Saitek wrote:I tried to figure it out, fortress at least, but it's still pretty vague.. how exactly is Fortress played? And Sumo as well?
Well, I'll start off with sumo since that is probably the easier of the two to understand.
Basically, you start near the edge of a circular zone. If it is normal sumo, there can be up to 3 other enemies in the zone also. If it is team sumo (teams of 2 players each), there can be up to 3 other enemy teams in the zone.
The entire of idea of sumo is to
stay inside and survive. You are allowed to leave your zone for about 2 seconds, but after about 3 seconds your zone will be "conquered" and you will randomly explode (eradicate).
For team sumo, the concept is the same, but this time you have a teammate on your side. As long as one of you guys is in the zone, you will not be "eradicated." However, if you both leave the zone or are killed, the enemies will conquer your zone.
The scoring is much different than most servers. For normal and team sumo, 30 points for a kill, 0 for a death, -30 for a suicide, and 60 points for conquering a zone. The thing about conquering a zone is that if 3 teams are in the zone, each team gets 20 points (20*3 = 60), if 2 teams are in the zone, each team gets 30 (30*2 = 60), and if 1 team is in the zone, they get all 60 of the points.
In team sumo there's also something informally called "team leaching". This is when your teammate stays in your zone (and hopefully doesn't die) while you go to the other zones in the map and try and jack points. That could sometimes result in teams getting just 15 points for conquering a zone (15*4 = 60) and etc.
So if you're still confused, just remember this: to win a sumo game, just
stay inside and survive.
Now I'll talk about fortress.
Sumo was made to be a practice for fortress. Although the game types are completely different, the idea of conquering your opponents zone remains.
2 teams start on opposite sides of a big square grid. Typically, each team has one designated "defender." What this person will do is make some type of box-like figure around his zone in order to prevent the other team from entering it and capturing it. In order for the defender to "do his work," this requires that all members of his team leave the zone as soon as possible at the start (you start inside your zone).
The fastest and most efficient way to do so is by "grinding" the center. You spawn in a triangular shape with the center player being slightly ahead of everyone else. The players on the team then wiggle their way onto the center players wall as illustrated
here. By grinding the center, this allows everyone to simultaneously gain speed and help get to the enemy defense faster after the "split." Since each team starts opposite each other, they will eventually have to turn before hitting each other after having gathered enough speed during the grind. This is called the split and is very crucial in fortress.
After the split, players try and either attack the other teams zone or stay back and help their defender fend off the opposition.
To conquer the enemy zone, your team needs to generally have more players in the opposing than the enemy does. For example, if it is 1 defender vs 1 attacker, the zone in unconquerable. 1 defender vs 2 attackers is conquerable. On most fortress servers, 2 defenders vs 2 attackers in conquerable. 2 defenders vs 1 attacker is obviously unconquerable. Of course if you just kill the entire other team, you win the round as well.
Anyways, those are the basics to fortress, but before you start playing I should advise you of the 3 nevers: never TK (team kill), never don't grind the center (or you will probably get poll-kicked), and never not split (leaving your teammates with no room to split causing them to die (you're essentially TKing them)).
I didn't cover everything, but I tried to talk about the basics. If you would like to read a true fortress tutorial you should probably check out
this page. I also know that a few people are working on a more advanced fortress tutorial so just keep checking these forums for updates.
Also, you might want to check out some fortress videos on youtube such as
this one.
Anyways, hopefully I helped.
- Durka
. When I logged on I saw a CTF server and I was like YAY, and imo it's probably the best game-type... but then again that might just be because I really haven't played any others 
