Engineers.

The hardest-working class in the entire Fortress got a well-deserved upgrade recently, with Valve once more reminding us that they are the Way and the Light and the Joy.  Or at least, with Valve releasing another free upgrade to the greatest multiplayer game currently in operation, which is close to the same thing.

The new and improved Engy (well don't that beat all)

The updates have so far been aimed at underused classes, aiming to promote the pyro or make up for a medic shortage (both of which worked well).  That certainly isn’t the case for our hard-hatted friend, the most  played class (fully 33% more than the closest competitor), but was instead intended to reward the rock-solid engineering core.  Because Engineers are vital - no one mourns a Scout, and no team in the history of TF2 servers has ever needed more snipers, but if you log on to  a full RED team with no Engies there’s only one option: log out and find a game server that isn’t full of idiots.

A host of hard-hats.

The update gave engineers the excitement of their very first games all over again.  Most mechanically-minded players had their build orders refined down to the microsecond and could defend the second stage of dustbowl in their sleep.  They were about as likely to change their strategies as an overpass designer - even the slightest alteration could cause a lot of death and destruction.  For their own team. Which is bad.

Never mind the sentry - this dispenser looks like it could beat you up.

Level 3 equipment has changed all that.  Upgraded dispensers are now an epic font of health enabling Heavies to stand their ground against much stiffer competition, and they spout metal like a Cybertronian volcano full of steel mines.  Even an Uber-Heavy can now be held off if he starts too far away - no more marching out of Dustbowl stage 1’s upper-left tunnel in a shiny blue blaze of guaranteed glory.

The most important upgrade, however, is the teleporter.  The Level 3 Tele isn’t a handy shortcut, it’s a full-on reinforcement highway to the front lines.  It’s so powerful, so amazing, it’s done something thought impossible - it’s stopped idiots from trying to crouch-nudge the Heavy off the platform.  People now actually queue up politely for their ‘port into action because it’s so fast.  Amazing.

It can change the entire course of the games.  Payload stage two particularly, with the torturous route to the tele entrances (if they aren’t hidden in the spy-inaccessible upper tunnel) frustrating spy-sapping and meaning that RED can make BLU work very hard just to break outof the spawn.

Which is why the update also helps the Engineer’s natural predator: the  Spy.  The ability to replenish the cloak by picking up fallen weapons has single-handedly changed the spy’s style from “softly softly years of espionage”, hiding in corners for ten seconds at a time (an eternity!) waiting for your cloak to recharge, to action-packed James Bond daredevilry as you thread through hordes of enemies to pick up an ammo pack and dash back to their spawn.

The Spy feeding off his mortal enemy.

Because the update makes teleporter entrances the most valuable target in the game.  Before it was strictly amateur hour, where running all the way to sap the entrances bought your side a second or two at most (as well as advertising where you were to the entire enemy team).  But since destroying either end of the teleporter reverts the whole thing to level 1, sapping a slew of entrances at the spawn can entirely change the course of the battle.  If you’re good you can stab the first person to come investigating, pick up their weapon and the teleporter rubble to recharge your cloak, and dash off into the shadows - possibly while singing the “Mission Impossible” theme.  Before crippling the weakened defense.

The PERFECT sap.

Goldrush is the most popular map on Team Fortress 2 servers (recent update insanity aside), even pushing the almighty Dustbowl from the top spot. What makes moving a cart along a fixed track so compelling?



It can’t be the novelty - that fades a couple of weeks after each update, along with all the horrible TF2 achievementbox servers (aka “How to turn your favorite game into work in one easy step!”). As well as being added to the main rotation, loads of custom servers have cropped up offering Goldrush 24/7 and most tellingly of all, Goldrush/Dust TF2 servers.

That’s your first hint: the dedicated attack/defense dynamic is tremendous fun. There’s no such thing as a stalemate on a one-way map: if things aren’t moving forward then RED is kicking your weak BLU ass. But with a map so well designed it never becomes an uncrackable Chokepoint Of Death: there are always alternate routes and counter-strategies to however they’re holding you back. Protip: 90% of the time the counter strategy is “You need more medics you BLU dumbasses”. Looking at the win/lose ratio, we can see that this happens a LOT.

Why does RED hold sway on this map so often? Half of any battle is intel, and a look at the valve-provided “Death Map” for the stage reveals a major hotspot:

or as you normally see it:

This one section of corridor is slightly more lethal than a Predator wearing a necklace of nuclear warheads. A great stickybomb point, open to close-range sentries (and snipers from clear across the map), a Heavy buffet of Eety-Beety-victims and so wonderfully custom made for defensive pyros it might as well come with gas nozzles in the walls.

BLU can hide behing the corner and build an uber - but they never do seem to run fast enough when the RED counter-charge comes barreling round that wooden corner. I’ve seen more medics burned up at 90% uber than I care to count - and with so many medikits so close by, there’s really no excuse. Be ready to charge, but be ready to flee with that precious percentage at the first sign of trouble. Remember: a medic life without an ubercharge is a wasted life.

There are other hot spots (the final approach in stage 2 and the terminal corner in stage 3), but none nearly so deadly as that first tunnel. A few hints to help crack any of those hotspots:

- There are other routes. Outside of relay races, spending ten times as long running as fighting is not a good contribution, so don’t just march round the Corner of Instant Explosion trying to headbutt a level 3 sentry.
- Watch your back - and more importantly, watch your medics back! Some of the alternate routes work both ways.
- Are you a spy? Are you in the bottom half of the scoreboard? Then why not try going medic and NOT being hated by the rest of your team!
- If you must spy, be aware that after the first point is capped sapping the tele entrances does nothing but tell them you’re there.
- Don’t be an offensive scout on stage 1. What the hell is wrong with you?

With Valve announcing that the Heavy will be updated next we can all look forward to TF2 servers filling up with glaciers made of miniguns. Two teams advancing towards each other at the speed of reforestation, with a few spies and snipers racking up scores like credit card numbers. So before the new unlocks download themselves onto your desktop, maybe you should learn to use the gear our Russian friend already has:

1. Guard Your Medic

Too many Heavies treat the Medic like a glorified janitor, cleaning up the bullets and rocket wounds that dare to sully the Heavy’s glorious torso. Worse, they can swear at this vital teammate for failing to keep them alive during their attempts to punch four level 3 sentries, and are then mystified why they aren’t being healed anymore.

Remember that you Medic is playing a game too! Be his friend! Say please and thank you, and if you’re being healed you should spin to check behind your medic every couple of seconds, no matter what else you’re doing. The Heavy is only slow for moving, not turning, and it costs nothing to spycheck by spinning while firing at full speed. Should hear your Medic scream while you’re demolishing the enemy team, he isn’t ecstatically overcome by your minigun prowess - there’s backstab one nanosecond from your spine, so spin and see if that spy can cloak past one hundred thousand rounds per minute.

(Protip: He can’t, and it is totally sweet when you shred him.)

2. Two steps forward, one step back

When your resurrected Russian steps out of the spawn make sure you’re holding the shotgun while stomping your way to the front. A Scout who knows what he’s doing can kill you before your minigun even spins up and I’m sorry, but if a Heavy gets killed by a Scout he has to stop playing for a week in sheer shame. It’s one of the rules.

It’s also a fact that the only back bigger than the Heavy’s back is the Outback. The Heavy spinal column is the Promised Land in the religion of the Spies, the glorious reward for good little boys who disguise well and sneak behind enemy lines. Turn to face backwards and backpedal at least one step in three, constantly firing your shotgun into thin air as you go. You get to the battle just as quickly while keeping your body conveniently free of Spy switchblades.

3. Jump into action

Spinning up your gun takes a couple of seconds, also known as “More than long enough for a decent Dustbowl chokepoint to murderise you to pieces.” Tip the odds back in your favor by jumping around corners facing the direction you want to fire, spinning up the gun in midair. You’ll start firing as soon as you land and should be able to take out one or two assailants before they can even aim, giving after that you and your healer have a much better chance. DON’T start firing before you go around the corner - the unaimed hail of bullets is a gigantic announcement screaming “ATTENTION SNIPERS, GET YOUR FREE HEADSHOTS HERE”.

4. Back Off

It’s time for your Team Fortress 2 Maths Lesson: 300 is a finite number. Hell, the Spartans had 300 and they got their seminaked asses shot to pieces, so stop running out onto carpets of stickybombs and acting surprised when you explode. Running with the Heavy might feel like making a getaway in a dump truck loaded with grand pianos, but it is possible. You’ll never make the distance but you can make it around the nearest corner or onto the nearest medikit.

Every time you don’t just stand there and take it until you’re detonated holds the tide of battle on your side - it takes about four years for you to get to the front line, so you can’t afford to get killed after three seconds. That Medic will have an Ubercharge soon - make sure you’re alive to get it.

5. Play as Sniper

The Sniper is the natural predator of the Glorious Heavy. Any tactical text will tell you to think like your enemy, and on a Team Fortress 2 server you can literally do that. Rack up some time as the Aussie assassin, hanging back and picking off the real men who do their killin’ up close. You’ll quickly learn which Heavy actions are giant “Please headshot me signs”, the importance of even the thinnest cover, and how to randomly crouch just often enough to be really annoying. For every second you’re “annoying” a sniper, you’re staying alive to “kill” everyone else.

And isn’t that what carrying a hundred and fifty kilogram gun is all about?

Team Fortress 2 - as the name subtly suggests, you can’t be a lone wolf. It doesn’t matter if you’re the best Engineer since Scotty first rubbed against a warp drive, if you’re being held off the last dustbowl cp with two teles already up it’s time to don surgical gloves. Most players on TF2 servers can handle a few classes, but there’s always one mooching at the bottom of your “time played” table - and every second of those few minutes was spent swearing. Here we look at your weaknesses and tell you how to improve.

1. Scout

Symptom: You keep exploding! Or burning. Or just falling over dead when an enemy gives you a stern look.

The Problem: You really want that kill! You die because you allow an enemy to see you for more than a second. The Scout was never designed to go toe-to-toe with anything but a capture point, and even then only when he’s lucky. If you land two good hits of any description on anything your job is already done - your mission is now to escape before somebody decides you’re worth the splash damage. And for the love of god, when you’re chasing that retreating engineer, try to remember that they can build things that begin with Ess-Gee.

2. Soldier

Symptom: You consider the Soldier boring - you and your skills are more important than that!

The Problem: You know what’s really boring? A Team Fortress 2 server with two scouts, three snipers and four spies failing to hold a single CP for a single second. It turns out that in a game based on blowing the opposing team to smithereens, a man with a rocket launcher is pretty useful. A soldier is NEVER a bad addition to a team, now learn to rocketjump and rain splash-damage death down on the enemy!

3. Pyro

Symptom: You’re stuck at a 1:1 kill ratio, at best

The Problem: Argh, you REALLY want that kill! It doesn’t matter how “on fire” they are - running straight at someone who has a rocket launcher is ALWAYS a bad idea. If you want to be a good pyro learn to love the assist. Love it, want it, value it more than the kill - once an enemy is ignited your work is completed. Yes, you know they’re running for a medkit or a doctor - and every step they take back to that pickup is one they’re not taking towards their objective. A good enclosed space barbecue does far more damage than even the most critically sniped headshot - you and you alone can turn an entire offensive wave into a screaming pack of (burning) little girls, running home and crying for their medic mommy.

4. Demoman

Symptom: Even scouts beat you up, and that’s frankly embarrassing

The Problem: The Demoman requires an unprecedented level of tactical planning for an FPS, requiring you to think three, perhaps even four seconds ahead. It’s best to think of having a “personal space” radius of four meters, and anybody closer than that is way the hell TOO close. One-hitting scouts into chunky soup may be one of the best sights in this or any other game, but it’s not something to count on - back off and back often, lest you give the enemy the second best sight: an array of sparkling crit stickies disappearing from the CP in the white light of a demoman who died before his time.

5. Heavy

Symptom: Twenty deaths, no kills.

The Problem: Basic math misunderstanding - three hundred does not equal infinity.
Also, scientists at the Fortress for Team studies recently proved that Heavy skulls actually magnetically attract sniper bullets. Suck them right out of the gun into their brains. Damnedest thing they ever saw. The Heavy isn’t the home of the keenest tactical mind on the team, but you still need some spatial awareness. Specifically, being aware of which spaces have medkits or snipers in them.

6. Engineer

Symptom: Tending a sentry gun is boring!

The Problem: The Engineer is actually a deeply exciting and rewarding class, as long as you focus on TEAM rather than your own score. It’s a critical indictment of human nature that this focus is so rare, but when it happens it can turn the whole tide of the battle. Helping other Engys raise level 3 sentries quickly rather than raising a patch of level 1s to be flattened by the first Soldier to look at them, constant spychecking, even a single good teleporter route can make all the difference.

Watching the filthy BLU tide breaking against the rocks of your defense (and professionally rebuilding within instants of the inevitable uber) is greatly entertaining - and the meaty thump of a wrench hitting a spy is the greatest sound in the Team Fortress audio files.

7. Sniper

Symptom: More deaths than kills.

The Problem: Valve has cunningly balanced the richly interlocking skillsets of all the classes, but one fact is unchangeable: if you’re a crappy shot you will be a crappy sniper. There’s an easy test - do you headshot the enemy sniper, or is it your brains splattered on the gravelpit? If the latter, hit that “,” key and choose a different class. You should also change if
- Your team has a sniper with a higher score. No, it doesn’t matter who was there first.
- There are more snipers than medics. Medics are ALWAYS better than snipers.
- You find yourself catching fire, thereby proving you don’t even have the remotest idea of how you should be using that class

8. Medic

Symptom: You die before deploying an ubercharge/kritzkrieg.

The Problem: If you are not getting at least one complete charge per spawn you are failing as a medic. This problem has been particularly bad since the update, with hordes of demented doctors running around waving bonesaws like they’ve been possessed by Jason Vorhees (with a corresponding drop in intelligence). Your job is to heal people, get the hell out of there when things get rough, and help smash sentries to rubble.

9. Spy

The Symptom: You don’t like playing spy because you’re bad at it

The problem: No problem! Keep it up, and god bless you for not being a spy!

If people who suck at spy would just stop wasting playerslots running around failing backstabs and catching themselves on fire the average TF2 IQ would increase tenfold. Every failed spy is a valuable bullet-absorbing soldier your team doesn’t have, extra points for their pyro, and at best - at best - all they’ll manage is to sap an unimportant dispenser for all of a second before they get spotted, desapped and shotgunificated. Even if Valve released a update with a “James Bond” class and a map called spy_espionage, there would STILL never be a good reason to have more than one spy per team.

Too Many Medics? It seems like an impossible fever dream. Looking at last week’s “Total Players By Class” statistics from the Valve website, the medic seems popular enough:

But we both know it’s not like that in practice. Online it’s often a game of class-choice chicken, a real sense of “All right, if I have to” where the most team-minded player on the server dons surgical gloves while three other idiots run around as snipers. Because we all know how useful snipers are on the fourth point of dustbowl. That was until this week when Valve released a whole host of new Medic achievements and unlockables, in the most hotly anticipated medikit since the first Space Marine fell to 01 health. I single-handedly gathered public TF2 server statistics playing on the day of the release:

That might seem awesome, every TF2 server a magical medical Mecca with free healing for all where no-one ever dies - but further highly scientific study reveals a disturbing problem:

Almost every one of these new medics is acting like he’s been punched in the head by the Heavy. Repeatedly. It’s like somebody filled an ER with lemmings dressed up in little white coats, as Medics charge into Pyros, dash onto sticky-bomb fields, and sprint, bonesaw-drawn, directly at an already spun-up Heavy - presumably hoping that their fearsome Teutonic accent will cause the All-Killing Minigun Of Death to jam out of fear. (Note: it is recommended to say “Just like medic to bring saw to gunfight!” after shredding them).

In an attempt to highlight the vital support class, the update has temporarily destroyed it as a majority of medical morons chase unlockables. That’s not even counting the dedicated servers with names like “MEDIC ONLY SAWSAWSAW!!!” where packs of players line up in turn to earn achievements, thereby utterly defeating the point of those achievements, the game, and their own useless lives. It’s become quite clear that if Valve included the achievement “Darwinism: place your penis on the table and smash the keyboard on it over and over 0/10″ then server voicecomms would be full of high-pitch screaming.

On the upside it’s only temporary. The tf2 achievement server whores will get their fill within a week or two, and we’ll be able to enjoy the update for what it is: fresh content for an already awesome game designed by the Force of Brilliance that is Valve, designed to prevent servers from becoming “Standard Attack on Dustbowl #4525332″. The changes in ideal sentry spots to deal with Critzkrieg, the value of the sniper taking out key personnel, and of course the strategies of the surgeon-stalking spy. I’m looking forward to the pavlovian pleasure of the “achievement unlocked” sound. You know, when I’m playing on a team that doesn’t already look like half of New York General Hospital got teleported into Hydro.

In the meantime? Spy, gentlemen. Because unless Computron 5000 has logged on my private server to defend Goldrush there is no way anyone can keep track of all their Medics these days.