) has many problems in its AI that can be exploited, or problems in its design. This section is devoted to locating those minor flaws, and making strategies that use that flaw to its greatest potential. Power to Exploiting programmers' mistakes!
The following tricks are all gleaned from playing on gamespy, I, myself, havent actually done them all, but I've seen em in action and try to get a few in each game. Take a look for yourself, see if your faves are there, and if not, send it to me. I have been kind enough to tell you all of mine, it's the least you can do for me :)
1)Flarius' great Scion strategy, shield rushing. When playing ISDF, deflection shields are invaluable as most of ISDF's early weapons are projectile. To get a fast deflection shield, build a Kiln, then an Antenna, then customize a sentry with a shield. Voila, ISDF scout-kabob a la mode. You can also kill turrets out or range with Ion Gun II as well. When playing a Scion opponent, Absorbtion shields will come in handy at some point, so build the following: Kiln, Upgrade to Forge, Stronghold. Customize a sentry or warrior and you can easily destroy any scion unit, as pretty much all of them have energy weapons.
2) Scavenger decoys. A scavenger has high armor and is cheap effective cannon-fodder. Send a scav blindly to a place guarded by a turret or two and have a pilot to back you up. Send the scav in and do not approach until all the turrets are firing on the scav, then move in and kill the turrets. The turrets will not fire upon you until the scav is dead, and it's got a lot of health, so it wil give you enough time to kill the turrets. You might lose the scav but OH NO, A SCAVENGER!!!
3) Solar Flaring. A scion scout begins with a solar flare to attract FAFs. The flare also does collateral damage to targets. Locate a target like a turret and find a small bump or ramp nearby so you can leap off. Get a good speed and jump straight over your target. It helps to be in Shift-F2 view to see this...now timing is crucial, drop a solar flare mine during your flight so it lands right on top of the turret. The mine will drop underneath the target and fire its blazing death upwards to char the target, killing it within seconds.
4) Camping. Some people hate when you do this. Right off the start do a suicide attack (try to take someone down with you) and have it so you eject from your ship. Land on the recycler but keep a low profile, do not shoot anything nearby or they will find and kill you. When they make turrets, sniping them is relatively easy as they deploy on the recycler's production deck. Snipe turrets as you please (as it is slightly covert) until you are discovered, or you can hop into the turret and begin firing on their recycler itself. Beware, you will get banned from servers for this, as it makes commanders very very angry.
5) FAF and Stinger cornering. When engaging turrets that have a natural emplacement (like a mountain) within its range, hide behind it and point your craft (ISDF scout or Scion Lancer) around the mountain. Fire your homing missile and if you're lucky it will hit the target around the mountain, with you being out of its fire range, behind a mountain. You have to experiment a little to get this technique to work the first time.
6) Scion Scout dance. A technique of my own concoction (I named it, too). When fighting a scion vs. scion battle, the Scion scout can perform a sort of "dance" technique that will allow it to destroy guardian turrets, that is if it is willing to take a lot of damage in the process. Engage the turret and begin to jump your craft (hold down the "e" key) and strafe back and forth. You are aiming to jump, then in midair change your direction and jump in the opposite direction, moving in a circle, essentially. You will land in the same spot, then jump again in another circle, it won't be perfect, but as long as your vector is changing the turret will overshoot you. Do this about 100m away from the Guardian and fire while "dancing" and if your dance was good enough, you can kill the turret easily without taking too much damage.
7) Sky Knight technique. This requires that you be out of your ship, or ejected. While in the air, try to land on a cliff and get a solid footing in the mountains. Arm your pulse rifle and look down below, if you can get a position above a turret, as long as you are really high above the turret, it cannot aim high enough to return fire, so shoot that pulse like crazy till its dead. This works particlarily well on the map "Desert Quarry" where the top and bottom extractors are vulnerable to this technique.
8) Edging technique. This is a relatively simple technique that a lot of people know. Stil there are a lot who don't know how to edge, so here's the juice: When fighting against a gun tower where your weapon has EXACTLY the same range as that of the stationary unit (plasma is 200m, shadowers 200m etc.) target the tower (with the "t" key) and move SLOWLY towards the target. Move until you get EXACTLY 200 m away from the target. Fire away. The tower cannot return fire because an AI gun tower fires upon units that are 199m away, This tiny window lets you sit still and fire like crazy until the tower is dead. The towers ranges have been extended in 1.2.
9) Radar Jamming. The ISDF RED field is an effective Radar Jammer, When turned on, AI units will not fire upon you until you get in their direct line of sight. When approaching a gun tower of some sort, turn it on and watch the way the turret is facing, it randomly turns around its firing mechanism. Move in, RED field blazing, when the eye has just turned away from you and begin firing a good ranged weapon at the tower. As soon as the eye/turret turns back to fire upon you, move away, let it spin again, then go back in for seconds. The RED field consumes little ammo, so this is helpful to take turrets down. This technique also works on turrets (although, they fire back once hit) and is tougher to use when there are multiple gun towers to deal with.
10) Targetting. Target, target, target. The "T" key will target the nearest objet to your reticle, and there are many things targetting can do that are way more helpful than just chasing someone. First off, you can detect where an enemy is even if they hide behind a terrain object like a mountain, if you hadn't targetted you might lose them. Next, targetting allows you to detect invisible units. An invisible unit is still detectable by radar, so as long as it is on the radar, you can target it. Finally, the Popper and Comet Cruise weapons need a valid target lock AND a missile lock to fire, so you need to press "t" to even fire your weapon on them. It might be easier, after you get better, to change your targetting key to "Q" as it is closer to the main controls and you will want to have it at quick access.
11) Chain gun rushing. All you need is a factory for the ISDF and you can modify the ISDF scout and the Turret to hold chain guns, far superior to the classic minigun. This can give you an impressive edge in combat, but later you might want to give your turrets Lasers for maximum damage.
12) Geothermal Lung-bashing. This is a MEAN trick and gets commanders extremely mad at you. You can do this as any race and you have to be in a hover-vehicle. Locate an enemy Gun Spire and stay outside its range while you take a look at it. Look for the geothermal lung on the spire, and then blitz towards the spire (taking a few hits if needed) and drive up to the lung. Now move the tank under the lung and tilt your tank straight up by moving your reticle up as far as it can go. You will now be facing the geothermal lung, and the lung itself will be your shield! The Spire will not be able to shoot at you until the lung is destroyed, and then it is useless. This only works on lone Gun Spires, but few people know how to do this, and it is extremely cheap, too.
13) Rocket-bashing. Have your commander make you a pilot-equippable rocket launcher from the armory/stronghold. This only works against the ISDF buildings, but give yourself an empty scout and do a kamikaze run into the enemy base. DO NOT shoot your weapons, just die, or the towers will fire on your infantry as he flies into the sky. Now look for a big building, either their recycler or factory and locate where the door is facing. If you can see thet the door is facing another valuable structure then go inside and arm the bazooka. Begin firing through the inside of the building to hit the building outside the one you are in. It will take a while for you to be discovered, and when you are, the bazooka can cause significant damage on an enemy tank anyways, so you can usually cause a lot of ruckus doing this. It works best when your commander is attacking at the same time you are bazooking the building, as the enemy commander will not know the difference and get confused, buying you enough time to take down a valuable structure.
14) Pummel-rushing. After you get an armory, the pummel gun will be available. Equip it on a tank (make one as fast as you can) and drive up to the enemy recycler and fire away. The spread of the pummel does a lot of damage on buildings, and if you can do it by evading the enemy base defense, all thepower to you. This IS a mean trick, however, so dont expect any gratitude from the enemy if you win this way. It also doesnt work in version 1.2 as pummel is powered down.
16) Hornets. Hornet missiles should be customized to a rocket tank as soon as possible. A Hornet has a 250m range, making it a simple task to irradicate towers from afar. The best part is, the AI will use this weapon and if you tell a Hornet tank to attack a tower, he will sit 250m away and fire like crazy. Many people don't realize this and lose towers because they did not respond fast enough.
17) Static Lag. Like using a biological weapon, fighting an enemy with lag is a pretty dismal way to go. The Scion Static charge creates a static effect on any units it touches and continues through electrical units by induction. The Static Charge effect is also very RAM-reliant and many static charges can reduce a frame rate drastically. As scion, equip your warrior with a stat charge and tell a batallion of 10 other units to follow you. Locate the enemy commander (or whoever has the server, dont do this on your own server!!) and fire just a little bit of stat when you fight him. the stat wil spread like crazy and everything will start lagging in combat, ESPECIALLY whoever is the server. I learned this the hard way, it is not good to get in the way of a static charged enemy when there are tons of units all over the map charging as well. Dont do this on my server, however, or I'll ban you good :)
18) Sandbags & Resin. The weakest weapons in existance. Still, combine them with a pummel gun and you've got a killer. Locate an enemy (in DM) and fire a sandbag/launch a resin. Keep doing this and strafe fast around the target. They get slower and slower until they cannot move at all. Then let the pummel gun fly. The can sit there and watch you cream their tank with pummels. It really is quite funny, if you actually try it.
19) Popper tanks. Scion cannot have mortars in their tanks but ISDF can. If you can snipe an enemy tank and take it home, re-equip it with a scion Mortar called the popper and you can use the ever-so-cheap popper in a Strat game! Pop pop pop away to freee dom, yeah!
20) Scout factory. The empty scouts, as you probably noticed are a great deal cheaper than normal scouts. If you are ISDF, make a training centre next to your recycler and do the following: Make an empty scout - Order the armory to send it a weapon of your choice - Let the training centre give it a pilot - Send it to a nav - Begin cycle again. This can be used to make many well-armed scouts extremely cheaply AND extremely fast, too. The only drawback is that the commander has to use all his time to make the scouts.
21) Gatling Laser. The ISDF have two instant-fire weapons, the Blast and the Laser. Put both of these on your tank and go into battle. Engage the enemy, and fire your first weapon, the blast, make sure it hits, now cycle to the laser quickly and fire it, cycle back to the blast and fire. The cooldown for each weapon is usually equal to the time it takes to change to another weapon so you can fire 2 lasers at the speed of one. This sucks up the ammo, but I have taken down tanks in 5 seconds with this technique before. Useful in DM as well, not so useful with the Arc cannon instead.
22) Archer placement. When inside the Antenna Mound, a Scion commander can place archers anywhere on the map....even in places inaccessible to units. Use this to your advantage, and place a few archers wayyy up over your enemy's recycler. They'll never know what hit em, til the howitzers come rainin' down.
23) Multi-MDM. Remember back in the good ol BZ1 days when the Ctrl-Key would allow you to fire 5 MDMs and detonate each individually? If you hold down the mouse button, you can launch 4 MDMs in this game, and when you click, they all blow up at once. This is much easier than letting the mortars bounce to their target, no more waiting! Just fire 4 and detonate all at once.
24) Multi Tech-tree. You ever wish you had two Service stations? Two Dowers? Order a builder to make one in one spot, then order another to make another one BEFORE the origianl builder begins construction. If you make scrap fast enough, you can make as many dowers as you have builders, and for the Scions, this is helpful because of the Dower's versatility of placement. Of course, having two factories never hurt, but just make it so the enemy has to kill more stuff to get to you. Two factories DOES NOT increase production :(
25) The Decoy Game. Play the decoy game! As scion, have a pilot engage a turret/pack of turrets (ISDF or Scion) and swerve like crazy to attract fire but avoid as much damage as he can. Meanwhile, you come up behind the turrets and Plasma Stream 'em to death. This game also works with warriors and ISDF gun towers. Have one pilot have sonic blast and the other arc, the decoy morphs and uses Sonic Wave to attract and deflect the fire, then the one with arc morphs, gets in close, and finishes it while it fires (and misses) the Warrior with sonic blast. Very helpful even against MANY gun towers, works with maulers, too.
26) Turret-in-the-scav. Learned from a few friends of mine and insisted I know the trick. Place a turret right on a scrap pool and if you did it correctly it falls into the pool, unseen. When a scav is deployed on top, the turret hides inside the scav and fires on any approaching enemy units! If the enemy makes a scav there, whenever they go near the scav, they get shot! If it is in yours, then any enemy units that try to approach the scav will get shot! The turret does not shoot the scav, but you must kill the scav before you get to the turret. A neat thing about this trick is the turret does not show up on radar so when the scav IS killed from the outside, the turret plops covertly back into the pool awaiting another sap to place a scav on it. This works especially well in 4 player games...you can keep scrap pools to yourself!
27) Jammer-Spires. A jammer can be built on the ground at a defensive position to block out enemy radar contacts...but...you also can build a spire right overtop of it. The result? A jammer-spire. The spire's control interface is blocked (so the buggers can no longer drive in there) and sometimes the jammer prevents Geo-thermal Lung bashing, too (Trick #12). And, of course, it saves space as well as offers protection to the spire. You have to kill the jammer first before you can kill the spire.
28) Auto-levelling. It has been known that you can do hovering tricks making your craft stay still in the air over a turret as you fire down on it, unable to return fire. To perform this trick, simply turn autoleveling off. Autolevelling automatically adjusts the vehicle's centre of gravity so it is upward-facing. The autolevelling allows you to fire in a full sphere around you when you are in the air. Try it some time and you can do back-flips, and if you try to reverse, you can "hang" in the air above a turret to fire on it. This technique takes some getting used to and practice to perform correctly. Beware, this option cannot be toggled in-game! Also, dogfighting is a lot tougher when this option is turned off as well. Dont say I didnt warn you!
29) Sonic Slice. Approach a Guard Tower with a scion warrior equipped with Sonic blast. Stop about 150m away from the tower and point your reticle RIGHT in the barrel of the GT that is facing you. Fire away. The shots will be deflected, and the other barrel will always miss. You can kill a GT taking little to no damage this way, but you are open to sniping! Version 1.2 GT's fire alternate barrel shots, so this trick is useless in version 1.2.
30) The funnest (sp?) trick in the world! Arm yourself with an Arc Mauler and have about 10 healers around you. Destroy the enemy's recycler, but leave the kiln/factory alive. Aim the arc streams right where the enemy respawns and order your healers to heal you while you fire. Hold down that fire, and watch the arc streams home in on infantry as they respawn. This is a total blast! Magicide and I got upwards to 80 kills in 5 minutes just doing this! Insulting and painful deaths, and the arc hits every time.
31) Evil turret hiding. Try hiding turrets underwater. With 1.2, turrets can aim higher than before, so when a tank drives over a pool of water, the turret fires up at it, and you can get a few kills before they realize what is going on! Try placing turrets in corners people dont look at often, or on top of cliffs overloking a choke point. Turrets, in the right places, can be tiny gods. A more evil variation of this trick involves placing a turret, then building a Power plant (or any building) over it. The turret ires safely out, but the plant has to be killed first before the turret becomes vulnerable.
32) High-potency Mortar-lobbing. With the Auto-leveling turned off, your tank does not have to keep its canopy pointed up.. thus you can tilt your tank or do flips etc. when it is turned off. Try this: take a normal 170m range mortar and go about 200m away from your target. Jump in the air and pull back causing the tank's reticle to fly upwards. Fire mortar. Using auto-levelling off you can tip your tank 45 degrees up achieving the absolute maximum range of a mortar by tipping your tank.
33) Long-range targeting. If you want to get a permanent radar lock on something, no matter where it is on Radar, select it with your target key (default "t") and then tell your commander and other pilots to "Attack my target". The target leaves your radar, but on their radar, you can permanently see the location of whatever it is they targetted. This is useful for commander's reconnaisance, or to detect sneak attacks. Note that when the targetted pilot changes ships, or it is destroyed, the lock must be re-established somehow.
34) Permanent Site Cam. There are a few ways to get a permanent site camera in this game, which will allow you to run BZ faster on low-memory computers or on a network that just cant handle it. One way is to get the BZERC Utility belt, which allows you to toggle wireframing in-game (I forget where it is..), and the other is simply to allow your ship to die while site cam is turned on. The cam doesnt turn off after you die, thus you get permanent view. When you order the construction of a building, however, this is disabled, so the use of this trick goes sorely to pilots or DM'ers.
Click the nuke to go home
