Guide for new players & Gameplay/strategic questions/debates

This thread’s purposes are multiple. It serves mainly as a basic guide/FAQ for new players and to try providing complete and clear answers to people’s strategic questions, even significantly more complex ones [in posts below]. In regards to the latter especially, debating is allowed on this thread.

It is also the place that will be used for suggestions on the finished weapons/classes guides, which will be removed once dealt with to avoid clustering shit up.
If a guide is currently under constuction please use the associated draft thread to submit suggestions.

This thread may also extend itself continuously using frequently asked questions and informations/suggestions from posts below.


#[color=#55BBFF]Humans[/color]

[color=#90DDFF]Things you should absolutely know about[/color]

  1. Don’t forget to always buy an armour and a helmet before any weapon! You won’t last long otherwise and will cause massive credits waste.

  2. Crouching with no helmet makes headbites == naked body bites, so it lowers damage taken. [bug]

  3. Crouching with a helmet makes headbites == naked body bites, so more damage. Don’t do it. [bug]

  4. Don’t sit right behind someone in halls, especially tight ones, so they can move out or dodge without being blocked.

  5. You should try to avoid spamming your weapons. It usually ends up handicapping your own team more than the aliens, via teamkill, pushing them around with lucis, etc.

  6. Don’t use AoE (area of effect) weapons inside of base. At all (okay, unless you know your shit, that isn’t the case of most newcomers, and even then it is risky). This includes luci cannon, flamer and to a way lesser extent, chaingun against smaller aliens running on structures.

  7. Be careful when shooting over RC as its hitbox is taller than the model, resulting in shooting the RC if you aren’t positioned high or far enough.

  8. You might see humans jumping on top of eachother. This is an efficient method to disallow aliens from headbiting, but remember the helmet rules. Note that crouching under someone also effectively prevents you from dancing or dodging hits.

  9. If you don’t have a radar (helmet), make sure to check every corner for hidden aliens if you are in the front line. If the front liner didn’t check, make sure to do it yourself quickly and continue following them.

  10. There will be a guide on dodging, but for now, I advise you to watch good humans closely and pay attention to their movements.

  11. Until the building guide is done, watch other, good, players do it before attempting to build. And know that buildables’ line of sight is blocked by other buildables.


#[color=DD0000]Aliens[/color]

[color=#FFAAAA]Things you should absolutely know about[/color]

  1. Dretch bites automatically when close enough to the target. Aim at about 70-85 degrees up to hit the head easily from the floor.

  2. Aiming at heads gives an enormous boost in damages. If you want to make sure you hit the head, aim at the human’s hair or very slightly above it.

  3. Wallwalk might be hard to use at the beginning but is absolutely mandatory to learn. Stick to only the walls in the beginning and start going actively from the ceiling to the wall etc. when dodging as you progress and feel more confident. Wallwalk is great for dodging, picking headbites, and the best solution to blocking your team. Avoid staying on the floor too much, or atleast not in the middle of the halls.

  4. If you are going to use the floor, avoid straight lines at all cost or you will simply be a walking kill. Instead, wiggle around left-right, etc. Also avoid being in the air for extended periods of time (jumping, too often, and/or without advanced techniques such as strafe/directional jumps) since it makes your movement easy to predict. Fast jumps from the bottom of a wall to the floor for example, work great. Again, be careful about blocking your team.

  5. BattleGranger is the term used for Adv. Grangers (regular ones can’t even fight and will be denybuilt) fighting humans offensively. If you plan to use this class in fights you need to be aware it is extremely weak and blocks a lot, that most people may try to denybuild you or kick you, and that you are likely to feed or be a wasted team spot. However, experienced players may use it every now and then as a support, to slow down enemies movement with its spit. There is also nothing wrong with defending your base as a granger, but please step away when big aliens try to help. [color=2020AA][Placeholder for offensive adv. granger guide link, for the ballsiest people.][/color]

  6. Be PATIENT. Rushing in directly isn’t often the best option if you aren’t familiar with the game. Make sure you are going to fight someone isolated for example, or with lowered HPs, try to judge if you are able to take on the situation.

  7. Avoid standing in the middle of the way. If someone is running back towards you, try moving to a spot that won’t slow him down or block him. Also, generally avoid hugging a first-line alien sitting behind a corner to allow them to run out. You may stay close to provide backup, but make sure they can run away easily.

  8. Until the building guide is done, watch other, good, players do it before attempting to build. And know that trappers’ line of sight is blocked by other buildables.


6 Likes

This should definitely be used in-game, maybe as part of !info or something.

Mainly because most new players have no idea of the forums and probably don’t even know that they exist. I don’t see what’s the point of doing these FAQ/guide threads on the forums since registered users here are experienced players with basic knowledge of the game engine/physics.

2 Likes

This? Yes, it should be known by everyone. The others are a bit more advanced guides, they are better read on a forum or a wiki. This section is publicly readable by guests also.

The problem with tremulous is that all the info available is scattered out there somewhere on the web. Might aswell start putting it all in one place (the same as where the active community is), and direct other people to this community where all the guides/assets/references also are. Uhm not to mention posting it here is an excellent way of building things together and gathering the maximum of correct, up to date information possible to build them.

2 Likes

I was thinking that after these guides are pretty well fine-tuned, we could include them in the help menu (a help menu is many orders of magnitude better better than the !info command).

what a crappy (non-)guide. i’d say it does more harm than good, not to mention that it wastes the reader’s time.

WRONG.

unless u don’t suck.

epic logic fail.

especially when u’re the Nth (N > 1) in the line.1

1 NOT

WRONG.

ie., never leave the relevant rectangle !

eg., at the cost of the lives of ur teammates.

so forget about strafejumping.

WRONG. also, if it’s annoying to the enemy team, then that’s good.

how about we (uhm, u) fix the game so that boring shit (patience, etc.) isn’t of particular benefit.

WRONG.

WRONG.

gay.

1 Like

Not talking so technically, for example, staying only on the ceiling, or the right wall instead of switching through the 4 interior faces of a hall.

Needs to be clarified indeed.

Strafejumping done right, aka not 99% of the new players. I can add a note about this if you want.

Bad wording again indeed, thanks for pointing it out. I didn’t clarify much more because I was in a haste. Will edit it out. Technically the dretch only has a triggerbot and the same targetting system as other aliens.

Patience is necessary in a game that is ironically so fast-paced when you aren’t used to it, because everything can fuck you up so fast if you don’t pay attention.

It’s not uncommon in clogged ATCS games to come across this. I should just detail about how to not block instead of giving map-specific techniques.

Thanks for your input though, I’m fixing this shit up.

Also about the bgranger thing, it is more of a problem to the aliens than the humans most of the time since they will use it wrong (and, it IS hard as fuck to use offensively) and just feed, so I disagree with what you said. Also, there WILL be a guide on how to use the granger’s offensive abilities.

I edited and clarified everything, if you have anymore time to waste re-read and tell me if everything is correct.

I’d also want you to elaborate about the RC hitbox logic fail.

Oh, and also the correct mechanism behind crouching with helmet.

@MaeJong never crouch with helmet is the right advice

only crouch with helmet if you’re dead to the next goon chomp anyways and you might have a chance to dodge the headchomp by crouching

Both of these should say == naked body bites. Also, give the example that a Goon head chomp vs. a crouching human will always do 80 damage regardless of whether they have a helmet, armor, both, or neither.

Just use radar to check corners if you have a Helmet.

More accurately, being in the air prevents you from changing your movement for the most part (you can modify your path slightly, which is noticeable on cannon maps, but largely negligible in close combat), so you are actually stuck in a straight path until you hit a wall, floor, or ceiling.

YES PLEASE

This is correct, but also incorrect; if jumping may cause you to only be chomped in the chest, and you can survive a chomp in the chest, then jumping may be a better choice than crouching. Crouching is best if you are dead no matter where you are hit against Mara, Goon, and Rant (but not Basi or Dretch).

1 Like

parabolic* path

notice how i say “the next goon chomp” and not “the next goon headchomp” but yes jumping is generally a better idea than crouching. It’s just that against mara goon and rant (as you said) you should never crouch, and therefore if you are dead if you get hit no matter what, you might as well try it as it for mindgames.

This isn’t really true for (high: 125/333 fps) jumping maras, especially on ramps, where they will jump too high to score a hit from above you. Tremulous’ engine making jump height/length dependant on the FPS (magic numbers) doesn’t help with this.

There is also crouching on a ramp in ATCS for example against, for example, a tyrant charging towards you that’ll make them go above you and throw them at the opposite side of the hall, leaving you with the ramp height advantage.

Besides, some people actively use crouch in their dances (even though, clearly, that isn’t something to recommend).

yeah i knew someone was gonna point out that crouching against maras is a good idea sometimes but i couldn’t be asked editing my post when reading it back. The crouch vs tyrant charging down ramp thing is something that people suggested to me earlier and im probably just doing it wrong but the rants always manage to instakill my crouching shotty whenever i try this.

1 Like

A lot of people do it so prediction is a huge factor. You need to do it at the last moment so they don’t have time to readjust their aim. If you do it right, just pressing (instead of holding down the crouch key) works great (so you won’t stay exposed to buffed headbites for too long, but still slip under them most of the time). Don’t just bump into them, it’ll be very obvious.

It also works relatively well against goons generally.

Edit: Good to note that experienced players will try to keep height advantage and might just not go down the ramp so that makes it another factor to consider.

u’d also have to be careful when shooting to the side of a barricade, as its hitbox is taller than the model ?

topbite during crouching = torsobite ≠ headbite.
(torsobite with helmet = torsobite without helmet.)

topkek.

1 Like

alright sweet lets do this

  1. git gud
  1. git gudder

i think that encompasses my contribution to this thread

3 Likes