1 v n scenarios: Kill your enemies and make your friends worship you ;)

We've all been there at some point. You're playing like a boss when, all of a sudden, you find yourself, alone, against a whole bunch of unfriends. And hey, it doesn't always mean you played badly and separated from the pack. Many times, your teammates fell prey to a well-placed ambush you saw ahead of time, or just went the wrong way despite your commands for them not to. Shit happens.


So say you DID end up like that. What do you do?


In this guide, I will try to help you with this. In my (not-so-impressive) 15.6k battles, I have been in more 1v2s than I care to count, a few really rough 1v3s, and one 1v4, that I managed to pull through and win. Now if 1v4s, for YOU, are something you know how to handle, this guide may not be for you. But if you get shaky fingers the moment you find yourself alone, and more than one enemies are after you... You've come to the right thread.

In this guide, I'm going to discuss what you can do in such a case.

WARNING:- This is, for the most part, a speeder- and enfo-only guide. Any other players will find that the more specific tips are useless to them.


1. Calm. Down.
Yes, your team died. Yes, you're up against multiple bogies who are perfectly capable of ganging up on you and wiping the seafloor with you. Yes, your chances of survival are slim.

SO WHAT? You gonna give up on the win? Did you fight through this many battles to lose here? THINK!
Evaluate your current position. Consider every factor.

• How much health do the unfriends have?
• How many of them have self- and team-healing capabilities?
• Where are they?
• Where are you?
• What is your condition? (HP, cooldowns, debuffs)

Now if it's something like you with 300HP, no selfheal, in a defender, with the unfriends in carro speeders halfway across the map... Unless they somehow manage to ALL go AFK, you've already lost. BE REALISTIC. BUT BE RESOURCEFUL. Unless it is completely and utterly a 0% win chance, you can still win. Don't be daunted by the enemy's numbers, that's the surest way to lose a 1 v n.


2. Make a call
Even if people manage to calm down in a 1 v n situation, the next mistake they make is indecision. Indecision is sure to kill you. Whatever you do, do NOT hesitate.

An example:

It's natural to hesitate here... But you're on the clock. What helps me, personally: I decide, then and there, what will lead to me losing faster... And rush to the decision that prolongs loss. In this case, I'd go in guns blazing, but carefully enough that I don't go any closer than absolutely necessary.

Making calls is difficult. And many times, you find that you simply didn't have the experience to make the right call. Remember those times, they come in handy. A LOT.


3. Play with their heads
The biggest advantage you have when you are alone is that there are no variables on YOUR side that are out of your control. There are no teammates to block shots, give wrong orders, or otherwise negatively influence enemy teamflow. That means you can manipulate the unfriends with no interference. They are more susceptible to manipulation as well. Wouldn't they be? There's n of them against one off you. Heck, they probably want to use you as target practice What should you do?

• Well, first off, split them up if your build favors it. Spread out opponents equals less firepower pointed at you. Easy prey.
• Guide them into places with less space to fight in, it is really useful if you have trap weapons or specialize in torpedoes. It also gives you a LOT of choices when it comes to retreating to recover and surveying the situation again. It has the additional use of lowering the number of potential attacks from your attackers.
• If the enemy has trap users, be very careful. Stay on your toes, but MAINTAIN PRESSURE. Trappers, especially good ones who use more than just their mines, cannot set up wide nets if you constantly harass them.
• If they have healers, GO FOR THEM. But try "testing" the enemy team (For example, "diving" into a fake "assassinate" to check whether the enemy team tries to defend their fixer/reaper is a good way to test the waters.)
• However, BE AWARE OF THE CLOCK. Don't get tunnel vision when it comes to your enemies. Capturing WILL WORK where killing doesn't. The tiebreaker rules make it so that when the time ends, the team that is capturing gets the win. Don't forget that.

4. TERMINATE TERMINATE TERMINATE


I cannot emphasize this enough. You cannot win a 1 v n by leaving deep wounds on your enemy, you win it by killing them. One by one. Coldly. Ruthlessly. Leaving deep wounds to just choose a different target shows bad form, unless it's a trick. "Kill order" is important. The order in which you kill your targets will differ, of course, depending on your playstyle. So let's talk about that.

• Assassins:- You have high speed and burst, but high cooldowns. DO NOT PROLONG ENGAGEMENTS. Low HP targets first, always. Fixers first if the unfriends have them. Enemy speeders chasing you take priority above everyone else, split them far away from their team and annihilate them before the enemy cavalry arrives. Enemy enfos are tough, learn to juggle targets there. If the enfo has a TS on, spare your weapons. Unless of course you have torps. If you have torps, the best time to use them is when enemy shields (applies to both the Guardian's wall and the enfo's TS) are on. It reduces visibility.

• Duelists and Rangers:- With better-than-average burst and mid-low cooldowns... Engage the bigger threats first. Fixers are almost always huge threats, while shooters come a close second. Smart speeders will stay the hell away from you if you are a good enough duelist. Nobody wants to cross swords with a speederkiller when they have the advantage of numbers. Use that to your advantage, and you should be fine.

• Rogues and trapsetters:- It's not going to be easy. As a rogue, you may have the best of both worlds (assassins and duelists) but that also means your kill orders change with your role. I got my 1v4 win playing a rogue speeder, and let me tell you, deciding the flanks you will engage on is the toughest part if you're proficient at ranges. You'll have to monitor your targets more sharply than most, and react fluidly to changes in the environment.

5. Greed and self-control

First off, I would like to thank @JoshW for sharing his interceptor replay here (be sure to give it a watch in the post below!). Before I watched that replay, I had TOTALLY forgotten about writing this section.
So I guess I'm the right person to talk about greed and self-control. Who better than someone who suffered from its effects, eh?

Spoiler: My history with greed

Greed and I go a LONG way back. Like, a real long way. So long in fact that it is what got me hooked into the assassin classes in BB (that's nearly one and a half years ago). It has been my weakness for AGES, and it's only now that I'm a Nightmare that I'm barely able to suppress it. There's a story behind it.
December 2018. I was STILL greedy, believe it or not. But it was holding me back, and I knew it. I was at 3916 infamy. I remember it clear as day. I saw Bittersteel, backed by twin fixers. Me being me, I rushed them about halfway into the game, dying pointlessly and losing 23 infamy. Having gone all the way up to 3986 that day, I took a breather and walked out of the lobby.
That's when I saw Bittersteel message me. What he said then stuck with me.

I live by that these days, since I made Nightmare a few hours later. Solo.

Greed is both a catalyst and a poison. It WILL trip you up, 80% of the time, as a rookie in the clutch. Greed makes people choke. It also VERY RARELY makes them as Gods. Everyone has ways to deal with it, but the ones I use most are:

• Remembering ALL the times you did stupid shit like walking into a 1v3 when three enemy railguns cooled down.
• Thinking, "Is this really the best thing I can do?" Don't take massive risks in a 1 v n scenario if you have less risky options. A chip damage kill that takes 60 seconds is better than a burst damage kill that takes 20 but is a risk. It's okay to take your time.
• Paying attention to where you're being greedy, going for an attack you WANT to make and not one you NEED to make. Be careful, and you won't have a problem.

(Continued below, crossed length limit lol xD)

 

Before you leave:

There’s a couple of things you can do in certain conditions:

1. If there’s no yellows in the enemy team, you have 30s to go and the enemy team opponent is an idiot

In this case, take him/her as far away from the capture zone as possible, and when 20 seconds remain, rush to capture. Really douche move, I know, but hey, lands you the W.​

2. If you're on Damage Depot and your opponents are not coming up + they are mortar users

In this case, start capturing until they try to break it. Then pretend to retreat. Now they feel obligated to capture, so you can take your pick from THREE different entrances (four if you have a grenade) to pop attacks at them. They will be so busy trying to hit you that they'll most probably forget to check each others' statuses. Whittle down and terminate.​

3. If you have debuff weapons in a 1 v n situation

Those weapons are super useful. Know the exact values of damage they are capable of, because debuff weapons deal WAAAAAAY more damage than they let on. Burning your target also causes them to retreat, fearing a follow-up blast/excannon attack. Use that to your advantage when you don't want an opponent to follow you.​

Some videos for reference:-

1. 1v4 battle: The importance of ranging, switching flanks, and truly knowing your ship.

2. 1v3 battle: The importance of knowing how to deal with trapsetters, keeping your cool and not giving the enemy a chance to retaliate.

3. 1v2 battle: This is slightly irrelevant these days, but here goes. The importance of using a knowing the map, psychological manipulation and using a DoT weapon.

4. A guest appearance by @JoshW that shows us the importance of not being too greedy for that kill!
https://replay.battlebay.net/MJXKKKYF#JXSFJGCB
Also, you might find this scenario-based guide to be handy to maybe learn some new sneaky tricks

 

I would if I had WiFi and a quiet place to stream xD

 

It's a rather hard skill to explain, but I'll try my best!
The REAL trick here is the entire flow of backward-rest-forward. And it's been super optimized at the backward and forward movement stages.

For the backward movement:

What you can see there are 50% the effects of overboost, and 50% my experience with coaxing the speeder into going much faster than its design speed in reverse. You could even call that other 50% "trickery".

Spoiler: The long explanation

• Overboost makes a LARGE difference in reverse speed. The first time I noticed this was last year when I was just about to walk into a torp(like 2 seconds from that point) and overboosted in a panic. In the first second, the overboost pulled me DIRECTLY into the torp's path while I frantically went full reverse. In the second second(did I just say second second? LMAO ) it hauled my long-body brute of a speeder right back! It was crazy, and so I started experimenting with it, accidentally inventing a new style of the speeder along the way.
• So the speeder is NOT designed to go in reverse. And many of the pros clearly state that if you're reversing in a speeder, you're playing it wrong. But as you may have seen in that particular battle, I was almost reversing as hard as a pureblooded enforcer. The reason for that is, well, I picked up a thing or two playing enforcer. For example, did you know that the enforcer "dance" no longer works straight forward-backward? Yeah, you have to VEER diagonally forward or backward. Why? Because the enforcer's increased agility gives it a "fake reverse" when you do that. Because the hitbox POSITION changes INSTANTLY when you fake-reverse. You physically TRICK the enforcer to reverse just a little bit harder than what it is designed for. I used that on the speeder, and found that, due to the speeder's DISPROPORTIONATE length-breadth dimension ratio, you "fake-reverse" even HARDER in a speeder! (See figure)

For the forward movement:

So the forward movement is an interesting trick as well. The entire process is premeditated. I don't go like, "Yeah, I'm done moving backward, I'm going to go forward now.

So when I move forward again, I don't hesitate or stop to consider whether I'm making the right decision. It was a common enforcer skill back when the "enforcer dance" was the primary maneuver. We were always making those plays where we popped in for just enough time to make a shot, then popped back out again.

Think about it this way: When an expert gunman runs out of ammunition, does he treat:

• Ejecting the spent mag
• Inserting a new one and resuming firing

As different processes? Or are they ingrained into him as the same process?

 

I rewrote this response to complete my answer btw, I was only explaining the first part of my maneuver there. Now it talks about why the "moving forward" part is as fluid as you see it.

 

That was an excellent play, and a total work of art. You also showed me something I omitted when I talked about 1vn scenarios. In the 1v1 at the very end, you showed a very important attribute of a clutch playmaker: You weren't GREEDY.

Editing my original post to talk about this! Also, putting up your battle tag as an "example"!

 

You know, I would totally have tried to hit him with that second excannon(and taken a hit later, putting me on the back foot, evasion-wise, in the long run). My greed is one of the main reasons it took me so LONG to get to NML. It was actually @BITTERSTEEL who helped me with that greed part. I'm going to give him props as well when I write the "greed" section in my OP.

 

I hope I have the space for that, guess I'll put it into point number 3.
Edit: Yay, it fit!

 

Well, I only really mastered that technique later on in my speeder career, and my device hasn't aged well, so it's difficult to record without stutter. I think I only have a couple of videos where you can really see the rapidfire reverse under play. I'll find them for you when I wake up tomorrow (2304 here lol)

 

^^ At around 1:12 and 2:34 in this video, you'll be able to see "swivel" movement, which is one of the major applications of that particular style of reverse for duellist speeders

^^In the second video of this section, you'll be able to see another use of reverse: It helps you to change DIRECTION without giving your enemy any obvious clues that you are changing it.

^^Now this is VERY old and dates back to the time when I was just understanding that particular reverse. I called it a "taildrift" at the time. I overshoot my target because I fire my flare, and you'll see me pop a very efficient reverse. That's the core of the forward-backward technique. It's at around 2:48.