I don't want to be "that guy", but it's frustratingly hard for me to actually get anywhere in Invasion. I've gone through about a dozen games today that lasted only a couple of minutes. The part that's really frustrating is that I've won invasion games before, but I have no idea how it happens. I've won games without having a stellar performance, and I've had many games where I get a massive kill streak on my first life, and then die and respawn to discover that the enemy is in the process of capturing our one base.

I've encountered two main starting scenarios:
1. The base our team is attacking is the same base that the enemy will be coming from. So, we have to go up against a superior force, push our way into their base, then survive as dozens of enemy soldiers come in for backup. And the whole time we're attacking, we have to hope a bunch of enemy soldiers don't take a different route to get to our base, thereby shutting off all our spawns and removing any chance of our attacking force getting backup.
2. The enemy will be attacking us from a different direction from where we're headed. Basically we launch our attack, the enemy swoops in and captures our base, and then I wait for the next game to start.

I thought maybe playing defensively would be more successful. So I tried it a couple of times, and it didn't help. With only a single base, there's usually not many good positions to defend from since the enemy can come from a ton of directions at once. And by playing defensively, it means that by the time I'm shooting people, my team is already losing. Plus the attacking force is probably large enough that they'll just swarm me, shut down our spawning, and start capturing our base with not much I can do about it.

I also occasionally tried going for different objectives. I've occasionally had minor success with this, as in I've sometimes managed to capture a base before I lose our original base. The bases are usually just too well defended to reliably capture before I lose the match.

One time I also tried just running around the enemy's attacking force and capturing their base. This actually sort of worked; there were no enemies in the base, so it got captured easily enough, but then the base was surrounded. There were 42 enemy soldiers in one square during the peak of that conflict. That base fell quickly, and then our original base didn't last much longer.

And so I ask: how do you actually win?

To win you have to capture the other bases. This mode was meant for multiplayer co-op.

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It only takes one

That's a bit of a Mathematician's Answer.

How many other players did you have with you? The current settings aren't targeted for you to go alone against the enemy, you'll mostly need at least 4 guys to do anything useful, even then you might be crushed. It's a bit harder than your regular single player match currently and we need to experiment to find the right settings, for both the online version and the single player version.

Having said that, it's a known fact that the cycle of 5 maps in invasion has gone through several times, so it's definitely possible. It can take a half an hour to capture the second base so that you actually hold it, or a few restarts at the map, but that's no news.

Just an idea, but you might want to have one player focusing on defending the base you have with an MG with a very good cover position, right from the start of the match when you usually have some troops over the capacity of the base, and a few players that aren't complete noobs getting themselves killed more than the bots do. Getting a chance to spawn at a base with vehicles likely helps too, even if I too played for a while with 4 other guys and we had the tank and kept losing our second base nonetheless, and then JackMayol started playing and probably captured the rest of the bases alone. It's mostly tactics too.

Well, I don't even remember the last time I played with more than 2 other people, so that might be part of my problem. I think it was just yesterday, though, that I came into the server with only one other player on, and we only had one or two bases (I think we had Hotel and Airport). The other player left shortly after I joined, and the rest of the game went smoothly. But my lucky capture of West Farm might have kept things from going south, because I've had similar starts with Airport or Hotel where I can't manage to hold the other base once it's captured.

So I've won short-handed a couple of times, but I sure can't explain how. Like, the winning and losing games aren't even comparable. I don't do anything special to defeat the inevitable swarm of greys that follows the first capture, it just doesn't seem to happen. Maybe a lot of it is just a lucky starting base; my "best" losses are generally at Hotel, where there's actually some pretty good places to defend without getting swarmed.

I haven't played Invasion so much that I could say a definite sure way to win, I hope one doesn't even exist but I'm sure there are several ways. It gets easier once you get closer to having half the bases in the map, from there the match is fairly similar as with the "default" single player match settings. You can try playing single player too by starting the map with one base.

There's one majorly annoying thing in Invasion online currently, which is that you can't join and respawn when the Greys are attacking at Green's last base and have gone far enough for the spawn points to have become locked. As we don't have a good way to work around or even indicate this for the moment, I'm going to set up Invasion for 0.88 so that the enemy leaves the last base or two last bases alone, going into defense mode. This should allow players pull off backdooring stunts a bit easier without the fear of having to surrender and max out forces inside the last bases. Gathering RP and saving it a bit for paratrooper drops should also help immensely when you finally start the attack together with the AI.

Was it map1 (Stalemate) you were playing in Invasion? My own experience is that that is the hardest map in Invasion as you start with 1 vs 13 bases, even if the enemy doesn't try to crush you with all it would got. Maybe map1 would make more sense if it would have 3 or 4 factions, making the starting point more like 1:6:7 or 1:4:4:5.

Yeah I was on Stalemate for most of the games. I think even getting to 3 bases is good enough for a solid foundation, but yeah, getting even that far is the real challenge.

I'm a bit wary about having Invasion maps with more factions. I'm not sure how the commander AI works with multiple factions, but I'd worry that games could be pretty swingy depending on how much the other factions fight each other in the beginning (or how much they gang up on you). And as much as I dislike losing short matches one after the other, I think it's important to still be able to lose. That makes the victories feel more satisfying. I welcome changes that would make playing Invasion short-handed more reasonable, though. Maybe it'll mean more people will be willing to play online instead of waiting for other people to get online first

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What about a catapult? Why not hurl the soldiers into Center Trench? Over the greys' defenses!

^ Now that's a grand idear.

ComJak

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ComJak's house... stay out of it