Clan War Strategies:
Many people have messaged me asking about war strategies and the like, unfortunately that is far outside the scope of this guide. For the more serious players, Whisper has an excellent guide to warring especially regarding buying equipment. His guide can be found at the following website.
http://whisper.ausgamers.com/warstrats.htm The best advice I can offer is a team of champions is often beaten by a champion team and that Counter-Strike: Source is more like Baseball, where every team plays so many matches that you are guaranteed to lose a few every so often no matter how good you are. Learning from losses is usually far more beneficial than easy wins.
Aiming Practice: A lot of people wonder what the best way to practice aiming is when gaming these days. Well there is no right and wrong answer here any practice is good practice. A few of the better techniques are create your own server and fill it up with a whole bunch of bots. Give them all knives and or pistols only. And then practice taking them down ONLY with headshots. The other good method I recommend is one which my fellow clan mate rec swears by. When playing on a public server. Buy only one clip of ammunition. When rifling this forces you to be ultra economical and not waste bullets. Concentrate on only getting headshots and maximizing the amount of kills you get for your own clip. Once your clip is finished, move on to your pistol. This is a great way to ensure your aim is enhanced and you also practice your pistol skills in tough situations. Another technique one of my other clan mates uses is some form of self punishment as it were. You can buy up your kit as usual, but whenever you do something silly or that costs you badly like spraying from a distance or not checking a hiding spot, punish yourself by only using a pistol the next round. Do this for only one round after you have done something silly and you will rapidly enhance your pistol skills as well as make yourself play smarter and less stupidly. These are the three tactics I tend to think work really well for ensuring your aim is top notch for rifling.
Teamspeak and Ventrilo: As many of you will know, the in game voice communication system for Counter-Strike: Source is below feeble. It needs a major work over before it becomes useful again. I tend to recommend the use of either Teamspeak or Ventrilo when warring to ensure you can communicate effectively with your team mates. Typical sportsmanship rules apply however, do not communicate with live team mates when you are dead, for starters you will get into bad habits and if you have any aspirations of lanning then you will end up costing your team rounds and possibly matches by communicating when you are dead. These programs make communication much clearer and easier and are a great way to go to practice strategies. These programs can also be configured so that you don’t have to press a key to speak, which can be great to keep yourself focused on the game, especially when you are starting out at lans. Often laners wont use in game communication but would rather just speak audibly enough for everyone in the team to hear. So pressing the button isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for lanning either.
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Computer Related Information29/12/2005 (top)
Computer:
Running a decent specification machine is not crucial but it does help. I know a number of top tier players within the Australian community who play on lower end gaming rigs. Many players who go from a low frame rate machine to a high frame rate machine improve dramatically as it helps you to hone your aiming a lot better when things run smoothly. I recommend the AMD Athlon 64 platform, Counter-Strike: Source is incredibly intensive on your CPU so basically the higher spec the better. Though I am not endorsing spending ridiculous amounts on a CPU. Dual core current doesn’t provide any real advantage aside from the higher clock speeds but that may come into its own in the future. 3500+ and above is more than adequate I find. Ram I generally recommend 1Gb as a minimum and that is what I am currently running though many games, including Counter-Strike:Source are starting to appreciate 2gb’s worth of memory. Can always add more as you can afford it. Make sure you always get a decent motherboard don’t cheap out in this department. It is the pure guts of the machine so make sure it has the features you need as well as the performance, I generally buy Asus but all the mainstream brands have top level products depending on your budget. Finally video cards, this will really depend on how much you can spend, cant go past the 7800GTX’s at the moment from Nvidia, they are a powerhouse card that will easily handle any current game. In the lower end spectrum I am still running an X800 Pro which still seems to perform reasonably well for me though I have lowered my graphics settings somewhat since the games initial release as a lot more detail has been added. But they are good value for money and will last you a while if your investing in a card now. That is if you can still find one. Ultimately it will depend on your budget but I would say spend as much as you can within your means on your video card. That way you wont be disappointed. You cant expect a $200 video card to perform on par with the higher end cards but at least it will be an improvement over what you currently have (I am assuming here you are upgrading).
Headphones:
I use a set of Sennheiser PC150’s for my headphones. I find them lightweight and very high quality, fine for Counter-Strike: Source. They have a microphone as well which is nice and clear and perfect for competitive gaming. Choosing a good headset depends a lot on budget and needs. There is no point having a top of the line headset for a weekend gamer. Unless of course you have money to blow, in which case send me a cheque
The lower branded headphones are all pretty decent and find for the casual gamer, Logitech, Altec Lansing all manufacture quality components and very affordable prices. For those going for more competitive gear then I tend to recommend something that is light weight. I used to have a set of Zalman 5.1 headphones and while I found them ok quality wise (if a bit gimmicky), they were very heavy on my head and I found I often got a headache after prolonged usage. This is not so with my Sennheisers so ensure you take your own comfort into account when choosing a headset.
Mousepad: Choosing a mousepad is pretty simple really. They are all pretty similar these days. I use a Logitech MX518 mouse with an Everglide Ricochet mousepad which is a nice large surface and has both a rough and a smooth side so I can choose whichever surface I prefer. This is generally the rough surface as with some nice mouse skates you get awesome traction over the surface. Ultimately though, they are all pretty good I generally don’t recommend spending an absolute fortune on a mouse pad, concentrate on the rest of your equipment. A nice large surface is ideal and any of the high level mouse pads are great.
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Australian Counter-Strike: Source Community (top)
A majority of the Australian community resides on IRC. You can find most players and clans on the EnterTheGame IRC domain. #ausource is great for picking up scrims and finding other clan channels to idle for matches. Some of the bigger named Australian clans are #ichor, #sykotic, #livid and of course #ceterisparibus. Some of the regular clanners such as #tz are great for finding practice scrims against but there are a whole host more channels once you get in there and start idling. For those looking to start getting into a clan it is the best way to go, start scrimming with teams in pug channels and make yourself available as a slut and you can often find a clan that way.
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Conclusion (top)
At the end of the day, people have to remember that Counter-Strike Source is just a game, especially in public servers so it isn’t worth taking that seriously. Play for fun that is the aim of the game. Competitions and clan wars are a different thing but the same rule applies, we are there playing to have fun the same as any sport.
I hope you all found this guide useful and if you have any suggestions or things you think should be added to the guide then please feel free to contact me on my email:
johnsidey@hotmail.com which is also my MSN or I can be found lurking in the #ceterisparibus channel on EnterTheGame on IRC. I also sometimes hide out in #IGN with the Internode regulars. Please don’t contact me in game regarding the guide or any settings covered or not covered in the guide. I am available plenty of the time through any of the other contact means. Thanks for taking the time to read the guide and I hope to see you all on the Internode servers!
Cheers, Voodz