The Playground is Bad Company (BF:BC2 in the Playground)

[Maeglin_Dubh]

Does anyone here play?

I've only just started, with a group of friends, and it drives me a little crazy that you don't start with the gear to do what your class is supposed to do. Engineers have to unlock the repair gun, medics have to unlock the health kit, and assault has to unlock the ammo bin.

Been having moderate success with the engineer. I'm good at arc prediction (thank you, demoman) so I've been acting as mobile artillery with my RPG while having one of our snipers call adjustments. It's worked pretty well, and I single-handedly took out one of the capture points in a game last night by doing that.

[FoeHammer]

I play! Not so much anymore, as lag keeps getting really bad, but i try to whenever I can spare the time. I'm FoeHammer99099 if you're interested.

The support roles for each class are where the points are. A well placed medkit or ammo bin is worth more than a kill anyday. The RPG is also handy for people hiding inside of buildings. Just take out the wall and follow up with a few seconds of smg fire.

[Maeglin_Dubh]

Don't have the paddles yet, but I unlocked the repair gun, ammo bin, and health kit. So that'll help.

Hoping to get the mortar strike at some point, but I'm rubbish with a sniper rifle.

[Elm11]

I absolutely love BC2 and play it fairly regularly. I can offer you the advice that as an engineer, the AK74-U is your bestest buddy with improved silencer attached. I can also say that it's a bad idea to think of the recon class as a sniper. I play recon as my secondary (primary is assault) but i very, very rarely snipe. Instead, i scout using the SVU with a red dot sight and an abundance of sensor relay drones. It's great fun to have a gun accurate to ping someone across the other side of the map in three shots and not alert the guy three meters away.

[Maeglin_Dubh]

Unfortunately, all I have at level 3 is the first sniper rifle and two shotguns of varying degrees of uselessness.

[Ozymandias]

Bolt action sniper rifles are essentially useless, unless you are really good at hitting mobile targets from long ranges in the head. The fact of the matter is, all of the guns have accurate enough single-fire that it's easy to kill stationary targets before they react with four or five bodyshots, especially with magnum ammo. And the semi-auto SRs, especially the SVU, kill almost as fast as bolt-actions (three bodyshots, which is like 1.5 seconds or one body and one head) with numerous other benefits, including being excellent hipfire weapons if you can get over not having a crosshair.

For recons, though, the best advice is to use motion mines. A lot. No, more than that. You have to make up for the 85% of recons that don't realize that they even have them. Throw them in front of you as you approach a point to prevent ambushes, then throw them when you're at the point to ambush the enemy yourself. You also get tons of points.

Shotguns aren't useless - the Neostead and, to a lesser extent, the 870 kill in one shot at ~5m, or 2 up to 10ish, more with magnum. With slugs they turn into sniper rifles without scopes.

Most important of all, here's the protocol for when you see an enemy:

1.)Spot.
2.)Shoot.

People get that backwards, for some reason...

[Elm11]

Everything in this post is brilliant, though i'm tempted to disagree on the bolt actions being useless part, having had a lot of fun with my m24.

[Kudaku]

Been playing this game for a good long while now, currently rank 41 - Kudaku. Feel free to add me :smallsmile:.

First of all I want to say that you shouldn't feel bad if you feel that BC2 is rough on you - it takes a while to get a feel for the gameplay, and at the start you'll probably have a fair few "how the hell did that happen"-moments. Even highly skilled players who have been playing for a very long time will usually have a Kill/Death ratio of 1 to 1,5.

If you want to play sniper there's not really much advice I can give you, marksman recon is probably my least played kit - however, some general pointers can be useful:

Be very careful not to stand/crouch with the sky to your back when you're sniping - your siluette is easily noticeable with the skybox behind you. Always try to take cover in front of, or preferably behind something. As others have mentioned, spot every chance you get. Always join a squad, and try to help them out whenever you can - moving up to follow the action will let them use you as a mobile spawn point. Always use recon balls if you're close enough to the action - cannot stress this enough. Most kits get at least half their points from using their tools, this goes double for bush wookies. However, also keep in mind that balls can be fooled - they only ping people who are moving, which means that if you're not running the balls won't track you. This works both ways, if you hear the recon ball scan sound and you don't see a ping on the map that's not a friendly ball. If you go to cover you could well get the drop on some overly confident troops.

The sniper rifles in BC2 can be beastly if you're excellent at placing headshots at long ranges, but the problem with this is that the recon class is partly self-contradictory. If you're far enough away from the action to get marksman bonus points, you're too far away from the action to contribute everything you can to your team (specifically recon balls).

Finally some general advice:

Always use your kit abilities, be they healing crates, ammo boxes, repairs or recon balls. Try to setup boxes in areas where people will migrate naturally, ideally also in cover.

Shotguns are utterly awesome once you get the hang of it, and all the pump-action shotguns have very similar stats - apart from reload speed they all do the same damage and have the same accuracy. However, the important thing here is to pick your battles. BC2 is all about having the right tool for the job, and if you find yourself in a situation where you have the drop but you're not feeling confident about the range, just spot him and move on. Alternately you can try to pistol him to death, but this takes a bit of skill/luck.

Never stand still unless you're in cover and you're reasonably sure no one has spotted you - due to destructible environment cover is quite fluid in this game, and you'll often find that an opportunistic assault player will fire a 40mm grenade at the window you were just firing out of. Needless to say this works both ways, if you play assault/engineer and notice a sniper lurking in a window, take out the wall.

If you're playing a medic and you're on a map with vehicles, grab the Tracer Dart Gun as your sidearm once you unlock it. Since LMGs have excellent ammo you'll (hopefully) not need to rely on your sidearm for defense, and you get bonus points and good karma for tagging enemy jeeps/apcs/tanks.

If you're playing engineer and you want to utilize the tracer system, first find a tracered vehicle. Aim at the vehicle with your RPG, you'll see a red box (not you can do this even if there's cover between you). After roughly three seconds that box graphic will change - this means your RPG is locked on. No matter where you aim and fire the rpg, it will loop around and (ideally) hit the target. However it's not a smart track, it will hit whatever is in the way as well. This means that with a bit of training you can loop rockets around buildings, walls etc and destroy vehicles without ever having to risk your ass in direct LOS. It's worth noting that the AT4 launcher does not support tracer darting, and is instead wire guided, similar to the stationary AT guns.

If you feel that the iron sights of certain weapons are crap, don't worry about it. As you level up you'll unlock custom scopes which can completely change how a weapon functions. The AN-94 is a good example of a rifle that with a x4 scope can essentially change your class to "sniper with ammo box and Grenade Launcher".

If you're playing Assault and you exchange your assault rifle for a shotgun or later the G3, M14, or M1 Thompson, your grenade launcher is exchanged for C4 charges. Have fun with unlimited explosives :smallbiggrin:.

Structures are (usually, there are some exceptions) destroyed when more than 50% of their vertical walls are destroyed. If you want to destroy a building from the inside, place C4 charges high on the ground floor or low on the second floor. This way they'll take out both the first and the second story wall. Similarly, if you place a C4 charge in the corner of a house you can take out up to four 1walls with each bomb.

Finally, you mentioned you were having a hard time getting points for recon. As you level up you'll get access to weapons that can be used by all classes, such as the shotguns you already mentioned. I can't snipe to save my life and so leveled most of my recon unlocks (and points) using recon balls and the M1 Thompson (and later the VSS), playing reccie as a run'n'gun SMG toter who had a rather unfair advantage in that I always know where people were hiding (doe to ball scans). This also goes for medic - if you have a hard time getting points with the LMGs (whose iron sights are at times spectacularly bad), grab a different weapon and farm points till you get gear you feel comfortable using.


...Wow, that went on for a whole lot longer than I thought it would. Hope you find some of this useful, and again feel free to hit me up for a game sometime. :smallsmile:

[Maeglin_Dubh]

All the games I play with my friends are in hardcore mode, so that changes the game a bit (including recon balls, I think.)

I'll definitely keep those tips in mind, though.

[MachineWraith]

My friends and I play the heck out of BC2 on Xbox360.

My favorite setup is Assault, Pump Action Shotgun, Colt 1911, Slugs, Magnums.

870 + slugs is a one-shot kill to the upper chest/head at fairly long ranges, and a 2 shot kill in almost every other situation. The trick is to learn to take that extra fraction of a second to aim. Using an automatic weapon tends to make people start shooting and then snap in, which is a terrible habit for the shotgun + slug combo. Generally, I find that I can get two to three shots off at most in a firefight before it's over - one way or another.

C4 and an ammo kit is heavenly. Collapse buildings on objectives, booby trap choke points, murder any vehicle in the game with at most 2 C4, and being able to completely ignore front/side/rear armor, as C4 does full damage regardless of location. It's awesome.

Dirty, nasty trick ahead.
If you're not playing on hardcore, and you're on offense, there's a nasty little trick with C4. Get one squadmate in the UAV. All 3 remaining squadmates should, ideally, have C4 and the explosive damage bonus. Throw 6 C4 each (the max allowed) on the UAV, and have your pilot fly it onto the objective (or into enemy tanks if on defense), and trigger the explosives. BOOM! You just got all kinds of points for objective damage/vehicle kills, and since you're not on hardcore, the UAV pilot just flies back to the computer so you can do it again. :smallcool:

[Maeglin_Dubh]

C4 is a weapon I definitely want to get better with. The possibilities seem endless.