202nd Groundborne Division Field Manual (1st Edition)

Overview

202nd Groundborne Division Field Manual (1st Edition)

Contents

1. Who We Are
2. Introduction & Philosophy
3. Speed
4. Aggression
5. Disruption
6. Awareness
7. Leadership
8. Teamwork
9. Who We Aren’t
10. Conclusion

Who We Are

The 202nd Groundborne Division is a small collection of people who have a cross-genre skill set in first person shooters. Comprised of competitive players from games such as Counter-Strike, but who like “tactical shooters” –whatever that broad category really means, we are simply a loosely affiliated group of people who like to play games such as Post Scriptum or Red Orchestra, but who are also interested in playing them well – by our definition of “well” which is the simplest one: by dominating the opposition and dragging our team kicking and screaming from the jaws of defeat and instead to bask in the sweet, sweet glory of winning a map in an obscure shooter filled with autistic LARPers and old drunk wehraboos.

Where did the name come from? The full name is the 202nd Groundborne Division: The Contemplative Turtles. This was intended to make us the exact opposite of the 101st Airborne “Screaming Eagles”. Why would we want to do this? Generally speaking, this was created out of Post Scriptum’s focus on Operation Market Garden and the nauseating level of promotion and hero worship the 101st Airborne has always received. It’s not out of disrespect for those veterans and what they accomplished, but more-so the fact that their accomplishments constantly overshadow much greater sacrifices in the same theater of war by men who will never receive accolades and hero worship. So, if most people who play this game stand with the 101st, we stand for almost the exact opposite of whatever it is they stand for.

Introduction & Philosophy

The 202nd Groundborne is an organization which is built upon some principles which apply and are proven to succeed not just in life and reality in many cases, but especially in the safe confines of a video game. We are not concerned with “immersion” in a world and role playing as if we were soldiers during WW2. Ironically, through our methods we frequently produce recreations of combat which are true to reality perhaps better than the so-called role-players out there. How? We are concerned with 6 core principles which will be outlined in the following sections: speed, aggression, disruption, awareness, leadership, and teamwork.

Through this manual, you will learn how we conceptualize these principles, and how they lead to repeated success both measurable and immeasurable. If we had to sum up our philosophy as a group in one brief statement or motto, it would be: “Don’t be a chicken-♥♥♥♥”. Apply that motto to everything you do in game, and you will already be on the fast track to embodying the Contemplative Turtle spirit.

Speed

Speed is key, it’s essential, it is the building block for everything else we do in Post Scriptum. Whatever you’re doing – whether it’s getting to a cap to defend it, pushing out against an enemy, peeking someone from a defensive posture, running to the next capture point, driving a vehicle somewhere on the map, do it faster. You are too slow. Let that sink into your head, don’t fight it mentally with thoughts of “oh I’m pretty fast, I do things quickly enough most likely…” because you are completely wrong and you don’t even know it.

How do we know this? Because in 300+ hours in game we have yet to ever encounter a single group of people who move faster than we do. There are some points to consider here:

• If you waste time spawning in at the start of the map, and aren’t absolutely bull rushing to the 1st objective (whether attacking or defending), then you are giving up a massive advantage in positioning to anyone else who does have the initiative to move quickly
• If you had the option of using a vehicle to drive somewhere and instead you decided to go on foot, see the latter half of the first bullet because you’re screwing yourself and your team over
• If you’ve captured an objective and you’re not immediately ignoring any enemies there and disengaging to head as fast as possible to the next objective, you’re screwing yourself and your team over
• If you kill those enemies in the point you just captured rather than abandoning them behind your own front line like helpless little sheep, you’re actually helping them to respawn within the next capture point you’re trying to take, and bolstering their defenses which makes your task even more difficult
• If you are defending, and after losing the point you linger around for 15 minutes fighting sporadic battles against slow enemies, you’re weakening your team’s position in the next cap and leaving it vulnerable to any enemies that ignore you and move quickly to secure your next point

This list could go on and on ad nauseum, but the point has been made. While our mascot may be a contemplative turtle, imagine that it’s a turtle who has also taken his pervitin and is all amped up on amphetamines. We would point out that while that’s an amusing idea, part of why the Germans achieved such success in their offensive operations early war were because of speed, mechanization, and plenty of meth. While it may seem counter-intuitive to what you’ve been told about moving slowly and keeping your head down, you’re actually much more effective in this game (and in reality as the Germans proved) if you move with the speed of a meth-head.

Aggression

All of that speed is wasted if you are a passive player. Passivity is the absolute antithesis of not just the 202nd Groundborne, but warfare in general. There is no good way to passively fight a battle, especially if you’re on the offensive. It was called “blitzkrieg” because lightning is insanely fast and it will kill you if it touches you. If successful wars were fought by being a slow little chicken who goes prone in a bush for half the game, they would have called it “Faultierkrieg” which translates to “Sloth-war”. Again, there are some points to consider:

• Letting players get comfortable where they are enables less skilled people to beat you when they shouldn’t
• Aggression makes people play uncomfortably, it forces them to move and shift around in attempts to contain your aggression
• Forcing players to get out of their comfort zones and confront you on more even footing leaves them at a disadvantage (if you’re better than they are, and you should always bet on yourself because confidence is key)
• Once you force your opponent to engage you on your terms, an even fight between a skilled and aggressive player (you) and a passive ♥♥♥♥♥ who is out of his element (the bush wookie who has to actually stand and deliver) will usually go in favor of the aggressor
• Fear of death is something reserved for reality. While it is true that dying in certain circumstances will limit your killing potential, and there are moments where you do want to stay passive momentarily to conceal your position (for immediate future aggression), you should not fear death in a video game
• War is a trade-off of risk and reward as everything in life is – it’s pathetic to see people in a video game who are risking nothing behaving with more cowardice than actual living human beings who were risking their lives in an order to charge across the countryside and kill other men
• The potential reward of aggression in a game thus has almost no downside and almost unlimited upside as long as you have ammunition, if you have an opening to be aggressive and break the other team, you must attempt it

We can deal with people who are still working on being better shots. We can deal with people who are working on becoming faster players. We can deal with people who are earnest and try their hardest to keep up with the group. We cannot deal with people who are afraid. You’re sitting in the comfort of your home with a mouse and keyboard in your hands. We cannot tolerate cowards – aggression is the only way.

This applies to the defensive as well. Again, historical context in the broader sense is on our side. The effective German defensive strategies on the Eastern front were centered around mobile defenses and blunting the enemy’s point of attack. The objective is not to catch the enemy, but for you to collide with him. Erwin Rommel once said “I would rather be the hammer than the anvil” and we are in complete agreement with this. Think of all the times you’ve attempted to defend a point in Post Scriptum. How many people were shouting “GET IN THE CAP! GET IN THE CAP! STOP GOING OFF ON YOUR OWN!”? While it’s true – if the enemy is capturing the point, you need to get in it and eradicate him, it’s also an absolute last resort. Consider the following:

• If you’re defending a point inside the point itself and the enemy comes through, surrounds the point, destroys your spawns (which must be kept on the periphery), then hits you with artillery – killing many of you and destroying any prepared defenses before flooding into the point, what is your recourse?
  • You cannot regain control of the cap because you lost your spawns and have too far of a run to get back
  • You cannot get back in, because now you’re attacking a point that is by definition made to be defensible, and is difficult to attack without a large concerted and coordinated effort (which your team in disarray reeling from a punch in the mouth will be incapable of mounting in most cases)

However

• If you are aggressive, push out and establish a perimeter outside of the objective itself, you are buying yourself extra room to operate
• You will be able to move and match the enemy’s speed and aggression in flanking maneuvers
  You will protect yourselves from encirclement and the destruction of your spawn points

• You will force the enemy to waste time, manpower, and perhaps even team resources like artillery, strafing runs, and close air support to dislodge you from a position that isn’t even the objective itself, rendering their attack impotent if they finally break through
• If you get killed, wiped out, a breakthrough occurs – because you played an aggressive defense, you will have provided yourself the time needed to respawn, regroup, and recover before the point becomes overwhelmed

This is the strength of being aggressive. When every individual plays with this mindset, the result is always a defense which can bend, but seldom breaks. When applied in coordination with some of the other 6 principles, it sets the entire squad and team up for success which is sustainable.

Disruption

We’ve often asked a question based on the following scenario: Someone has a fire hose pointed at your face. You don’t want to get wet. Would you rather find a way to turn off the hose, or wrap your lips around the nozzle and hope that you can swallow the torrent of water indefinitely? If you would rather drink the water than destroying the source, you might have a mild form of mental retardation. The hose is an MSP, FOB, or enemy rally. The cap is your face. The enemy players that stream in from these spawn points are the water. If you don’t want the water to mess you up, you’re best off disrupting it.

Disruption is in many cases less of a doctrine by itself and more of a biproduct of aggression. When players are faced with the chaos brought on by an aggressive opponent, they make mistakes. They leave things exposed, they lose certainty in terms of how to react to what’s happening to them, and this opens up opportunities to completely disrupt their plans. The goal of any player – whether playing on offense or defense, should follow a simple process flow:

• Is the cap actively being taken? (Y/N)
  • If yes, then get in the cap – offensive players should be helping to take it, defensive players should be helping to hold it, eradicate the offensive players, and push their defensive perimeter back out
  • If no, then you should be hunting their spawns

Hunting MSPs, hunting FOBs, hunting rallies, making sure that the enemy doesn’t get a chance to build a cohesive group, to push together, to flood into the point is your actual first line of defense. A team which is worried about and dedicating resources to protecting their spawns is a team which cannot defend or attack the objective in a cohesive manner. A team which is constantly threatened to have their respawns cut off is a team which cannot focus on being speedy and aggressive themselves. How many times have you heard people shout “THE RALLY IS HOT”? How many times have you had an attack peter out because your FOB was destroyed? How many caps have you lost, not because the enemy was great at attacking the point itself, but because they were great at destroying your MSPs and making sure very few players were available for its defense?

Disruption leads to attrition. If you can’t respawn, you will wither and die. Your effectiveness as a squad is diminished when the squad leader and radio man (two of the players with the best weapons and tools in the entire squad) can’t afford to be aggressive because they’re sitting around waiting to try and put down a rally. Even if you lose more people as an aggressive force, if you make the other team lose more people in important positions such as defending the cap point, you will eventually whittle them down. A team could have a 1:2 KDR overall as a team and still win a game if they are highly disruptive, move quickly and shut off the other team’s respawns.

Awareness

This is something that’s difficult to coach or explain. Awareness can be broken down into two major areas – awareness of the overall tactical situation for your team and squad. This can be defined by things such as whether or not the other team is taking the cap points, if they’re setting up a forward base in a position that would be dangerous to your team, if they’re leaving large gaps in their lines which you can exploit, etc. The second type of awareness is your immediate surroundings. This comes down to understanding what enemy weapons sound like, listening for footsteps and bush rustling. Knowing when to be hyper-aggressive vs. when you have moments where you shouldn’t shoot because it will alert the enemy to the fact that you’ve found his MSP and are positioning yourself to destroy it.

The major tip here is to get comfortable with utilizing your map as frequently as possible. Any 202nd Groundborne member spends half the match running and looking at their map. If you can’t walk and chew bubblegum, then you had better learn because it’s an essential skill which will increase your tactical awareness. The map tells you many things, some absolutely reliable and true – such as a rally going hot, and other less reliable things like infantry marks that god only knows who might have placed on the map accurately. There is a conundrum with this however. If you’re staring at your tactical map constantly, how do you maintain high awareness of your surroundings? Speed in glancing at the map is helpful, but the rest isn’t something that can be easily explained. It comes from experience and being able to read a situation.

The last thing to note here as guidance is something that’s almost worthy of its own entire principle: decisiveness. When you’re trying to read a situation or choose a course of action, wasting time trying to work out every possible permutation and pick your favorite one will frequently either get you killed or close a window of opportunity you may not even know exists while you sit around unable to make up your mind. George S. Patton once said “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week”. Decisiveness is part of being aware and assessing your situation. It feeds your speed and aggression. Whatever you decide to do, decide quickly and commit to it – even if it might be too risky, or the wrong decision. Make that judgement quickly and stick to it. Even bad plans or incorrect strategies that have full buy-in from you and others can be willed to succeed. When people don’t question it, go all-in, envision their success, and can make those decisions quickly it gives them an advantage over everyone else around them. This advantage can be so great that it makes up for foolhardiness. It’s better to be a good decision maker as well as a quick decider, that’s the goal, but if you can’t be perfect be quick, be aggressive, and be decisive.

Leadership

Leadership in a video game is something that isn’t very well understood by many. This is our bias as competitive players speaking, but in games such as Post Scriptum there is a certain attitude towards leadership that is fostered. People want someone to tell them how to think, how to act, how to play, where to be, what to be doing, etc. Our best guess is that this comes from tropes and stereotypes of the military and following orders. It is reasonable to assume that people who are trying to role play in a WW2 game will come in with the mistaken impression that there was very little decision making done at the individual level, and that those in leadership positions were the end-all be-all.

While it is true that leadership is an extremely important factor in the military, the army does not actually want robots. Most militaries of WW2, and especially the U.S. military had learned the lessons of something known as decentralized command or decentralized authority. Essentially, this meant that while orders should be followed and obeyed the details of execution should be left up to the people in combat at the granular level. This meant that frequently the life and death decisions on how to approach an objective were left up to NCOs and the individual soldiers under their command. It should be noted that individual decision making is what produces acts of bravery worthy of medals of honor and iron crosses. When a grenade lands in a foxhole, the NCO nearby doesn’t have to order one of those men to pick it up and hurl it back, or to throw themselves on it to sacrifice their bodies for their comrades. These are decisions that are left to the individual. Likewise, if you are playing a video game (which should be FAR more decentralized and responsible for your own actions) and looking for someone to hand hold you, change your diaper, and tell you how you absolutely MUST act, then you do not belong with us

Leadership within the 202nd Groundborne means someone takes on the burden of positioning the squad via rallies, makes suggestions from time to time on directions the squad should move either to attack or avoid detection by the enemy, or to defend or blunt an enemy advance. It also means taking on the burden of driving the squad from location to location (part of positioning) and on occasion it means letting your squad go off and fight while you move an MSP. It also means marking important information on the map from time to time so the squad can reference it. Importantly, it also means leading by example. A contemplative turtle squad leader should be the most aggressive member of the squad. He usually has the best weapon in the squad (especially on the Germans) and should be the one engaging as many enemies as possible to enable his teammates to move on and accomplish their various tasks.

Leadership in the Groundborne does not entail giving constant instructions to your squad on how to play. It does not entail living out of your binoculars and marking every possible thing on the map. It does not entail playing passively unless absolutely necessary in order to protect the squad’s ability to spawn. If you cannot think for yourself, if you cannot play off of the positions of your teammates, and you cannot communicate in a succinct and direct manner without flooding the local or squad chat with inane nonsense or stupid suggestions and requests, then you do not belong with us.

Teamwork

There is another great misconception within the Post Scriptum community en large regarding what “teamwork” really means. Most people think it means dogmatically sticking in close proximity to your squad mates. Being nearby does not magically cause teamwork to happen. I could stand near a piano all day but I will not spontaneously compose and play a new concerto. It will take a concerted effort, and so will any real teamwork. Teamwork is also not merely communicating what you’re seeing or talking an endless stream of drivel about what you’re doing. In fact, most good teamwork in the 202nd Groundborne happens without much communication at all.

It is an expectation of our players to be able to play off of one another, and for them to understand the necessity and strength of doing so. This ties in with awareness – if you are aware of your teammate’s position, weapons, and posture (aggression in most cases), then you will be able to make your own choices on how best to support him. This might mean that while he is pushing a position, you watch his back or flank to protect him while he’s blindly charging a location. This might mean tossing a smoke or a grenade to enable him and yourself to move safely through an area. It does mean communicating, but the bare minimum necessary to further your coordination (i.e. mono-syllabic quick words which can indicate if you saw an enemy, if you’re throwing a grenade or dodging an incoming one, if you want them to follow you or if you’re following their lead

Yes, teamwork means sticking together, but it does not happen unless you have singular focus on making sure you play in a complimentary way to your nearby squad mates. It also does not mean being paralyzed waiting for someone else to coordinate your actions. Think of a pack of wolves. They don’t sit around having a detailed conversation of “okay you go here, and I’ll go here, and we’ll chase the caribou that direction…” they wander as a pack, they find prey, and they coordinate their attacks with deadly teamwork and precision just by watching each other’s positions, movements, and having a common understanding of what will bring them success. One of the takeaways of that example is that unless the entire pack has the same conceptual understanding how to achieve success in their hunt, they will not be able to play off of each other’s movements. A lone wolf with its own ideas who refuses to buy in will derail the other wolves just like someone who refuses to cover his teammate, and favors the philosophy of hiding in a bush like a wimp will hang his friend out to dry, and cause both of them to fail.

The last point to note here is that sacrificing yourself for the good of the team is always the correct move. We will try to pick each other up whenever possible. We will gladly bait ourselves so that someone else gets a good opportunity to deal with an enemy. It’s just a game, and you can respawn. If you don’t try to enable everyone around you to succeed then you’re doing it wrong. Nobody cares if you went 35-10 but you screwed the entire squad over the whole game. A rising tide lifts all boats, and the best option is always going to be the choice to succeed together if possible.

Who We Aren’t

Anyone who has made it this far in the field manual should have already picked up the answers to this question, but it stands to be reiterated. We are not:

• Slow
• Passive
• Fearful
• LARPers

Anyone in this team who wants to go prone in a bush on the periphery of the action and try to shoot 4-8 people per game can ♥♥♥♥ off. We will be in the action, we expect 15-30 kills per match each regardless of what weapon we’re using, and we’ll laugh at and ignore all of the people who are more deserving of the moniker of “Turtle” than any of us are.

Conclusion

As a group of people who have had competitive success in a plethora of games over many, many years of experience there is a common thread with everything. It is less important how skilled you are mechanically at a game, it is less important how knowledgeable you are of the maps and little gimmicks. The key factor to success in any sort of game or competition is your philosophy. Your mindset. This dictates how you approach the game, how you approach adversity, and how you handle success. It might all sound quite serious for something that’s “just a game”. This may be a fair criticism, but our question to the reader would be why they’re wasting their time in that case. Calling people “too serious” or “tryhards” is a copout of the lazy and unambitious. Sure, we might never gain anything other than personal satisfaction from winning in a video game, but if you’re going to dedicate hours of your life to an activity, why would you ever allow yourself to be bad at it? Why would you revel in being inferior to those around you? Another quote from Patton which I’ve always agreed with is “Americans play to win at all times. I wouldn’t give a hoot and hell for a man who lost and laughed”.

We play to win, it’s how we enjoy ourselves. If you feel the same way and want a place to call home with people who enjoy what they do then welcome aboard. If you think this entire guide is a lot of drivel and self-absorbed bull♥♥♥♥, then good luck. We’ll see you in one of the few NA servers in this game and take pleasure in beating your brains in over and over with our “drivel”. Our results speak for themselves.