First, the boring ass video above is not a perfected refined strat not some scrim between practiced players. AJK was bored to tears from previous games and not caring, and the others had the strategy explained in them as the game started.
So siege mode was put forward as the flagship mode for the Hawken E-sport scene. So being interested in this, I put thought into what would be the most effective strategies. Things to consider in general is minimizing risk, #1 being engaging other players. Remember that this is considering a professional level - other players will not be random players, you must assume they are of equal skill and dangerous. Other things to consider are denying your opponent from getting ahead as much as possible while getting ahead yourself.
The #1 reason to engage the other team is fighting for the AA because you need to destroy the battleship. The answer on how to reliably avoid this risk is simple: It’s piss easy to shoot down the battleship without leaving the safety of your base. So no need to engage - as you can see for the first half hour I had 5 kills. And most of those were from the enemy team getting bored, and attacking us while we had out massive defenders advantage.
Next is how to get ahead. The only things to get ahead in are EU and battleship level. So this was the strategy. Drop the EU required to launch your ship very low, then suck the map dry of EU. Let the enemy fire the first ship, who cares. Fall back to the safety of your spawn and launch your ship. Let them have the AA - you actually want them to shoot down your ship ASAP. Begin pummeling their ship to low health-but don’t shoot it down. When your ship goes down, instantly re-launch it then go collect all the energy it dropped. Against standard play, the AA should shoot it down right over your base. Do this as much as you can, leveling your ship as much as possible and re-collecting all the dropped energy. You can then wait until their ship is overhead to shoot it down and collect their energy.
With no risk of fighting for the AA and losing, no risk of getting hit by the battleship you will be leveling up your ship faster. Eventually your ship will get to the point where it’s unstoppable long before their ship does.
There’s a catch though
Prior to playing this, I did not realize two things, that ships stop and wait for one ship to get blown out of the sky before continuing on, and that the ships HAVE a maximum HP, 18,000. 18,000 is an issue all by itself because of HOW easy it is for a full team to down a max-level ship without the need for AA. The ships being so polite leads to stalemates, easier shooting down of ships and abuse. At 27:15, if we knew this we could have earned a free level up AND relaunch because 2 ships drop enough energy to launch another ship.
Worse yet, this leads to a point where neither team will want to launch the first battleship. Why_ Because if your team does, the other team can so easily drop the ship to next to no HP, wait for it to get to their base, then block your ship with theirs. For the game to continue, your team must now shoot down their ship OVER THEIR spawn, and then they will shoot down yours finally. This will give them enough energy to instantly re-launch the ship, locking down the EU points and earning them a free ship level (not that they mean anything, you can always down the ship) if you don’t have enough stockpiled EU to relaunch the ship and return the favor.
TL;DR siege is easily broken, abused, and can be best won by never fighting the enemy.
Edited by NotKjell, November 27 2012 - 05:17 PM.
3
Hopefully the devs will see this and put their thinking caps on.
