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Advanced Tactical Battle Guide

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2023-10-19 10:14:33

1.Introduction

Hello everyone, this guide is meant to cover some of the most useful, widely-employed tactics involved in PVP battle. It is not a complete of what-to-do and what-not-to-do book, and it does not interfere with your personal play style or fleet choice. It is simply a collection of tips that sorted by timeline. The “advanced” means most part of the guide is not included in the tutorial, and you really need at least several weeks of experience to fully understand it.

2.Even Before Enter The Game...

You really shouldn’t neglect this phase. Almost every guide and tutorial starts after you spawn your ships or at least the deployment phase, with some very intuitive objectives like “cap the natural point” or “deploy behind the rock” etc, but now I’m telling you that YOU HAVE VERY IMPORTANT THING TO DO.

-Remember play styles

NebC has a relatively small community, with most mid-to-high rank PVP players recognize each other. Therefore, you may actually have a vague image of what they are playing. Seize every opportunity, whether it’s passed game experience, or conversation in lobby, in steam guide, in discord, to analyze their behavior patterns. (P.S.: This guide does ABSOLUTELY not encourage you to listen in their voice channel or streams) Choose your fleet and strategy accordingly. Someone loves playing containers? Best to avoid use BB or at least group up and share PD. Got a shuttle swarm player tends to rush? Call teammates to hide, equip small caliber guns, prepare him a big surprise. Your enemies have no idea what is your plan, and they will easily fell into an elaborated ambush and lose their whole fleet.

-Don’t forget the prefix

You can, although it’s a bit late if your team doesn’t have an intel center, tell the a players ‘ship by prefix, like “ANS” or “QAQ” something. Take 10 secs in lobby to remeber their prefixes. Be careful with high rank players, be bold against low rank players.

-Drive flares: huge information giver

Now this is something that actually worth a whole guide to talk about, most players know this, but very few are consciously doing information collection. What’s worse, I’ve met less than 3 players shared their information in my PVP experience. At the end of deployment phase, the game will play an animation which actually shows the situation on left of your first ship in the fleet. Typically, players deployed on right will spot almost everything on mid and left. (You will be spotted, too, but the chance they actually notice is very slim) You can take this chance to observe drive flares, usually an experienced player can somehow tell their type and numbers. The larger the ship is, the more shiny the flame. Most people are obsessed to put their ships in a plan or follow certain angle, so by observe the position you can tell if the ship are in a formation or not. Lastly you can combine numbers and positional information to guess the type: any rational player won’t buy 4 CLs, so a formation of 4 ships is usually DDs; a formation of 3 with large flame at center is very likely a CH plus 2 FFs. It’s bit tricky to identify many flares in just a few seconds with 100% accuracy, as the author I can tell you just a half hour ago I misinterpreted 2 BBs as CHs, spotted 3 CLs with 2 FFLs and reported “a CL and several FFLS”, so if you can, consider a screen shot or take on photo on your phone. The most important thing is to share information with your teammates, your teammates will thank you for avoid a battle they can’t win.

3.Contact And Identification

If you have correctly followed the previous step, you would probably gain a huge advantage upon your enemies. This is your time to shine. Yep, you can tell a players' level at this phase.

-Cap

THE VERY VERY FIRST THING IS TO CAP. Hit flank on your capper. The quicker it gets on the point, the less likely it will be exposed. Besides it ensures a small advantage on points. Do everything possible to preserve your fragile cappers, things you can and you should do includes: periodically switch on/off the COM and radar to reduce RCS, maneuver if you are in the point (we’ll talk about it later), prefire decoys for possible missile threat, and to use thrusts not engines to avoid wake guidance.

-Set formation to “true”

Why set heading to “true”? This is because when your leading ship turns, all the other ships need to traverse typically several hundred meters to arrive on their “relative” position, thus reduce the speed of the whole formation. We will also see this will create chaos at close range combat. Also a tricky thing to notice: at many maps, the position of the formation will not be the same in the fleet editor in "true" configuration. However the upper and down will remain the same.

-Set heading and rolling(especially true for gun CL, CH, BB, LN)

This is the second thing in this guide that worth another guide to talk about. Before explain why you should set heading and rolling, we would talk about two important mechanism in the game: arc of fire and damage mechanism. Guns are limited arc of fire depending its positions, and if the target isn’t in an ideal angle, you will only have very limited firepower. Your ship will start turning and rolling in order to get into an ideal angle but oh no it’s a capital so it turn at 6°/s…Catastrophe. If you want a maximal firepower and reduce your ship’s reaction time, it is suggested to put your heading at 3/9 o’clock and preroll the ship to an ideal angle (typical configuration for BB, LN, sometimes for CH and CL) . Once you’ve done the configuration for the leader, all the other ship in the formation will follow the same. Great, until you meet enemy and they start punching you hard. The previous configuration, although it maximizes the firepower, exposes the huge side profile to the enemy with limited angle of attack. So what you need to do now is return to what we called “bow tanking” configuration, that is, point the heading towards enemy (typical configuration for CL, sometimes for CH and BB) . Now you have a much smaller cross section, much harder to hit. Even if you are hit, the shell would (if you build the ship properly) penetrates less important or reinforced components at front, reduce its penetration by ship’s interior armor, and finally it will result a much smaller damage on key components. “OK I get it, but what’s all the talking about arc of fire talking before?” Well, you have to balance between several solutions. For longer CLs, bow tanking is essentially its life. So a regular solution is, you put an Omni-directional jammer or VLS or something on the tail mount and you won’t need to worry about its arc any longer. For CH and BB’s, once you decide to bow tanking you lose basically 1/3-1/4 of whole fire power, but if you are not bow tanking it will quite fragile, so stay flexible. For LN’s you doesn’t really have the choice, and you will really want to master this heading and rolling skill, especially when you get a fix mount (I really don’t recommend this) like mass driver or a weapon with very limited traverse angle like C60.

-RWR: another huge information giver

You really should get a huntress/spyglass with adaptive radar receiver, this is essential for your situational awareness and anti-jamming capability. If you don’t have it, you are practically blind. If you don’t get the receiver, you will still be blind countering any average-size ship with jammers. As a OSP player, having huntress + receiver and I-don’t-know-where-is-the-spotter usually means a spyglass, which is a dangerous signs for at least one fleet.

-Target identification

Now this is again an essential chapter. Basically, target identification is not simply install an IC. What you should do is to check every target manually, and identify:

>target type? You can tell a target type by its spotting range, moving speed and position.

>target weapon? Click on the contact and quit the tactical view, observe what weapon it is using.

>target condition? Is it firing or not? Is bridge’s light on? Is it moving? Remember to mark it “dead” in signal panel if it’s dead. (Very important!)

Trick: you can see the ship if friendly missiles pass it closely, even when they are not EO guided.

>target intention? Consider like your enemy: what are they doing?

It sounds simple, but it is not clear for everyone what they should do when they don’t really have anything to do. Too many commanders, even experienced ones, just skip all the information collection we’ve mentioned before, charge into the battle, bumped into a deathball, lose the fleet in minutes and just rage quit. Skillful players will share contact information at beginning, but once it’s in the heat of battle on one can possibly follow every track , not to mention identifications. If you have the time, you really need to do it.

Ideally you should check every target, or at least the targets you are facing and those large targets. Share the information with your teammates, and choose your strategy wisely.

4.Engagement

On to the battle! You have much more information than your opponents do, and you fear nothing. (This isn’t discourage you to go reverse flank speed when necessary)

-Range matters

Rule of thumb: Keep you enemy at optimal range. This range is decided by your weapon range and your opponent weapon range. Let’s take a 250mm gun liner fleet and a beam DD fleet for an example. 250mms have a range of 8000m, and they punch any non-capital real hard in that range. The beam DDs however, hits anything even harder in 6000m range. So an optimal range for liners in this case will be 6000 - 8000 meters, for DDs it’s below 6000m. The next question is how to get in the optimal range. Super simple strategy for liners: it hides behind the rock, monitor the DDs with a spotter. Once they are in range, it gets out, going reverse on flank so DDs can never get the chance to beam-the DDs will died in minutes. For DDs it’s harder, it needs to sneak into 6000m meters-if you are detected at 10km then you really should consider abort.

-Careful about movements

At macro: there are only three things are meaningful at macro. First, stay behind cover or seek cover. Two, keep the range. Three, cap. Many moves that everyone does isn’t actually justified. For instance, 95% players love to charge at a crippled capital ship. Think of it, how can a proper build possibly miss a locked capital at any given range? And why not just going to cap while keep on firing?

At micro: Pay attention to rocks. 200 meter difference on position near rock result enemy lose the fire line, a careless movement may leads a collision. (Any normal player will avoid a collision course, but did you checked EVERY ship in the formation that they are not on the collision course? Did you checked ship heading and rolling in the heat of battle? Hard one to answer.)

-Maneuvers

What? There’s more than hit flank and set MNVR at evade? YES! The dev have strengthen the setting of MNVR, nerved some engines at past, but maneuver manually is still vital, and frankly, quite easy. All you need to do is draw a course with some back-and-forth that is vertical to incoming fire. Want a permanent solution? Set the ship to orbit the target, don’t forget the orbit plane still need to be perpendicular to incoming fire.

-Dodge missiles

Every people make mistakes, especially when the missiles are fast. Anyone who had done the tutorial knows a “standard procedure”, go flank, jammer, decoy, PD, standard thing. Now, what I can to tell you is that this procedure is very questionable. Why? Well, we’ll start from the missile guidance mechanisms.

Nowadays, the cheap, mainstream guidance of S2 missiles or S2H missiles are typically Act/HOJ, Act/wake, wake/Act, Act(wake) and Arad/Act. The active radar part can be easily soft killed, and the rest part won’t exactly working if you switch something off. So personally, (man I know this is going to be controversial) I suggest you turn off radar jammer and any radar (provide you receive the missile track from other ships), just do the maneuver and chaff.

Tip 1: If you recall the previous part of how to set the heading in order to invalid the wake guidance, then any wake guided/wake validator missile should never work, so we don’t talk about it.

Tip 2: It is still somehow possible there: many PDs have an internal FC radar that CAN BE CAPTURED by Arad seekers. In this case, I don’t suggest you turn off radar and jammers.

Tip 3: Arad or HOJ doesn’t have a 3000 meter range limit for guidance of a jammer target. (Weird but extremely reasonable: how can you tell the target distance if you are jammed?) So if your ship be at 6000 meters away activate the jammer and jammed a missile flying to ship B, it will turn to ship A without considering its range.

Tip 4: You can consider a SAH seeker as an Act one. If one countermeasure is effective to Act seeker, it’s valid for SAH, too.

Of course, you will encounter COM guidance (mostly for torpedoes) and EO seekers (mostly for S3Hs and containers), too. The only countermeasure there is COM/EO jammer, although you can try radar jam the COM launch ship but typically it doesn’t work. These jammers are not target of Arad seeker, so always remember to use them.

At the end, try use personalized hotkey to reduce the reaction time. My personal bind for move is F, and R for fire decoys.

-Use correct ammunitions

This sounds easy but many people just mass it up all times. Apparently, if you use a shell whose penetration is lower that target armor value, then it wont pen unless the armor is stripped. But what if you use a shell whose penetration is slightly higher or equal to its armor’s? In practice, a 450 HE of 65 mm pen or 250 AP of 60 mm penetration would never penetrate a BB that has 58 mm armor, this is because you have to taken it’s angle into account.

Don’t use HE on any bow tanking ships, or at least change to AP later. HE shell will detonate at a random point on its flying path, and this path is limited to certain length called “penetration depth”. Let’s take a 250 HE vs a bow tanking CL for example. So yes it pens, but a its penetration depth is 25m and explosion radius is 9, which means it wont do any damage at all for all the components that locate behind 34m after bow-a CL’s length is slightly longer than 210 m, so don’t.

Use RPF and grape on FFL or FFs. The current in-game damage about RPF and grape isn’t accurate, as they will explode into 6 shrapnel each deal the description damage, so if you test it out in test range it will probably doing more damage than its potential damage.

Many OSP players plays MDs and plasmas. MDs works like a cluster of HEs that have a tremendous pen, so it’s comparatively effective to small ships, but still it can’t kill a bow tanking ship. Plasmas are support weapon, its damage value is somehow negligeable and its sole purpose is stripped the armor. The question is, if you are using 100mm plus plasmas, even if you stripped a BB’s armor, its interior armor will still be enough to stop the AP.

5.Aftermath

Oops! You get hit hard, real hard. You start wondering, do I do something wrong, or this guide is actually full of nonsense that posted by one player from opponent team? Don’t worry, we’ve prepared for this.

-You can fix the component with restores!

Lmao. Haven’t the author done tuto? Believe it or not, but you can restore a components with your restores by shift click it in the DC panel, and you really reserve 1 or 2 restore in case you lose the CIC, reactor or magazine!

(Similar story from another LT this morning: Near the game ends, he complained about he suffers badly and did nothing. I asked why cause in my view he was totally fine. He said he lost the magazine very early. I respond: “Then restore it” His answer is “Oh can you get the ammo back after the restore?”)

-Shutdown the reactor if necessary

Spend 2 seconds on a warning ship for a possible save is much smarter than stay shocked. It’s a bit shame to say but it’s a transfer that I’m struggled to make.

-If you lose every ship?

Don’t surrender, don’t quit. I’m personally against play for a unwinnable battle, but if it isn’t you can still do many thing for the team.

>why shouldn’t I surrender? Your enemy can possibly determine your ship as “destroyed” by your action, as well as some mild awareness toward what is happening. If you don’t, it will be much harder to judge the status, they may waste ammos, time, and it can potentially draw some firepower away from your teammates.

>what can I do after that?

>target identification. Your teammates simply don’t have time when they are in battle, which you have plenty. Lets do a basic report: 9031 beam BB closing, 8026 7599 gun CLs with S3hs, 1774 FFL going C, 8924 died…….

>think. This is another advantage. You are much more rational and more considerable than your teammates when you are out of battle. Sometimes they are just oblivious, and you should tell them what they need to do. Do it gently. Don’t be a jerk.

>Encourage. Yes, you are out of battle, but your teammates still do. Try create an atmosphere like “Im still there” and encourage your teammates…

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3040251712

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