General tactics

General tactics
I have not writtent all this, but it is good to know

- Your enemies are predictable
In many cases, you can predict what your enemy is going to do. This is a huge advantage. Most of the time, unpredictability is what ruins a good strategy. You have some great idea, then the enemy ruins it by doing something you didn't expect it. However, the moment your enemy becomes predictable, you have control of the situation.

One good example of predictability is a medic running toward a teammate with his syringe out. In this case, you know exactly where he's going, so you can get him off guard. For example, if I'm right next to the corpse he wants to revive, I'll just go and sit on the corpse at the last second and then pump the medic with lead. It's pretty funny to do this, they are running at you with your syringe out while you shoot them up. Or, if there's a big gap between the medic and the corpse, at least you know the medic's movement is mainly going to be linear so you can just focus your crosshair on him and track him very accurately. Another thing you could do is wait til the medic gets near the corpse, then suddenly gib the teammate, and then kill the medic while his syringe is out. To aid you with this, what you could do is partially gib the teammate before the medic gets there, so that you only have to fire 1 or 2 extra shots to fully gib the corpse.

Another example is a crew-served MG. You always know where these are going to be, so you can easily know to look before you leap into their sights. Also, if you are a panzer or something, you can usually count on the guy manning the MG to be stationary (i.e. he doesn't keep manning it and then going away and coming back), so you can blast him easily.

- Stopping airstrikes
This one is pretty well-known. If an airstrike lands near you, just go prone over the cannister. The smoke will stop coming out. After a while, you'll hear the sound like an airplane passing overhead- that's your cue to get off the cannister real quick. If you do it correctly, you can stop the airstrike, saving teammates nearby and you won't even take any damage from it. This can only be done if the airstrike wasn't thrown by a level 3 or higher field ops. Also, it must be done within 2-3 seconds of the airstrike being thrown. If you do it too late, the airstrike will occur even if you go prone over the cannister.

- Crazy class combos
For example, when I used to play in matches and scrims with the JAE clan, we would all go engy at the beginning of goldrush. 90% of the time we'd get the tank repaired on our first or second try, even if the clan we were playing against was better than us.

- Medic Duo
Get 2 rambo medics with good SMG skills working together. Can be extremely effective, although there are a couple of problems with it: what if they both run out of ammo, and what if the rest of your team is left without any good medic? In clans you may have many medics doing this since there are so many good gunners.

- Flamer camping
You may be able to hold a chokepoint for a long time with your flamethrower. Even if it doesn't kill enemies, it may help to discourage them from going that route.

Works best with the support of teammates. A field ops to supply you with ammo, and a medic to heal you. Also that way if the enemies manage to take you out, they can use their SMGs.

The best place I've seen this done is in the supplydepot map. Battery is also a pretty good example (flame the allies when they are trying to come in thru the main entrance).

- Hiding
For example, sometimes after I take the radar parts, I go hide in the original Allied spawn until a teammate tells me it's safe to go to the truck. (Useful if the Axis are completely bombing the hell out of the truck area).

- Take control of the tank
In some cases it's better to use the tank against the enemy instead of destroying the tank. If you're worried about it, what you can do is, nade the tank until it's almost fully damaged. Then, use the tank against the enemy. If the enemy takes control of the tank again, no problem- it'll just take 1 nade to disable it.

- Don't repair the tank until it's ready to move
For example, if the tank is at a barrier, and dyno has been planted at the barrier, wait until the dyno is about to blow, and then quickly repair the tank. If you repair too early, then all that will happen is the tank will get damaged again by the time the barrier is blown. Of course, be careful- you can't wait too long or you'll get killed before you get to repair the tank at all.

- Knifing a MG
This isn't really an exploit, but it's not commonly known. You can disable a crew-served MG by knifing it many times. Shooting also works, especially if you shoot at a stationary MG with a tank MG.

- Stealing a uni as the body sinks into the ground
Most people know this by now, but it's pretty useful anyways... If you are stealing a uni and the body sinks into the ground, just continue looking down at the ground and holding the use key (F). Most of the time, you will still steal the uni.

- Take a look around while constructing!
The first times I played as an engy I focused only on the objective I was constructing, like wearing blinkers. Sure, this is necessary for repairing things like MGs. But when you build constructibles like command post, water pump or tank barrier you can watch what is going on around you while constructing. First you must focus on the constructible until the pliers-symbol appears. Then start constructing and while holding the left mouse button you can turn around while constructing. This is a big advantage, because you can see enemies earlier.

- Be productive while afk (away from keyboard)!
When you go afk a very common advice is to join the spectators. A not so well known and really awesome tip comes from GeniXPro:
"I find it's common for me to go afk, generally for about 5 minutes. During this time it is possible to be productive. What I do, is go field ops or medic. I find a covered area near the exit of my spawn but one that I'm not exposed. I put out the ammo packs or medpacks, go into my console, and type /+attack. Thus, I am constantly producing ammo or medpacks while I'm away. My team is well healed or ammo'ed, you gain XP, delay the time before anyone kicks you by (as I've found) as much as 4 times. So long as there aren't noob admins as opposed to someone who knows what you're doing it's a good idea"

- Using 2 heavy weapons
Wouldn't it be cool if you could have akimbo heavy weapons- like one panzer, one flamer... Well, that's not possible (sorry!) but what you can do is pick up weapons on the ground and then alternate. So if you have a panzer and there's an SMG on the ground, fire your panzer, then pick up the SMG for a while, then switch back to panzer, etc. As long as a weapon doesn't remain untouched on the ground for more than 30 seconds, it won't disappear.

Now, this isn't anything new. What is somewhat interesting is that you can move a weapon on the ground by repeatedly picking it up again and again. This is somewhat confusing to explain in words, so I just made a demo showing how you can move a weapon to some location. Download this demo and then switch to 3rd-person view by pressing ENTER:

Download double_heavy_weapons.dm_84

This is a very odd trick that has very limited uses, but I'm sure there are some very creative people reading this, so I figured I'd include it. Note the weapon that you pick up doesn't even have to be stolen from an enemy, it could even be stolen from a teammate, or yourself. (Just select one weapon, /kill, then select another weapon and respawn. Now you have 2). This may be useful if you're camping some objective which is relatively close to your spawn. The main problem I see with this method though is that you have to keep picking up a weapon otherwise it will disappear after 30 seconds. So if you had say, an MG and a panzer, it would get really disruptive because you'd have to keep interrupting your MGing to pick up the panzer.
Movement

- Run backwards
If you are in a dangerous area and you need to escape for some reason, run backwards so you can continue firing and watching out for threats.

- Walk or crouch
The obvious benefit is that your footsteps become more or less silent. However, there is an added benefit: if you are silent, then you can more easily listen to enemy footsteps.

- Open a door silently
Hold the walk key as you open a door (CAPS lock for most keyboards).

- Going prone during a firefight
This is somewhat controversial - some people swear by it, others say it's a bad idea. In my experience, most of the time someone went prone during a firefight, it was fairly easy to finish them off. (Stationary target). However I have to admit, there have been a few times when someone used it to good effect against me. The key is doing it at the right time, and quickly taking out your enemy with accurate shots. The best time for it is when you are in a situation where you and your enemy don't have much space to maneuver. (If you can't sprint around like crazy, proning is better than just standing or crouching). You should also be at a reasonable distance from your enemy- this way you won't get flanked, and you will appear very small on your enemy's screen.

Another situation where I might see the logic in going prone is if you and a teammate are both shooting at an enemy within a narrow space. In this case, whoever is in front of the other teammate will put himself at risk if he sprints from side to side, because then he'll keep running into his buddy's line of fire. So, the guy in the front can go prone while the guy in the back is free to sprint side to side. This way they can effectively concentrate their fire on the enemy without getting in each other's way.

Finally, it may also be good to go prone if your enemy is shooting you from far range and there's some thing you can take cover behind. For example if I'm a medic and I'm getting shot, I might go prone behind a rock or something and heal myself. Of course this would only work if your enemy is very far away - if they're close they could just follow you and gun you down.

- Boosting/stacking
This is kind of a cheap trick, but it can be very handy. Stacking means, basically standing on top of your teammate's head (make him crouch, then jump on). This can work well on fueldump. Say you're an engy, and you get to the fueldump through the tunnels early on in the game. No covert is there to let you in, but there is some teammate there. You can stack on his head, to jump on to the little guard shack outside the main entrance. From there you can jump on to the fueldump wall, and into the base.
Another infamous spot for stacking is for getting the east radar parts, as in the image shown below. Just crouch against the wall at the lowest point while a teammate jumps up and steals the east parts.

This can also be useful if a teammate dies and their body gets tossed up and lands in some weird spot that's too high to reach. If you're not a medic, just crouch under the body if a medic is nearby, so he can boost on top of you to get the revive.

In some instances, stacking is actually prohibited. For example, it's possible to plant dynamite on Oasis by stacking behind the guns. In general, match rules allow stacking with 2 guys, but stacking with 3+ guys is prohibited.
Grenades

- Corner whoring
Just hide behind a corner, lean around and then ambush people when they come through. Note that although you can't actually shoot while leaning, you CAN throw a grenade while leaning. Thanks to Obi-w00t for mentioning this grenade tactic.

- Nade spamming
Really good players always seem to have a nade primed, waiting for you. Often, they run into some area with a nade primed. If someone is there, the nade will kill him. If not, they just get rid of the nade by tossing it somewhere. Especially if you are a soldier or engy, learn to use tons of nades.
Tactics with mines

- Dying on a mine
If you die and your body trips a mine, the mine won't actually explode until you tap out. You may be able to kill an enemy or covert ops this way; just wait til they come to your body, and then tap out! Thanks to [LVG]Rockrobinoff for this tip.

- Bait for landmines
This is a pretty funny tactic, I haven't done it too much myself, but I think it could work. Just place some health pack or some ammo on a landmine, and then hopefully it'll lure some enemy to step on it. Of course the downside is that dumb teammates might fall for this trick, so you have to be careful.

This trick would probably work well if you do it in some area which is not usually mined. That way the enemy won't suspect it, he'll just see a nice juicy ammo pack.

- Plant mines near health/ammo cabinets
Kill the weak!

- Mines in front of the tank
If the tank is currently stopped, and you have some spare mines to plant, you can plant some mines in front of the tank so it gets damaged as soon as it starts moving. The tank has 1200 HP, and each mine will do 250 HP of damage, so it takes 5 mines to damage a tank. The downside is obviously, you waste 5 mines you could have used for stopping an engy from repairing the tank in the first place.

- Check if your mines have been spotted
Just throw a nade on them to see if they blow up.

- Defusing a spotted mine without setting it off
Usually to defuse a mine, what you do is run onto it, until a smoking cannister appears at your feet, then you bend down and use your pliers on it, right? Well, if the mine is spotted, what you can do is prone at a safe distance, crawl up to the mine, and defuse it while it still looks like a red (or blue) flag. This might be useful if you're defusing a mine in a dangerous area; then if you get caught with your pants down, you can get away more easily. Also, you won't trigger smoke to come out of the mine, alerting the enemies to your presence. Thanks to si:Exodus<for>:/: "Well U can actually go with flamethrower into enemy's spawn.. Keep firing, and it wastes the ammo right away. But yeah, that's cheap."

- Killing the AFK's
Look at the other team and note if anyone has a 999 ping (obviously this only works on a pub). For example, if you're a covert ops in need of a uni, you can see if someone on their team is AFK. Then run into their spawn and grab one when no one is around and you know the enemy isn't going to spawn any time soon.

- Door blocking
Basically, standing in the doorway to annoy enemies. May be useful if you get an enemy uni, throw smoke in the spawn point, then stand in the doorway. They will probably just assume some stupid teammate isn't in the way. You might block a door to just delay the enemies so your teammates can steal an objective, to delay the enemies long enough that their invulnerability runs out so the panzer waiting outside can kill them all, or perhaps to trap them in the spawn point so you can explode them with a satchel you laid out.

This is a very odd tactic, but I mention it because I noticed the Online Gaming League actually listed it as an official "exploit" which they prohibit. However on a pub or something, there's no specific rule against it... heh heh heh.

- Use the objectives camera to spot enemy
In the limbo screen, there's a little camera window you can use to see what is going on around objectives. And since enemy spawn points are often near objectives, you may be able to use it to get the spawn times easily. Sometimes you can't see the enemy, but you can hear them passing by (use headphones). Here's an example below, for finding the spawn time of the Axis (1st spawnpoint) or Allies (2nd spawnpoint). You can use a similar trick on Battery, by viewing the forward bunker flag.



Much thanks to Ragnar-X- for this awesome tip.

- Spectating
This is kind of obvious, but often you can go spectator to spy on your enemy to see how their defense is set up, or to find someone who stole radar parts, etc. I don't do this, it's pretty cheap! However, if you did do it, probably nobody would catch you for it :p

- Ask a question
For example, say a guy named Bob on the Axis team keeps mowing you down every time you try to get into the bank on Goldrush. Ask a question like, "Jeez Bob, you're such a good MG. How do you get me every single time?" Then rush in and kill Bob while he's typing back to you

I haven't ever tried this although I think it'd be funny to see if it worked. Could get you kicked or banned though, I suppose :p

- Impersonating the enemy
This is really low and dirty, although it is kind of funny. You can use ^5 to change your text color to light blue, so it will look like team chat. Then you can give the enemy misinformation. For example, if you're about to infiltrate through the back door on Radar, you could type a message like this:

"^5Engies, get to the front NOW! The allies are coming from the front!"

Although a stunt like this will just make experienced players chuckle (or maybe get pissed at you, I don't know), it may be enough to fool some of the newer players on the enemy team.

If you're really serious about doing this, you could even change your name and add in a coordinate after your name. Like change your name from Frank to "Bob (F, 3)". This will make it seem more convincing.

Personally I only do this as a joke, in a real game this is just too mean
Amazing Exploits

Here are some neat things you can do, which are all legal. (Not considered hacking). So technically I guess a lot of these aren't really exploits but they're still pretty odd Note that some of them are serious flaws in the game, so I would not be surprised if they are fixed in a future version of etpro or shrub. For now though, I have tested all of these and they do work at the time of this writing. If they don't work anymore I made a remark about it.

- Stealing a uni through a window
Believe it or not, you can actually steal a uni from the other side of a window. I'm not sure if it would work for all windows but it's definitely worth a try. The key is that you kill a guy through a window, then stand on the other side, face his body and hold the use key (F) for a while. Even though the 'stealing uni' icon does not appear, IT REALLY WORKS. Even in ETPro and the new patch 2.60. In fact, I didn't even believe this was true after I heard about it, I didn't even believe it as I was writing this paragraph... But then I made a demo of it, so here you are:

Download window_steal.dm_84

This is an extremely low and dirty trick, doing it may get you kicked from the server or something. So don't say I didn't warn you :p

- Giving yourself rifle nades
NOTE: This exploit got fixed in ETPro and the 2.60 patch.
Thanks to $CY-C$~Jazzman~ for pointing that out and velocity for testing it.

Usually you start out with 4 rifle nades. If you're a rifle nade whore, then this exploit is for you You can give yourself more nades, by doing the following:

1. Load a grenade on your rifle (alt-fire)
2. Now, pick up another weapon on the floor (e.g. an MP40)
3. Now, pick up your rifle again.

Voila! You now have another rifle nade up your sleeves. Thanks to {AR}Skippy for submitting this exploit, and {AR}KillerWhale, who discovered this one.

- Shooting rifle nades through doors
This is fixed with newer versions of ETPro and the 2.60 patch.
If you walk right up to a door, you can shoot a rifle nade through it. It's kind of weird though, at some angles it will work and at some angles it won't. I think the key is that the tip of the rifle nade has to stick out as much as possible, basically.

Anyways, this is a HUGE exploit, probably the biggest one I know of, and rather cheap. I made a demo showing one place where this could be used:

Download riflenade_exploit.dm_84

- Insta-gib
Crouch over a fallen enemies head, and knife their crotch. This will instantly gib your enemy. However, there are a couple of things to note. Firstly, you don't have to aim exactly at the crotch, as long as you are crouching over the head and you aim generally towards the other end of your body it should work. The other thing is, if the mod you are playing has increased the HP it takes to send an enemy into limbo, then this "insta-gib" might actually take 2 stabs instead of 1. Thanks to Christiano Pereira for pointing this out.

- 16-bit Z-buffer (options->system->depth buffer)
Sometimes you can see through walls/doors from long distances, because of calculation errors. Useful for sniping. As you can see in the screenshot below, part of this window has disappeared so you can see the enemy's entire body instead of just their head sticking up. Thanks to Ragnar-X- for this tip.

- Magic FPS
When the game runs at an FPS of 43, 76, 125, or 333, you magically move faster and jump higher. This has to do with numerical error in the Quake 3 engine. They're very useful if you want to do trickjumping because they help you jump further than you normally could.
To cap your FPS to 76, use the following script command: "com_maxfps 76". This will give you a constant FPS of 76, assuming your machine can handle it. Capping your FPS also helps your aim. However, if your fps really sucks, then it's probably better to stick to a variable FPS between 50 and 60 than to cap it to 43.

- Fast-firing Akimbo pistols
You can write a script which will let you fire Akimbos nearly as fast as an MG. It doesn't work on all servers, but when it does, it's pretty sweet. Learn more about this in the "tweaks" section.

- Dual SMG
Thanks to Sikhstar and [FCU]TERROR TIMER[NL] for this amazing tip:

It is possible to carry two Sub Machine Guns AND a heavy weapon!!! When you reach level four Heavy Weapons, you are allowed to choose a smg and a heavy weapon. Basically all you have to do is cycle to your heavy weapon, find a dead enemy and pickup a thompson if you are Axis, and vice versa for Allies. Your heavy weapon is on the ground now, just simply pick it back up again and now you have dual smg and a heavy weapon. For some reason the second time the enemy smg is not dropped. When you pickup any ammo crates you recieve ammo for both smg. So when you're out of panza en out of ammo for mp-40 you still have the thompson... Of course this works also when you are Allied.

- Transferring engy charge
You can transfer charge bar from one engy to another. Just put a landmine in a spot where it can't be armed, and then let the other engy try to arm it. His charge bar will actually increase!

- Head hitbox exploit
Since head hitboxes are just simple cubes, you can increase your chances of getting a headshot by attacking at a different angle. Consider a cube with sides of length d on each side. Then, if you look a hitbox at a straight angle, then the effective diameter of the box is just d. However, if you come from a 45 degree angle, then the effective diameter is actually sqrt(2) * d, or about 1.4 times as large. Here is a picture showing this concept:



One important note is that head hitboxes do not rotate with the player models, they are always oriented the same way. So, basically if you want to face at 45 degrees to someones head, you need to point northwest, northeast, southwest, or southeast. You can use walls of buildings as a reference, since they tend to be aligned along north, east, south, and west directions.

Thanks to h3rf who made this information public on the planetwolfenstein forums, and [NW]reyalP for clarifying some things about how this works.

- Exploiting prone hitboxes
Although the prone hitboxes are much smaller in ETPro and Shrub, you can use this with ETMain: prone hitboxes are a lot higher than they should be. What this means is that you can often lie down behind a wounded teammate and the bullets will hit them, not you.

- Shooting around corners
As I mentioned in the shooting portion of the "basic skills" section, the hitboxes in ET are actually much larger than the character models. So, say someone is hiding behind a corner. You might be able to hit them even if you can't see them by just aiming at the edge of the corner. You'll know if you hit them because you'll see blood splatter or smoke puffs (depending on your settings), or if you're playing on etpro 3.0.0 or higher, you can also enable "hit sounds".