Section 2 - Timing
You need to learn the maps to understand how long it takes to get from point A to point B. The reason this is important is for realizing before it's too late that an enemy has slipped by you in sp_delivery_te to go build the controls, meaning they've skipped the flag capping process at the flag you were so busy trying to defend. If you're playing a 3v3 and only see two enemies dead and you're looking around for a couple seconds for the third and he hasn't come you need to be thinking to yourself "did somebody get through?". This is ESPECIALLY the case if two of the dead enemies are non-engineer class. Turn around immediately and try to kill the engy. I don't suggest killing out because assuming you hit the coincidental perfect time to killout once realizing someone slipped past your team you still need to run to the controls and the quickest way is spawnway but the controls are built on the other side of the room (the side opposite of the button). It takes too long. If you know how to move fast you should be able to catch up to that engy because usually (mainly in pubs) the engy that sneaks through is often the type of player who isn't very skilled in shooting and wanted to go build the objective to lock down the flag cap for their team. The sneaky engy could be caught earlier if you use headphones and pay attention, assuming they were making noise to begin with. Knowing how long it takes to get from once place to another can also provide you with better alternate routes to meet up with your enemy and kill them when they're trying to deliver docs or simply get you another frag because you already know when to aim at a specific location on the map based on when you saw someone leave another location. This is especially useful when you're fighting one player and he runs behind a wall and another player is shooting you so you focus on him. Well what happens when you kill this 2nd player? You turn around *and aim where you suspected that player was going to be running to. Typically players like to double team you if you're alone, especially if they feel like you outclass them in skill. This only provides you with even more of an upper-hand because you know their moves before they make them.

Knowing when to push our kill out is important in pubs just like scrims. If you push out into enemies when you're about to spawn without killing out before the timer resets you're hurting your team's progress as well as your own. You're stuck waiting for an entire spawn, which is often a very long time if playing in etpro. You should be pushing out when you're about to die so you can die if you have to (but hopefully not) or kill out when you're about to spawn so you can get full health and ammo and push with your team again to defend or rush your objective depending on your current team. There's nothing unfair about killing out either, don't worry about people thinking you're a "noob" for that. It's part of the game. More on that later...

Knowing when to hold back is just as important. If you're alone against an entire team, you probably want to hold back or kill out when it's almost time to spawn to support your team. Which one you choose is dependent on the situation but if you choose to hold back and defend, you need to waste the time of your enemy. It doesn't matter if you're getting kills here as long as you make them afraid to come in. More experienced players will rush you anyway but often you can get away with holding defense all by yourself by wasting their time while your team is down full if you're playing against players who are not as skilled.

Reviving is another useful task you need to learn because medic is the staple class of ET. Yes medic, not engineer. For optimal team play you need more medics than engineers but most pubbers don't realize this and dislike medics for the wrong reasons (again, I'm going to go over those reasons later in this guide). Reviving and healing keeps your team alive to complete the objective and medics are great for taking down enemies and putting out alot of damage. When to revive is actually something I still think about sometimes. I think it's heavily dependent on the situation you're in and the players you're reviving. No, I don't think that medics on pubs HAVE to revive everyone. It's a public server, not a scrim. I think it's great to have medics on the team who do revive though and I do appreciate being revived and I personally have a habit of reviving everyone I can. It's possible to do well personally and still revive but I think alot of people assume that anyone who kills alot of people automatically isn't reviving but that simply isn't true. I've been called rambo medic countless times while being the best medic in the server (the award) or other high amounts of healing and reviving my teammates. People assume that I'm not reviving simply because I can aim and strafe. Ah, the tough life of playing medic and being hated by baddies.

I see alot of players throwing grenades without priming them. Do people not realize that nades can be primed? Hold your attack button down longer and listen to those beautiful click noises. Don't hold longer than 4 clicks because you'll 'splode yourself. How long to prime nades I can say can only be learned by experience and it depends on the situation.

I see alot of players try to capture flags while there are enemies defending them and the team has 15 seconds left to spawn still. Why do this? Why push into the flag to try extra hard to capture it and 95% of the time die because of that when you can simply wait until your team is about to spawn and THEN go potentially sacrifice your life to capture the flag for the team. This causes your team to spawn at the flag as soon as it's captured (if timed right) and annihilate those 1-3 players that were giving you a hard time while you cap. I understand it's difficult to get used to watching the spawn timer but it's very important in ET. If you really want to get this down you may need to go do scrims (yes in etpro). Don't scrim in other mods, use etpro and global configs because they're balanced and consistent across every server).

When you're fighting an enemy and they go behind an object such as a box, wall, or rock to reload you need to listen for the sound of the gun finishing the reload. I wouldn't say to start shooting exactly when it finishes reloading, but it's a short moment after. I don't care if you don't see them, shoot the same side of the object they just came from. The reasoning behind this is most people are too distracted by the battle to actually expect this from you or try to trick you and won't bother going the other way. People tend to hide, reload, then immediately come back out. It takes practice to learn exactly how long it takes the average player to jump back out after reloading. This often gets you an early headshot or two if you're aiming in the correct place and gives you the advantage. They either die or go back into hiding and try to pull out med packs in which case you rush and own them.


Section 3 - Movement
Being speedy in ET is very useful and I recommend that everyone learns how to TJ (Trick Jump). Not necessarily jumps that get you into advantageous positions or over walls to complete objectives, but gamma jumping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cAKh4lRfsc (These were supposed to be embedded but the forum only allows 2 per post)


Section 4 - Map Knowledge
Knowing the map plays a HUGE role in being successful. It helps you know where enemies are going to come from, how long it takes them to get places, and where you should be aiming and moving to and from. Without knowing a map you are almost useless to your team in every way because you don't know the objectives to complete or where to go to kill people. You also tend to lose more fights meaning it gives your team a lesser chance of winning and lowers your chance of dominating the scores. Because of the amount of players that have played the game, and currently do and the countless years of playing and several thousand maps played, I tend to know where people are going to be in maps I'm familiar with. To me all spots are common spots that people actually use in maps like Goldrush. I know the paths they take, I know the spots they camp at and spawnkill at. Here's an example of a player appearing upset that I knew he was under our spawn. The reason I knew is because it was impossible for him to get to the transmitter that fast. I could hear him jumping away with the objective while waiting for respawn and saw nobody jumping from the box outside our spawn when we spawned. It became clear to me he was underneath the spawn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PgFl1ISxIw (These were supposed to be embedded but the forum only allows 2 per post)


Section 5 - Game Knowledge
Gibbing is very important because it prevents the enemy team from advancing (or defending). Assuming the enemy team has medics who actually revive, if you don't gib battles will be much more difficult for you as well as your team. Gibbing is simply the action of forcing someone into limbo (making them wait for respawn) by either exploding their body or shooting them when they're waiting on the ground for a medic to revive them. Sometimes, based on the situation, it's wiser to finish killing more enemies first. This heavily depends on the skill levels and if the enemy team is reviving or has any medics alive. Usually you want to kill and gib engineers so they can't do objectives. This is why I said medics are the main class of ET despite many maps requiring the wrench and/or dyno. They keep engineers alive which is precisely why you need to counter that by gibbing.

Getting the first hit on your enemy is important as well because it gives you the natural advantage of starting to damage them before they damage you but it also gives the potential to give them a hard time hitting you back. If you find yourself in the situation where someone is hitting you too much and you're having problems hitting them back, just sidestep and re-initiate the gunfire with the enemy. You're basically hitting the reset button on the fight and getting in the new "first hit". Make sure to make up for the time they were damaging you alot and you weren't because sidestepping to re-initiate won't guarantee you win a fight. Despite the lack of guarantee, it's a useful tactic that is commonly used by skilled players to win fights.

When you see a relatively close enemy with an MG and have the opportunity, run around him. You only need to go around them enough to be out of their range. Unless they're skilled and get you fast you can easily get around them outside of their bipod range and kill them before they can even leave the bipod mode.

LEANING! Just do it! It really helps you out and give you the advantage of knowing when an enemy is coming around a corner. You can jump out when they're in the air (especially useful on those servers with the super high double jump) and just knock them down immediately. It takes practice to learn how far out you should stand to see things without hanging out the edge of the wall and being detected. Learn how to do it and make use of this great ET feature.


Section 6 - Psychology
I feel that alot of being successful in ET is actually psychology. Coordination is important but psychology can win you alot of battles even against players you tend to struggle against. In a way, it's a method of outsmarting your opponent in their decisions to make certain moves in ET. One way you can trick people who are "less advanced" at ET is to do something very simple such as opening a door then coming out through the large opening next to it. Anyone should be able to do this as it's very simple, and better players are very aware of this trick and won't fall for it at all. A good example of this is on supply at the first gate (the one that's already open, not the one that allies need to destroy). The idea is to make the player look to a certain direction and then go the other way and hit him while he's looking away. Here's what I mean:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGYKJxeqI94 (These were supposed to be embedded but the forum only allows 2 per post)

Most players in ET tend to do the same exact thing as other players. You will rarely find players that do something different. Since you have a statically higher chance of being successful by adapting to the most commonly occurring gameplay choices I suggest you do just that. Expect that every player you go against is going to go to the same spots you've become used to seeing people go to in order to camp or sneak by or even rush in.

Another useful tip is when there are two doors next to eachother and you see an enemy go behind the wall between them you need to realize that he can pop out of either of those doors at any minute. For sake of the example let's talk about a separation between the two doors which is equivalent to two or three ET characters standing next to eachother, elbow to elbow. Typically he'll be going behind those to reload or run from one of your teammates that may die just after he does. Once he jumps out, where will YOU be aiming? You can only choose one answer and there are three options. The first option is to aim between the two doorways, dead center between them. The second option is to aim at the left doorway. The third option is to aim at the right doorway. If you chose either of the last two options you're correct. Don't aim between the two doors because you have a 50% higher chance to already be aiming at the enemy if you choose one of the doorways. If you aim between the two doorways you will need to adjust your aim to the right or the left but if you aim at one of the doorways you may or may not have to move your aim to the other door. Snapping to the other door shouldn't be a difficult task for you if you've built your muscle memory. How do you know which door to choose? Typically if a player ran from a good amount of distance and quickly behind the doorway separator it means they're coming out the other doorway (the one furthest from the direction they got behind the separator). If a player was already strafing in a way where they occasionally go behind the separator while shooting you and only went behind it to reload, they are most likely to decide to come back out the doorway that they came from. You should keep this in mind when you're the person behind the doorway for those players like me who realize this already. People tend to choose the shortest route to the outcome they want, which is to kill you. They don't usually think ahead and expect you to expect them coming out of a certain doorway. Most people probably don't think anyone even thinks about this. I know that was probably very confusing, especially if English isn't your fluent language. Here's an illustration:



In this example you can see our ET character is strafing left and right and appearing at the doorway which is on the right. Imagine the character BEHIND that wall, there's no other way to really draw that so use your imagination! That means they are more likely to come back out on that side after reloading.



Here we can clearly see our field ops is coming in from the left really quickly. Well, it's most likely he'll end up in that right side doorway.

There will of course be those players who defy the usual behavior of most players so this isn't full proof but I think you should get the idea by now, if not I don't know how you made it this far through the guide.

I often trick people into coming out the other side of an object, for example a rock. This requires an object for me to take cover behind as well. They shoot me, I shoot them, they take cover behind the rock and I come out for a moment to let them shoot at me then quickly go to the other side of my own object and wait for them to pop out of theirs. Nine times out of ten the average player will do this and you'll have the automatic advantage because you won't be moving and you can even crouch to possibly get better hits on them. You'll get the first hit usually too because they're playing right into your hand. Also, learn how long it takes them to get to the other side of an object and you can even prefire it. Things like this often cause players to accuse you of cheating by the way, so have fun with that. The reason this is so effective is because of the competitiveness of an ET player (especially male et players, which make up most of the game). Once they are attacking you, it's like you got them to bite the bait and you need to reel them in by going to the other side and forcing them to want to do it too so you can kill them. They will want to once again find the most direct route to attacking you again and often don't consider the outcome. This is especially ironic considering the whole reason they decided to go to the other side of the rock is because they couldn't see you anymore on the previous side of the rock you're hiding behind. They're so anxious to grab the frag that they don't consider the fact that you're setting them up to be in movement while you can easily prepare to shoot them the moment they appear on the other side.