Work in progress: P1

Hey.

This is something that I've been working on for quite some time. It's purely my opinion on how I'd want my team to play / how I play when I'm a whale.
Basically it's how I see how there should be fluent movement between the whales (classic way of seeing it would be offensive and defensive whale) as well as rest of the lot when defending.

I'd want some discussion on this, what you guys think?

-J

Plane 1 (P1)

tl;dr at the bottom.

My mentality here is this: we can miss an infinite amount of goals but our defense can fail only six times. Thus we should have at all times someone covering the goal as long as the enemy is in range of shooting the ball in.

There are two types of P1 players, designated P1 and situational P1. The designated P1s job is to *always be between the ball and our goal. The best plane for this is Explodet because of its range and health. This would generally be considered as a defensive whale.

The situational P1 steps in when our designated P1 either dies, gets horribly out of position or starts to smoke with no hp laying around. Being a situational P1 means that you will stand in for the designated P1 until someone else replaces you (another situational or the designated).
In case there are two equally viable options for P1 (eg 2 Loopies right next to each other), the one with more health should stay back.

Order of importance for situational P1: the other whale > loopies = randa > bomber > bip
While taking in account: the guy who is closest to the goal and/or has the most health and where the ball is (continued in next post)

What this means is that if you are the only player alive or you don't know whether there is anyone behind you, you must take the defensive stance. If you are spawning, you should always take the defensive route, fly towards our goal and then turn towards the ball.

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If the ball is in our area, the designated P1 should always take the shortest route to our goal after spawning, regardless of who has the ball.
If 2 or more players spawn at the same time and start to race to our goal, the fastest plane should go for the block while others concentrate on killing the enemy ball carrier.
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The most important thing as a P1 is to constantly be aware of the balls location and the ownership of the ball. P1 must also be able to anticipate the ball movement and be able to react to whatever happens to the ball. This means that the P1 must keep some distance between them self and the ball carrier so that they have time and space to react to ball movement.

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My rule of thumb has always been that there has to be at least one obstacle between me and the ball carrier.
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If our ball carrier dies, there are three possible scenarios:
1) We recover the ball and maintain control
2) The enemy picks the ball and gains control
3) The ball dies

The worst case of scenario here would be that the enemy picks up the ball, shoots the ball and scores a goal. P1 must always consider this as an option and be ready to cover that shot.
P1 must also be ready to catch the ball in case the enemy tries to clear the ball towards our side or if we need to play the ball backwards.

Because P1 should always be between our goal and the ball, it should *never carry the ball. If you get the ball as P1, you should get rid of it as soon as possible but with the emphasis on doing it safely. If possible, slow down and let someone behind you get past. If you do have to carry the ball yourself and there is someone well behind you, then they should become P1 for the time being.

tl;dr:

Like Jim always says, someone stay back and block teh goal

-J

Order explained: The second whale is the obvious since it's basically the same as the regular P1. Loopy and randa are marked as equal since imo their strengths and weaknesses are equally matched: loopy has emp, easy to hit projectile and a lot of mobility, randa has a lot of burst damage and mobility. Bomber has a lot of stopping power but is punished harsly if it misses.
Bip has the smallest cone of fire. I see it as the worst plane to defend with if you end up face 2 face in a 1v1 since it has no room for error.

Distance from goal slightly changes the order. If you need to cover a lot of possible passing/clearing ground, you need a lot of mobility --> lights.
If you are close to goal (ball on our side), you need to be able to take some hits and clear out faster --> whales.

-J

re: spawning at the same time on defense

i think that having people adjust to individual situations and instinctively knowing "ok, i'm the slightly slower plane, i need to kill the carrier instead of blocking the goal" is ideal, but the practicality of applying it in an altitude game is probably pretty unlikely considering how differently every player views the game. a band-aid solution would be to just have assigned roles when situations like that occur, i.e hula will always go for the block and i will always go for the kill, or vice versa. it'll be suboptimal in the sense that there will be many times when the roles should have been swapped, but it's easier to not have to make those decisions on the fly and prevents overlap.

also are we planning on using mumble during the season? being able to vocally communicate who is alive on defense is critical unless you instinctively know without having to press tab, and being able to say these things instantly eliminates a lot of need of designed structure and unnecessarily going back on defense if you're unsure if your whale is alive. even if members don't have mics or don't like talking or whatever, just having them in the channel is useful as we could have the sub communicate whale positions and powerups etc in the worst case.

and since we're on the subject of hypothetical optimal play, we should probably design some kind of hierarchy for powerup taking for starts so people don't waste time going back for powerups that they won't be getting. imo:
shields - bip>emp>randa>bomber>acid>whale for taking shields on offense and defense
missiles - randa>all
walls - pretty much just the randa and whale should take for defense, randa>bip>loopy>heavies for offense
health - should have 1 designated light to go clear the hp for a better powerup during starts

it hasn't been a big problem at all during our scrims (mssv and i have both gone for the same powerup a few times, but i usually defer to him) but it should probably be something that's cleared up before real sl games

I love the P1 strat. Like SSD said it may get confusing with the whole "who covers now?" if P1 dies, but respawn is fairly quick to cover that anyway.

Too many times (and I KNOW ladder is a loose example) I'm in ladder games and the team loses FAST because no one covers the goal. I always liken it to real football (REAL football) in that a team without a goalkeeper would get laughed off the pitch. Even when the other team is on offense, people love ignoring our own goal. Thankfully though vlix isn't so stupid.

Also it was briefly mentioned earlier but knowing who block the goal and who kills the carrier is also really important if we are assuming P1 is dead and we are under significant threat. For this reason, a solution is definitely needed here. It's a difficult call. Put the guy with the biggest HP blocking the goal? But some randas/carriers don't shoot (the fools). Okay the one with best dps goes for the kills?