Thread: Bob the Sane's Guide to Engineering (aka Ground Pounders R Us)

Hopefully I'm not overstepping my bounds here, but with all the attention given to vehicle combat, knifing, sniping, etc. I thought I'd expound on my own thoughts regarding my most favorite kit of all, the engineer.

The engineer is, or can be when employed properly, the most versatile kit imaginable. There is nothing he can't do, with the notable exception of reliably hitting the broad side of a barn at more than 50 yards (damn SMGs). He is the squad's best friend in terms of taking and holding a chunk of real estate. His primary weapon deals destruction to armor and aircraft alike, and his defensive weapon spews bullets at a rate only matched by the recon kit's carbine. With his mines, repair kit, and defuser equipment he can drastically improve the survivability of his squad and their vehicles.

It is unfortunate, then, that many players simply see the kit's weaknesses and disregard its combat strengths, relegating it to 'as-needed' status to remove annoying APMs and RDX on a titan or contending with nuisance armor. In a toe to toe firefight, the engineer is more than capable of holding his own.

The engineer SMG, while dealing low damage per bullet, fires at an incredible rate of speed. The low bullet velocity means there is little recoil even at a full rock and roll. This enables the engineer to side-step, strafe accurately, and do 'death spirals' by running around his target in a circle (players from CS and CS:S should be familiar with these manuevers with the MP5 SMG). By utilizing your mobility in conjunction with the low recoil and high cyclic of the SMG, you as an engineer can easily take down every other soldier class no matter what weapon they carry (with the exception of the carbine equipped recon, who can pull the same crap on you).

Motion Mines, aka rollers, also provide hours of exothermic fun, and not just against vehicles! Did you know you can kill infantry with them, with no vehicle in sight? You can, although it is a bit tricky to pull off. I have personally used them to clear Titan hallways of infantry defenders. Here's how.

Drop a motion mine outside a doorway leading to console 1 or 2. Using your SMG, shoot the roller into the hallway proper. Hopefully, if your aim (and luck) are good, you will get it on the downhill slope and another couple of bullets will send it on it's merry way. Now, once it is about halfway down the hallway, throw an MMB grenade towards the defenders. Usually, they are confused as hell by the idiocy of using a roller mine against infantry and ignore it. If your aim (and, once again, sheer luck) are good, the MMB grenade will land in their midst, pulling the mine along with it. As I'm sure you all know, when the MMB detonates the mine, it causes splash damage to everything around it. In such close quarters as a console hallway, in just the right place, this can lay waste to the enemy defenders.

This is NOT easy to do. I've only successfully done it 3 times, and in heavily defended titans you will quite often not get the chance to even attempt it. But if the defenders are content to sit in their hallway and nade spam without sending a harassing force out to the vents and back deck to cause your assaulting squad grief, it can be a good tactic (not to mention the satisfaction of watching the defending force sputter and curse your name when you actually pull it off).

As has been mentioned other places, you can lay other booby traps with those little exploding metal soccer balls. Tanks and APCs have enough ground clearance to allow the non-claustrophobic sapper to crawl under them and leave a bundle of shrapnel-laden goodies for unwary would-be armor crewmen.

Of course, they are crucial for things like silo defense. Often people will lay their mines out in a widespread minefield in order to force enemy engineers to use up more than one MMB grenade to clear them, or bundle them together on the silo in the hopes that this will provide some camo for their special gifts. I prefer a more 'one-two punch' approach. I will place one or two on the silo in 'obvious' hiding places, or even out on the ground. These are the decoys. The others all go behind crates or the corners of the silo itself. The logic behind it is thus: the MMB grenade will eliminate the obvious mines, while the ones protected by other objects will (hopefully) be blocked from running to their doom like explosive lemmings.

My favorite main weapon is the pilum. While the guided rockets have their use (like hitting just the right spot on a distant walker, for instance) there's something to be said for firing your Blue Bolt o' Doom and ducking behind cover to reload. And it is my experience that there are a few choice spots to hit on various vehicles. Most of these have been covered elsewhere and I won't take up space here with those. However, a few seem to have been neglected. The first, is just where to hit a walker. Sure, everyone talks about the vents, which is all well and good. But aside from those, it is my experience that the weakest spot on a walker is the joint between legs and torso. A solid hit on that joint will immediately reduce a walker by half. Two good hits and it is now an ex-vehicle, often blowing up before it burns. Barring a leg-torso joint strike, the next best bet is to hit the legs. I'm not sure how EA figures the hit damages, but the legs seem to be quite complex. A hit on the foot does not do too much, but one to the 'ankle' will do a hell of a lot. That seems almost more luck than anything else.

Tanks: well, a hit on a tank's rear means instant death. We all know that. But the obliqueness of your firing angle also plays a role in how much damage you do if you hit somewhere else. A straight-on, level strike from a pilum to the side will do a lot of damage, true. But it seems (to me anyway) to be reduced if you strike from a more frontwards facing angle, and increased if struck from a backwards angle. I am uncertain as to why this is, as in reality the damage should be the same from both angles. Maybe they count in things like engine or critical components from different angles, I'm not sure. But for certain, if you can at all avoid it, do not hit a tank straight on it's glacis. All you will do is scratch the paint and piss off the crew. Your squad will not thank you for drawing attention to them in this manner from a now enraged steel and ceramic behemoth.

If this has been at all useful or entertaining, let me know and I will continue to leave my steaming nuggets of wisdom. Otherwise, I'll just shut the hell up and go back to shooting my little popgun

Well done Bob. There are no bounds to overstep. If you have information that is relatively relavent, then it will always be within bounds.

And I think you are the only other person to use the word "glacis" here. I like nickle words.

I like the MMB Titan assault. Nice and evil. Hopefully others can work it out with you.

Laggy

Nice tips Bob!

I do have to question your sanity though. What kind of sane person would come up with such an awesomely manaical idea like using roller mines and bait to defend a titan. I love it!

Thanks for the tip, now I really gotta try the roller on titan trick.

Thanks guys, I'm glad ya'll found the roller trick interesting. It is a bitch and a half to pull off, but ooooh the satisfaction when you do. And the beauty of it is you can do almost all of it from behind cover.

Another problem I forgot to mention is that the rollers don't always want to move inside the hallway. Sometimes you drop one and it sits there like a lump, and nothing will make it move. I haven't figured out a way around that one yet. If someone wants to play around and maybe point out something I've missed, I'm all ears.

Why isn't Bob an admin here?

You know Bob, your thinking on the engineer kit goes right along with the two founding members of this community - who live and breath engineer and support kits - and actually don't even have their assault kits totally unlocked yet.....

I won't name names

Welcome to TTP

Originally Posted by sjt17

the two founding members of this community - who live and breath engineer and support kits - and actually don't even have their assault kits totally unlocked yet.....

I won't name names

They might..... if they actually PLAYED here more. I've got some good squad leaders that could help them out.

Laggy

Heh, thanks stj17. I've actually been a regular player on the 2142 TTP server for quite a while. And for a while, people keep pestering me to get on the forum. So, I finally got around to it

@ Laggy - Sunday Night.....I'll be there - and hey I played Tuesday, and it was FUN.

Bob - that's great to hear, hope you stick around, you seem like you're going to fit in, we've got a pretty special community rocking along here - hope you'll stick around and help the cause.