The Lurker's Quake II CTF guide

Starting with classic Quake, a popular front of team-based modifications and servers has arisen. It wasn't something that interested me, prefering instead the sheer contest of reflexes in deathmatch. So it comes as a surprise that when Zoid's CTF for Quake 2 became appeared, clearly so little players had any concept at all on how to play it! If you'll listen, there's dozens of would-be experts touting this and that tactic as definitive in coming out on top in deathmatch. Truth be told, you'd figure them all out yourself in time and have fun in the meantime. However it falls to me to create a simple and short guide on how to play Quake II CTF. I'm no CTF God but if a hand full of people read this and have a more enjoyable game of Quake II CTF, then count me a happy man. Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? Ahem, well read on...

CTF: The basics

Obviously we have two teams, a red and a blue. Forget your skins, they don't work. You can be male, female, cyborg or - if you're willing to gamble that people have installed the model - Paul Steed's new Crack Whore. When you join a CTF server, observer mode activates awaiting your selection of a team. More on this later.

The two teams each have a base. In each base is a flag. The key objectives in order of priority are as follows;

  • 1. Defend your flag
  • 2. Capture the enemy flag
  • 3. Return flag to base
    •

You don't get more straightforward but already we've covered a basic fact that many players don't seem to understand. Number one priority is to stop the enemy from capturing your flag! If the enemy has your flag, you can't capture theirs! There is nothing more frustrating in the CTF game than to get the enemy's flag, return to base only to discover it overrun with the enemy and promptly end up being dispatched inside your own base - usually followed by the other side capturing your flag since they already have yours and were nicely waiting for you to bring theirs back to them. Confused? Just refer to the three rule guide to CTF above.

After accepting this golden rule, we can move on to the tools of play. As is traditional in the CTF game, we have 4 powerup devices. In the past they were known as magical runes, now they are known as technical artifacts in keeping with Quake II's theme.

These will spawn on the map and await collection. When picked up they instantly go into effect and if you're killed, the 'tech' is deposited near your remains usually as a spoil of war for your tormentor.

The autodoc is obviously very powerful at keeping you alive. It's can be used for a raid on the enemy base to counter some of the inevitable heavy damage but death gives up the most powerful tech. The disruptor sheild has similar uses to the autodoc, note that with lots of conventional armor and power armor as well, the player becomes very very difficult to kill indeed. Superb for flag raids. The power amplifier turns many weapons into one-shot kills. Beware of weapons causing damage to yourself in the same was as you would a quad, if in doubt use something safe like a super-shotgun. The time accelerator largely negates the railgun and supershotgun's lengthy reload times but it can also deliver an awesome barrage of rockets at a rapid rate. High speed railgun sniping ahoy!
It may be advantageous to drop a tech, usually in your base for a team mate. You can only carry one at a time but to drop it, simply type drop tech in the console or bind it to a key. We'll be doing lots of key binding later on. Note: If you drop a tech, you wont be able to pick it up again in this life.

The Grapple Hook

A vital tool in the game, the grapple hook can pull you up to inaccessible ledges and negate the need for skillful rocket-jumping techniques. It's also superb at pulling yourself around underwater at high speed and clinging to walls in unexpected places for ambushes etc. Learning to use the grapple hook is a key element in a good player's toolkit. The simplest way to deploy is to use your weapon cycle button to get to it, hold down fire continuously to let it spool out and pull you up to where the head impacts.

However, it would be a very good idea to make it more readily accessible by binding the grapple hook to a key so that you can activate it quickly. Simply add bind "use grapple" in your config.cfg or type it in the console during a game. At one point I used a nice alias when pressing the key, would select grapple, fire it, pull me up and then when the key was let go to change back to the previous weapon. However, this makes one of the single coolest things to do with the grapple hook impossible and that's to leave it engauged while moving to another weapon. Typically known as the spiderman technique.

However, if you feel like binding two keys, one for manual and the other for the system I described, here's what to add in your autoconfig.cfg;

alias +hook "use grapple;+attack"
alias -hook "-attack;weaplast"
bind <key> "+hook"

Team talk

Clearly it's vital to be able to tell your team mates things that you don't want the enemy to know. In fact that's just about everything unless goading the other team and so on. To do this, we absolutely MUST bind a key to messagemode2 which is just like the 't' talk system but it goes to your team only. For this;

bind <key> "messagemode2"
If you're very used to 't', why not overide it with this rather than use a new key. If you WANT to talk to everyone, bind your standard 'messagemode' to some other key since you'll be using it less. Also CTF adds a very nice option for special control codes, using those one can construct automatic key bindings to say vital things. To make the enter key on the keypad output our current status to the team, we could use;

bind KP_PLUS "say_team Status: I have the %them flag %L area, with %H, %A and %T"
Which might say (only to your team), "Status: I have the Red flag near Blue flag area, with 20 health, no armor and a time accel tech". Handy huh? Check out this links box for a couple of pages showing advanced usage of this feature.

Use team talk a LOT. Here are damn good times to keep your team mates updated;

Since we have no player skins, it's a little difficult to know who that is on your team in front of you. For this, there's a fantastic feature called 'id'. Simply pull the console down and type 'id' and hit return. Now when you point your crosshairs at a player, you'll be shown their name, model and team. When you see that, you can say something to them with the team say by simple typing their name first. "gowron, it's OK if you shoot at the guys in red invading our base OK?"

Basic tactics

Cast your mind back to the three mission goals we have. Number one was something about making sure the enemy doesn't get our flag. I can't remember the last time the team I was on lost if all the players were savvy to this concept. However I can remember plenty of times I was on the losing team as I watched every single player run off into the distance for the imagined glory of capturing the enemy flag personally. Oh yes, by now you should guess that I'm a fan of defence above and beyond all else. In time you will see the wisdom, even if you don't now.

Here's the rest of my tactical tips in the form of one of those patronising do/don't lists...

Things that are good


- Defending is good, defending is fun. A defending team is a winning team. Defending scores higher.
- Consider the outlandish possibility that when carrying a tech artifact, you may be better off staying in defence. If you're killed, you don't deliver the tech artifact neatly to the enemy.
- Life is cheap. If you have nothing, the base is well defended, by all means attack the enemy.
- On the way to attacking the enemy, kill only those who you are confident of killing.
- A raid on the flag should be a hit and run, grab and run. Don't hang around to kill the defenders since they'll be more of them any second with the warning klaxon.
- Use the grapple hook and come up with inventive approaches.
- Use the grapple hook to cling to a wall in ambush.
- Use the grapple hook to obtain the high ground being difficult to shoot while forming a superb defence.
- Use the grapple hook to move underwater! If the other guy has a railgun, your only defence is to grapple out of there!
- Cells for a single BFG blast are often better spent on a sustained hyperblaster barrage.
- Form attacking parties. Attack together and from multiple directions. I know it takes a minute to team say this strategy, do it anyway.
- If you have a tech, don't be afraid to run. Keeping the tech is far better than killing one or two extra enemy.
- When you leave the base (regardless of it having a flag or not!) look around to check that there is enough defence to cover for you! Otherwise don't leave, you're just being an asshole if you do.
- If someone is issuing what sound like well thought out orders, listen - there's no time for discussion and the chances are that's a veteran issuing the orders.

Things that are bad

- Believing that it is your god given right to launch at the enemy and personally bring back the flag.
- Stealing resources from the flag bearer. If he dies, your team loses the flag. If you die, no loss.
- Operate on auto pilot as far as picking up health and stuff. There are others who may very well need it a lot more than you. If you have a rocket launcher, do you really need that super-shotgun when your team mate has a blaster?
- Being afraid to team say vital information for fear of being killed.
- Standing in the way of a flag bearer. Being killed because a team mate is standing in the doorway is not pleasant or rewarding - prepare for abuse! Treat flag bearers as fire engines, get OUT of the way.
- Spamming pointless ego-centric text to the console if you happen to score. Look, it's just lame.

Joining the game

Mostly the CTF servers are configured to let the newly joining player decide which team to join. I seriously urge that you make this decision based on player numbers and not score alone. It's not fun playing particularly well and outscoring the oposition only to find that there's 20 members on the other team and 5 on yours. What happens is that the winning team will desert in the face of hopelessness. This is a regular occurance, please join based on numbers and possibly ping considerations and not score alone. Of course if it's 20:1 then the choice is clear.

Don't be so eager to join. Why not use observer mode to have a quick look around and let the teams state their case for having you join. They both will often point you to the correct team. Another sneaky thing is that when your mind is made up, take the oportunity to scout the enemy base to have a look for any ambushes and size up the defence undercover of observer mode. Useful intelligence for when you start the game. :)


Essential Q2 CTF links

CTF News - All CTF... All The Time!
Captured - "The very best in CTF"
Capture^2 - Quake 2 CTF news on quake2.com
Tsunami - Hentai's VWeap mod is here
Autotext - advanced autotext for CTF
CTF cfg - sporting the ultimate CTF config
Planet Quake file archive - Everything you need

Finally

If you can't grasp the team considerations in Capture the Flag, consider returning to regular deathmatch instead. Sadly it's the case that players will leave the game if they're not happy with their team. If you're not having fun, it's not working out or whatever then feel free to join another server. After all, it's only a game. :)

CTF is an incredibly fun team spirited game and hopefully I've pointed out the major factors which enable it to work smoothly for one and all.

VWeap addendum

Some servers have Hentai's VWeap patch installed. If you're seeing white shapes where the player weapons should be then you're on a VWeap server and you don't have VWeap installed. In that case join another server or get the VWeap patch which enables you to see the weapon other players are carrying. This is extremely useful and adds to the game immensely so I recommend it. Oh, if you do have the Crack Whore player model installed, please not that you'll need Hentai's pack of VWeap models in order to see the weapons on this model too.

Return to the main page. For some info on the author 'The Lurker', see here.

Mat Bettinson was here, did this and can be E-mailed, cunningly by clicking on my name. Just there, to the left.