Robust Tips.

[DeadLantern]

1. Use Macros. It only helps.

2. Set your Alpha Transparency in the top left corner of character setup to 150 or below. This allows you to see better even when you have your UI on.

3. Use a set of different keys for Aliens And Marines. I use WASD for marines since the macros are mostly set up. I use Arrow Keys for the Aliens since it allows for many more Non-Confusing placed macros, using the numpad. I used to use the Numpad for aliens, but I discovered how hard it was to place good placed macros.

4. B18 can be useful. Bring a riot shield and a flamer and get right up in the Aliens grill. You can easily kill anything not flame resistant. In fact, I believe you can easily kill anything except for the Queen and Ravagers and maybe Ancient T3s.

5. White Phosperous will insta kill a T3 if landed directly. Also good for clearing out eggs.

6. A revolver with a Barrel Charger and a stock is a better Shotgun.

7. An SL is only good if you are directly referring to your squad. For Example, "PERSON A, YOU'RE ON ME! PERSON B AND D WILL BE OUR POINT MEN. AND C WILL PROTECT THE SURVIVOR!"
Don't just give them orders as a whole.

8. If you put a grenade launcher on a shotgun, it looks like the MK211 Shotgun the MPs have. As CL, you can easily sell bootleg shotguns.

9. As CO, you also have a fax in your office. Use it.

10. Roleplay. Don't be entirely focused on what you get or how well you play. In fact, I encourage you to make ICLY dumb desicions because you don't know something ICLY. It usually leads to fun. A good example would be setting up a minor fob in the sand temple in the northeast, just when an invisible thing appeared out of nowhere and screeched, before running away.

11. As CO or XO, be outstandingly nice and caring. Don't swear. Listen to every marine. It helps everything. And even if you do get mutinied, at least they'll feel bad for killing such a nice person.

12. As Hunter or Runner, bring two FACEHUGGERs when hunting. You can easily throw a FACEHUGGER at someone, stunning them and then you can slash them and/or take him to the hive. And I say two because you can easily take on two or more people if you have two FACEHUGGERs.

13. When bombarding as boiler, use long range sight. You can bombard as far as you can see. Don't be afraid to use your acid spit during a bombard, it doesn't cancel it.

14. When a Young Runnwr, stay inside the hive. You are terribly vulnerable.

15. When an Alien, you see a B18 spec, target the hands. That's the weak spot. And as Marine OR Alien, use the same tactic for DS.

16. If you are being aimed at in a large crowd, you can easily run away and the person will fire and miss if you're fast enough, hitting someone else.

17. Crusher can easily be countered with flamethrowers. A B18 Spec with a Flame Thrower is the Crusher Exterminator.

18. When sniping, beware of FF. You probably will take a limb off if you do.

19. As Squad Medic, bring latex gloves and a surgical mask.

20. Doctors on the ground are incredibly useful.

21. MTs are even MORE useful. You can whip up an FOB quick, and you can make an auto lath there too. That can create flashlights.

22. If the Aliens are coming, you can place C4 all around the hanger.

23. An SMG with the right attachtments can be suprsingly useful due to its low damage. If you FF, it's never a problem.

24. When duel wielding anything, set up a macro to shoot things quickly.

25. MK211 Shotguns the MPs have come equipped with a grenade launcher.

26. Murder someone in the Firing Range. You could easily claim it was an accident and no one will hear the gunshot.

I will be continually adding more tips! Hope you enjoyed!

[Jroinc1]

Snip

Decent guide, but you seem to be misinformed on some more technical issues, and I got comments on some of the others.
5- Are you SURE? I've been hit directly by WP as an elite t2, wasn't instakilled (It did hurt, and the fire's effective).

7-Good luck doing that.

10- Good luck doing that.

12- Helmet will block one, up to 3. One hugger WILL NOT STUN, unless they lost their helmet previously.

14- Good luck doing that.

19- Why? I believe those only help with surgical infection chance, not applying bruise packs.

20- True, but it depends on how good they are. If they're dragging a crate, they're prob moderate. If they aren't dragging a crate, they either didn't bring tools
(...bad...), or they ACTUALLY KNOW HOW TO PACK (good).

21- You think an autolathe or a cloner is good? You aint seen nothin' yet. viewtopic.php?f=94&t=9008&p=94809#p94809 The standard MT sets the engine, then cryos. The GOOD MT does that, then shows up at the FOB with a few vendors, sets up an autolathe and cloner (if research is held) and makes some walls. The PROPER MT does all that, and shows up at the FoB 60 min into the round with enough personally carried firepower to remove a quarter of the nexus, not counting the scary crate painted with a rad trefoil he's dragging. Fear the proper MT.

22- Either I'm missing something about C4, or you are. As far as I know, C4 is attached to one thing, with a 10 second timer, and utterly destroys that one thing. Are you planning to blow up doors that you could seal? Poke holes in walls for xenos to run through? BREACH THE SHIP? You could destroy vents, but you could also just unwrench/weld them... yeah. As for shipboard explosives, CLAYMORES and SADARS do not function. REGULAR GRENADES, RESEARCH GRENADES (Which can be used as mines, but HAVE NO ID recognition feature, be careful), GRENADE LAUNCHER GRENADES, and ATMOS BOMBS (but atmos bombs WILL breach. Just don't.) WILL function. Also, SM-based weaponry will work to clear the hangar function as designed. But you're setting off a nuke in the hangar, with all relevant implications. That's gonna sting.

23- LESS of a problem. If someone catches a 3-5 round burst, still gonna hurt. Also, think of the poor medic who has to patch up EACH injury.

26- Until someone looks and clones him. There's no disposal, and no closets. You could drag him to engineering... I guess.

NOW. My tips, more staff-side.
Many Sulaco roles are underused. MD's before the first casualties return, MT's... always. Squad medics and engis have headset keys to talk to the medical/engi frequency. Keep talking. We can't hear what's going on on the ground, and keeping us informed is the difference between us drudgingly doing our jobs and lurking, and getting like 6 pill bottles/ 2 or 3 atmos bombs on the next supply drop. Also, most of us are willing to come down and help.

As MD, MAKE PERDIOX ROUNDSTART. I got a mass production formula in several guides, follow it. Giving each medic a 50u bottle (or pills *shudder*) pre-drop ups their efficiency significantly, and lets wounded marines survive. If you have time, make a bottle of dex+ and dump 10u in each bottle, crit reset is useful.

DO NOT make TRICORD, ANTITOX, KELOTANE, or ANTIBIOTICS. Those 4 are all easily gettable from vendors in mass.
What's NOT easily obtainable from vendors in mass?
BICARD. Make 20u pills *sigh* rapidly roundstart AFTER the perdiox, each batch in a large beaker makes 6 pills, and is criminally easy to make. Bottle em, label em, and toss them into the fridge. They'll be used.

Custom med-blends. ONLY make these for your own use, or people who trust you OOC. Other people either fuck up the dosage, or ignore them. That said, develop your own blends and your quick guide to making them. I got mine (obv in a guide...), and I like them best. Find ones that fit your style, just don't OD people.
I'll give a few examples.
BruteHeal (not mine, credit belongs to Ms.Degrasse) with 20 bicard, 20 tricord, 10 tramadol, and 10 inaprov, in one pill, for an impressively strong single shot pill that's simple to make, won't hit OD thresholds, and will keep you from dying from crit while on it, but you can't control the dosage, it takes time to administer, and you only get 5 per 300u batch. Made for healing in combat and "here, take this and go shoot the giant bug"
Healmix (my own mix) with 20 bicard, 20 tricord, 10 tramadol, and 10 dex+ in liquid form administered by hypospray. You get INSTANT treatment, crit reset, variable dosage, 6 60u bottles per batch, won't hit OD thresholds, AND the ability to treat up to 6 people in one go. Downsides are you're gonna spend a lot of time filling your hypo, it's a little time-consuming to make, each shot doesn't heal that much (but can spaminject to overcome that downside), and if spaminjected, has more dex+ than optimal. Made to stabilize people rapidly, no matter the damage.
Perdiox+ (pretty common recipe, not sure who to credit) with 5 perdiox and 5 dex+. Pretty obvious upsides, no downsides.

If you go FoB doc, pack the tools in an emptied and labeled first-aid kit. It makes me sad to see people drag a crate, lose it, and spend the rest of their time at the FoB wondering where they went wrong in life. Plenty of packing guides there if you're having trouble, I wrote 2-3.

If you aren't dragging a crate, you can drag an IV drip. Take blood, get that guy with 40% blood level who no one else can help back into action.

There's a chem dispenser in research, but no chemmaster, so any perdiox you make will be plasma-tainted. Better than nothing, if the Sulaco was evac'd.

Work WITH the medics. You can do surgery, they can't. They can do EVERYTHING else.

As a MT, you are the HAMMER of the corps. Yes, as MT. As far as I know, no other role can go planetside with 6 insta-OB's that can be camouflaged in bags. Hell, grab the valves from the 2 vendors planetside, and you can have EIGHTEEN. Takes about an hour's worth of work to make, and some skill. Use them one at a time, or remote trigger 3-4 up at once to remove the ENTIRE front of the hive. No downsides to these, except for the time.

Supermatter delamination-based weaponry. You want to remove the ENTIRE hive, like ALL OF IT, wipe out the marine assault force TO A MAN, and give the FoB squad hallucinations and rad sickness, that's your baby. I have a guide to building this monstrosity. I would STRONGLY recommend that you not do so, but it IS a legit option. Just tell me when so I can get the popcorn.

You can build an autolathe planetside. You can also build cloners planetside, if you have a good doc who brings down cryo meds AND you have to hold a place with a wrenched shower (dorm bathrooms or science).

Tcomms done herp-a-derped? You can loot the tcomms room without breaking comms, and get enough parts to set up a redundant network. I wrote a guide, FOLLOW THE GUIDE, unless tcomms qualified. takes a little while, but sometimes the only fix.

Walls and tables, same as a squad engi.

Bring vendors. I personally hate the abuse of wheeling vendors around and melt the planetside ones when I can, *but* it is a feature. Bring your own if I'm playing ayy.

Scavenge whatever you can. Medical got a lot of stuff, and SOMETIMES some of it's not melted. Did you know med has 80 sheets of metal, and 10 of plasteel, just lying there? Robotics got multiple tool vendors and an autolathe, and an exosuit fabber (your mileage may vary), Corporate has a food vendor, and tcomms/engi have many engi-based ones. Grab whatever's not melted.

Secure storage makes a decent FoB, if you're just looking for safety. For some reason, boilers don't melt rwalls... because they're lazy.

On the ayy side... BOILERS. If you aren't bombarding, MELT EVERYTHING. You have the second-quickest destructive acid ability, and can take out rwalls.

The QUICKEST destructive ability? Spitters. Acid spit DAMAGES walls and girders. THAT INCLUDES RWALLS. At ancient, and to a lesser extent, elite, you can store enough plasma and spit fast enough to shred a wall within 20- FIVE seconds respectively. Engi throws up a wall? MAKE HIM CRY. Does not work on hidden doors, though.

[InterroLouis]

8. The ugl no longer fits on the M37A2. 15. The B18 comes with armored gloves, shouldn't you be taking their feet like all good foot fetish ravagers? Also, yes, research DOES have a chemmaster. And for 26? Hide them in the maint under the firing range, the Windows there get broken so often from marines with poor aim nobody even cares anymore, and one of the lockers in there is unlocked for easy corpse disposal.

[jaggaaff]

6. Stock reduces RoF and revolvers don't have the stun/knockback the shotguns have, while also not being able to have buckshot.

[Desolane900]

This is so meta it hurts to read. Please kill me.

[DeadLantern]

This is so meta it hurts to read. Please kill me.

If Meta is masked well enough, it's all good meta.