Tactics

This section is about each type of weapon and how to use it. Also, if you haven't read the "basic skills" section, I suggest you read that first since it has some additional information on SMGs.
General tactics
Corner whoring
Just hide behind a corner, lean around and then ambush people when they come through.

Boosting/stacking
Just have a teammate crouch and jump on his head. The most infamous spot for stacking is for getting the east radar parts, as in the image shown below. Just crouch against the wall at the lowest point while a teammate jumps up and steals the east parts.

This can also be useful if a teammate dies and their body gets tossed up and lands in some weird spot that's too high to reach. If you're not a medic, just crouch under the body if a medic is nearby, so he can boost on top of you to get the revive.

Kamikaze
Say you are low on health, low on ammo, and it's almost time for respawn. You have 3 options:

  1. Go find a medic and go find ammo.. Nice idea, but that is going to take a while, and while you're trying to find that medic, you might just get killed by an enemy and by then you'll have missed respawn time!

  2. /kill. Good idea, but if there's still some time until respawn, maybe you could do something more productive?

  3. Kamikaze, a.k.a. suicide mission. Prime up a nade, find the nearest enemy, and chuck it at them, then immediately /kill and hope that the nade got 'im. Or, maybe just go run into a panzer's line of fire and get him to fire a shot at you. Do you get a kill for it? No. Productive? Hell yeah. Considering that you had practically no ammo and health, your little mission just saved one of your teammates. Also you could /kill as he fires the shot so then he won't even get heavy weapons XP for it.

Playing dead
This will work on most shrub servers. Just use "/playdead" in the console, or bind it to a key. Only really works against noobs who aren't in the habit of gibbing!

Plant mines near health/ammo cabinets
Kill the weak!

All else being equal, the team with more medics usually wins
Very basic tactic, something to keep in mind anyways :)

Check if your mines have been spotted
Just throw a nade on them to see if they blow up.

Your enemies are predictable
In many cases, you can predict what your enemy is going to do. This is a huge advantage. Most of the time, unpredictability is what ruins a good strategy. You have some great idea, then the enemy ruins it by doing something you didn't expect it. However, the moment your enemy becomes predictable, you have control of the situation.

One good example of predictability is a medic running toward a teammate with his syringe out. In this case, you know exactly where he's going, so you can get him off guard. For example, if I'm right next to the corpse he wants to revive, I'll just go and sit on the corpse at the last second and then pump the medic with lead. It's pretty funny to do this, they are running at you with your syringe out while you shoot them up. Or, if there's a big gap between the medic and the corpse, at least you know the medic's movement is mainly going to be linear so you can just focus your crosshair on him and track him very accurately. Another thing you could do is wait til the medic gets near the corpse, then suddenly gib the teammate, and then kill the medic while his syringe is out. To aid you with this, what you could do is partially gib the teammate before the medic gets there, so that you only have to fire 1 or 2 extra shots to fully gib the corpse.

Another example is a crew-served MG. You always know where these are going to be, so you can easily know to look before you leap into their sights. Also, if you are a panzer or something, you can usually count on the guy manning the MG to be stationary (i.e. he doesn't keep manning it and then going away and coming back), so you can blast him easily.

Walk or crouch
 The obvious benefit is that your footsteps become more or less silent. However, there is an added benefit: if you are silent, then you can more easily listen to enemy footsteps.

Run backwards
If you are in a dangerous area and you need to escape for some reason, run backwards so you can continue firing and watching out for threats.

Reverse psychology
You can pretend you're weaker than you really are to get your enemy to come after you or let their guard down. For example, you could fire some shots with a pistol as if you're out of SMG ammo, then suddenly whip out your Thompson. This tactic can be dangerous though, mileage may vary :)

 Crazy class combos
For example, when I used to play in matches and scrims with the JAE clan, we would all go engy at the beginning of goldrush. 90% of the time we'd get the tank repaired on our first or second try, even if the clan we were playing against was better than us.

Bait for landmines
This is a pretty funny tactic, I haven't done it too much myself, but I think it could work. Just place some health pack or some ammo on a landmine, and then hopefully it'll lure some enemy to step on it. Of course the downside is that dumb teammates might fall for this trick, so you have to be careful.

This trick would probably work well if you do it in some area which is not usually mined. That way the enemy won't suspect it, he'll just see a nice juicy ammo pack.

Stopping airstrikes
This one is pretty well-known. If an airstrike lands near you, just go prone over the cannister. The smoke will stop coming out. After a while, you'll hear the sound like an airplane passing overhead- that's your cue to get off the cannister real quick. If you do it correctly, you can stop the airstrike, saving teammates nearby and you won't even take any damage from it. This can only be done if the airstrike wasn't thrown by a level 3 or higher field ops. Also, it must be done within 2-3 seconds of the airstrike being thrown. If you do it too late, the airstrike will occur even if you go prone over the cannister.

Going prone during a firefight
This is somewhat controversial- some people swear by it, others say it's a bad idea. In my experience, most of the time someone went prone during a firefight, it was fairly easy to finish them off. (Stationary target). However I have to admit, there have been a few times when someone used it to good effect against me. The key is doing it at the right time, and quickly taking out your enemy with accurate shots. The best time for it is when you are in a situation where you and your enemy don't have much space to maneuver. (If you can't sprint around like crazy, proning is better than just standing or crouching). You should also be at a reasonable distance from your enemy- this way you won't get flanked, and you will appear very small on your enemy's screen.

Another situation where I might see the logic in going prone is if you and a teammate are both shooting at an enemy within a narrow space. In this case, whoever is in front of the other teammate will put himself at risk if he sprints from side to side, because then he'll keep running into his buddy's line of fire. So, the guy in the front can go prone while the guy in the back is free to sprint side to side. This way they can effectively concentrate their fire on the enemy without getting in each other's way.

Finally, it may also be good to go prone if your enemy is shooting you from far range and there's some thing you can take cover behind. For example if I'm a medic and I'm getting shot, I might go prone behind a rock or something and heal myself. Of course this would only work if your enemy is very far away- if they're close they could just follow you and gun you down.

Medic duo
Get 2 rambo medics with good SMG skills working together. Can be extremely effective, although there are a couple of problems with it: what if they both run out of ammo, and what if the rest of your team is left without any good medic? In clans you may have many medics doing this since there are so many good gunners.

Flamer camping
You may be able to hold a chokepoint for a long time with your flamethrower. Even if it doesn't kill enemies, it may help to discourage them from going that route.

Works best with the support of teammates. A field ops to supply you with ammo, and a medic to heal you. Also that way if the enemies manage to take you out, they can use their SMGs.

The best place I've seen this done is in the supplydepot map. Battery is also a pretty good example (flame the allies when they are trying to come in thru the main entrance).

Hiding
For example, sometimes after I take the radar parts, I go hide in the original Allied spawn until a teammate tells me it's safe to go to the truck. (Useful if the Axis are completely bombing the hell out of the truck area).

Dynamite "trickplants"
Damage boxes for constructibles are sometimes amazingly large. So you can plant dyno from far away without exposing yourself. Also some of these "trickplants" make it hard for the enemy to defuse it. Here are example trickplants, screenshots taken by Ragnar-X-:


On Battery, you can plant dynamite here. Very useful if the ramp can't be destroyed with a satchel charge. You can even plant the dyno before the ramp is built.
Here's a nice spot for destroying the old city water pump, in Oasis.

Excellent spot for blowing up tank barrier #1 on Goldrush.
This spot lets you destroy tank barrier #2 on Goldrush without exposing yourself much.

Dynamite as a weapon
Especially if you are a high-level engy and your team has built a command post, you can plant 2 or 3 dynos in succession. If you have nothing else to do, you can place them in areas where enemies will pass. The dyno will either delay the enemy from passing an area, or force them to rush past it carelessly so they can't sneak or attack out of cover. Credit to Ragnar-X- for this tactic.

Nade spamming
Really good players always seem to have a nade primed, waiting for you. Often, they run into some area with a nade primed. If someone is there, the nade will kill him. If not, they just get rid of the nade by tossing it somewhere. Especially if you are a soldier or engy, learn to use tons of nades.

Mines in front of the tank
If the tank is currently stopped, and you have some spare mines to plant, you can plant some mines in front of the tank so it gets damaged as soon as it starts moving. The tank has 1200 HP, and each mine will do 250 HP of damage, so it takes 5 mines to damage a tank. The downside is obviously, you waste 5 mines you could have used for stopping an engy from repairing the tank in the first place.

Take control of the tank
In some cases it's better to use the tank against the enemy instead of destroying the tank. If you're worried about it, what you can do is, nade the tank until it's almost fully damaged. Then, use the tank against the enemy. If the enemy takes control of the tank again, no problem- it'll just take 1 nade to disable it.

Don't repair the tank until it's ready to move
For example, if the tank is at a barrier, and dyno has been planted at the barrier, wait until the dyno is about to blow, and then quickly repair the tank. If you repair too early, then all that will happen is the tank will get damaged again by the time the barrier is blown. Of course, be careful- you can't wait too long or you'll get killed before you get to repair the tank at all.

Shrub tactics
Body dragging
Look down at a wounded teammate, hold down the use key (F), and then move backwards. This is useful for dragging teammates out of danger.

Playdead
Use the "playdead" command to play dead. It may fool enemies into leaving you alone sometimes. Don't do it in the middle of a fight with 1 enemy. He'll notice that he never saw the "You killed <your name here>" message, so he'll know you're just playing dead. However, if you do it in the middle of a big fight with multiple enemies, it may sometimes fool them.

Hiding in the tank
If you stand on top of the tank and then playdead, it will make you go inside the tank, so you are nearly invulnerable to harm.

Shrub-specific trickjumps
There are some trickjumps which will work only on shrub servers. Read more about them in the Special Trickjumps section.

Spawncamping

Spawncamping has a really bad name, because it's considered cheap and unsportsmanlike. However, if you are playing competitive ET, spawncamping is almost required, because if you don't do it and the other team does, you're dead. A lot of the best players are also good spawncampers, it's not a noob tactic, it's a very powerful and useful tactic. Keep in mind though that spawncamping is prohibited on some pubs (usually the more "noobish" servers) so if it is prohibited, then either respect the rules or switch servers.

The basic idea of spawncamping is simple: cut off the flow of reinforcements to keep the enemy's numbers small. It can include mortars, airstrikes, panzers, rambo medics, covert ops (satchels), flamethrowers, landmines, or MGs. In short, just about any class can participate in spawncamping. However, the best tend to be artillery, mortars, and panzers since they inflict splash damage and thus can take out large clumps of enemies.

On every map, you can think of a game as a tug of war, with each team pushing against the other. Spawncamping is, in some sense, just pushing the enemy as far back as possible. The advantage to doing this is that you can contain them to some extent, and filter them down so if anyone does get past your offensive camping, then the number of enemies who break through will be small enough that your defense will easily dispatch them. This is important- when you're spawncamping the heck out of your enemy, you still need some defense. The best example of this is when the Axis is pwning the Allies on Fueldump. Then suddenly you hear "Dynamite planted at Fuel Dump". So, it's good to be aggressive and offensive, but you still have to watch your back.

Another reason for spawncamping may be not necessarily to dominate the other team, but just to temporarily hamper the enemy reinforcements. For example, on Goldrush, it's very effective when the Allies spawncamp the Axis so they don't have a chance to boost the defenses inside the bank. If you can contain the Axis in their spawn for a while, you can create a window of opportunity for your team to run into the bank without much interference.

If you want to be a good spawncamper, get really good with panzer, mortar, or calling airstrikes/artillery. Having good SMG skills helps as well, so that you can finish off any survivors.

Learn how to use a spawntimer, like Heron. Or, just get really good at manually determining it. Most good players announce the enemy spawn time to their team as soon as they know it.

Observe how people spawncamp when it happens to you. Don't just whine about it, think of it as a learning opportunity ;) Watch where they place their artillery, when they call it, and other things that work well.

Amazing Exploits

Here are some neat things you can do, which are all legal. (Not considered hacking). So technically I guess a lot of these aren't really exploits but they're still pretty odd :) Note that some of them are serious flaws in the game, so I would not be surprised if they are fixed in a future version of etpro or shrub. For now though, I have tested all of these and they do work.

Disclaimer: Some of these are really mean and dirty, I'm including them because they're interesting but I'm not advocating them here, or saying that I do these.
/Killing
This is a pretty standard trick, but worth mentioning. You can commit suicide during the game by typing "/kill" in the console, or binding "kill" to a key. Here are some uses for /kill:

Use the objectives camera to spot enemy
In the limbo screen, there's a little camera window you can use to see what is going on around objectives. And since enemy spawn points are often near objectives, you may be able to use it to get the spawn times easily. Sometimes you can't see the enemy, but you can hear them passing by (use headphones). Here's an example below, for finding the spawn time of the Axis (1st spawnpoint) or Allies (2nd spawnpoint). You can use a similar trick on Battery, by viewing the forward bunker flag.

Much thanks to Ragnar-X- for this awesome tip.

Stealing a uni through a window
Believe it or not, you can actually steal a uni from the other side of a window. I'm not sure if it would work for all windows but it's definitely worth a try. The key is that you kill a guy through a window, then stand on the other side, face his body and hold the use key (F) for a while. Even though the 'stealing uni' icon does not appear, IT REALLY WORKS. In fact, I didn't even believe this was true after I heard about it, I didn't even believe it as I was writing this paragraph... But then I made a demo of it, so here you are:

Download window_steal.dm_83

This is an extremely low and dirty trick, doing it may get you kicked from the server or something. So don't say I didn't warn you :p

Stealing a uni as the body sinks into the ground
Most people know this by now, but it's pretty useful anyways... If you are stealing a uni and the body sinks into the ground, just continue looking down at the ground and holding the use key (F). Most of the time, you will still steal the uni.

Shooting rifle nades through doors
If you walk right up to a door, you can shoot a rifle nade through it. It's kind of weird though, at some angles it will work and at some angles it won't. I think the key is that the tip of the rifle nade has to stick out as much as possible, basically.

Anyways, this is a HUGE exploit, probably the biggest one I know of, and rather cheap. I made a demo showing one place where this could be used:

Download riflenade_exploit.dm_83

Constructing over dynamite
If you've built the first stage of the bridge on fueldump and the enemy plants dyno, just go ahead and construct the second stage- it will "eat up" the dyno.

Dynamite-proof bridge
Multistage constructibles (such as the fueldump bridge) cannot be destroyed while they are in the "under construction" state (i.e. they appear transparent). For example, say the Axis plants dyno on the bridge which is halfway constructed. Then, the Allies run in and constructs the bridge only a little bit so the transparent bridge appears. The dyno won't damage the bridge, since the dyno takes 30 seconds to blow, and the "under construction" state lasts for 30 seconds.

Killing the AFK's
Look at the other team and note if anyone has a 999 ping (obviously this only works on a pub). For example, if you're a covert ops in need of a uni, you can see if someone on their team is AFK. Then run into their spawn and grab one when no one is around and you know the enemy isn't going to spawn any time soon.

Fast mine disarm
If you want to quickly disarm every single mine you've planted, go spectator for a few seconds and switch back. Voila, all your mines are disarmed! This is useful, for example, if Allies took the bridge on fueldump, so you want to relocate the mines from the bridge to the fueldump. (This exploit submitted by Ragnar-X-).

16-bit Z-buffer  (options->system->depth buffer)
Sometimes you can see through walls/doors from long distances, because of calculation errors. Useful for sniping. As you can see in the screenshot below, part of this window has disappeared so you can see the enemy's entire body instead of just their head sticking up. Thanks Ragnar-X- to for this tip.

Using 2 heavy weapons
Wouldn't it be cool if you could have akimbo heavy weapons- like one panzer, one flamer... Well, that's not possible (sorry!) but what you can do is pick up weapons on the ground and then alternate. So if you have a panzer and there's an SMG on the ground, fire your panzer, then pick up the SMG for a while, then switch back to panzer, etc. As long as a weapon doesn't remain untouched on the ground for more than 30 seconds, it won't disappear.

Now, this isn't anything new. What is somewhat interesting is that you can move a weapon on the ground by repeatedly picking it up again and again. This is somewhat confusing to explain in words, so I just made a demo showing how you can move a weapon to some location. Download this demo and then switch to 3rd-person view by pressing ENTER:

Download double_heavy_weapons.dm_83

This is a very odd trick that has very limited uses, but I'm sure there are some very creative people reading this, so I figured I'd include it. Note the weapon that you pick up doesn't even have to be stolen from an enemy, it could even be stolen from a teammate, or yourself. (Just select one weapon, /kill, then select another weapon and respawn. Now you have 2). This may be useful if you're camping some objective which is relatively close to your spawn. The main problem I see with this method though is that you have to keep picking up a weapon otherwise it will disappear after 30 seconds. So if you had say, an MG and a panzer, it would get really disruptive because you'd have to keep interrupting your MGing to pick up the panzer.

Stacking/boosting
This is kind of a cheap trick, but it can be very handy. Stacking means, basically standing on top of your teammate's head (make him crouch, then jump on). This can work well on fueldump. Say you're an engy, and you get to the fueldump through the tunnels early on in the game. No covert is there to let you in, but there is some teammate there. You can stack on his head, to jump on to the little guard shack outside the main entrance. From there you can jump on to the fueldump wall, and into the base.

In some instances, stacking is actually prohibited. For example, it's possible to plant dynamite on Oasis by stacking behind the guns. In general, match rules allow stacking with 2 guys, but stacking with 3+ guys is prohibited.

Draining their ammo cabinets
If I'm spawncamping as a rambo medic and I need some ammo, I'll always go to their ammo cabinets, so they have less for themselves.

I suppose if you were really cheap you could fire one shot, reload, pick up a pack, fire one shot... etc.

Impersonating the enemy
This is really low and dirty, although it is kind of funny. You can use ^5 to change your text color to light blue, so it will look like team chat. Then you can give the enemy misinformation. For example, if you're about to infiltrate through the back door on Radar, you could type a message like this:

"^5Engies, get to the front NOW! The allies are coming from the front!"

Although a stunt like this will just make experienced players chuckle (or maybe get pissed at you, I don't know), it may be enough to fool some of the newer players on the enemy team.

If you're really serious about doing this, you could even change your name and add in a coordinate after your name. Like change your name from Frank to "Bob (F, 3)". This will make it seem more convincing.

Personally I only do this as a joke, in a real game this is just too mean :)

Door blocking
Basically, standing in the doorway to annoy enemies. May be useful if you get an enemy uni, throw smoke in the spawn point, then stand in the doorway. They will probably just assume some stupid teammate isn't in the way. You might block a door to just delay the enemies so your teammates can steal an objective, to delay the enemies long enough that their invulnerability runs out so the panzer waiting outside can kill them all, or perhaps to trap them in the spawn point so you can explode them with a satchel you laid out.

This is a very odd tactic, but I mention it because I noticed the Online Gaming League actually listed it as an official "exploit" which they prohibit. However on a pub or something, there's no specific rule against it... heh heh heh.

Ask a question
For example, say a guy named Bob on the Axis team keeps mowing you down every time you try to get into the bank on Goldrush. Ask a question like, "Jeez Bob, you're such a good MG. How do you get me every single time?" Then rush in and kill Bob while he's typing back to you :)

I haven't ever tried this although I think it'd be funny to see if it worked. Could get you kicked or banned though, I suppose :p

Magic FPS
When the game runs at an FPS of 43, 76, 125, or 333, you magically move faster and jump higher. This has to do with numerical error in the Quake 3 engine. See the "tweaks" section to find out more about these magic numbers. They're very useful if you want to do trickjumping because they help you jump further than you normally could.

Fast-firing Akimbo pistols
You can write a script which will let you fire Akimbos nearly as fast as an MG. It doesn't work on all servers, but when it does, it's pretty sweet. Learn more about this in the "tweaks" section.

Knifing an MG
This isn't really an exploit, but it's not commonly known. You can disable a crew-served MG by knifing it many times.

Transferring engy charge
You can transfer charge bar from one engy to another. Just put a landmine in a spot where it can't be armed, and then let the other engy try to arm it. His charge bar will actually increase!

Head hitbox exploit
Since head hitboxes are just simple cubes, you can increase your chances of getting a headshot by attacking at a different angle. Consider a cube with sides of length d on each side. Then, if you look a hitbox at a straight angle, then the effective diameter of the box is just d. However, if you come from a 45 degree angle, then the effective diameter is actually sqrt(2) * d, or about 1.4 times as large. Here is a picture showing this concept:

One important note is that head hitboxes do not rotate with the player models, they are always oriented the same way. So, basically if you want to face at 45 degrees to someones head, you need to point northwest, northeast, southwest, or southeast.

Thanks to h3rf who made this information public on the planetwolfenstein forums, and [NW]reyalP for clarifying some things about how this works.

Exploiting prone hitboxes
Although this may be fixed in newer versions of the ET mods, at the current time of this writing, prone hitboxes are a lot higher than they should be. What this means is that you can often lie down behind a wounded teammate and the bullets will hit them, not you.

Spectating
This is kind of obvious, but often you can go spectator to spy on your enemy to see how their defense is set up, or to find someone who stole radar parts, etc.

I don't do this, it's pretty cheap! However, if you did do it, probably nobody would catch you for it :p

Shooting around corners
As I mentioned in the shooting portion of the "basic skills" section, the hitboxes in ET are actually much larger than the character models. So, say someone is hiding behind a corner. You might be able to hit them even if you can't see them by just aiming at the edge of the corner. You'll know if you hit them because you'll see blood splatter or smoke puffs (depending on your settings), or if you're playing on etpro 3.0.0 or higher, you can also enable "hit sounds".