The 7 Reasons That You Keep Dying In Shooting Games

I spent some quality time in the armed forces but never got deployed, or had to do it full-time. Nevertheless, I picked up some interesting training that has helped me a great deal in playing a number of computer games that involve shooting: Doom, Quake, Max Payne, AvP 2, Deus Ex, BioShock, Half Life 2, Call of Duty and Team Fortress 2. However, having had a lot of time to watch robots in action and reading other player's reports, I realise that a number of people don't really understand why they're dying so often.

Is it their reflexes? Probably not. Most younger FPS shooters are wired to the gills on caffeine and are ready to go. Sadly, however, this isn't much use to you against a game that knows the dumb things that you'll do.

So here's a handy guide.

1. You don't try hard enough not to get shot

This may sound obvious, but the fundamental rule of armies is to inflict as much damage on the other side while taking the least. One of my old instructors said that the best thing he learnt from being shot was 'not to get shot again'. Real soldiers do not, if they wish to live, jump up and charge blindly into established positions or people who are ALREADY FIRING. They do not charge into rooms full of headcrab zombies armed only with a sharp stick.

Games, unless you are playing on realistic or hard mode, do not do enough to discourage you from being shot. Some games have a health bar and you can bring this back up using magical packs. Of course, you chew 'painkillers' in Max Payne, but given that a portion of the game features you running along a maze that is your wife and child's blood trail suspended in mid-air while you listen to them scream, you can see why they use those.

I'm not kidding.

Other games just let you take a certain amount of damage and then you naturally recover again. This is particular true of Call of Duty, where a protracted session being hit by machine gun bullets gives you what appears to be a really bad hangover with throbbing veins in your eyes.

So what's wrong with that?

The problem with being hit by bullets is that they make you less healthy, or slow you down. If you know exactly what's going to happen next and where all of the damage is that you will take, then maybe you can optimise for this. However, in any game with random antagonists or where you don't know what's going to happen, you cannot just expect to heal in time for the next encounter.

The first time I encountered Ravenholm (Half Life 2) I was charging through firing at things because I had become used to having lots of ammunition reloads and medical packs. Ravenholm is one of the scariest levels in Half Life 2 - dark, oppressive, lots of things leap out at you and, worse, if you don't play smart then you rapidly end up with very little ammunition and steadily depleting health. And the zombies just keep coming. In fact, there is a point where you get infinite zombies. Stay there and keep firing, you will eventually get swamped.

Ducking in and out to see what's happening is very important. Having your weapons prepared for the most likely threat is also important but we'll talk about that a little more later on.

Note: pants are sometimes more important than guns

Your best bet is to be sneaky. Keep your head down. Half Life 2 is excellent practice for this as it encourages sneaky and stand-offish gameplay, although Deus Ex is one of the kings of the Sneaky genre as you can achieve almost all of the goals in DE without firing a shot.

There's an old saying "Time Spent in Reconnaissance is Rarely Wasted" and it's true. Rather than charging in, guns blazing, and risking getting shot, you will be much better prepared for the unexpected if you do a bit of scouting and try your best never to be caught in the open, or have to charge past an active machine gun. You never know when you'll need that extra health or that last clip of ammo.

2. You don't secure your flank

"Securing your flank" does not mean sticking your fork into the best steak at a family barbecue, it's stopping people from sneaking up on your sides and attacking you side on. I could write pages on the gentle art of the flank attack, referring to the use of high-speed and shocking forces like horse cavalry or tanks, but I won't. All you need to know is that you leave yourself open to an attack from the sides, or the rear, you have now got too many points of attack to worry about.

The most likely outcome of an insecure flank is that you will get shot, or worse.

An unusual flanking action, where the pianist is going to attack the security guard from the rear, while playing the Minute Waltz.

The most desirable way to engage the enemy is for you to be able to fire forwards, towards the enemy, at a time when they cannot fire back at you. Sound familiar? Yes, you want to flank THEM. The second most desirable is that you know that the enemy is only to your front and, by hiding behind something, you can stop them hitting you because they are not going to sneak up on you.

If you run into the middle of a warehouse and start shooting at the first person you see, the second person you don't see will shoot you. Got it? It's an extension of the first thing I discussed - if you know what you're getting into, you can control how people can get at you.

How do we actually do this? It varies from game to game. The best way to really secure your flank is to completely remove the antagonists as you move forward, so that none are left behind you, and then positioning yourself so that the enemy can only come from one direction. To do this in many games, you will have to employ complex technology like corridors, stairwells and doors.

Seriously. If you block off any other way to get to you, and the AI has to send creatures up the stairwell to get at you, you get to fire down at them, or drop things at them, until the enemy goes away. However, it's worth noting that you should (a) always have an out in case there are infinite enemies and (b) some AIs are smarter than this. (BioShock is interesting here, as you can secure your flank by using mind control goo on a Big Daddy and can get them to hold your flank for you, assuming that you don't accidentally shoot them.)

The other approach is to use command or proximity activated mines, sentry guns and all those good things. You have to look after them, but we'll talk about that a little more later.

Some defensive mechanisms are more effective than others.

The golden rule is to never stand in an open area for too long, always try to clear behind you and, if you must stand in a corner to reduce the attacks, always have a way of getting OUT of that corner again.

Team Fortress 2 offers an excellent way for an offensive team to stop the defenders from sneaking back and attacking them as they run forward - the sentry gun. Properly maintained, a sentry gun in the right position allows you to ignore an enemy threat because the enemy would have to carry out a mass attack to effectively take it down (or use a spy who should be trying to find your snipers). Make your enemy have to choose where to deploy their resources and be prepared to either reap the rewards of your secure flank or have slightly more offensive firepower as the enemy wastes their effort trying to remove that security.

3. You don't stage your resupply

Ammunition runs out, health packs dry up. At some stage, you are going to need more bullets or health, so you need to have a supply handy. Almost every game puts a limit on how many things you can carry, although Knights of the Old Republic was an amusing exception where my character was carrying around more than any store by the time he was done.

But it could have been worse...

If you have to run too far back to get healed or resupplied, you will lose track of your opponent, who in some games will even heal while you're away, and risk have to retrace your steps when things respawn.

Armoured Units (that's tanks and APCs for those who don't know) operate a very simple and effective resupply system. Given that tanks are fast-moving and fearsome beasts, they are often forward in the battlefield, and in places where you just can't go to the shops. We call the fighting bit the F Echelon but every armoured unit will have an A and a B echelon as well. The B is the warehouse, reasonably close to the front, where supplies come from. The A echelon is the bit that delivers supplies from the B to the F. In a slow-moving, or stationary, army unit, the A echelon can easily give you the supplies. Armoured units are fast-moving. Because of this, the A echelon splits into two pieces: A1 is the piece that goes forward and resupplies the F, not quite at the front line but not that far back from it. A2 resupplies from the B echelon and then moves forward. Then A1 goes back (and becomes A2) and A2 goes forward to F (and becomes A1). It's a simple and effective way to get things going but, above all, it is flexible, fast and mobile.

In most games, you don't have the option of moving your resupply points - they are either fixed respawn points or dispensers. So what do you do? When you can, and you are out of combat, you draw from as far away from your next destination as possible to make sure that, if you get into trouble and are actively fighting, you haven't used your closest caches.

Ok, if you're on a speed run then that won't work, but you speed runners are all crazy.

Wow, you must think that we care. Lunatics.

In TF2 you can move your resupply points up, which is fantastic. A correctly placed dispenser is an invaluable part of a point defence, but it is also a vital part of an offensive strategy. If you have a dispenser, you have a well-controlled and fast-spawning resupply point that can be put where it suits you. Of course, you're going to have to look after it... but it reduces your resupply time, which means that you may be able to get back into the battle faster than your enemy.

The other thing about resupply is that you should always top up whenever possible. In Half Life 2 this is simple as 'Hey, have a box of infinite rocket ammo? Resupply AFTER you've taken down the ship or strider. That way you always have some rockets up your sleeve.'. I should note that I spent a lot of the final battle in HL2:Episode 2 resupplying by running between those two houses. And I lived. Eventually.

4. You don't maintain the momentum

Ever heard of something called the OODA loop? No, it's not a rollercoaster at a Cro-Magnon theme park. It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act, and was a term developed by a USAF strategist to describe the combat operations process. Basically, look at what's going on, work out how it fits with what we already know to filter this into usable information, decide what you're going to do and then DO IT. The whole idea is that you have an opponent, they are going to be trying to do this too and, if you can get your loop finished before they do, you will act first and they will then have to react to you.

Lots of games have this concept, whether Chess, Go, Arkham Horror or Bridge: if something happens, and you can take advantage of it in a way that forces your opponent to take a certain action, then you are the dominant force on the board and you are in control. The same thing applies in combat: if you do something that means that your enemy must react in a certain way, you rob them of the opportunity to carry out the actions that they want to do.

It helps to be less predictable than this.

Examples? There are so many. Shoot a poison head crab in HL2 and watch it run away for a while instead of attacking you - you can then worry about the Combine zombie with his grenade. Hit a dispenser or sentry and the engineer will probably have to run over and fix it, which will mean breaking cover and then being vulnerable or stopping the engineer from fixing the teleporter! Set the sniper on fire and he's not going to be thinking about sniping you anytime soon.

What you want do is to seize the initiative and then control the battle. If you keep doing this, you have established momentum and the basic principle is that it's easier to keep something moving than it is to get it moving. If you can just keep pushing forward and you never get trapped or have to stop to deal with 10,000,000 things you are far more likely to achieve your goals.

What you don't want to do is to charge forward, gaining the momentum, and then falter, allowing the enemy to regroup. This is a classic flaw in the robot design for TF, as anyone who has ducked 4 times and then sniped a reloading soldier will tell you. If you overcommit in your attack, you may hold the momentum for a while and then lose it as everyone has to go and heal, or run back from a respawn point. In order to gain the momentum, you have to outthink your opponent and act in a way that forces them to react. Do that and you'll win, most of the time. Dying is, generally, the best way to lose your momentum.

There are also incorrect ways to record your options that won't help much, either.

One very effective way to maintain momentum is to have 'one foot on the ground'. While one group are moving up, another group are firing in support (sentry gun, anyone?). The first group then gets into a position where they can stop their opponents doing too much and then the second group moves up, possibly even straight through the front position to push even further forward. Good tactics but, remember, check those flanks!

5. You don't cover your obstacles

This is one of the most frequently broken rules and explains why people are now trying to eat your head. If you use an obstacle of some kind to restrict access to your position, you need to be able to see it and protect it, unless you can completely seal off that approach. Let's look at an example - a minefield. Traditionally, minefields are put out to stop people coming at you from a certain direction. However, what a lot of people forget is that battle is fluid and today's defensive position may be tomorrow's rear echelon. In other words, you may have to move your minefield. Because most armies expect that they will have to do this, it is completely possible to go in and, carefully, pull up all the mines, disarm them and take them away again.

Getting the picture? If you're not looking at your minefield, the enemy can sneak in, pick them up and move them. Even if you are looking at them, if you can't fire effectively at an enemy who is in your minefield, you will watch impotently as they move in and pick up your minefield. They will probably make rude gestures at you, as well, although fairly carefully so that no-one explodes.

Not everyone will politely point out the obstacles that you are failing to protect.

If you close a door to stop the enemy, make sure that you can still see the door, just in case someone shows up who has amazing door opening technology, like a hand. If you can drop lots of obstacles behind the closed door, and the game doesn't just swing the door open anyway due to poor collision resolution, then maybe you can ignore it.

If you put down a sentry, make sure that you can see when it is damaged, or has fallen over, or needs restocking. An obstacle that is not covered by observation and fire is barely going to stop anyone. That's why the engineer has to stay near the sentry gun in TF2.

The best obstacles are obstacles that never need restocking and cannot, within the given universe, be dealt with easily. That giant trench in Dustbowl in TF2? It's a terrible place to try and pop out from because it's a giant natural obstacle that you can only get out of by running up a small ladder while everyone shoots at you. You can only leap it successfully in a couple of places, and that's class dependant. That's why the final cap point can be so hard to get.

Of course, resupply can be harder.

Mountains are also good, or really big rocks. Walls and things like that, where they can't be blown up, are also good. Used properly, a good obstacle will allow you to limit the number of ways that things can eat your head.

This is, however, not to say that a short-term obstacle is always bad. A burning or exploding barrel may give you enough time to think and regain the initiative, or just to get the hell out of there. But, if you're in a position for the long haul? Choose your obstacles wisely and make sure that they either can't be destroyed or you can make life very difficult for someone trying to remove them.

6. You don't understand force superiority

The basic rule of armies is "If I am not three times more powerful than you are, I'm not attacking". However, this is obviously not judged at a global level because, otherwise, the country with the biggest army would say 'Tadahhh', and everyone else would start changing their flag and learning another language. (Hint: it wouldn't be English.) The army works on a model where individual force units have a certain amount of firepower and, combining their need to secure their flanks and maintain the momentum, they leave one of these force units in fire support (stopping the enemy from doing much until the attack), one force unit starts the attack, and the other force unit moves behind them to take over if the attack bogs down. (One foot on the ground, remember?)

You want what we call force superiority, in that you will be deploying more force than your opponent and, because of this, you will win. Yes, a man armed with a buck-toothed hamster will occasionally defeat a man armed with a knife, but only if the hamster is exceedingly well-armed. And angry.

Look past the cute - that's pure rage.

In games, we have a different approach because, most of the time, we're on our own and, when we do have support, it's perhaps not as well-disciplined as we would like. (Follow Freema... ARGHHHHH) However, this is also the same principle armies use, we look at the force superiority at a point.

The fundamental question is "Can I, using all of my cool stuff, deliver more killy-deathy-stuff to the enemy than they can?" If the answer is 'No', then GO AWAY or FIND ANOTHER WAY TO APPROACH IT.

All of the things I've talked about so far allow you to concentrate your force in a way, and at a time and place, that will maximise your force superiority. Do not then squander this by running into a room of Combine Zombies to try and swallow as many grenades as you can. Maximise your superiority by (a) reducing the number attacking you by choosing your own ground in which to engage, (b) engage at a range where your weapons are superior to theirs or (c) catch them before they've even noticed you.

Gordon Freeman, Half Life 2, has to be one of the most overloaded weapon carrying lunatics every animated. Have you counted how many weapons he has? Compare that with Call of Duty with your very small set of weapons and look at how it changes the tactics. I love option (b) from above: attack the enemy out of the range of their own weapons. This makes me vastly superior to them because they cannot bring force to bear against me - I have an infinite multiplier for my force superiority. As a result, I almost always ditch my pistol in Call of Duty and replace it with a sniper rifle when I can. When I'm playing Gordon Freeman, I make very good use of the crossbow. In Deus Ex, it's crossbow and sniper rifle. I am now far more powerful than my opponents at that range and I am very effective.

Never go hand-to-hand with someone holding a live grenade. I have had to pull someone out of the blast zone of a grenade and I did not enjoy it. Even if you bring another grenade to the party, it's not a good result.

If you do have a team, work as one! The end of Hl2: Ep 2 is great because you have other people helping you out. I was looking down the barrel of a Hunter's flechette gun when one of my team fired a blast that felled it. For a moment, I thought I was playing with other people. All of those people at the end of Ep 2 give you the force superiority that you need, although sometimes it's just because they distract the enemy by dying. Don't underestimate a good sacrifice!

Although you can take this too far.

The teamwork thing is very true when you're in Team Fortress 2. A barrage of rockets is more effective than Fire - pause - Fire - pause and good covering fire allows you all to move properly. However, you need to carefully note who you are about to attack so that, at that point, you are not depending on luck to win, you are just depending on the sheer magnitude of the force that you are brining to bear. The sniper is a one-man force multiplier, but only when he's either accurate and mobile (with the bow) or well-protected in a nest with the rifle. The sniper removes enemy units quickly and effectively, giving you the gap you need to attack while in the superior position.

What does that mean? It means if you're playing humans who are halfway decent and they snipe somebody, get ready for an attack. What it also means is that you should know when and where that's likely to happen, which brings us to:

7. You don't use your resources properly

If you don't understand what your weapons can do, how accurate you are, which weapons are best against which opponent or how to take advantage of the terrain, then you're toast. Knowledge is power. In TF2, that's weapons, characters and maps. In HL2, it's weapons, reload times, ideal loads for certain targets and likely encounters. In Deus Ex, it's knowing who the enemy is, which cyberloads to take and who to trust - and, believe me, that's not easy.

"This end towards user" is a very simple label to fix to your weapons.

Even when I only had one shotgun shell left in Half Life 2, I walked around dark corridors with the shotgun readied. Why? Because I could fire it instinctively, point blank, and, firstly, not kill myself in the ensuing explosion and, secondly, kill most things that came out of the darkness or slow them the hell down. I could have carried the pistol or the gravity gun, loaded with a saw, but one requires more than one shot, and the other misses quite a lot when it's a small, irritating, headcrab-like target.

In BioShock, I had to learn that certain splicers no longer seemed to be bothered by my default 'zap zap' electrical attack and, when I saw them, I had to react and use a different attack. Or they would shoot me and I would die.

Whether it's a burning barrel, a saw blade, a gun or simply knowing what's around the corner because you saw it from a ledge, your ability to stay alive in games depends upon you putting it all together in the best way possible. Don't blow a medpack for a 1% heal unless you know that there are several up ahead. Don't use 12 shots to kill zombies when you can set them on fire. Get used to what the game is telling you and optimise.

I'm sorry, the game was telling me something?

The final thing to remember is 'so what?' You've seen some corpses and heard some noises. "So what?" Reload your shotgun and get ready for something to jump out. You see a room full of explosive barrels. "So what?" So put down anything that explodes as a weapon, turn on your flashlight and look around very carefully for things that are lurking or moving slowly. You can then choose to set off one barrel (a long, long way away), or switch to something accurate and light to drop down and investigate.

For the more advanced, sometimes people build these tactics into games. Deus Ex contains a number of examples where your opponents use area denial techniques to secure their flanks, like proximity or gas grenades. Interestingly enough, a lot of these have nearby soldiers who react to the detonation and will come out to attack you. "So what?" if you're going to try one of these approaches then, either, deactivate it sneakily and stealth on in, or stand the hell back and blow it, then throw in some grenade love, or give covering fire as people try to get out to attack you.

Conclusions:

So that's it. A potted guide to military operations, poorly remembered and badly applied to a number of computer games. I hope that you've found it either informative or amusing. Hopefully both, in the right places.

Never forget, winning is what you make of it.