COD4---A Beginner's Multiplayer Improvement Guide: part deux

In the last lesson I tried to show you how to improve a bit individually. This time I'll give a couple more hints about individual shooting, but I'll focus the majority of this blog on team play.

Here's a tip for those of you having a hard time aiming, or just finding yourselves a bit slow with your reaction time. Try using steady aim as your third perk in conjunction with either juggernaut or stopping power as your second perk. Then select a weapon with a high rate of fire like the P90, uzi or RPD/SAW and spray and pray as you come up on your victims. As long as you're aiming in their general direction and not allowing your weapon to ride up from the kickback too much, you should kill them faster than they can kill you. This method of killing does have a limited range though. If your crosshairs don't cover at least 1/3 of your opponent's body, you must aim to be a reliable shot.

Team Play-- When playing with your team, your strategy should change depending upon the gametype being played, and the roles already likely to be filled by various team members. I'll explain further by listing these styles of play by gametype.

Death Match -- In death match games, the object is to score 750 or 1000 points via kills before the enemy does. This depends on if the game is being played with 12 or less players or 13 or more. . This means you have two immediate goals...1) Kill....2) Don't die. I admit the second part is damn hard to do. COD3 is built to have people die and respawn quickly, but if you limit your deaths...within reason...you should come out on top. This doesn't mean play uber conservatively and be the tactical genious MLG competitors must be. It only means you need to know when you set up and cover a flank, when you seek the relative safety in the middle of your group, or when you should go it alone and try to flank. Those options all really depend on which weapon and loadout you are currently using. If you're a Light Machine Gunner and you find yourself in a fairly defensible position, go prone and cover that flank. You should get at least a 3 for 1 kill/death ratio if you do this before the other team knows where you are. If you're a sniper, I would suggest you find some ground in the back to middle of your team that has long, wide firing lanes for you to snipe from. If you're an assault gunner you should try and push slowly through the middle or try and go it alone and flank from the sides. And if you're using a shotty or an SMG, you should charge into the heart of darkness and face the horror so others on your team don't have to.

COD is not a slow game. You'll find fronts move quickly if your whole team loves to run into the enemy, or the enemy loves to run into you. Try guessing where the new spawn locations will be for you and the other team. That info should help you decide on your plan of action. But you better make it fast! If you don't decide in 10 seconds or less, you'll find yourself out of position.

Domination -- Domination is all about locking down spawns. Kills, deaths, who really cares? Just as long as you always know where the enemy is, you can always line guys up to feed the slaughter machine that is usually created in domination games. The best way to lock down these spawns is to take two territories and allow the other team to keep their territory and try to funnel the enemy into one of three or four preprepared kill zones. A key to this strategy working is having no one get overzealous and charge into the other team's spawn. Should you do so, you increase the liklihood a few, or even all of that team will spawn to your team's rear. Since your team isn't set up to defend your flag, or defend the middle from a rear assault, you could jeopardize the outcome of the game by running in their spawn guns blazing. Just don't do it. It is that easy to win in this gametype........If you find yourself locked in, you must mass all on one flank and push through, ignoring the middle capture point and trying to run an end-around their defenses to force yourselves to spawn closer to their flag.

Headquarters -- Headquarters is basically a mad rush to capture a territory. You must constantly change your tact in this game from pell-mell suicidal rushes when you're trying to capture an area or take away a headquarters that has already been set up, to a more conservative, camping style when you have already established a headquarters. It is helpful to change your loadouts often in this gametype. If you find your team is having no problem at all capturing headquarters, but can't defend one for more than 10 seconds, try switching to a LMG with claymores so you can lie in wait watching one direction and have the claymores watch your back. If you find yourself losing out on getting headquarters and constantly trying to dismantle the enemy's base, try switching to an SMG loadout with extreme conditioning for those quick footraces to the headquarters. Under no circumstances should anyone ever snipe in headquarters games with the exception of playing on the map Bog (and I'm leary of even letting anyone do it on that map). This is because that sniper will act as an anchor for your team's spawns, and more than 3 out of 4 times you'll find yourself spawning so far away from the new headqurters that the team will have a hard time just arriving in time to stop the other team from taking it. Another helpful hint in headquarters is when taking a virgin headquarters and after the other team has made their initial rush to stop you, pile two or three people on the headquarters to speed up the process so everyone can find a good hiding place to surprise the enemy should they arrive again. And another hint is also to have one person stay just out of range of the headquarters and rush in just as the person trying to take it dies. There is a split second where your time accrued in the capture zone does not disappear even though no one is in it. Use that time to dash in and take over where your teammate left off.

Sabotage -- This gametype is a lot like search and destroy but with infinite lives. The one difference between it and the other gametypes listed above is that instead of respawning whenever you press that X button, you're now on a group respawn. 10 seconds from the point the first person on your team died, everyone who died within that 10 second span can respawn together at your initial bases. This means should one guy die, and then 7 seconds later everyone on your team buys it, press those X buttons fast so you can all respawn at the same time! In sabotage the object is to plant the bomb on the other team's arm site while defending your own. It is essentially a great big game of rugby with firearms. The best bet in this game is to have one guy run one direction early to draw fire and have the rest of the team run the other way for a quick arm. If this is successful the game won't last longer than 2 or 3 minutes. If it isn't then you could be looking at a 20 minute game at least. At the end of regulation time the game suddenly becomes a search and destroy game with only one life. If you do not have the bomb in your posession, you might as well kiss a win goodbye. Aggression is the name of this game. You do not want too many flankers. One on each side is plenty and they should always be in front of the main group. The reason being that if the other team decides to push through that flank with the bomb your main force should be able to jump right on them and nix that push. The flanker's death let's you know ahead of time which direction the main enemy force is going.

Search and Destroy -- One life, best of 7 rounds. Use your life well. Quick feet is essential here. You and the rest of your team must be in synch in order to push into one of the two territories you're given to assault. This choice is what gives the offense a slight edge. On offense you have three choices: 1.) Send all your team to one arm site and the bomb dude to the other (high risk but high reward), 2.) Send everyone to one site and try to defend the bomb guy while he plants the bomb (has about a 50/50 shot of working) or 3.) Just try to turn the game into a death match and hunt down the defenders. On defense, teams usually send two to one arm site and two to another leaving two somewhere in the middle for quick backup after the other team's destination is known. The defender's strategy is almost always one of turning the game into a death match. If they kill everyone but the final guy with the bomb, then they have a distinct advantage. They can then use the clock against the bomber forcing him to give up his hiding spot to try and arm the bomb quickly and live long enough to defend it so it blows. The Offense always has the advantage in search and destroy. They have the initiative. Once that is taken away by thinning their numbers, the defense has a better shot at winning the round.

Hardcore gametypes -- Hardcore gametypes usually have the same strategies as their regular counterparts. The differences are they should move slower, and the loadouts should be much different. This is because the weapons do much more damage...to the point where one bullet from a skorpion SMG will kill someone. This makes stopping power unnecessary, ans since running and gunning isn't on the agenda, steady aim. The best loadout to use in my opinion is UAV jammer with dead silence and a silenced weapon. This loadout helps you in a number or ways: 1.) It makes it harder to hear you if you happen to run past an enemy hiding spot and might let you get the jump on them. 2.) The UAV jammer makes their UAV's useless, and if they manage to get an air strike, so long as you're not hiding in the middle of a bunch of your guys who don't have a UAV jammer, their air strikes won't hit you. ( I like to run on teams where everyone has the UAV jammer as their second perk. 3.) The silenced weapon will still have almost the same amount of killing power as an unsilenced one, but the lack of noise will make it even harder for the other team to locate you due to the lack of the kill cam.

Hope this helps anyone who feels they need it. If you have any questions, as always, feel free to pm me with them and I will answer them every Thursday.