A newbie's guide:
First, I'd like to say hello to everyone, as this is my first post. I'd also like to personally praise the guys responsible for giving Tribes 2 another chance, and create a golden image in their likeness which I will offer virgin sacrifices to on a daily basis (shouldn't be hard to find them, I play Tribes 2 and WoW afterall).
Let's face it, Tribes 2 is definitely not a newbie friendly game. There are several nuances to learn, and when starting a game that already has quite a following of veterans, you're going to be respawning quite often. I typed up this guide on another forum, and it simply made sense to add it to this one. Everything is from memory, but it's reasonably accurate. This guide also assumes that you're playing BASE T2, but the majority of it applies to Classic as well.
What is Tribes 2?
Other than being a direct sequal to Starsiege: Tribes, Tribes 2 is a fast pased team oriented FPS game.
How is Tribes 2 different from other FPS games?
Other than being extremely team oriented, Tribes 2 also allows players to utilize jet packs to take to the air at any time. This makes the game much more 3-dimensional than your average FPS title.
Okay, I'll give it a shot, what should I know?
Glad you asked:
Beginner's guide
Armors
Vehicles
Weapons
Let's face it, Tribes 2 is definitely not a newbie friendly game. There are several nuances to learn, and when starting a game that already has quite a following of veterans, you're going to be respawning quite often. I typed up this guide on another forum, and it simply made sense to add it to this one. Everything is from memory, but it's reasonably accurate. This guide also assumes that you're playing BASE T2, but the majority of it applies to Classic as well.
What is Tribes 2?
Other than being a direct sequal to Starsiege: Tribes, Tribes 2 is a fast pased team oriented FPS game.
How is Tribes 2 different from other FPS games?
Other than being extremely team oriented, Tribes 2 also allows players to utilize jet packs to take to the air at any time. This makes the game much more 3-dimensional than your average FPS title.
Okay, I'll give it a shot, what should I know?
Glad you asked:
Beginner's guide
Armors
The three armor types are commonly known as light, medium, and heavy armor (sometimes called jugs, juggies, juggernaughts). The main advantages of each armor are pretty self explanatory.
-Light is the quickest but takes the least amount of damage. Lights can carry three weapons. They are the only armor that can use the cloak pack, as well as the laser rifle (which requires an energy pack). Lights can pilot any vehicle.
-Medium is the in between. Mediums can carry four weapons, and can use the missile launcher. They can pilot any vehicle except for the grav cycle. They can carry any pack except for the cloak pack.
-Heavy is slow, but can take a beating. They can carry five weapons, and can use the missile launcher and the mortar. They cannot pilot any vehicle, but can ride in the passenger seats of the havoc, or the tailgunner seat of the bomber.
Vehicles
There are six vehicles in Tribes 2. Each one can be used to be a huge asset for the entire team when use properly. Three vehicles are ground based, and three can fly. Every vehicle can be used to ram people to death.
-The grav cycle, also called the wildcat, has the highest potential speed in the game because of the game physics, but is generally slower than the shrike. It's a very lightly armored vehicle, but because of the way it hugs the ground and it's small size, it's a hard target to hit with missles. The grav cycle is not armed with weapons in BASE Tribes 2, but has a chain gun in Classic.
-The behemoth tank is very well armored, and actually fairly agile despite behind someone slow. The tank has two seats, one for the driver, and one for the gunner. Tanks have two weapons, the chain gun, which does great damage but has a huge spread, and the mortar.
-The Jericho MPB (Mobile Point Base) is slow, and can take a huge beating before being destroyed. The MPB is only useful when deployed. It has a missile turret on it, and an inventory station in the back. Despite being very durable, it's also a huge target for the opposing team. They should not be left alone. Also, when deployed, the MPB's driver seat is not usable by members of the opposite team, but it takes a few seconds for it to deploy after someone jumps out of the driver's seat.
-The shrike is a quick and agile air to air/ground fighter. It's lightly armored. It's equipped with duel blasters on the front that are capable of tearing through anything pretty quickly.
-The heavy bomber is only slightly better armored than the shrike, and it's slower, and a much larger target. Other than the pilot, there are two other positions in a bomber. The bombedier drops bombs, and can fire a blaster turret from the bomber's belly, but the turret is limited to objects underneath the bomber. The tailgunner protects the bomber by firing his own weapons at anyone chasing it, and by dropping flares to protect his crew from missiles.
-The havoc transport is only slightly better armored than the bomber, and it's slower and a larger target. Other than the pilot, there are a total of 5 passenger positions on the vehicle. It's primary use is the transport of a group of heavies to the enemy base to attack it's defenses and assets.
Weapons
There are a total of ten different hand held weapons in Tribes 2, along with mines, and five different types of hand grenades. The blaster, ELF, laser rifle, and shocklance all require no ammunition and use the player's energy instead. Also, with any projectile weapon (the laser, shocklance, and ELF all do not use projectiles), the projectiles take on the momentum of the player. So if you're strafing to the side when you fire a weapon, the projectile will drift to the side as well.
-The blaster is Tribes' pea shooter. It's projectiles can ricochet off of walls, and also ignores shield packs. It has a decent rate of fire, low damage per projectile, and is most effective indoors because of the nature of the weapon. The blaster can also hurt the player using it if the shots ricochet back at them.
-The laser rifle is Tribes' sniper rifle. The amount of damage dealt is directly related to the amount of energy the player has when he fires, so it's best to fire fully charged shots. The beam is bright red, and draws a line straight back to the sniper; it's best to shoot and move. Headshots deal more damage with this weapon. Only usable by light armor.
-The shocklance is a short ranged weapon, only effective up to 16 meters. Hitting a player in the back with this weapon guarantees a kill, unless the target has an active shield pack. The weapon also sports a knockback effect, and can be used to flip over flying vehicles by a skilled player.
-The ELF is primarily a support weapon. It deals no damage, but rapidly drains energy from the target, leaving them vulnerable. The electrical arc locks to it's target, so it's very easy to aim, but has a limited range of 30-35 meters (as I recall).
-The spinfusor disc launcher is basically a fancy looking rocket launcher. It fires a disc that explodes on contact. It has a low rate of fire, decent damage, and the blast has a good knockback. A small gimmick to the weapon is that discs can be skipped off of water and magma at a low angle.
-The plasma rifle is similar to the spinfusor in many ways. Lower damage per shot, faster rate of fire, smaller blast radius, and no knockback. The nature of the weapon makes it best suited for indoor use, and taking down base assets.
-The grenade launcher is pretty self explanatory. It has a rate of fire slightly slower than the plasma rifle, blast radius and damage slightly more then the spinfusors, and fires in an arc. The grenade takes a second or two to arm, and bounces off of any surface until it does.
-The chain gun is also pretty self explanatory. It fires projectiles in a cone at a fast rate, and does low damage per projectile. It's a great weapon for air-born targets, but is a poor choice for indoor combat. The chain gun takes a moment to "spin up" before it starts firing.
-The missile launcher fires a heat seeking missile at a locked target (red reticle). It can also "dumb fire" while it's locking on (green reticle), and under water. It does high damage, has a very low rate of fire, and a small blast radius with a small knockback. Base sensors, base turrets, all vehicles, and any personel with a high heat signature (the red bar under your energy bar, when it's flashing) can be locked on. Missiles are diverted by flares. Only usable by medium and heavy armor.
-The mortar is the grenade launcher's bigger brother in every way. Slower rate of fire, more damage, larger blast radius, longer range. Only usable by heavy armor.
There are also hand grenades and land mines that every armor can carry. Anyone can carry up to three land mines, and the number of hand grenades depends on the armor you're using.
-Land mines are fairly simple. Drop one, give it a second to arm itself, avoid it from then on. You'll often find that land mines are marked with a beacon which shows up as a marker on your HUD. Your flag is also almost always mined. You can destroy a mine by damaging it. Land mines cannot be placed too closely to one another.
-Frag grenades are the most common grenade seen. You spawn with five of these. Toss the grenade, it explodes after a couple seconds.
-Concussion grenades do no damage, but can knock players around quite a bit, and can disarm them and knock the flag away from flag carriers.
-Flash grenades do no damage. They can blind anyone within range for a couple of seconds, including team mates and the person using them.
-Flares are used to divert missiles. They serve no other real purpose, but are very important for what they do.
-Cameras are not really grenades of course, but they take up the grenade slot. You can deploy a camera that the team can use to monitor an area. They're often used in conjunction with a satchel charge pack as a trap. Some players have even started using them as a small platform to stand on, or place land mines on.
Comments
Base Assets
There are a few basic gameplay nuances that should be known, such as skiing, a few terms, and some of the understood rules of the game. Rules that are understood tend to vary from server to server, understanding some of the terms will prevent you from being kicked from servers. Remember, if you don't like a server's rules, then you're playing on the wrong server. Someone owns that server, and it's not democratically run. Servers are dictatorships.
Skiing
Terminology
If anyone feels like something should be added, feel free to post it. If things become hectic, I'll update the OP with pertinant information.
the 20,000 character post limit sucks. :P
*edit*
I also typed this up on a forum where language is not an issue. I did a quick proof read, and edited out two curse words (as I haven't read the rules to this forum yet). If anything is left, I honestly apologize, and will edit it out if I spot it or if I'm told.
If language isn't an issue.... well I'll soon find out.
Oh and I'm pretty sure discs can't skip off lava.. and lance has a range of exactly 16 meters. And you should also say that turret barrels are interchangeable by medium or heavy armor, and spike/clamp turrets require you to be those armor types as well to carry/deploy them, as well as deploy remote inventory stations. And you can only use cloak pack as a light.
"The grav cycle is not armed with weapons." unless your playing classic, and you get a chaingun like weapon.
Nice job though, thanks for typing it up- I'm sure noobs will take advantage of this.
And as bombardier, I seem to recall that you switch with the same button you switch weapons with.
On the bomber, just like ColonelFatso said, you just have to switch weapons to the bombs.
Voting is also as he said, in the esc screen, you look at the top right hand corner to see the voting options. To vote to kick (or mute on some admin mods) someone, you find their name in the list on the left side, and right click their name.
Someone really needs to write a script where when a vote is started the bottom says that, so the admins don't have to bother heh.
In GOON (with 64 ppl playing) it could actually be useful to take controll of the turrets. Would prevent mortarturrets from killing teammates... if you can aim a bit.
It's always dependent on the map.
I doubt it would ever be that coordinated on a pub server like Goon Haven, just from the large amount of chaos, but that would be an awesome strategy to see happen.
I've done it, it actually can be surprisingly effective IF you have more patience than buddha and the entire enemy team is deaf to the sound that a clamp turret makes (or you get them so paranoid about cloakers they just always assume one's running around). Personally if you absolutely MUST control a turret go stick an AA barrel on a turret and use your human ability to lead targets intelligently to turn it into a spike turret's big brother.
Retro-tardedness aside doesn't the plasma rifle also ignore shields?
On the up side, you learn how to take down shielders really well.
Still, a fun mod.. The server owner is a cool guy, the old player base was fairly nice.