The Art of Leadership

Note!

''Leadership is usually something that comes with, and while in some ways can be practiced and learned from, not everyone can do it. There is no shame of being incapable of leading, ESPECIALLY if you are playing a game with random people who are probably heavily unlikely to cooperate with you. You will most likely lose at first and feel like you fucked up, but in order to get better at leading you need to learn from losses in order to achieve victory. Legends of Victory were built with a Road of Failures.''

This will be a very unusual guide as there is several ways to lead without them being wrong entirely, so we will just give you mostly advice and tips.

Understanding Leadership

 * 1)  Communicate with your teammates. - Communication is key to success. Many battles were lost due to lack of proper communication. Always give orders to your subordinates, don't expect them to know everything. Tell them what they're supposed to do and remind them of their goals. Talk to other command roles, pay attention to the radio feed and keep the information flowing!
 * 2)  Remember that you are a playing a game with randoms. - People can't usually be punished from across their computer, and they don't see you directly or likely feel you. You rely on their willingness to actively cooperate with you. If they do not cooperate with you, they are likely just here to shoot things and revel in chaos. Try and steer them in other ways, be it either moving the brood as Queen or having a few people including you suddenly move to another direction. Manipulating the Horde is easier than you think.
 * 3)  Failure is Inevitable. Learn from It and Rise. - As was said before, you are not going to likely succeed on your first attempt. Even if you do, there is eventually going to be one defeat. This is fine. Learn why you have failed or succeeded in order to become better. No matter how bitter the defeat is, it ultimately serves a lesson, even if harsh. There is little reason to stay mad at what happened for a long time.
 * 4) Have a strategy in mind before you deploy. - A squad with no strategy or what it really wants to do is a terrible squad. If you are the CO or Queen, this is even worse. Figure out what you want to do for this round. Maybe you want to attempt to defend a location with everything you got and let them come? Then you will obviously need a good place and enough supplies to do so and must prepare yourself for that.
 * 5) Learn your Tools and their Limitations. - Understand what your squad excels at and what it sucks at doing. If you are Delta SL and most of your squad is bringing Chainguns, it might be more effective to stick with Alpha and support them just behind their frontline melee. If your squad is mostly Snipers instead, then you must adjust to that. Figure out how your tools work and what their limits are.
 * 6) Predict your enemies, learn their Weaknesses and Strength. - Know thine enemy. For example, Mercs are at their best early game and have all their supplies, but if they have no supplies being delivered or their objectives picked up, then they are in deep trouble. That means that taking out their PO's could prove to be highly beneficial and you can try and find a way to do so. Do they seem to be perhaps trying to separate and search around the map in small groups of 3-5? They are trying to find the Brood and you should group up and quickly take out these pockets. Use your Strengths to strike decisive and critical blows against your foe's Weakness.
 * 7) Try out new ideas and ways and accept Criticism. - Biggest factor to your improvement will be logical Criticism from others. Even if they may sound Harsh, it is for your own good. In the end they point out what they see as errors of your ways. Never also hesitate to try out new ideas from time to time, and never do the same trick too much. Otherwise you become predictable and complacent until you get hit with a powerful and harsh Wake-Up Call.

(Could use a lot of improvement.)

Abilities
As a Squad Leader, you have access to transportation pods, which are a contextual ability found on the left side of the HUD. Upon calling one down, you can set it's destination by getting inside and using the new contextual ability to set a target LZ. After you set it, the pod will launch after a very short delay. When it lands, the pod will break, and a five minute cooldown will begin until you can call another one. Use this to get your squad out of bad situations, or avoid hostile territory. These pods differ by squad, Alpha and Delta both get a standard pod that must be entered, Gamma's pod is the command tonk, which will grab any vehicles or allies near it when it launches. Beta's pod is aerial and always hangs in the sky later.

The Field Commander does not have access to pods, but has an announcement ability that can be used for grabbing attention, the cooldown for it is very short.

The Saltshaker | OBSOLETE AT THIS TIME
While a SL doesn't need to know as much about the Saltshaker, what it can do and the importance of each area, OW's and CO should know for sure how their ship operates and what support it provides.

''First up, get to know the Saltshaker a lot. It has 2 decks, Upper and Lower. Upper Deck contains the Bridge and Cryo, and almost everyone with the exception of Crewmen spawns there. The Left Side of Upper Deck contains the Bridge, while the Right Side contains Cryo. Lower Deck meanwhile, is where most of the ship is truly run at. Left Side of Lower Deck contains the SAL and Dawn Crawler, while the Right Side contains the Engine.''

You will most likely spend your time in Bridge if you are OW, as that's where the console and orders are at.

Beware that all 4 of those areas have ISP's. Bridge has a bit of a special one called AIS, but its still a ISP.

As long as one of those ISP's is alive, Saltshaker will keep living.

Bridge Tools


Your workplace, for most of the time as a OW.


 * First up: There is several consoles, but the most important one is near the SL and Squad status. Accessing it lets you see the tacmap. The tacmap is a view of the Saltshaker/Planet and lets you see the icon of who you are looking at, but not any real detailed info. A Merc who has a SCAR or is heavily injured and a Merc who has a M41A and is fine will look the same to you. Don't worry too much about that, you don't usually need to know that. Essentially you see icons running around.
 * Try to get Mercs together or have them set up Radar Stations. If you don't have those, you can't see what's in that area.
 * If you want to launch Dawn Crawler, use the north console in the CO seat. It will let you set the target and launch it or use the pods on it.
 * If you wish to use orders, use the south console in the CO seat. You can announce, talk to Corporate/Admemes, request reinforcements, and use Orders.
 * Orders Include: No Order (Nothing essentially), ECM Order (Prevents the Zurganids and Weak Horrors from boarding Saltshaker until they completed their objectives. MUST HAVE! ALWAYS TURN ON WHEN MISSION STARTS! THERE IS NO REASON FOR THIS TO NOT BE ON.), Shield Order (Don't use this, as it makes the Engine go Dawn and doesn't let you really produce power, and only has a chance to stop pods), Jump Order (Starts a 5 minute timer. Once the 5 minute timer is over, the ship will jump and end the game. However if a Hive is on and its marked as Primary, you go into Overtime, where you have to destroy said HIVE to win.), Exterminate Order (Starts a 10 minute timer. Once the 10 minute timer is over, the ship will stun all Zurganids and nuke the central hive on the planet, ending the game.). Almost all of these require some Power from the Dawn Capacitors, but you usually don't need to worry about that, assuming crewmen aren't incompetent.
 * If you wish to use FLAK/OB's, go to this separate console at Port side. It will bring you to a tacmap again, but with options available to target and fire. Beware that OB's have a large scatter when not used near a beacon, so your shots might not go as intended. While they have IFF mostly, they will still destroy terrain, so don't shell your friend because they still need cover.

And that's about it. Only thing to mention is that you can Arm/Disarm yourself as a OW by clicking the button on the bottom of your HUD. You have infinite ammo at least.