I have some confessions and I need some advice. I think I'm a good pub com, especially on super low pop matches. I tend to struggle when the populations grow to 5v5 and I can't rely on my team. Any less than that and I can do shit myself. Any more than that and it's likely that I have a few people that know what they are doing. I'm a reasonable guy, I don't rage when I'm playing with noobs. But my last three matches were horrible and I can't help but blame the experienced players on my teams. The first match started as a 2v2. I dropped a pretty safe forwardish rax for an engy. He build about half of it and then walked away and got killed. This was not a noob. He was not under fire until he walked away from the rax. I lost my shit. I can't understand why you would stop building a perfectly safe rax and go do something unsafe. It was made even worse by other players joining and being forced to spawn in the main rax. We were completely fucked by one player. The second was a bunch of noobs being noobs. I can't blame them. The third was a 3v3 on Palm bay. One noob spawned as an engy and happily got refs for me. The other was a relatively experienced player that went gren and moved straight for the enemy main alone. I would normally be kinda ok with this, but he was a shit gren that goofy nothing done. I even accidentally dropped a ref for him because I thought he was a engy. When I found out that he went gren, I wasn't happy. When he absolutely couldn't do shit and we lost the entire map, I lost my shit. Am I being unreasonable? Any other similar stories?
Boom tank more Also at the beginning of the round decide how much you are going to invest in the round, sometimes win/loss is either a foregone conclusion or largely irrelevant - Just live with it. Other times the board looks good and you really want to win - save your sanity for those matches and use everything in-between as practise for building placement. One good thing to practise in low population games is to passively control people's movements. I used to spend most of my time suggesting, then yelling, then pleading with people to go a certain position or take a particular route. You can usually make infantry go anywhere you like by placing armouries, and vehicles with a couple of walls. Its just like playing Lemmings.
Don't make strategies where your team has to listen to you. Let them run around, like A-z-K says, like lemmings.
Honestly, I prefer games where my team does absolutely nothing to my advantage. If anybody was wondering how I became a decent comm so quickly, its by playing those types of games over and over again. First thing to do when your team does nothing for you is decide how risky you want to be with your boomtank. In these situations, boomtanking is not optional if you want any chance at all. From there, if its a map with a decent resource rate, get a radar and you'll want to research to level 3 turrets. I research lvl 3s every time that I know I can't rely on my team for base defense - I even research it in 7v7 and above if I know that nobody on my team is likely to killspawn when I need it. Otherwise on maps with low resource rates you can only get a barracks and whichever refs are safest. To get a barracks you're going to have to rush past the enemy with your boomtank, for instance on canyon your best bet is to go to A2 (no matter what team you are on) or C1/D1 forest (if you want to be risky). BEFORE you place the rax, go into comm view and do a scan for attack orders in the area. If you see any at all, leave immediately and search for somewhere else to do this. Repeat the scan until you find a place that is suitable for your forces to go towards the enemy and unwittingly secure ground for you. Any time that there are no enemies around you, you should be building or going to where there are enemies. Any time that there ARE enemies around, depending on how risky you want to be, either run away or make sure to run a few over and then run away. And the most important point of all: when I play low pop as commander, I attempt to make contact with my team. I ask if they will go to wherever I need them to at start of round. If they don't, then I am playing a game by myself and I don't expect anything more from them. That usually keeps me from being angry - I just pretend like there are no other people on my team. Anything they do is a bonus, not a detriment. The secret is I play high population rounds like this too.
This. This right here. Once you start realizing that some rounds are going to be a pointless exercise in futility, then you can start directing the energy for those rounds to more important goals and important rounds.
Obviously you're not unreasonable, it was a 3v3 you honestly can't do much when you have so little numbers.
Holy Fuck I feel your pain. I had two guys on last night on Money, one who would constantly talk to me. I'd say GO EAST - BUILD REFINERIES IN MAIN. The guy walked up to the water and started ping ping his rifle across the water. Finally I started calling them the two stooges. Fortunately I had ScRaT on my team and he made all the difference. I researched for newbs and Scrat convinced me to change to veteran research after I go Bio Engine. Fortunately the newbs were too stupid to push a vehicle. I could get them to build shit if I started building they would come up and help - but they did little else. Scrat built all four refs north and I had to build the four south, I couldn't get them to do shit and they voice spammed me the whole game. When I talked to Scrat they thought I was talking to them. I spent too much time giving them order after order and pin pointing move positions. Fortunately Creeper joined and we overtook the newbs on the other team. Spartacus - you might have been the other COM on that match. I feel your pain. You may have had more newbs on your team. I was very frustrated the whole match and researched shit for newbs that I would not normally research. I was going to ARTY but thought the newbs would dump them and normally I won't push Arty on Money unless the other COM starts dumping arty on my base. I think Arty on money is too easy to win and cheap. Finally SIMON - aka The Guy - drove my COM vehicle into the water when I was pushing a heavy helping to get into the opponents base. I drove back to kick research and COM vehicle was gone - then YOU HAVE LOST. He quickly changed his name but I was able to get all the Steam ID's and match him to "The Guy" in the next match. I didn't ban SIMON/"The Guy" but I watched him the next match and he was obviously a very new player. He ran around randomly shooting the heavy MG without crouching. It was funny watching him rattle that thing off at the sky when another newb stood next to him that he couldn't kill and that newb didn't know to shoot him. At that point I started burning Music CD's for my wife and ripping an Empires Video. During my AFK period you butt heads started pushing "JustGoDie", "JustGoTry", "JustGoCry" and I ask myself why the fuck am I playing this game when there are plenty of great games out there ?
I don't think I have ever rage quitted while in the command seat. I always went down with the ship. But when im not, I know I have quit to spectate on several occasions because I just didn't want to play anymore.
I'm actually pretty good at this sort of thing. The problems start when the enemy team gets large/good enough to overpower me. I'm always eager to play a man down in <5v5 matches because I'm good enough at boomtanking. I often go Electrical so I can get turrets. I'm a real rapist with turrets. You drive up to a building with your right side facing it. Drop turrets on the left side behind the CV. Hop out and build them then drive off to unleash rape. One time on Forest (JGF may remember ove: ), I pinned 2 players in their rax with lvl3MGs and used lvl3MLs to kill their CV. My rage really comes from the beginning of the match. I'm forced to sit in the damn CV for ~60s and try to give noobs targets, build orders, etc. With noobs, I'm totally chill. When I see a forum regular on my team, I can't help but raise my expectations. When they defy me with their shitty choices in completely non-skill-related ways, I simply cannot tolerate them. That wasn't me. The first match was on Streets of Fire, the second was on Downfall and the third was on Palmbay. All were as NF, as per usual. The forward rax on Streets of Fire is fucking critical and not getting that for a (seemingly) frivolous reason made me rage pretty hard. The Palmbay match was horrific because BE took all of the island refs and kept us down at the main ref within 2-3 min. The gren that I talked about had zero points up until around 2-3 min into the game. I gave up before I saw that worthless SOB get a single kill.
Oh was that me? Sorry that you rage quit after seeing me die once and left the cv alone for used fetus to jump in a few minutes later. That was like my 3rd round ever trying to be a dedicated gren, sorry I wasn't perfect. edit: Used fetus was our com.
I don't really command in pubs now. People don't listen and it's just not worth my time. If I do "command", that just means sitting in CV being silent and dropping/researching shit while someone else leads. If I'm actually going to command the team, I need them to listen to me. Some people have ways of getting their team to listen to them and do what they want, but that's not really me, I don't have the patience for it. They either listen or they don't, I can't be bothered going out of my way to make them listen.
"People don't listen and it's just not worth my time." Trickster, at-least I admit when im being an egotistical jerk. I opt in regardless of team, and keep trying because it's always different. If it takes years off my life, that's my decision. Giving up because of bad experiences is what quitters do.
If it were something else then I would say sure. But this is a video game, something that is inherently designed to be fun. If you don't have fun, why wouldn't you quit? My two cents, which hilariously exchange for -20 US dollars. I owe everybody who reads this twenty dollars. You won't get it tho, it's more of a promise of twenty dollars than it is twenty actual dollars. You have twenty dollars so long as you don't actually ask for it, is what I'm trying to say.
If I play a video game I play it to have fun. Empires is no different. If I have to sit there and watch my team ignore everything I say while I'm commanding, then I'm not having fun. Any time I spend playing video games and not having fun is, ergo, a waste of time, and thus not worth it for me. I used to feel a responsibility to take the CV regardless of the circumstances, probably much like you do now. I'd take it round after round, despite desperately wanting to play as infantry for a change. But the fact is, I'm past that now and I don't really care. If I have players on my team that I want to command, that I want to lead to a win, then I'll take that seat. If not, I have no motivation to do the job anyway, and as such, would prefer to play for my own enjoyment, rather than everyone else's. Say what you like, but even now, I've still probably commanded 10 times the amount of games you have. Quite frankly, I've earned the right to take a break from it now.
No you haven't You have done it more, but certainly not 10. I was still here from 08 to now, I just didn't give a shit about the community at the time, and I had a shitty computer until 2011.
I really want to take your side, but you're making it kind of difficult. 'Earned the right'? That shouldn't even come into it. What's so hard about just saying, I don't know, "I don't enjoy it so I don't do it"? You don't have to try and sound better than the other person to get your point across. It could just be me, but you kind of come off as pretentious there. Also YAY pissing matches.
It's not about that, though I'll admit the way I've worded it makes it seem fairly pretentious. Teef is implying that I have a responsibility to command, or that any good commander has a responsibility to take that seat when he's the only one on his team available. And to some extent, he's absolutely right. If you're an active commander and you command a lot, you are fully expected to take that seat, and rightly so. Games without commanders can seriously suck. I always saw it like a term of service. You do your time doing that job, and in return, generally people will think better of you for it. You only have to look at the current line of "active and well known" players. Teef being a prime example. Regardless of how much I might be shitting on Teef's commanding ability (over a specific match) in another thread, he's commanding regularly which is a lot more than can be said for a lot of other people. Whether he's any good at it is irrelevant. Spartacus is also on-point in this thread. Sometimes, it's just not fun to command but you do it because you know if you don't, the game won't go anywhere. But after you've done that for quite a while, then I'm sorry but you've done your service and that responsibility isn't there. When you play for a limited amount of time then it's just not ok to be forced into that position. This isn't just me being a pretentious faggot, however much of a pretentious faggot I may actually be, this is a genuine thing. If I play on the same team as any of the older well known commanders, such as FN, Jephir or even fucking Spike for that matter, I just don't don't feel that they have that responsibility. Spike , as we all know, commanded every fucking game he played in nearly since we hit Steam. Now, if he plays and just wants to riflewhore, fair fucking play, I don't blame him. He's earned the right to say, you know what, I just want to have some fucking fun instead.
