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The Vibes You Need For Frontline CLN (Or How to Ultrahot)

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2025-02-02 10:12:40

Prelude: Your Ship Is A Joke Broski

Bonjour! I’m Chereamie. This is how I like to personally approach frontline CLN, in terms of mindset and vibes. This may not work for everyone but it has worked for me. My personal frontline CLN can be found here on the Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3411618653

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Frontline CLN is, at first look, an oxymoron. The container liner, and the moorline hull itself fundamentally is not a frontline combatant. If you are within visual range of an enemy ship that is a failure state. This is what people are going to tell you. Ignore it. It is not true. In the eyes of God your ship is an abomination, but in your eyes CLN is a frontline combatant.

No matter how many times it works, no matter how proven it is, the concept of frontline CLN is ridiculous to most people. People are not going to take you seriously. You should be prepared to ignore that.

Part One: Your Team Is Life And Everyone Can See You (not Eating ♥♥♥♥)

For the opening and mid game (or actually, for as long as is necessary), treat your frontline CLN like your opponent always has tracks on it. The reality is that with any missile ship, people are going to be able to trace your salvos back to you. You’re one ship that’s 3000 points. Make a mistake early game and die without fulfilling your point value, and you doom your team.

So stick with the rest of your frontline. Stay within PD range of Ocellos, monitors, and liners - your personal missile defense, besides other ships, are decoy liners, and that is still a last-ditch emergency tool, and should be used primarily to assist your team. PD is not worth it on a CLN, so utilize your team’s missile and craft defense. Follow them around.

Your frontline generally might be playing around cover, so you can still tuck in with your frontline while still being behind cover. However, if your frontline is moving aggressively, do not be afraid to follow them. You should be more afraid of your frontline leaving you than you should be of moving aggressively with the rest of your frontline.

The minimum restores on a frontline CLN is arguably 10. I prefer 12. You are not going to die under sustained fire in 90 percent of situations. The more time the enemy team spends firing at you is more time your frontline can fire at them while remaining unscathed. In fact, if you have bowtanking modules, you can purposefully try to attract enemy fire for this specific purpose of taking strain off your frontline.

Do not be afraid to put yourself in dangerous situations if you are with the rest of your frontline.

Part Two: Your Team Has Abandoned And Disowned You And You Are Alone (not Eating ♥♥♥♥: Reprise)

You are now in a situation where you are not near any frontline ships. There’s three ways this may have come to be: You ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up, it’s late game and it’s good to split up and cap/defend caps, or you want to rely purely on staying hidden and constantly moving, which can work in specific game situations.

If you are with your frontline, it is good to follow them but it’s also alright to stay in one place for a bit if they aren’t moving too.

If you are alone, the clock is ticking. Every second you spend in one place is a second closer to death. You should always be moving on flank speed, between locations. Do not stop to plan out salvos, plot salvos, even ToT, while moving. Practice getting good at plotting ToT while moving, it is an invaluable skill.

If you are alone more likely than not you will die eventually. Your goal is to do as much damage as possible before you die. Otherwise, you can find your way back to your frontline if moving alone was not your goal.

Your frontline CLN should more likely than not be armed with a sidearm. Some people like guns. I prefer offensive S1s. If you are jumped by a sprinter, and you are alone, this is your tool to fight them. Even if you aren’t alone, and are with your frontline, sometimes you are the best tool to handle ambushing torpvettes and the like. If it is late-game, there is less assets to threaten you, and it is normal to stray from your frontline, to sit on caps or cap points with your CLN.

Part Three: You Are Not Trapped In Here With Them. They Are Trapped In Here With You (engaging The Enemy)

ANS is going to salivate at the thought of a CLN that plays in the frontline. This is because the average CLN brings around two restores (this is a guess, not an actual proven fact). If you are playing frontline CLN well people are quickly going to change the way they approach you, and realize you are the hunter instead of them.

If you are within close range of your opponent, you should not be the one panicking. Your opponent should be panicking. If anything, this is your success state. You want to be within 6-8km of the enemy, normally. If you are within sub-4km this is arguably even better. You are here to kill, not for your DC board to stay green.

If you successfully pre-position your CLN, you will be in position to tank any kind of fire. If you are within visual range of an enemy ship, even an enemy capital, they basically cannot do any meaningful damage to you unless they have torpedos or beams. You should have the intel to avoid that anyways, so you can hunt what will not immediately kill you. You still also have the DC and modules to tank a beam to the face anyways, so it’s not like you can’t hunt beams.

In knifefighting range (say, sub-4km), you are minimizing the amount of time your opponent has to softkill. Their active decoys will achieve less separation from their ship allowing you to plot to avoid them. They cannot separate from chaff in time. Oftentimes they cannot allstop to counter wake/thermal validation in time. If they do allstop, you can plot your salvos close enough to your target that when they reach the end of their plotting, they are close enough to the target to avoid seeking onto anything else.

A lot of my advice in Part One pertains to playing carefully. But this is a guide about vibes. Feel out how you should play. Sometimes the vibes are right and the correct way to play is like you are invincible.

Part Four: Wake/Thermval Or Bust, And Being A ♥♥♥♥♥ To The Enemy Team (not Doing Less Than 10k Damage)

Frontline CLN does not work well with SAH unless the SAH is on offensive S1s. SAH requires offset illuminators. SAH requires careful micro and planning, with methodical salvos that you watch and wait to hit before you move onto the next one. That is not how you play frontline CLN. A frontline CLN should be wakeval. I use thermval for the pure ease of use.

You want to utilize everything in your toolbox to negate active decoys. As mentioned earlier, being in knifefighting range can be good to negate softkill but you can’t constantly put yourself in these situations and the reality is that a lot of your containering will be done from around 6-10km range.

One of the biggest advantages you have in a frontline CLN as opposed to a backline CLN is the time you have for salvos to reach your target. You are so close to the enemy that you can constantly pressure them, salvo after salvo. Too far away? Just move closer.

Use the terrain to your advantage. You have a huge opportunity if your opponent is hiding behind a rock or the like. Plot your containers so they curve around the rock and are only spotted last moment, giving minimal reaction time. In general you should hide your salvos with terrain. It’s also really useful to request your teammates to jam your target for you. In general, frontline CLN, and CLN in general, is a fleet that only works if you cooperate with your team. You are here to decide fights, not start them. But someone has to start and draw out that fight for you to decide it.

On paper, you are trivially softkilled. Just press allstop, pop an active decoy, and watch as containers sail by. In practice, playing against a CLN is hell. Your job is to maximize the amount of softkill steps required by your target. In general, your job is to make your opponent have to pay much more attention to their fleet and tax heavily on their mistakes.

Against a cap fleet, you should be picking off their targets one by one. Their attention is spread across multiple ships and you are going to slip through eventually.

Against frontline, forcing allstop means they cannot dodge anymore, and this is most useful against light cruisers which utilize lateral dodging. With larger frontline ships, such as CH and BB, they will easily be picked off by you if they are alone, so they will have to ball to counter you with an enhanced PD/softkill net. Use this to your advantage. Don't fire into a net you cannot penetrate. Focus on light assets and dominate the cap war, forcing the ball to split up and let you pick them off one by one.

Plan your salvos carefully, and a player which does not have a lot of active decoys will need to ration them. They will run out eventually.

You are there to make your enemy’s life a living hell, and eventually force them to make a decision in which neither outcome is a win for them. That, or you wait until they finally slip up.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3417865144

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