Noob to Noob: Reading the tea leaves of battle (how to scry the future from the team screen)

My Noob to Noob series is just as it says.... one Noob talking about the things he's learned hoping to help other Noobs. A large part of my reason for this is that many of the things I read here on the board turned out be relevant to the 3000k+ crowd and completely different in the <1000 infamy area. So read on and learn the quite probably incorrect lessons I've learned.
--------------------------

For the longest time I'd start a match and wait for it to find me a team and then take a quick glance at the team boards mostly waiting for the match to start. Oh what a mistake that was! I've learned there's quite a few things you can deduce about the upcoming match from the preliminary team screen. So I thought I'd walk through my analysis of one. I chose this screen because i found it fairly interesting.



Here's what I scan for as quickly as possible:

The balance of high mark shooters: This is the first thing I want to know because it determines our offensive capability. In this case, the teams are evenly divided each of us having one M5 shooter. Good. All too often the game throws 3 M5's on one team and one on the other because.... infamy.

How about fixers: In this case, we have one and they don't. This is great news if only my team knew what it meant. They don't generally but I do. This means we want to play conservatively and hope for a war of attrition. A long range mortar war is ideal in this situation because we will ALWAYS have more HP than them. That will make me mostly useless but we'll win. So my strategy just changed from aggression to hanging back. On a team I was more confident about I'd go ahead and be aggressive trusting they'd hold back but in this case I don't want to encourage anyone. The converse of this is also true and and that is also not commonly known. If the other team has a fixer and you don't you MUST be aggressive. Then again, aggression is hard to come by anywhere in the lower infamies.

Tankers: Tanking is terribly commonplace in these infamy levels so the next thing I'm looking at is the infamy levels of the high marks on my team. If that infamy level is 700 or below they are almost certainly a tanker. They may not tank this particular match but they need watching. Our sluggers are up in the 900's but that's still pretty low for a M5 so I'm suspicious that something is going on. As I do in most matches where I'm not high mark I'll be keeping a close eye on them.

Examining our fixer: The most obvious thing is that he's at a reasonable infamy level for his mark. That's highly encouraging. Tentatively I'm going to trust him to be good.

Our Defender: I notice we have a defender and that's probably not a good thing at this level. Most defenders do so from the rear at this infamy level which means they are just very weak shooters. Conveniently, that's balanced by the other team. There's nothing to do with this but hope for the best and watch carefully.

The M2 Shooter: Our low boat, worries me a lot. It's not that he's low boat exactly. I've played with awesome M1 and M2 captains. It's that you get a lot of cowboy behavior at those infamies. If he plays conservatively he can be a a real asset. Otherwise he's write off. What I do is wait to see if he starts with "Attack, Together". If so it's a virtual certainty that he's useless.

Looking at the other team it's a lot the same as ours if you swap a healer for an enforcer. Their M5 shooter is very low infamy which bodes well for us.... maybe. Their enfo will want watching because good ones can cause chaos and it's my job as a wannabe speeder to convince them to cut it out -- at gunpoint. The same is true if the other team has speeders. I'd like to say that I'm going after their M5 shooter first but I've learned real combats never work out that way. In the real [sic] bay, you encounter who you encounter and you must prioritize accordingly (which tells you how dumb it is to tell your team to attack the healer at the beginning of the match given that the healer is seldom exposed to attack in the beginning).

The plan I derived from all this
For starters, it all hinges on our M5 shooter and whether he plans to tank this match or not. I also need to see what our M5 defender is going to do so we're going to start out this one looking and waiting. I'll just loiter a bit until I get a bead on what's going on. I'm going to pray they aren't tankers and are smart enough to fight conservatively but I'm not optimistic. I'm most concerned about our M5 shooter so if push comes to shove, I'm partnering with the defender. As a team we can be pretty strong. Our fixer will probably get mad at the team but he'll just have to cope. The M2 will determine his fate in the first few seconds so that'll be easy.

Here's how that turned out:

In terms of play strategy I was 100% correct. The team was not smart enough to fight conservatively except the defender. To be fair, we kind of got dragged into by our M2 and the fact that our M5 kamikaze'd. My prediction about our M2 shooter also turned out to be correct. He gave the ever popular "Attack together" than ran off on his own into the middle of the bay by himself screaming Together! repeatedly. I was pleased to see our fixer start to follow and then stop at a respectful distance waiting to see what myself and the M5 shooter were going to do. I'm feeling emboldened by his caution because I could see he was itching to follow our M2 to their untimely demise.

Moving on, yes our high mark shooter was a tanker. He waited quite a while to start his engines and then he pulled a Leroy Jenkins.

As I had guessed, our healer was pretty spiffy. He was left with an awful choice of following me and the high mark defender (who I started desperately chugging after on the other side of the map) or trying to stay with our floating M5 and maybe save the M2 shooter from his own folly. He elected to hang with the M5 & M2. Later in the match he pretty quickly figured out that I was going to be doing most of the in-fighting and glued to me while, astonishingly enough, tossing healing bolts all over the freakin place. Yeah, I want Vinz13 on my team a LOT more.

But let's go back to my concerns about the defender. That turned out to be wildly inaccurate. The guy was my favorite kind of defender... a massive dual bandage, dual std cannon juggernaut. Better, he was smart enough to lay back but got aggressive when he saw the team was committed. And yes, he was a berzerker... just pretty much charging his foe and beating them down before moving on to the next.

Me? I waited by the defender for a bit but our team was getting dug in deep and they needed relief. Worse, the position myself and the defender were in really didn't give us a clean shot at anything. So I did what any Shooter who think's he's a speeder would do. I went around the side and charged the enemy team from the flank... quickly getting into a furball... my favorite kind of fight.

 

Thanks
If that's actually true then I ought to make a compendium and see if someone wants to pin it. I really do think these boards are not helpful for noobie captains. They led me astray several times.

Too bad that defender robbed me of a clean sweep in terms of my predictions. How DARE he build an actual boat and pilot it capably! Didn't he know I was going to be talking about it in public and it'd make me look foolish? Speaking of which... the first time I saw a defender built like that was the last time I said, "Defenders are basically useless". I had no idea that a defender could be so terrifying. I can guarantee you that the days of me just motoring on up to a defender expecting an easy kill are done with. Nowadays I'm gonna be looking for those dual std cannons.