Moving and Protecting Your Teams

Your enemies in Full Spectrum Warrior are on the defensive; they’re defending their homes and their cities, and are well entrenched behind cover of various sorts. Thus, they have no motivation to seek out and engage your teams, and you’ll be forced to do the hard work of moving through occupied territory, which is a highly hazardous undertaking. Your teams are trained to minimize the risk of movement by utilizing several different movement styles and formations.

Movement Modes

Rush

The standard form of movement is the normal rush, wherein all of your soldiers will sprint in a single-file line towards their destination. Over short distances, or when your team is a good distance away from an enemy, you’ll probably find that rushing from cover to cover is an acceptable risk, especially on the lower difficulty setting. If your other team can’t provide cover fire, though, rushing forward towards an enemy is a good way to get a couple of team members killed; in these situations, it’s best to either use smoke to obscure the battlefield, or incorporate as much lateral movement in your rushes as possible.

Because of the delay between issuing an order and seeing it carried out, it’s quite difficult to coordinate your rushes so that they occur during the period in which an opponent is reloading.

Bounding Overwatch

When you’re forced to cover ground without the benefit of cover fire from your other team, you can use the bounding overwatch movement mode to move your team while giving them the opportunity to open fire on any enemies that appear while they’re in transit. You can select the bounding overwatch form of movement by holding A after you’ve selected your destination.

The main difference between bounding and rushing is that you’re asked to choose a firing vector before you instigate a bound; this lets you choose the direction you want your teams to aim while they’re moving. After you’ve selected your destination and your firing vector, your team will split up into two groups of two men each; one group will move ahead, guns at the ready, while the second team covers them, and then the first team will provide cover fire for the second team as they move up.

If either team spots an enemy (it’ll almost always be the first team), they’ll automatically let loose with suppression fire to keep the enemy ducking while they complete their move. If you spot an enemy that’s not behind cover, you have a good chance of taking him out without getting shot, but you do move quite slowly while bounding, so you always run the risk of getting taken out yourself. This is especially true when an enemy appears in an area not covered by your firing vector; they’ll have what amounts to a few seconds of free firing in which to ping away at your soldiers as they saunter along. (If this occurs, you may want to cancel the bound by pressing and holding the B button--your soldiers will duck behind any nearby cover or, failing that, will lie prone, thus giving them a better chance at avoiding fire until you manage to retask them on the surprise Zeke.)

Formations

Depending on where you move your movement cursor to, your team will have a few different formation options available. These are context-sensitive, so you can’t decide to use a stacked formation when you sidle up to a corner, for instance.

Open Ground

When you move a team to the middle of an open space, they’ll form a rough triangle and will automatically kneel down to reduce their profile. You can expect your soldiers to start verbally heckling you if you leave them in the open for too long, and with good reason; if an enemy appears, they’ll be hard-pressed to defend themselves without adequate cover. It’s almost never advisable to leave a team in open ground, and since there’s always at least a wall somewhere near where you want to move, you never have to.

Since soldiers without cover will automatically fire on enemies that enter their field of view, however, you can occasionally leave a team in the open if you know that your other team’s movement is about to roust a Zeke or two and cause them to sprint across an open area. The enemies in Full Spectrum Warrior always appear in the same place, so if you’ve played a level once or twice, you should know when this will happen. Since your teams’ field of view is larger than the area that you can fit into a firing vector, you’ll have a better chance of hitting an enemy that runs across your line of sight if you’re in the open, but if they take cover and begin returning fire, you can go ahead and reload without waiting to see the gory deaths that’ll result.

Corner

You’ll find yourself entering into a corner formation quite often, as it’s by far the safest way to approach a blind alley or roadway. When you place the movement cursor near the corner of a building or cover object, the icon will change to that of a cursor; moving your team to that corner will place them in a line next to the wall, after which the team leader will pop his head out to verify the presence of any enemies around the corner. The team will have complete, indestructible cover from the fire of any enemies that are within a 45-degree arc or so from the wall; anyone further away than that may be able to peg your team, especially if you decide to open up with point fire, so be careful.

Point fire from the corner position is weakened because only two members of your team will be able to contribute. Your team leader and automatic rifleman will be the shooters, while your grenadier and rifleman will hang back and watch the rear. Suppression fire will cause all members of your team to step out from behind the corner.

Line

When you’re able to move towards a cover object with a wide body, such as a car, you’ll be automatically placed into a line formation, which is the most desireable cover formation, as all four of your team members will be able to contribute with point fire, and they’ll all have an equal amount of cover from your enemies. Unfortunately, there isn’t always an object capable of giving you a line formation--only cars and the occasional pile of rubble or destroyed vehicle will provide enough space for this formation.

Stacked

Your team is capable of taking cover behind smaller objects, like dumpsters, tree planters, or even sofas, but in most cases, you’ll be forced to enter a stacked formation, where two members of your team are flush up against the object, and the other two are placed behind them. This reduces the amount of cover available for the rear members of the team when enemies pop up from an angle, and can also prevent them from firing if the object is too high.