Grrl Power #419 – Lacking in tactics
Leon’s so good in fact that Peggy would accuse him of cheating if it didn’t make her seem bitter. That’s just what you get from playing games of that nature as much as he has. High level players memorize things like how long it takes people to get from their spawn point to certain other points on the map, even how long it takes someone to move from almost any point on the map to anywhere else. The firing characteristics of all the guns, what you can shoot through and how much that reduces the damage, etc.
Peggy’s not looking to make Sydney a diva at this game specifically, just get her to start thinking about basic tactics. Almost any game could work too – there are few games that involve no strategy at all, but she’s trying to avoid abstract lessons right now. She’s using Counter-Strike to teach basic lessons about positioning and cover. Plus a few rounds of this helps break up the regular training routines.
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I’d like to point out that step 2 is using the sights.
That’s more basic firearms operation 101. You should have mastered that before you started tactics, Amazingly easy error to make though.
No sights in counterstrike.
Sights? Please. Everyone knows you need to hold the gun sideways, gangsta style. :)
(And yes, I did watch the Mythbusters episode on that)
Hey it works for Falco.
Just for saying that, O.B., you need to pull up your pants and immediately jump off a bridge, according to page 12 of Peggy’s Do’s and Don’ts of Firearms.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1773
There’s also the little fact of “don’t shoot when there’s no target!”
But, if you look at panel four, Peggy was hiding behind that central pallet thing in panel two, the primary focus of Sydney’s ammo-dump
The central words here being “hiding behind”.
Aaand, I’m not so sure whether we can actually call it the primary focus. More like “by chance being somewhat in the middle of a widely spread cloud of bullets”. ;)
(The vast majority of which went way above it.)
Unless you are shooting for the express purpose of keeping the target in hiding
True, but first it’s better to use controlled bursts in quick succession for that. The increased accuracy makes it feel more close (well, it is), more dangerous to the target. And you can sustain the suppressing fire for way longer.
Leon? Pfft.
What? Y’all don’t know about Kevin?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zybAlbGM6mg
What? Y’all don’t know about Kara?
….it’s ‘Cara’
ordinarily, I leave people’s typos alone, but getting a name wrong, (especially on that is literally in the url you provided), is a whole different matter
Sorry, my bad. Cara. You’re right. I’m used to Kara because of Supergirl.
Also because K-evin. K-ara. I naturally just went there.
So it wasn’t by koincidence then.
I am by no means an artist and it might just be a perspective thing but in panel 4 it looks like Halo’s right hand is smaller than her wrist.
If it’s the angle and perspective and I’m just weird rock on keep doing what you do. If not I just wanted to point it out.
Love everything grrl power. Keep doing what you do.
It’s a deliberate style choice :D
It was supposed to be semi-super deformed, but since it’s really neither one or the other it does look off.
Doesn’t look ‘off’ to me
I see it now, didn’t notice it before.
I guess you would just make the hand bigger, right?
It looks like it’s half-chibi
I did notice she looked a bit odd. But once i saw it was in a game it made perfect sense.
A fun game like mario go cart chibbi version would be correct. Military shooot to kill half-chibbi like this is correct.
a tactical game with army to command like warcraft (bad example) then black/whitewould be perfect.
elf and orc goblin version of the heros. Soo cute a gnome Maxima
I’m surprised DaveB didn’t use a game like America’s Army. I havent played it myself, but I had heard that it was a realistic shooter made by the army.
Arma is more realistic, though.
Never heard of Arma. Who makes it?
Or to be current, Arma 3.
I never heard of either of these games. Dang. I’m losing my edge. Here I was thinking I was this knowledgable girl gamer.
DayZ started as a mod for one of the Arma games, so if you played (or heard of) DayZ then you basically know the Arma games.
Ohhhh :) Yes, I’ve played DayZ. Thanks for explaining.
Question is: was that around in 2011?
Yes it was around. The series dates back all the way to early 2000s with the publishing of Operation Flashpoint in 2001.
So, what color chocobo is Sydney? I bet it’s red; it suits her personality.
Nope…. she has diving training. At the bare minimum she has to be the gold one from 7 or the deep sea blue one from 9.
I gotta know, what do Sydney and Leon think of Overwatch
Or Battleborn
Give them a few years to catch up
Wait, if this is counter-strike, then why does Leon have the Golden Gun from Goldeneye?
Never mind.
We had it wrong all along. ARMA wasn’t the army simulation, IT WAS CS:GO ALL ALONG!
“She’s using Counter-Strike to teach basic lessons about positioning and cover. Plus a few rounds of this helps break up the regular training routines.”
Also saves money on simmunitions. Those suckers are not cheap.
Also saves money on bandages and bullet removal from brain operations. I hear those are expensive as well.
I like the no ink style, makes things look smoother.
Glad to see that games are, although necessary, not sufficient for training. Otherwise this would be a case of I Know Mortal Kombat” (hope I get the HTML tag right).
OK, one quotation mark too many.
Yeah, but you’d be surprised how many of the tactics from a standard shooter will apply to a variety of combat situations. I was once playing water gun capture the flag and without thinking about it I started circling someone while shooting them. They couldn’t turn and aim their gun fast enough to keep up so I stayed dry and “lived” to take their flag. Yes, in a real combat situation you would just shoot them and be done with it, but it still made me feel pretty badass.
Deagle deagle.
The Smurfs Song thank you. Either that or “Boingy boingy boingy” from Animaniacs
I thought something seemed different.
Peggy: “And another IRL vs game thing… hold out your hands.”
Sydney: “… ok.”
Peggy: “Here’s 5 full mags of ammo, like you fired in the game.” *Places them in Sydney’s right hand*
Peggy: “And here’s the one cartrage that took you down.” Places it in Sydney’s left hand.
Peggy: “Now hold your arms at full extention for as long as you can.”
Sydney: … *wimper*… “Ok, I get it. Encumberance is a major factor in real life.”
Peggy: “Conserving ammo, and keeping track of how much you have left, is a real life thing.
Sydney: (puts all the ammo in her pockets instead)
or
Sydney: (puts up her shield and uses her PPO, which doesnt emcumber her :) )
As with Max’s finger of boom the PPO doesn’t install a visceral sense of terror like a good pistol or rifle does. Also she may need to pistol or rifle IE orbs in the tube for some reason. Better to be over trained than having your butt hang outside for a round to clip it.
Plus, what happens when Sydney finds something that goes THROUGH the bubble ball’s shield? And, of course, there’s always the chance that people might start paying attention when Sydney hauls out the beam cannon, and get the heck out of there. All of that totally ignores the fact that the beam may be a little bit TOO powerful for most of her targets…and right now, she can’t aim it. Sometimes having a randomly wandering beam that can slice a tank in half is not a good thing.
Sydney reminds me of an online gaming streamer who play Shadowrun and NEVER uses cover. The entire chat is screaming “COVER” and she just does Sydney’s ‘Doop de doo’. Amazing how much frustration one little ‘non move’ can incur.
Is the new Shadowrun remotely anything like the p&p? Just wondering, considering the way the first one went.
(And nice gravatar. Got me some pins and shirts with that.)
I picked up a lot of bad habits from games that I don’t have in real life I will simply bullet sponge in the Division against NPC’s all the time unless I’m running a challenging mission then I play it a bit more real life. It is an issue I have always had with FPS’s they don’t treat firearms and armor correctly never have. My kingdom for a 12 gauge slug who the hell uses buckshot against an armored target. Sigh Yes the Shadowrun games is pretty darn good at least the new ones are the FPS one was crap.
They can’t treat guns like real life in video games, because in real life people would shoot you and you would die. That makes it kind of hard to keep a video game going when you are swarmed by enemies. In real life the only way you can accomplish anything that people do in the first person shooters would be to stealth the entire mission like a special ops team. A good game designer recognizes this and will come up with a gimmick to allow the player to absorbency more than a single bullet.
Combat is a stealth game at that level I practiced the art of it as a cavalry scout my job was to find the enemy and make sure then didn’t find me. My inclination is to not shoot when I run into a enemy but to hunker down and hide and wait for them to go by and then call it in and let someone else deal with them. If I had to fire my weapon shit had gone sideways in a bad way.
Cover is the thing developers try and use they get it mostly right. 16 inches please thicker the better. Once you have that you can cut out the bullet sponge and just have normal body armor which gives you some level of protection and in a few more years will pretty much make you unstoppable again on the battle field. Look up composite metal foams light weight and stops a 7.62 cold. Would of loved to have body armor above the old style flack jackets and the Kevlar helmet.
Give it 20 years and battery tech will have advanced enough to allow a new form of mobile cavalry, Powered Armor. They’ve got the basic design of an exoskeleton already. Add some armor plating and a battery with enough life to be worthwhile and the average soldier could be rocking a .50 machine gun or better with armor that can take anything short of HEAT rounds or explosives bigger than a grenade. They might even skip up to laser rifles by then although I doubt it. Too easy to foul the optics compared to a more durable firearm. Still, imagine a single infantryman being able to hump a metal storm area defense block on his back. He becomes a one-man artillery unit. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the optical camouflage. They’ve advanced the invisibility tech from a solid cylinder to something closer to a cloak that could be worn. Should make snipers nearly untouchable in the future (not that a good one is easy to find now). There’s some really interesting military tech in the works if they ever start using it. Of course there might be a bean counter somewhere who says it’s cheaper to keep using the older equipment just like when the joint military comittee during the 90’s was looking at replacing the main service rifle for all 3 branches but ended up sticking with the M-16 instead.
High tech soldiers are not a question of whether we can build the equipment, but how much it costs to supply whole units with it. That’s true today and will stay true in the future. Else I’m certain we would have long seen armoured exoskeletons in widespread use.
That’s just it though. They’ve been researching this stuff for decades and finding other applications for the technologies. Our civilian tech base is reaching the point where there are starting to be significant cost reductions for some of the tech involved in building exosuits. Once the price drops enough fielding limited numbers of power armor units or individuals in mixed units will become feasible and once people see how much more effective they are we will likely see a significant investment, at least in special ops units if not the marines, for the equipment. When one man can replace half a platoon we’ll be able to reduce the overall numbers in favor of superior force multipliers. Yes, that sounds far fetched, but DARPA has been researching armor designed to shrug off rpgs. With that it could turn up real fast.
Another good one for tactics and teamwork would be Payday 2, even though it seems like a lot of the playerbase would prefer to whine and moan about the fact that they actually have to pay for DLC…though they get to play the missions in the DLC even if they haven’t bought them.
I’ve seen some very good players, people for whom FPS was clearly their bag, baby, who still mess up there because they focus too much on trying to kill everyone. Which won’t happen. The cops they send after you are infinite. You can stand out in the open and shoot them however much you want, but ammo is pretty limited. Winning is about more than just shooting people; it’s about accomplishing the heist. And if no one’s hacking the right computer, fixing the drill when it messes up, or helping with some of the special enemies, it doesn’t matter how well you shoot. A Cloaker can still take you out in one shot, a Shield can block anything except explosives and fire from the front, a Taser can shock you on LOS and leave you hoping to shoot them while your trigger finger spasms, and a Dozer can tank anything short of a rocket launcher or anti-tank gun.
Don’t go there, Overkill dug their own filth hole and wallowed in it with Crimefest 2015. Don’t turn that back on the community. Yes the base games of Payday and Payday 2 are good, the developers… not so much. Especially since there is virtually nothing left of the original team. Payday 2 exists on Steam front page placement during sales, and no other reason. Without those there wouldn’t be a player base there anymore. It’s also a very out dated engine and the AI was never very solid.
Sadly I don’t wish for a Payday 3, at least not by the tattered tragedy that is Overkill. Now if some other developer with a bit more integrity about them, and business sense, were to create a similar hord
Isn’t Overkill coming out with a new The Walking Dead game?
I’ve heard so many good things about Payday 2, from a gameplay standpoint, but maybe a game where you rob people is not a good training game for super-‘cops’ :) Different set of variables :)
it WAS good. Then they screwed it up.
How did they screw it up? I’ve been thinking of buying Payday 2 for Xbox 360 since it’s pretty cheap now, but not sure if it would be better to buy the Payday 2 Crimwave Edition for the Xbox One for a few dollars more, or if I should just not buy either and rent it on Gamefly.
Rent it and see if you want to own it
Well, it’s on my queue but I have other games on it that I’d rather rent first. (it costs like $14 a month for Gamefly, and if the game costs less than that there’s no real point in just renting it). It’s inexpensive enough that it’s probably worth just buying rather than wasting the time to rent it. Just wanted to know how they screwed it up to know if it’s worth buying one or the other. I can’t tell any problems from either from just the walkthroughs on Youtube.
I really like your artwork in this one! The depiction within the game is great!
Ugg
The image won’t show again
Just a tiny thumbnail
the first frame looks amazing! pose, eyes and colour scheme are all immediately telling me what’s going on! great work.
I think if you wanted Sydney to learn good tactics I would pick an xcom game, and after adding various mods to remove chance and add more bonuses for tactics and flanking and such. Okay you can be done with tactics after you win on max difficulty with zero casualties.
“Max difficulty with zero casualties? Why, it is impossible!”
I think a no-loss victory is one of the ‘medals’ you can earn in the game. It’s been a while since I played it, but as I recall you can pick up all kinds of awards for certain accomplishments, such as an all female squad (Valkyries award), or a win as every one of the starting nations (which forces you to adjust your strategies to take advantage of their advantage, or if you keep to your favorite strategy you’ll at least be operating at a lower level if it doesn’t have synergy with the nation you begin in), etc.
But the no-loss victory is probably not possible without save scumming. Or a huge number of restarted games. Playing on the hardest level (Impossible/Ironman is the only way to play) it is easy to lose troopers just for being unlucky. A hit is often a kill before you get some advanced body armor, and even standing behind the best cover is not a perfect defense against getting shot. And the combination of explosives stripping away cover and then getting shot while in the open can be devastating. Losing soldiers on missions is fairly commonplace even against the easiest aliens, and the mid-game points when you are first introduced to the Chryssalid, Muton Elites, and Cyberdiscs can be especially brutal.
True. (But you missed the Monty Python reference.)
Or was that just in a parody of the scene. I’m suddenly not fully sure anymore.
I think a good game for stealth would be The Last of Us multiplayer :) As long as you put it on Survivor mode so you don’t have that ‘listening’ view advantage
I would not use an X-COM game for tactics. It’s fun, but it won’t get the basics of tactics drilled into you like Counterstrike or Day of Defeat will. For that matter, most FPS games require you to use things like cover or ammo conservation.
One of the other things that Sydney needs to learn is the simple idea of controlled bursts. Other than the first two or three shots she fired at Peggy, probably not a single round got anywhere near her target. Nobody sticks there head up in the middle of a burst to take a shot, true, but that’s because blind luck DOES come into play, and nobody wants to admit to St. Peter that they died because they were stupid. Statistically, a 2-5 shot burst is at least 50% more likely to strike a target than a single shot…but beyond that, the rest of the burst becomes largely pointless.
She should really be using Full Spectrum Warrior. That game was made for the US Army for this exact purpose and it’s a pretty solid game too. It covers the importance of cover, suppressing fire, maneuvering, and combat tactics.
When was FSW released though? Please to be remembering, the comic is still currently set during Sydney’s initial recruitment back in 2011
June 1st, 2004
Possibly not used simply because DaveB didn’t know about it :D
Nope. That system was not made available to Archon by the Army. They are pissed enough at having some of their best people stripped away by this new and independent organization. They aren’t about to share all of their toys without some serious budgetary consideration. :-D
Sounds about right :P
They may not have passed it to Archon , but Leon still has it.
And while every one else is talking vid games I’m the one seeing Halo’s choice in hardware and thinking Stargate SG1.
Of course Sydney is geek enough that might have also played in to the choice.
That was mentioned on the first page (including two links to the same clip from SG1 demonstrating it’s superiority over the staff weapon)
Guess that’s what I get for commenting late and just B4 bed. :)
I did finally see them.
No worries :D
Tsk, tsk, Sydney. “That was cheap” is the mantra of the scrub. She should go read David Sirlin’s _Playing to Win_.
https://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub
That’s the great thing about video game -ish plots. You can have ‘real’ fight where everyone goes all out and people die… and then you can do it again.
Just like in Counter Strike’s “Leet World” (OOOOOhhh Yea)!
… Now I have to wonder if they have Garry’s Mod in the office and do they also play prop hunt. >.> Be careful when trying a new server, you may accidentally wander into Archon territory.
So I’m not the only one who’s wondering if Sydney would ever appear in any of VanossGaming’s videos if given the opportunity?
I’m thinking she’s more of a prop hunt girl.
They would probably use Trouble in Terrorist Town, both to practice and blow off steam, if they had GMod in the office! XD
I notice that Sydney’s avatar includes her huge glasses, which might be an inconvenience in a combat situation.
I wonder if Peggy’s avatar has a peg leg
With a concealed rocket launcher.
Don’t care how many times Leon The Hacker has played that game, calling “CHEAT!!!” on him managing to hit the guy in the tank without even looking!!!
My bet: he managed to mod it to allow for dual hand wielding, importing Golden Eye’s gun, and has three monitors to give him at least 180* vision.
This is actually something Wedge Antilles went over in one of the Star Wars books. One of his pilots was bad-mouthing him, so he challenged them to a duel.
Since an X-wing duel woudl be manifestly unfair…It was a race, while driving CARGO HAULERS. Wedge won, of course….
By cheating. He pulled EVERY Dirty trick in the book he could. Culminating, at one point, in straight out landing on TOP of her hauler. (Due to the way they worked, she was unharmed.)
She complained he cheated…and then he asked this question. “When a tie pilot shoots you in the cockpit in an ambush….will you complain he cheated?”
“No sir.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll be dead.”
“So?”
“I should learn to cheat. And better.”
“Good job!”
There’s a REASON “All’s fair in love and war” is a saying. That said…Sydney is VEEERRRY good at cheating. She just has to remind herself to cheat.
Very good point, also, if you get caught ‘cheating’ at ‘war’, don’t deny it or bluff your way out, admit it, and walk away
Another word for ‘cheating’ in war is ‘victory.’
Those who win write the rules.
Those who win write the history.
Those that survive get to read the rules that were in effect..
If I were accused of cheating in war, I think I’d take it as a compliment.
Yes, so why deny it? You won, only the losers complain about the how
deagle deagle? What the hell is that? >.>
The godly Desert Eagle doing its work
I suppose next they’re going have her play Xcom and have it all recorded so they go into detail how she failed the mission, even when she completed it.
A multiplayer session would probably be better.
6 recruits vs 6 muton elites
Which X-COM?
Leon looks as bored in game as Math usuallydoes in an actual fight.
I want to see her go up against Harem. In an alternate universe she could be an e-sports team by herself.
That would be…that would be either funny as hell, or so very, very wrong.
This reminds me of when me and my army buddies went lazer tagging. Each time we formed a team and all used real tactics against the other teams. Complain complain complain, that’s all we heard from them. “Why do you keep hiding behind corners?!” “Why are you staging ambushes?!” “Why aren’t you splitting up immediately?!” Well duh, we wanted to win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VUuVu6cN2I
That summed it up quite well. People that just think it’s point and fire don’t beat an educated amateur and three pros.
I wish I could recall the name of the game I played, one of the weapons was a ninja-star launcher. as far as i could figure, the game had no gravity or friction set up, so if you hit the right angle you could kill someone from any room in the game. which i would do. constantly. the other players would say ‘that’s too op a weapon!’, so i’d switch to a grenade or grenade launcher and start running. they would chase. I would launch or toss the grenade at the wall or door jamb above me, and it would bounce back…and kill them. needless to say, everyone playing that game in the cyber cafe took a sudden interest in World of Warcraft instead…
They have the off the shelf FPS games to work out basic tactics. I want to see the custom coded version Archon set up with special-ability characters that match their own personnel. They could run some simulations against known bad-guy supers to see if they could work out some patterns or combo moves to ‘maxi’-mize their advantage. It is also fun to have people play other than themselves. Often a new perspective can think of creative ways to use an ability. (like ‘dropping an anvil’ on somebody)
Back in the old Atari days Activision had a Space Shuttle simulator. They had one of their mission scenarios set up where if the main engines failed you could still de-orbit and land using only the attitude control system. Someone at NASA heard of that move and ran the numbers. It turns out that the process was technically feasible. NASA then wrote up a specific ‘main engine failure’ emergency scenario and added it to their book of emergency procedures.
The trouble with that you never learn the basics. There is a reason Math kicks most supers’ asses in hand to hand combat. He understands the fundamentals of martial arts well because he had to learn them to get where he is. Most super typically win fights on power alone and never developed any high level of skill.It better to get them to learn how to think tactically asif they didn’t have their advantage first work so they are effective powers or not then fine tue for their special advantages.
Remember that it takes a few years to make a game
The first thing that jumped out at me was that Sydney is using a P90. Don’t do that on T side Dust 2. Just, don’t.
The second thing was “oh my god, I’ve been there.”
Why not?
o LORD! She just NOOBIN’ it up! Somebody start that kickvote. =P
Yes, actual military training can be a big deal.
One story I know of involves some retired army buddies who decided to kill some time during a long layover at a Battletech Center. In their first match, they lost because they didn’t really know how to pilot the Mechs. After that they slaughtered everyone because they understood small unit tactics.
DaveB is NOT kidding about some of these players who mainline shooters. My personal fave example of this is when the games allow mortars so some of these super soldiers will actually practice fire patterns with spotters telling them what they hit so that they know where to aim from their spawn and can just start shelling choke points leading out of enemy spawn areas or even the spawns themselves the instant the game starts. I’ve seen half the team or more killed in the first 10 seconds of play with this tactic.
Is that a Squiddle symbol on the computers?
https://mspaintadventures.wikia.com/wiki/Squiddles
It looks like the little badguys from Halo.
I cant stop giggling at the “Deagle” Sound effect with the totally casual/bored look on his face.