From: Tony Chamberlain Subject: Exercises to help in playing a CA (long) Date: 1998/03/03 Message-ID: <34FCA557.40A0@icarus.weber.edu> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Auth-User: 001888422/1af4de7b51585009 X-Post-Time: 4 Mar 1998 00:51:21 GMT Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: Prodigy Services Corp X-Problems-To: abuse@prodigy.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Reply-To: tonyc@icarus.weber.edu Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek 01234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789 Just thought I'd post a quick little message on some things I like to do to practice certain skills. I think if you follow these you will gain a minimum needed ability so most teams will feel your presence is better than an empty slot :) These exercises are based on the principle of isolating skills and practicing them till they become second nature. ( You don't want to have to "think" about how long it takes before you can phaser again, you just want to "know" ). Also, I would not mind.. no I encourage both follow up posting and/or email of opinions as to the effectiveness of the following exercises. 2 notes of caution before doing these. The first is that many of these exercises WILL NOT help any at the actual winning of the game. So if you do these during pickup (some of the steps you have to) and you feel that any members of the team would even notice (well it is pickup .. :), you might want to let them know what you are up to. Also, I would avoid doing these during peak hours on the more popular servers, i.e if there is a wait queue. Secondly, the following time limits are meant as a rough guide. I mean them only to give a reference point as to my own personal view on relative time that should be spent doing each exercise. If you want to half all of the times, or double them feel free ;). Although I really feel 95% of the people playing today could benefit from at least some of the exercises, feel free to skip over a few if you feel confident in that area. ( Though, try them all once.. you might be surprised ). PART 1: Dogfighting It is essential to become an average dogfighter. This does not mean you need to rewl the netrek communty. But, unless you have a modicum of skill in this area, mastery of other aspects of the game will be much harder to achieve. NOTE: During this entire section you MAY NOT exceed warp 4, except after you res to get back in position. Exercise 1: Dots and Lines 1 hr: This first hour should be spent learning about torps. As this is the least useful skill we will spend a minumum of time on it. The Goal here is to learn how shoot a spread of torps to herd a player as killing with torps is both ineffective and fuel-wasteful compared to phasers. This skill can come in useful in trying to keep a player out of your space, or forcing them to run into a friendly ship to tag-team them. First you should fly to the front. Now pick a direction. Alternate between left, right, up, and down. Now spend your entire load tyring to "force" that player in that general direction. You won't always succedd and you will oftern die, but after about 1 hour of this you should get a feel for how to spread you torps and where to aim them to make a player turn in the direction that you want. 2 hrs: The next 2 hours should be spent learning all about phasers. For this exercise YOU CAN NOT FIRE TORPS. You must kill every single ship you encounter using phasers only. You should pay very close attention to the following details (yes this will detreact from the actual killing, but your goal here is to learn, not increase DI) : a) phaser regeneration rate -- you should become proficient in timing your phaser fire as soon as the next phaser becomes available. Pay special attention to how long the CA has to wait before firing again. Constant firing is essential. b) phaser range/damage -- pay very close attention to the damage yoettu are doing to the opponent. Get a feel for how close 15pt range is, how close 20 pt range is, etc. Another way to do this is to watch your own hull/shields as you opp. phasers you to figure this out. Exercise 2: Detting Probably the most talked about, but maybe least understood principle of dogfighting. Yes, everyone knows you need to det.. but do you know which torps to det, or how much your saving by detting? The goal of this exercise is to practice and learn both the maximum det range of your CA, and to learn exactly how many torps your are going to det when you hit that det key. 1 hr: You are not allowed to fire a torp or phaser for this entire exercise. Just fly to the nearest enemy ship and practice detting all his torps. Initially try to see how far away you can det a torp. Keep doing this until you know EXACTLY how far you max det range is. Once you have figured this out, begin learning the damage you take from a det. I believe you will find out that at max det a torp will only do about 25% damage. (FYI: a CA/BB torp does 40, DD: 25, SC: 15, AS & BASE: ?? I forget *grin* ). Once you begin to get a feel for the damage, try predicting how much you will take. Exercise 3: Tractors and Pressors 1 hr: The goal of this exercise is to become proficient with the tractor beam. Remap that beam to an easily accessible key. Now fly to the nearest ship (remember once you get their stay at warp 4 or lower). Just fight the ship in general but you MUST use your tractor at least once per dogfight. Make sure to try the tractor at various times.. while you and he are approaching each other, going sideways in front of each other.. heading in the same direction, etc. In general just get a feel for how the tractor will affect both you and him, and get used to using it constantly. Do not worry about when to use it, just use it.. even if it doesn't help you paticularly in that fight. 1 hr: Now for the next hour repeat the the previous exercise but with the pressor beam. DO NOT MIX THEM. Just use the pressor and get use to it. 1 hr: Now you can mix them up. In fact you have to. For the next exercise you MUST use the tractor and pressor in each battle. Now that you have a feel for how they will work, keep an eye on using them to help you manuever, dodge torps.. force him INTO your torps. Try using tractors for the purpose of making sure you explode on top of him. Try pressors to AVOID having him blow up on you. Spend this entire hour trying to maximize the the effectiveness of using both the pressor and the tractor. Exercise 4: Total OFFENSE :) The goal of this exercise is combine the previous 3 exercises to form an offensive machine! Their is no time limit on this exercise, rather a 2 part goal. All the goals require that you log onto a pickup server as a guest. I have given a range to the following goals to allow you to choose how well you want to become. goal 1: Ratio. You must maintain a 1.25-1.5 ratio for a full hour. Continue to do this until you can get this ratio with ease. goal 2: Offense. Now you must achieve the previous ratio while maintaining 1.25-1.5 offense. The premise behind the 2 goals is that first you must be able to utilize your dogfighting skills to become better than the average pickup-player. Secondly, you must be able to quickly dispatch your opponent to then proceed to the next assignment thus the need a above average offense. This is the end of Section I. I will post the remaining exercies in the following post, as this is getting longer than i expected. tony drwhat aka Revenge