Hell Let Loose: Winning as Commander

I'm going to teach you how to win as commander in Hell Let Loose - at least at beginning and intermediate levels. This is for purely selfish reasons: I have a much better experience at Hell Let Loose if the commander doesn't loose the game, and too many of my recent game experiences have been because the commander loses the game.

Let's start by inverting the command chain. The fantasy of being in charge of 49 other people is just that, a fantasy. As a commander you are not here to command: you are here to be a servant for the other 49 players in order to ensure that they are having a good time. To do that you have to understand human behaviour, because your chain of command is fundamentally about getting the team to behave the way you want them to. A key part of this is understanding loss aversion: people are prefer to avoid losses then making equivalent gains, even when the final outcome is equivalent. To translate this: the team will have a much better time if they hold a point, rather than if they lose it then regain it over the same period, even though the net outcome is the same. And by holding a point, we avoid the risk of losing the game.

Your primary responsibility as a commander is to never lose a point.  Everything else much become subordinate to that. If you never lose a point, your team will have a stable platform from which they can launch attacks, feints, go off on adventures and find stories to tell. At worst, you will lose warfare maps 2-3 (but only against other players who've read this guide), win offensive maps when you're defending 4-1 (given the first point can often fall before the team gets there), and offensive maps when you're attacking... well, let's get there after covering off the basics.

Mechanically, how can you lose a point? Again, there is a very simple reason: your team is not on the point defending it. So all your actions must be considered in the light of "will this ensure my team will get to the point and defend it?", and anything that does not must be discarded.

At this point, some players reading this might start to object and point out how important the commander is for attacking. This is entirely nonsense. The commander does not need to do anything for the team to attack. The team will naturally attack. They have all the tools they need. A support class and either an officer or recon can put up offensive garrisons in blue territory. A well organised squad or pair of squads can do the same in red territories, given at most 40 seconds of swapping players between support to do so. An officer or spotter in a supply truck can do that anywhere that there's no armour on the field. If the squads don't choose to do so, that is not your problem as the commander; it is their problem as one of the other 49 other people in the game. If they can't kill the other team effectively when they're attacking, it's their problem, not yours.

Luckily for us the game is balanced so it is much easier to defend than attack, that smart players will realise that you're giving them every opportunity to maximise their kills and win that 50% experience bonus.

So as we're agreed that defense is the only thing we need to consider, let's look at the commander powers in light of this, starting with the manpower abilities.

Airheads

There is no faster way to lose your point then put up an airhead in exactly the right spot to attack the enemy team.

This may sound paradoxical, but hear me out. An airhead that gets up and stays up long enough to be useful attacking an enemy point will immediately divert the majority of your team from defense to attack. One of two things will happen: either you'll cap, because the other team is unprepared, or you'll be met with an equal or greater number of defenders. Your team attacking off the airhead will get their outposts up, and if you're lucky a garrison, and if you're incredibly lucky the garrison won't stay locked. But the stars have to align right for you to do this (and we'll talk about how to get the stars aligned right when talking about bombing runs) but in every instance, your airhead will stop before you've finished capturing the point.

At this point, you are in an incredibly precarious position. Your garrison and outposts are surrounded by enemy spawn points, a whole lot of your team is stranded in enemy territory and the other team is doing the right thing (staying on the point defending) and you're doing the wrong thing (not staying on the point defending). This is where I bring up the third principle of being a commander: you will win if your team is better then the other team, regardless of what you do. If your team is better, you can cap off an offensive airhead. But if your team is better, you're going to win anyway. Using the methods outlined here, you'll get your team joking "HLL speed run", a message I got while commanding a team last night using these techniques - even though I had lost voice comms for almost the entire match! That, by the way, is the secret to winning an offensive map when you're attacking, that I alluded to earlier: just have a better team than the opposition. It's simple really. Being the attacking side on offence is a test of the entire team, not just the commander, and I suspect where a lot more interesting high level commander tactics are actually useful. You'll see players haranguing you about these: "place the airhead here", "bombing run please", "drop supplies on me". Ignore them, unless you're the attacker on an offensive map. Then, and only then, start to consider the wisdom of the crowd and traditional techniques.

There's only one circumstance that you can reliably expect the other team to be unprepared, and that's after you've just captured a point. You may be tempted in these circumstances to drop an offensive airhead to get a double-cap. Ignore it. You're going to be setting up double-caps using an entirely different technique that will get you triple-caps, without any of the risk of manpower. And if the airhead stays up, you're in an even worse position than a traditional airhead, because now you've spread your team out across three points: the airhead, the point you've just captured, and the point you were defending.

Instead, use the air-head to reinforce a point you're just about to capture or that you've just captured. Drop it on or as close to the point, ideally behind some friendlies, with an unobstructed path to the point. The timing of the airhead is important: I required at least half of the capture bar to be filled, but usually as commander I'm busy doing something more important and end up saying something stupid sounding like "oh **** we're capping" and that's my cue to drop the air-head.

Get everyone to redeploy onto either the airhead you've dropped or the garrison someone is placing. People will ignore you, then come in on the second wave. That's ok.

Reinforce

Reinforce should be used whenever the capture bar starts to turn red on the point you are defending. Don't wait for it to get one third red, or in fact any appreciable distance into the red bar. Do it immediately. You're already in a position where the enemy has got too close to the point, because, as should be obvious, it means that all the enemy are close enough to the point, because, as stated before, all your team should be on the point defending. Reinforce is a force multiplier, so the best time to use it is when you have lots of defenders on the point.

Always keep enough manpower to use reinforce, but be prepared to sacrifice it immediately to use your airhead as described above.

Encouraged

Use encouraged whenever you get above around 700 manpower. You'll get to do this often, because you're not wasting airheads or reinforces. You'll end up with 2000 or more fuel as a result, but that's ok. Don't use it if you don't have nodes.

Supply Drop

Fourth rule of commander: Do not drop supplies anywhere in front of the point you are defending. This includes in the blue territory. In fact almost all of the supplies you should be dropping should be on the point you're currently defending. Supplies are a giant flashing sign in the sky of where your garrisons, infantry and recon squads are. They give away vital intelligence and are honey for enemy recon squads, recon tanks and bombing runs. Instead use them to encourage your engineers to build defences and to ensure your squaddies can immediately build another garrison if you ever lose the garrison on point.

We may as well discuss garrison placement now. This is your primary minute by minute job as commander: to ensure you have defensive garrisons. You'll do this by running up supplies using a supply truck, turning around, going back and getting more supplies. Make sure that you build the garrison as far away from where you dropped the supplies as you are able to, to make the supplies harder to find. But also be careful not to put the supplies within 50m of a zoomed out map grid line because a) it makes the locations more predictable because it is easier to measure in map grids and b) someone might build a garrison in the red territory (even if that territory is blue now).

A lot of commanders will argue that you should triangulate your garrisons around the point you're defending so that you don't have a garrison on point. The argument boils down to it's not fun spawning on a garrison which the enemy is bombing or spawn camping; and they're going to be spawn camping the point they're attacking. But the enemy is going to be focused on garrisons anyway, and triangulated garrisons gives them three opportunities to spawn camp instead of one.

I instead prefer to have a garrison on point, because I have the supplies on point and I have engineers building barricades to block incoming fire on point. I then have a defensive half-moon of garrisons around the rear of the point around 300 meters out (one and a half grid squares). I pick 300 meters, because I want the enemy to build their offensive garrisons within this ring, and I want to slow down enemy recon squads and tanks getting from garrison to garrison. I've seen a recon tank take out 3 triangulated garrisons and a half-track in less than two minutes around an undefended point at rear.

I want the enemy to build their offensive garrisons within my garrison ring so we can always flank and take them out, and because of rule number two: I want my team defending the point, not wandering off it. 300m is too far away to be convenient to spawn at another garrison and run back to point. I want them on the point.

There is one other exception to supply drops, for warfare maps only, and only when you're 2-3 or 4-1 down. If you have plenty of supplies on point, you should drop a supply drop or two deep into enemy territory: half-way between cap 4 and 5 if you are defending the second point, or between cap 3 and 4 if things have gone really bad and you're defending the last point. The function of these supply drops is to enable a triple-cap. This works as follows: you cap a point, reinforcing it using your airhead as you normally would. Your friendly recon squad immediately builds an offensive garrison in enemy territory using the supplies you dropped. From there you cap the next point (double-cap) by moving back from that garrison and the point after that (triple-cap) immediately afterwards.

It is really important that these deep supply drops aren't anywhere that can be used to build a garrison before you make the next cap. Doing so will enable your team to wander off the point you are currently defending, diluting your defense.

Recon

Since you never need to recon the next point, because you don't want to encourage attacking it, this frees up reconnaissance flights for their primary function: hunting tanks. Ensure that your officers mark up all the tanks locations to assist your tank and anti-tank gun crews.

Strafing Run

Use your strafing runs to kill the recon squads taking your defensive garrisons out. Zoom in and make sure you aim carefully, as soon as you notice the garrison is locked (completely red). Sometime it'll be an enemy vehicle passing by, but rarely. You want to teach the enemy recon the lesson that they'll die any time they try to take down a garrison. Then have someone deploy on the garrison to hunt down and kill them and destroy their outpost.

If you're dead or respawning, change your respawn location to an HQ to ensure you get the strafing run in time. Note that you can place strafing runs and other command tasks while you are mortally injured and waiting for a medic.

Bombing Run

Use your bombing runs to take down enemy garrisons that enemies are using to attack your point. Only use them against confirmed (precisely marked) garrison targets, and give the squad 30 seconds or so to take the garrison down itself. They likely won't be able to because that's where the enemy will be aggressively spawning, but note that if the garrison is in your blue zone, that it'll be locked from 100m out which should make it easier.

Note that these enemy garrisons will often include the garrison on their defensive point. Your team may choose to take advantage of this.

I will freely admit to not being very good at this but I've seen it used against my team and it is truly terrifying.

Half-tracks

The initial version of this article had a bunch of theory crafting about half-tracks, based on the most effective uses I had seen. I then went out and tried to put it into practise that evening, and remembered why the only times I've lost warfare matches is because I've used half-tracks. Half-tracks appear to support, but actually violate the principle "will this ensure my team will get to the point and defend it?". Will they can double your defensive spawn capability, any player of your team can decide to relocate the half-track, either driving it into a place which will get it destroyed (the least bad option), do something incredibly stupid like forget to switch the engine off (which will waste your team resources trying to fix it) or by putting it into an effective attacking position (really bad). This is bad for exactly the same reason that an effective attacking airhead is bad. The specific game I lost because I spawned half-tracks in, we lost because a player 'helpfully' got a disabled half-track from deep within enemy territory (wasting time they could have been using to defend our point), and drove it right up behind the enemy point in an highly effective attacking position. Everyone saw this, abandoned their defense of the final point, and we lost as a result. (We were defending final because I'd effectively lost the game in the first five minutes by getting a supply truck stuck in a great attacking garrison position, and the team built a succession of four garrisons all of which drained resources away from the defense of the point we needed to defend, after losing the neutral cap).

There are two situations where a half-track might be useful as a stealth airhead: either when you have capped the first point in an offensive map and need to get to the other edge of the map for point two; or when you have your fourth point almost captured and you want to ensure you can spawn on the HQ behind the final point. In both instances, limited yourself to a single half-track and hope that someone gets it blown up shortly thereafter.

Supply Trucks

Spawn a second one as soon as you are able to. You're going to be spending a lot of the game driving these: initially to get your garrisons up and then to get supplies up to points. If you are killed in one of these, just respawn and get another. Your team will use the one you left behind, or it'll get destroyed. If you drop the supplies, turn around, go back and get more supplies.

The worst thing you can do is get a supply truck stuck, so don't take any risks driving them. It's better to have the truck and you destroyed by a tank or mine than to get it stuck.

Other Tanks

I have never met as meek and polite a group of people as armoured officers asking for another tank. They're incredibly apologetic that they wasted your resources and embarrassed that they let a tank get killed, and if they don't hear from you they're likely to just go off and fire some artillery for a while. Keep reminding the command chat that you have 2000 fuel and Tigers for everyone.

"All your team should be on the point defending"

Don't ever tell the team off for not defending. Encourage them to defend, but if they do something else, that's fine, but it's their decision, just not something you can provide support for right now. The whole point of this "Doull's Doctrine" is to make everything else inconvenient enough that defense is the obvious thing to do. Call out when outposts and garrisons get lit (red indicator) or locked (all red), but you already have plans for that. Smart squads will use the garrisons you place to flank enemy positions.

The most persistent people are those calling for a supply drop, especially recon, because that seems perfectly reasonable thing to request from their perspective. The best thing I can do at this point is claim supplies are a minute out, and then in a minute, drop supplies on the defensive point again and blame the supply drop user interface: "Sorry I double-dropped at the last location". If it's a recon squad, drop them deep, and tell them "get the garrison up after we cap".

The location they're requesting will be overrun by the attackers soon enough.

So uh how do we cap?

If you never attack, there's no advantage to the defenders defending, is there? The defenders will get bored and stop defending and go all in. At that point, one of your disobedient squad leaders or a newbie will get in the attacking circle and start capping. This might happen several times. Just be patient and re-read the airhead section. You'll get the point faster than you think.

Games as Emotion (Part Two)

Looking back at my older blog series, I guess I've broken the post title convention I used to adopt, which was The Blog Post - Part One (The Partening) or something like that. I guess if you want a subtitle, then I guess part one might be Sadness, but this part two would be Making, which of course makes no sense.

A big part of the reason I've played a lot more games this year, is that they've got a lot easier to play. Roughly this time last year, I spent a bit too much money on a new rig with a 3080 and a curved QHD high refresh rate monitor and as a result games got a lot smoother than my slightly upgraded rig from 2012.

I bought it, of course, to play the PC release of Death Stranding (104 hours), which is an incredible visual feast of a game with DLSS running. I also played and finished Deathloop (time not tracked?) and Rage 2 (40 hours), started and finished a new play through of Prey (around 15-20 hours), and played Hell Let Loose (191 hours), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (72 hours), Mad Max (47 hours), The Witness (15 hours), Cyberpunk 2077 (6 hours?, I've done one quest after the opening), Disco Elysium (5 hours?, I've made it out the front door of the hotel and visited a book shop), Neocab (time not tracked), replayed half of Titanfall 2 (time delta not tracked because the game whips by), wasted my time getting frustrated by bad stealth mechanics in Alien Isolation (90 minutes) and am still unsure how the majority of games systems work or what I was doing in Destiny 2 (51 hours). Of those games, Death Stranding, Hell Let Loose and the Witcher 3 have become the 5th, 4th and 6th most played games of mine since Steam started recording that sort of thing. I also clocked some hours on Slay the Spire which is undoubtedly up there on time played.

This is mostly to say that the human brain loves lists (or perhaps a table or pie chart), and I am no exception. But my play experience has been made well by getting a new PC, and in turn, I've been able to play a number of well made games. And the games on this list are well made in the sense they exhibit a technical mastery of art and video game development. But that's not what I mean when I used the phrase "well-made" in the previous post.

Instead I think specifically of the interactions between the game, it's systems and aesthetics, and the player, the act of playing itself, to create a story which is experienced in a completely separate mode from being told or shown it: making a story. I've intuitively discarded alternate phrasings like "well-played", "well-designed" or "well-done" (doing a story), because of unwanted meanings associated with those phrases and because I want to emphasise the (conscious and unconscious) choices of the people making the game (in all its aspects, not just game design). I'm trying to gesture towards an active process: the construction of a "well-made" story requires the presence of a player who willingly enters the magic circle and plays the game aided by the game design suspending their disbelief and engaging them. However there are enough random factors in any game and player that I don't want to put any blame on a player if they don't experience the emotion affect intended: this is the distinction between "well-made" and a hypothetical "well-played".

In this sense, a game is a tool that allows a player to generate emotional experiences.

(And now I am torn, because maybe the term should be "well-generated" stories, but I've already used and abused 'generate' too much).

What I'm trying to capture here is best expressed by Hell Let Loose, a first person multiplayer collaborative shooter, where players effectively enter a deliberately limited consensual reality that largely mimics specific World War 2 scenarios. Hell Let Loose defies some conventions of these games while embracing others, but at its heart, much like Death Stranding, it tries to force people to communicate and collaborate in specific modes and channels to achieve objectives. Hell Let Loose does this using a number of now standard mechanisms (pings, voice and chat, group voice and chat) but creates vertical and horizontal choke points in these mechanisms which require players depend on each other to overcome. Players read compass directions and map grids and symbols to each other because targets are hard to see and quickly become dangerous; audio channels become expressive if used sparingly but jammed if overused, with officers having to observe, listen to and use channels and expressions that their squad is not privy to; building and attacking dynamically placed critical infrastructure is more important than individual achievements.

And, unlike a co-op shooter like Left 4 Dead, Hell Let Loose has a wide breadth of experiences for players to choose from, all of which are weighted with enough significance so that they meaningfully impact play: you can choose from driving a supply truck, firing artillery, desperately trying to flank a tank to hit it with one of only two rockets, and so on, so that the potentially each of these actions is a unique experience generator even nearing 200 hours of play. For instance, last night I lead a squad for 10 minutes to push a supply truck 200 meters up a road to try to get a second attacking garrison into Foy, only to have to abandon it to defend a previously well-defended position that was now falling on the other side of the map. For those 10 minutes, moving that truck while under fire was the most important thing we could do, and none of us ever before had had driving a truck such a short distance become so meaningful in the game.

These stories are not "well-told" or "well-shown": they are unique to games. And I am wise enough to see the hand of the game makers in making specific choices in Hell Let Loose that I see a continuum between single player, highly authored experiences like Death Stranding and multi player chaotic experiences like Hell Let Loose.

I'm going to pause a while, play some more Hell Let Loose and then think about writing a part three.

Games as emotion (Part One)

 2021 was a year where I reconnected with playing games in a big way. I played a lot more games. I finished games. And I felt a lot more strongly in games.

To be clear, I didn't feel a lot more strongly about games. As has probably been obvious from this blog feed and the lack of any Roguelike Radio episodes for more than a year, I have cared less and thought less about games than probably any time in the last decade. The exception maybe the TTRPG I've been working on since 2015, but even then releasing it has felt less urgent than probably at any point during its development.

This is because I am tired of the whole rotten industry edifice: the abuse of game maker and critics by players and funders continues to harm, burn out and drive away those people in the industry while enabling abusers. I quit BGG a few years back because of the way that community ignored, created and facilitated that actively hostile environment, and I genuinely see no end in sight anywhere in the industry. The world wide failure to deal with COVID should be clear to everyone by now that capitalism ensures there is no end.

While I'm highlighting the power imbalance between workers and consumers, I should be clear that there is no safe part of the industry: game players are just as trapped in this systemic abuse as anyone else, nor elsewhere in the world. My non-game industry day job is about 8 out of 10 on the actively evil scale and I spend as much effort as I can afford trying to get it to a 7.

But games in 2021 made me shout out emotions: fiero, joy, boredom, regret, surprise and surprisingly sadness, in a complex palette, in brief shared exchanges with strangers and in ways that no other medium can possibly encompass.

I'm writing this because I want to talk out a distinction I felt between emotions engaged by games and emotions engaged by narrative in games. I'm sure that there's plenty of writing and analysis out there about this (post in the comments if you know of any), but I'm going to try to tease these out myself so excuse any old ground that I'm walking over in a way that doesn't patent infringe by causing a narrow path to slightly broaden (thanks Sony!).

And that brings me to the first feeling I want to talk about, and probably the most complex: sadness in Death Stranding. Parasocial twitter mutual GB 'doc' Burford has written extensively about this elsewhere but I want to call out a different time Death Stranding hit me in the feels: the literal end of the Elder quest chain. Quest chain is the wrong word: Death Stranding does part of what I asked for many years ago and turns quests into a trading-like game, although like everything the game does, it makes the them most gentle and forgiving version of that idea.

On this scale, the Elder is the more annoying version. He's out of the way, requires that you climb up to the top of a hill without being technically difficult, and offers little in the way of rewards. The Elder also delays his connections to the chiral network just to rub it in your face: he doesn't want you there and the game does little to pay back your investment. Unlike another mission giver, there is no hidden back story, no secrets or twist. The Elder starts being unpleasant to your face, eventually begins to like and praise you and, just as I got towards the end of the game, he leaves you a message saying he's dying and then dies.

And his death left me in tears.

I have a good relationship with my father. He nearly died last November, which is to say that I have possibly felt a tiny fraction of the grief and frustration that someone who has lost a loved one during this pandemic and been unable to travel to see them before they died or to grieve them with others afterwards. This happened well after this incident in the game, which is my circular way of saying that I don't think there are specific extenuating circumstances that might have rendered me vulnerable to this story arc in a way someone else might not be.

Instead I think it was a story well-made. It wasn't well-told, or well-shown: the holo image I saw of the man fit the thematic conceit of Death Stranding, and the plainly written emails aren't especially memorable in themselves. This underdevelopment is typical Kojima canniness towards the broader themes he's exploring, but that set dressing needed me to act and feel my along the path he had laid out. My thesis here is games are unique in the way they can make emotions in a way no other medium can.

And in part two, I attempt to explain what I mean by the phrase a "well-made" story.