Laboramus Sustinere
And lo from the hills men with hammers caked in mud did descend and built a mighty mighty weapon.
The most important thing to know is that any throwing build is a viable engineer.
Throwing WPF is what is counted towards the break chance of your equipment, so high WPF is better.
The build I am currently rolling is a 12/24 3IF 5Shield 8ATH 4PT 8MW 47WPF1h 170WPF Throwing.
The ath is an exceptionally useful way to get your self out of trouble. I can't count the amount of times I have dropped my gear, pulled out my dagger and run like hell only to circle around an area pick the gear back up, run off and finish my set up. It works beautifully.
Offensive Engineering:
The Useful
In most siege maps you will find a few choice locations where a forward base can be the difference between a win or a loss. Things to look out for are, rear access doors and ladders, things that take a long time to get to from spawn.
Think of it this way, if it takes your team 30 seconds to run there and the map has a 6min timer then 4 deaths will leave them running for a large chunk of the time available to take that flag. Your forward base could completely eliminate that wasted time, not to mention on map reset you get to spawn from it again and attack straight away.
Be careful not to position you siege works to close to walls and doors, if the enemy team works out what you are doing and they have any brains your siege works will be toast. You can't rely on your team to defend you gear, or help. There are players that will but on the whole most will ignore you and only get involved once you have completed you forward base.
Another very useful thing to deploy is weapons racks. Get as close to the action as you safely can. If your team has throwers your rack(s) will be a god send. Unlimited ammo is nothing to laugh at.
The Useless
Healing tents are mostly pointless given your re-spawn time is 3-5 seconds. They also have the potential to give the defenders an advantage if they mange to capture the the area the tent is in, or ninja to it when on the attack.
Siege Towers take far too long to build and the terrain on most maps makes them utterly useless. You would need a well drilled 6 man team to build one of these things with any kind of speed.
Catapult its basically useless, horrible to aim, slow to build, slow to reload. It can be exceptionally amusing but its basically a waste of your time to build. If your on your own, you would be very, very hard pressed to build it before the round ended.
Defensive Engineering:
The Useful
Weapons racks are extremely useful to both you and the range members of your team. They are best placed in defensible locations to the rear of your castle often close to the flag. Maps that have back entrances have the most obvious points for weapons racks. Having them at the locations that over look that door will give your range a serious boost and keep the rate of fire high.
Healing tents are very, very useful. Their placement is map dependent. I'll be putting up a tutorial video on how they work and how to place them. An important thing to keep in mind is that the entrance will be the way your facing. So if you are facing a wall when you put the Csite down people may not be able to get to the front of it to use it. So if you doing it in a room, face away from the wall.
I'm not completely sure about putting this one in the useful section. When the team swap spawn issue gets fixed it will be most definitely. One of the most annoying things on a siege map is spawning randomly all over the map and miles away from the flag. So building a spawn point in location that doesn't have attackers swarm over it and close to the flag means that your team will easily be able to defend the flag. At the moment people can team spawn and then you have an attack spawning on top of your flag... which is very much a bad thing.
The Useless
Pretty much word for word in the as above Offensive Engineers section.
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How to use the gear.
"F" is your friend. Most things related to siege gear require you to look at a point on the equipment and hold "F" down, with one notable exception. The "breaks" on siege towers and catapults. All you have to do to activate those is press "F" once. It will move by itself so long as you are near by, when you want it to stop press "F" again, do not hold "F" it will do nothing.
To "activate" a forward base look at the poles. You will see a message that reads "select as spawn point". Once you see that message hold "F" down until the bar is full, once full that forward base will now be your spawn point.
For healing tents its exactly the same as above. Most of the time the only accessible place you can use to heal is in the tent its self, so be careful when placing them not to block the front up.
Weapons racks. Same hold "F" principle applies as with all the other siege gear. What the weapons rack does is replace all the gear you are carrying with what ever you have selected in your equipment screen. So basically it allows you to come to the fight in rags and then change into your fancy plate (no this is not a way around upkeep). It also allows you to spawn a pile of +3 weapons and shields for your fellow team mates, and if you are need ammo you can also spawn that as well. Simply put anything you select in your equipment screen will spawn.
Moving siege equipment (Towers, Catapults). The back sets of wheels turn it left or right respectively (is left wheels makes it go left, right goes right). At the front are the "breaks" engage/disengage the breaks to make it roll. It will go all over the shop when going up hills so keep that in mind and make sure some one is near the break to stop it, its both funny as hell and REALLY annoying having to chase a siege engine all over the map.
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Tips and tricks.
When you are building anything out of a weapons rack you need to pull your Csite first and then your deploy it and set it to what you want to build, then start "dumping" materials.
If your lucky a kindly passer by will start picking up the mats and dumping them.
Speed dumping mats. Think this over for a second, you can hold "F" change gear and drop it all at the same time. Which means you can save precious seconds. Once the bar fills up, repress f and start dumping your new mats. Rinse and repeat until you have enough.
Getting the catapult ready to fire can be a slow process. The fastest way to bring the arm down is to track it and spam F, don't hold it down just spam it as fast as you can. You will see the difference, it's night and day.
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Gear
Small Siege Tower 55 mats (dumps 14)
Large ST 85 mats (dumps 21)
WR 5 mats (none just stick them in :/)
HT 25 mats (dumps 8)
Catapult 45 mats (dumps 10)
FB 35 mats (dumps 7)
When working out how many dumps you need to perform knock 1 off each of the numbers since you nearly always spawn with a Csite and a mat.
I will be posting videos for all this crap soon.
