Situational awareness is what allows you to kill and not be killed.

Players who aren’t good at the game all share something in common: they only use what’s on their screen to obtain information and make decisions. Since Day of Infamy doesn’t have a minimap, spotting or any of that, I think new players think they’ve been dropped into a low-information world. This isn’t the case at all. The information is there – it just takes more skill and experience to obtain it.

In this guide, I’ll go through the methods of obtaining information that you can’t explicitly see.

In order of usefulness:

• Sound
  
• Map
  
• Death
  
• Communication

Sound is the best source of information because it’s the one that can provide you with the most information quickly. It’s a constant feed of information which you don’t have to sacrifice anything for. But to make use of it, you require a considerable amount of map knowledge.

There are three things that you want to listen for. Weapons, movement and voice.

Ideally, you know what gun is being fired purely from the sound. Movement is mostly footsteps, but you can also listen out for stance changes to know what the person you’re listening to is doing. Voice is pretty rare to hear, but if you do hear it then it can be quite useful.

Listening isn’t just about identifying the thing – it’s also about identifying the where. What you want to be able to do is not only tell the general direction, but also the proximity. For this headphones are necessary. It’s too difficult to tell if the gun you’re hearing is in the next room, or the next room over that, if you aren’t using headphones.

Let’s put those two things together: the what and the where. This is your minimap, but you can’t see it. It’s something you construct in your head from the sounds.

You might be thinking: “the minimap (in another game) gives me an exact location and orientation of any enemy who fires – but sound can't give me that”. I don’t think this is entirely true. It’s true that the sound itself doesn’t contain this information, but you can infer it from the sound. If you know the direction and general proximity, and you have the map knowledge, then you can make a really good guess about exactly where the enemy is and which angle they’re watching.

Together with map knowledge, sound can provide you with an enormous amount of information quickly. You can know which side of the map the machine gunner is on (and narrow their location down to a few likely positions). You can know when and where gunfights occur (and so predict whether or not you’re about to be flanked). You can hear which gun stops firing last, which tells you who won that fight (and whether or not you should put distance between yourself and that SMG).

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When do I flick up the map?

• Every 7 seconds.
  
• Whenever there’s a lull in the fighting.
  
• Whenever I die.
  
• Whenever I spawn.
  
• Whenever an objective is contested.
  
• Whenever a wave spawns.
  
• Whenever a regroup becomes available.
  
• Whenever fire support is dropped.
  
• Whenever I hear large explosions and gunfights.

In other words: all the time.

The map shows you one thing: where your teammates are. By extension, it also shows where the enemies are – where your teammates aren’t.

You can know how the other lanes are doing and where the gaps are in your lines. This makes it far easier to anticipate an enemy’s flank, or to initiate one yourself.

As a defender, you should always check your map whenever a regroup becomes available. Someone needs to regroup, the question is who. The answer is the person who is closest to the regroup, and the only way to know if you’re the closest is to check your map.

There are exceptions to this. If there are two defenders left, and one is blocking the objective from being capped, the other defender must go and regroup.

Some players change their route of approach very often, and I think this is a mistake. Dying on a route of approach is an important step in discovering and then countering enemy positions.

When you die, it’s for a reason. Most of the time, your death isn’t unique. The location you got killed from and the location you got killed on are tied together and will be repeated by different players. If you change lane every time you die, then you’ll just be killed for the same reason the other people in that lane were killed – but you won’t have the prior knowledge to do anything about it. By sticking to the one lane, you’ll learn all the spots that are currently in use.

I believe there are two reasons to change lanes (as an attacker).

• The other lane is making it into the objective easily.
  
• You’ve been outplayed in your current lane multiple times.

The first reason depends on what’s happening. A danger of one lane entering into the objective and the other not entering is that smart defenders will flank from their solid lane into the weak one and shoot it up from behind. Sometimes, it’s better to keep a lane occupied than to swap.

Being outplayed is more than just dying repeatedly. Being outplayed is when you’re expecting an enemy to be somewhere and take measures against it (eg. prefiring, grenades), but they expected you to do that, and so took measures against your measures. In other words, being outplayed is when an enemy player in that lane is objectively better than you are.

Death is a learning experience, and it should be utilised.

Let’s be real. There isn’t a lot of communication that happens in DOI.

Few people use voice, so I won’t talk about that. What I will talk about is the chatbox. The big advantage that text has over voice is that dead players can write to live players. Live people can’t hear dead voice chat, but can read dead messages.

If I die to a cheeky camp spot or if I die on the objective, I’ll use my dead time to share what information I gained. A cheeky camp spot can take out so many friendly players – there’s really no excuse to not warn people about where the danger is.

Sharing information about the objective is the one which is often most important. The best place to see this in action is on Crete B, which has a single route to get upstairs. If a defender is shot in the back upstairs, it is their duty to King and Country to type into chat “attackers are upstairs in B”. Defenders in the objective might not know this, and if they try to head upstairs then they’ll probably die an unexpected death.

It’s important to keep in mind that messages should be detailed enough that anyone can work out what location you’re referring to.

There’s another form of communication which you should make use of – the spectate. When you’re dead, you can spam your mouse clicks to stop the fade-to-black and spectate the person who’s closest to your body. You can then use your mouse clicks to swap between people. If there’s some place specific you want to spectate, you can open up the scoreboard and click on the icons on the map to spectate them.

While DOI doesn’t have a killcam, it does have the next best thing. Third person spectating a teammate to gain information about what’s going on is very useful. If you died but you don’t know where from, you can make use of the fact that you spectate the closest person to find the enemy.

I originally wasn’t going to include this in the guide, but I realised just how often I’ve seen players completely oblivious to what’s going on in the objective.

A flashing objective means that it’s being contested. There’s all sorts of information that this leads to. You know that at least one side of the forward defense has collapsed.

The pro-level use of flashing objectives is this: you look at a certain entryway and don’t try to cover the other. If the objective starts flashing, you know that the enemy must have entered through a different way. Using this fact means you can devote 100% of your attention to one entryway, while still being able to make sure you won’t get snuck up on from within the objective.

At the end of the day, situational awareness is something you gain through experience. But if you’re aware of how the above four sources can be used, then you’ll probably have an easier time gaining that experience.

Check out my other guides - what you've learnt here may help you there:
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https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1200681541