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Winged Warriors

Written by Isnagov

1. Control the Power Weapons
    Power weapon control involves more than just picking up and fighting over rockets and snipe the whole game. Proper power weapon control involves two necessary aspects. Reaquisition and Protection. Reaquisition involves going back and picking up the weapon at each instance of re-spawn. Because of this knowing when to drop the weapons and knowing when they will re-spawn is important. You don't want to waste any time waiting on them, getting killed, and losing control of the weapon. Protection of the weapons is also a necessary aspect of power weapon control. You must not let the opposing team gain control of the power weapons, so you must evade closing opponents who have a momentary advantage over you, and you must ignore combat situations that would jeopardize your control of that weapon. These two aspects of power weapon control are inherent and necessary. If you reacquire weapons but constantly wander into a shotgun with your sniper, you are not protecting; likewise, if you defend your power weapon to the death but then drop it randomly when its spent and forget when and where it is reappearing, you are not reacquiring. You must both reacquire and protect your power weapons, otherwise you are simply using power weapons you are not controlling them.

2. Control the Map
    Map control is a little more complicated, and requires more than just one person thinking on their feet to maintain. This is one of the more selfless functions of a well-oiled team because it always asks someone to do the unglamorous thing and guard a door the whole round, or wander around behind portal the whole time; but these jobs are important if you want to dominate during a match.

    Map control thrives on the practices of wary observation and anticipation. Players must remember where the opposition needs to be to kill them, where the opposition needs to advance their objective, and where the opposition will spawn after they were just killed. If you remember these types of things you will understand where the opposition will be moving and preparing; and through such information, red team will be able to control the map by being where they should be with a position advantage before blue team knows that's where they are going.

    So, after maintaining those senses of observation and anticipation you can do two very practical things. First, you must control spaces from outside their boundaries. This usually goes against our basic instinct as players, because our first reaction is to stand close to the objective and defend, or stay close to our teammate and compliment their advance but that idea is fundamentally unsound. By defending an area outside of its boundaries and avenues of approach you are able to view all the elements threatening that area. An example may help:

Winged Warriors Halo 3 Spartan    When playing CTF 1 Flag on Warlock, you are on defense; your obvious function is to keep others from snagging your flag. Standing in your base and watching people lob grenades into your face while they BR you from the cross platforms is fruitless, you have zero avenues of quick escape and counter-motion because you are boxed in by your surroundings, but more importantly you can only see out into the immediate attack area. A better approach to base defense is to stand on one of the green or yellow base front platforms and watch your opponents coming through either portal or across the center, often, you are even able to BR them before they can make it out of their own base area (because you are viewing both bases from the same distance). From here also, if you are killed as they leave their base, you may re-spawn in a defensive position closer to the flag before they have even have made it across to your objective.

    So, always look for a way to defend and compliment from a distance, it allows you to control more of the map and be more aware of the overall flow of each encounter as it progresses.

    The second important aspect of map control is to shutdown certain areas so that you channel the opposition into predictable patterns and routes. The appropriate example of this is having the rockets or combo guard the portal behind your base on Beaver Creek. After several deaths, the opposition will stop attempting to access your area through the portal, so now your team can always know that they will be approaching from the front of the base, this makes it a much easier task to kill or approach their base because you are removing options for their team, and choices that your team has to make during combat. Look for these choke points on each map and control them. Understand how each place in each map is used and can be used and close off the more easily closed routes to improve your chances of channeling the opposition's attacks. So, when controlling the map, remember to control from without, and to shut down the choke points to reduce the oppositions attack routes.

3. Control Opposing Team Spawn
    When we kill them the opposition re-spawns, it's a matter we can't ignore, and can't deny. So, whenever they spawn we have to kill them again, and as annoying as this is, there are things we can do to control where they spawn, and therefore control better our chances of killing them again. There are two basic ways to control spawn and they are specific to their game types. In skirmish, every player spawns in his or her base. Always. The only exceptions when you are in their base. When you are in their base they spawn outside of it, sometimes very far outside of it. So, the way to control the oppositions spawn to your advantage on skirmish is to control whether they spawn in their base or out of their base. An illustration would be CTF on Warlock. Two players attack the opposition base to capture the flag. You kill the two defenders but one of you dies. So, you advance to the actual base/flag area. At this point, you should arrange yourself within the base, so that the opposition will spawn outside of their base, and are forced to attack from farther away, thus giving your teammates a chance to arrive while you still maintain control of the base. Let's assume that this is successful and your teammate comes and steals the flag. Now, it is better for you to stand outside the base general area, that way the opposition spawns in their base and farther away from where your flag carrier is running. So, in this way you can subtly influence the flow of battle to your advantage in skirmish. In slayer it is much simpler. Control the four main areas of spawn where the player can take advantage of cover, or multiple movement routes, that way when they do spawn it will be in an exposed and useless place. For example, on Ascension, have a man at banshee spawn, a man at small tower, a man above rocket spawn and a man above big tower snipe. This way they will spawn in big tower, in the center, or below the man above big tower snipe. Try to think of a way that a team member man spawning isn't at a disadvantage either immediately, or in the very near future. Spawn control is a very infrequently practiced concept, I feel, but it can add to the overall KtD ratio.

Isnagov

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