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Weapons in Duel
As anticipated in the previous page, the lack of weapons plays a major role in duel. Here is a description of the three main weapons, and why they are important in duel. Notice that, this is a "situational" topic, i.e. everything we are discussing in practice depends on the situation in game, and therefore there is an intrinsic limit to how much a guide can do. With effort, one can explain in great detail a particular situation, but the requirement is that the reader takes these concepts and tries to internalize them, applying the same kind of analysis to other situations in game.
So, think of duel as there are 3 main weapons (rocket, rail and lightinggun) - which have the most impact on how you should think of the game - plus other 2 (shotgun and plasma) - which become relevant in a few situations. Machinegun has its own use in a few maps and specific situations, and we can leave it out the discussion for now.
The three main weapons can be considered as follows:
Now, these are the three main weapons because the union of the "areas of use" (i.e. where they dominate) pretty much fills up all space in all duel maps.
A few additions:
Now, here is where it gets hard. There three main situations where considering weapons is very important.
First, the match start. When you spawn for the first time, you will have a limited number of weapons you can get before engaging with your opponent. For a CA player, this is usually the first source of mistakes. If you know that your opponent has lg and you don't, you simply cannot go to an open area, say the central area in Lostworld. Similarly, if you have rail and your opponent does not, it may make sense to go in the open areas, or long corridors, and either force your opponent away or damage him.
The second situation is when you kill your opponent (or get killed). As a beginner, you probably don't know how the spawn system works, but over time you will learn it. Once you sort of know where he spawned, you should make a quick assessment that includes these kind of questions:
The third situation is toward the end of the match, when one player has to flee and kill the clock. If you are the player chasing, you should prevent your opponent to grab the three main weapons. The reason is, you will have to cut corners (figuratively and practically) in order to catch him, and if he has all weapons, he could punish you too much and kill any hope of a comeback. It can be tricky as you need to find an opponent who is hiding, while prevent him to grab weapons and maintain a stack big enough. Similarly, if you are the one being chased, you want to balance between getting weapons, some stack, and taking safer positions, i.e. positions where you can kill the clock for as much time as possible and then easily escape when you spot/hear the opponent coming.
The main reason these things are hard is that often decisions have to be taken on the spot, and picking the wrong ones may have drastic consequences. In reality, it's mostly a matter of experience (that makes you react properly) and planning (predicting the possible outcomes, having plans for all of them).
Dealing with Items
As discussed, there are no items in CA. Learning how to deal with them is quite important.
The first observation is that to pick up items you need to step on them. As items may be in an exposed location, you have to expose yourself to pick an item up. Now, since maps are "static", i.e. their geometry and items placement is fixed (with the exception of weapon dropped when dying), there is a lot one can learn just loading a map and looking around.
For each item (Health, Armors, Weapons), you should get familiar with where they are, and in particular, how exposed they are. A red armor in Bloodrun is quite exposed: you need to jump across the room from the shot platform or rocket/plasma jump from grenade, and the room geometry is so that there are many angles from where rail, lg, or rocket can be used to do damage you.
Knowing these angles is the first step! You can either play and find out while dueling, or you can load the map in practice mode, and simply go everywhere and think how you would damage an opponent jumping for red. You should consider which places are better than others, in terms of how hard the shot is and how much damage you risk to take doing so. You can also load your own demos, look for when you get destroyed trying to pick up red, and see where the opponent was, which weapons he used, and why you had a hard time countering it (not noticing it in the first place, and not being able to return the damage). Most of the time, if your opponent can do something, so do you.
With items you always have three choices:
The second observation is that you need to know when an item is up (has spawned) in order to take it. One can simply go there and wait, but it's inefficient, and can be dangerous if the item is exposed. The ability of knowing when items are up is called item timing. There are guides out there about it (you can check this one).
However, before you enter in this world, let me write a few important forewords. There are a lot of misconceptions about item timing and its importance. The problem is, when starting playing duel, a lot of people stress the importance of it, and you can easily end up practicing that, while you could benefit much more from focusing on other stuff. A few points
Spawn System
Quite likely, your first experience with the so called "spawn control" or "spawn raping" will see you on the receiving end, which is not the nice one. You die, spawn, and immediately get damaged again. It may sound quite unfair, but Quake has a long tradition with it, and like it or not, it's part of the game. The developers of Quake Live have tried to limit this with different rules, but in the end, it's still part of the game.
The first thing you should focus on is to not do something stupid. If you spawn and the opponent is just six meters away with three rockets flying toward your face, there is little you can do. Accept it for what it is, knowing you will eventually learn how to do the same.
However, more often than not, spawn control is successful only if both players cooperate, the loosing player unintentionally. Right after you spawn there are a number of things you have to ask yourself:
Eventually, you will be interested in knowing exactly how to do spawn control, and for that you can use these interactive visualizations, but for the time being, just focus on not doing something stupid as you spawn.
Mind Aspects
Allow me an excursion to pseudo-psychology here, knowing these few paragraphs may be pure bs:
I think of CA as a right-brain activity. It's like painting, driving, cooking, etc. You develop some automation, some intuition, and go for it. You can do it at 3AM, half-drunk or high, and you can still enter the flow and and perform decently. You can play CA for hours, in a sort of trance, enjoying the feel of flying around the world using your hands.
For most players, duel is not like this. You still have the mechanics of quake underneath, for which you don't have to actively think, but there is a lot of cognitive processing going on, mostly related to planning what to do, remembering items, checking all the little things like ammo count, etc. This is much closer to numbers, reasoning, and logic, and can take quite some effort.
Hence, you need to have certain brain energy to play duel properly. Depending on your daily activities, this may be hard to have. As duel can be quite frustrating, I advise not play unless you feel rested and ready to do it the proper way.
The other aspect is the one of learning. If you jump in and pretend to play the things you know without mental effort, you will likely not improve much. The more active your brain is, which you can measure by how tired you are after a match, the more likely you are learning something.
Being brain-active has other advantages. It helps contextualizing things, giving a reason to failure and success, and eventually this has a great impact in the enjoyment of the process. You can lose ten matches in a row, but if you have a purpose and see progression you can enjoy it. Or you can rage after one minute of play, and enter a downward spiral of losing and not knowing what's wrong, which usually ends with mouse gibs flying around the room. What makes the difference is your ability to have some self-distance and being able to dominate that beast you have inside, which playing +forward CA grew inside of you, and channel it the proper way, shape it, so that a part of your brain is a few steps back from the desk, thinking what to do.
As anticipated in the previous page, the lack of weapons plays a major role in duel. Here is a description of the three main weapons, and why they are important in duel. Notice that, this is a "situational" topic, i.e. everything we are discussing in practice depends on the situation in game, and therefore there is an intrinsic limit to how much a guide can do. With effort, one can explain in great detail a particular situation, but the requirement is that the reader takes these concepts and tries to internalize them, applying the same kind of analysis to other situations in game.
So, think of duel as there are 3 main weapons (rocket, rail and lightinggun) - which have the most impact on how you should think of the game - plus other 2 (shotgun and plasma) - which become relevant in a few situations. Machinegun has its own use in a few maps and specific situations, and we can leave it out the discussion for now.
The three main weapons can be considered as follows:
- Rocket Launcher allows you to defend yourself efficiently. Duel maps are narrower than typical CA maps. This was very much true with RA3, it's true for some CA maps today, and it's false for Campgrounds (which is also a duel map, though off the official pool). Anyways, all duel maps present some sort of narrow areas where rocket is the dominant weapon, because of its knock back, its splash radius, and the quick nature of narrow fights, which make other weapons (especially LG and rail) harder to use.
- Lightinggun is extremely lethal if the opponent cannot dodge efficiently. There are mainly three kinds of areas you want to use it: anywhere open, without pillars or other elements to hide, anywhere there is water on the ground, which slows the opponent down, and anywhere the opponents may jump in the air, using a bumpad or jumping off a platform. One classical situation is the lg vs lg bull-fight. In CA this is a discipline on its own, where players measure their aim and dodge, but it only makes sense there because the starting stack is equal, and therefore it is ruled out. In duel however, stacks are almost never equal, and unless the aim/dodging of one player is massively superior, the player with larger stack will win. Assessing the stacks correctly is crucial when picking this kind of fight.
- Railgun is both defensive and offensive. In defensive play (when out of control), it can be used to stop the opponent rush thanks to its knock-back, and to do safe damage form distance to the opponent as he picks exposed items. In aggressive play (when in control), it's the perfect way to contain the opponent, as often the opponent's stack is below 80 or slightly above, and a rail would be devastating. Also, one hit will cancel most of his stack, gaining you 30 seconds or more where he will have to go back picking yellows.
Now, these are the three main weapons because the union of the "areas of use" (i.e. where they dominate) pretty much fills up all space in all duel maps.
A few additions:
- Shotgun will be used as surprise weapon, close range, often as retaliation after a fight that left the survivor with little stack and his opponents spawns near shotgun. Close-range, it's generally more risky than rockets, but with the element of surprise it can be quite powerful.
- Plasmagun is extremely deadly in close range, especially in LAN, as well as when the opponent has narrow space to dodge. It's less preferable than rail or lg because of consistency, but often you see players underestimating it and paying a high price.
Now, here is where it gets hard. There three main situations where considering weapons is very important.
First, the match start. When you spawn for the first time, you will have a limited number of weapons you can get before engaging with your opponent. For a CA player, this is usually the first source of mistakes. If you know that your opponent has lg and you don't, you simply cannot go to an open area, say the central area in Lostworld. Similarly, if you have rail and your opponent does not, it may make sense to go in the open areas, or long corridors, and either force your opponent away or damage him.
The second situation is when you kill your opponent (or get killed). As a beginner, you probably don't know how the spawn system works, but over time you will learn it. Once you sort of know where he spawned, you should make a quick assessment that includes these kind of questions:
- How much stack do I have left? Is there a dangerous weapon he could pick to quickly retaliate? If yes, getting to a safe position (big items), or spamming the entrance where the retaliation would come from may be wise.Sometimes the answer is that you simply go for the items and make sure to stack up again, but being aware of all these options is important, as they are there both when you frag your opponent and when he fragged you. Knowing what the opponent can do is the first step to make sure he does not do it.
- Can I control my opponent options with good position? A good example is Aerowalk, where you can be at the red armor stairs, and control the options of the opponent by having the rail out and looking out the door, railing him if he goes to rocket or rail, or if he goes to the yellow. One rail off spawn often means a frag in the near future.
- Can I setup a trap near the weapon my opponent is likely to go for?
The third situation is toward the end of the match, when one player has to flee and kill the clock. If you are the player chasing, you should prevent your opponent to grab the three main weapons. The reason is, you will have to cut corners (figuratively and practically) in order to catch him, and if he has all weapons, he could punish you too much and kill any hope of a comeback. It can be tricky as you need to find an opponent who is hiding, while prevent him to grab weapons and maintain a stack big enough. Similarly, if you are the one being chased, you want to balance between getting weapons, some stack, and taking safer positions, i.e. positions where you can kill the clock for as much time as possible and then easily escape when you spot/hear the opponent coming.
The main reason these things are hard is that often decisions have to be taken on the spot, and picking the wrong ones may have drastic consequences. In reality, it's mostly a matter of experience (that makes you react properly) and planning (predicting the possible outcomes, having plans for all of them).
Dealing with Items
As discussed, there are no items in CA. Learning how to deal with them is quite important.
The first observation is that to pick up items you need to step on them. As items may be in an exposed location, you have to expose yourself to pick an item up. Now, since maps are "static", i.e. their geometry and items placement is fixed (with the exception of weapon dropped when dying), there is a lot one can learn just loading a map and looking around.
For each item (Health, Armors, Weapons), you should get familiar with where they are, and in particular, how exposed they are. A red armor in Bloodrun is quite exposed: you need to jump across the room from the shot platform or rocket/plasma jump from grenade, and the room geometry is so that there are many angles from where rail, lg, or rocket can be used to do damage you.
Knowing these angles is the first step! You can either play and find out while dueling, or you can load the map in practice mode, and simply go everywhere and think how you would damage an opponent jumping for red. You should consider which places are better than others, in terms of how hard the shot is and how much damage you risk to take doing so. You can also load your own demos, look for when you get destroyed trying to pick up red, and see where the opponent was, which weapons he used, and why you had a hard time countering it (not noticing it in the first place, and not being able to return the damage). Most of the time, if your opponent can do something, so do you.
With items you always have three choices:
- You can try to pick them up. Learning when this is safe to do is not simple. Often times, you can prevent damage from the opponent spamming grenades or other projectiles to scare him away. But in general, you can be as confident as your awareness of the opponent's position. If you have no idea where he is, be extra careful; as he is probably somewhere near, ready to punish you.
- You can use them to damage your opponent. You go on a safe location, and wait for the opponent to make the jump, or come out the corner.
- You can simply ignore them, i.e. stay away from that side of the map. If an item is irrelevant given the situation, you can leave it up, and possibly come back later. Say that you are controlling both mega and red in Bloodrun. You may decide that the yellow armor in the plasma room is not so important for you. However, you should be aware that the item is there and may be potentially be picked by your opponent on a regular basis (in this case, that's about 100 points each minute!).
The second observation is that you need to know when an item is up (has spawned) in order to take it. One can simply go there and wait, but it's inefficient, and can be dangerous if the item is exposed. The ability of knowing when items are up is called item timing. There are guides out there about it (you can check this one).
However, before you enter in this world, let me write a few important forewords. There are a lot of misconceptions about item timing and its importance. The problem is, when starting playing duel, a lot of people stress the importance of it, and you can easily end up practicing that, while you could benefit much more from focusing on other stuff. A few points
- Armors spawn quite frequently (25 seconds), and if you pick two of them in one order, that order will not change. This can help quite a lot, as you just need to remember the first one, and then keep the cycle. Health takes a bit longer to spawn (35 seconds), which makes timing both health (mega) and armors a bit more complicated, as at a certain point they may spawn at the same time, or the order may change.* If you find extremely easy to add +25 and +35 to the clock and remembering the time of at least two items over 10 min of play, go for it. But if you cannot, don't bother with it. You just started playing, and you don't want to kill your motivation with such a thing.
- Back in the days nobody timed with the clock. It was all by feeling, and still you had much better players than others. This means, that timing is not the only aspect of the game that matters, and by experience I can tell you it's definitely not the most fun one to learn. So, forget about timing with the clock for now.*
- Instead, do something much simpler, which is cycling a few items by feeling. Just try to remember the order in which items are spawning (this red, then this yellow, than that yellow), and focus on trying to always take a few, based on whatever opportunity you have. If you are the one fragging, focus on mega and red armor, if you are being fragged, focus on yellows.
- If you are fragged by a more stacked opponent, refrain from blaming your lack of timing. Did you have the right weapon out? Did you expose yourself in a stupid way? Could you have prevented the fight? These questions may lead you to fix more important problems than your lack of proper timing.
Spawn System
Quite likely, your first experience with the so called "spawn control" or "spawn raping" will see you on the receiving end, which is not the nice one. You die, spawn, and immediately get damaged again. It may sound quite unfair, but Quake has a long tradition with it, and like it or not, it's part of the game. The developers of Quake Live have tried to limit this with different rules, but in the end, it's still part of the game.
The first thing you should focus on is to not do something stupid. If you spawn and the opponent is just six meters away with three rockets flying toward your face, there is little you can do. Accept it for what it is, knowing you will eventually learn how to do the same.
However, more often than not, spawn control is successful only if both players cooperate, the loosing player unintentionally. Right after you spawn there are a number of things you have to ask yourself:
- Where am I? Where is my opponent?All these questions are simplified once you know the map, and have tested all sorts of spawns. You eventually learn when you have to immediately run, vs. when it's ok to linger.
- Should I immediately run away? Is this place safe?
- Can I move out, or will I take a rail doing so?
Eventually, you will be interested in knowing exactly how to do spawn control, and for that you can use these interactive visualizations, but for the time being, just focus on not doing something stupid as you spawn.
Mind Aspects
Allow me an excursion to pseudo-psychology here, knowing these few paragraphs may be pure bs:
I think of CA as a right-brain activity. It's like painting, driving, cooking, etc. You develop some automation, some intuition, and go for it. You can do it at 3AM, half-drunk or high, and you can still enter the flow and and perform decently. You can play CA for hours, in a sort of trance, enjoying the feel of flying around the world using your hands.
For most players, duel is not like this. You still have the mechanics of quake underneath, for which you don't have to actively think, but there is a lot of cognitive processing going on, mostly related to planning what to do, remembering items, checking all the little things like ammo count, etc. This is much closer to numbers, reasoning, and logic, and can take quite some effort.
Hence, you need to have certain brain energy to play duel properly. Depending on your daily activities, this may be hard to have. As duel can be quite frustrating, I advise not play unless you feel rested and ready to do it the proper way.
The other aspect is the one of learning. If you jump in and pretend to play the things you know without mental effort, you will likely not improve much. The more active your brain is, which you can measure by how tired you are after a match, the more likely you are learning something.
Being brain-active has other advantages. It helps contextualizing things, giving a reason to failure and success, and eventually this has a great impact in the enjoyment of the process. You can lose ten matches in a row, but if you have a purpose and see progression you can enjoy it. Or you can rage after one minute of play, and enter a downward spiral of losing and not knowing what's wrong, which usually ends with mouse gibs flying around the room. What makes the difference is your ability to have some self-distance and being able to dominate that beast you have inside, which playing +forward CA grew inside of you, and channel it the proper way, shape it, so that a part of your brain is a few steps back from the desk, thinking what to do.