Reloading in doi is different to other popular FPSs. In those FPSs, there’s a particular mindset and strategy you apply to reloading. This doesn’t transfer to doi because doi’s reloading mechanic is different.

This guide has three parts. The first is an analysis of what the common behaviour is and why it’s misguided. The second is the “solution” to the problem of the common behaviour. The third are other additional tips.

In doi, magazines are treated “realistically”. If you expend 50% of a magazine and reload, then that magazine will only have 50% left if you put it back into your weapon. In other words, doi’s reloading is about the manipulation of magazines.

On the other hand, other FPSs like Battlefield treat reloading purely in terms of rounds. Each reload will restore your weapon to full capacity. To make discussion easier, I’ll refer to this as arcade reloading.

In arcade reloading, the only penalty you really face for reloading is the time window that you can’t fire your weapon. In relation to ammunition, there is no problem.

The mindset is that you reload after every kill, and for games with arcade reloading this makes sense.

If you remove a partially used magazine from your weapon, you are essentially throwing that magazine away. There’s no way that you’re going to remember how much of that magazine you used, and how it fits into the order of magazines to be put into the weapon. While it’s true that the ammunition is there for you to use, the reality is that you seriously don’t want to put a used magazine into your weapon because you simply don’t know what’s in it. You don’t know the contents, so you could run dry at any moment.

Perhaps you thought that my guide would provide a method of accounting for partially used magazines. Maybe there are people out there who can hold the numbers in their head, but there’s no way I can do that. The goal of this guide is to minimise the wastage that occurs due to limbo magazines.

For many players, using a Kit is the solution to this problem. By using a Kit, a player looks at their magazine count not as an indication of how much ammunition they have, but as a counter for the number of reloads they can do. Kits are used as a crutch which allows the player to avoid the problem of used magazines entirely.

You might be thinking: “okay, so Kits are a crutch, but that doesn’t make them a bad thing. It’s a legitimate way of being able to avoid the problem of limbo magazines”. I’d agree if it weren’t the case that Kits cost a considerable amount of Supply.

This is where we enter into the loadout debate. In my opinion, Kits aren’t worth it because it usually means you’re foregoing something which is actually useful ie. a grenade. I’m willing to accept that the Kit might have some value for the newest of the new players, to whom learning about gameplay is more important/fun than learning the technicalities and strategies of reloading. But for all other players, efficient usage of Supply is important. A grenade has greater utility than being able to be lazy with your reloading.

Let me drop a truth bomb. In a single life, a player is unlikely to run out of bullets. For example, without a kit, an SMG player has 3+1 magazines. 30 rounds per magazine, and that adds up to 120 bullets on the player. I’d guess that on average the player expends less than 60 bullets before dying.

If there’s no plan to use that magazine again, then it makes sense to expend as much of it as possible. Having just five rounds left in the magazine is enough to deal with most situations. If you’re caught unexpected, firing those final rounds as you make your escape is a totally legitimate tactic.

Being able to know how many rounds you’ve used from your magazine is the simple solution. If you’re aware of how much fire you have left to play with, you can plan your actions accordingly.
You’re probably wondering what technique I recommend for keeping track of round expenditure.
I think you’ll be disappointed when I say “intuition”. I don’t count rounds (although for a bolt action it’s relatively easy to keep track of a number), but instead have a feel for how much more I can fire the weapon. If a weapon has a 30 round mag, I expect my feel to be within +/- 2 rounds of the actual remaining.

I do have a specific method of developing intuition – coop. In PVP there is an incentive to not mess around and experiment too much. In coop, there isn’t any such pressure and you can experiment to your heart’s desire. It’s in coop that you can develop good gunplay intuition which you then refine in PVP. If you want to get good at feeling rounds, I recommend this: before you reload your weapon, shoot all of the rounds remaining in the magazine. Over time you’ll develop a feeling for how much you’ve already shot.

You might argue that while I’ve made a sound case for efficient reloading, this hasn’t fully accounted for the value of having a full magazine to deal with any threat. Perhaps efficiency isn’t everything, and perhaps being able to unleash the full 30 rounds on the enemy does have value.
I wouldn’t be convinced by this. doi is different to other games because you’re practically guaranteed a kill with two bullets. Maybe if you managed to come across 8 enemies at once it’d be good to have that many bullets, but these situations are too few and far between.

I definitely think that some players do benefit from the reloading advantage of Kits, but these players are players who know what they’re doing and base their loadout around their gameplay. For most normal players, the reloading advantage isn’t necessary.

A recurring theme of my guides is the wave, and it’s absolutely relevant here. In other games, the probability of encountering an enemy is more constant than in doi. Because doi has waves, for the most part enemies are encountered in waves. The probability of encountering an enemy isn’t constant – it rises and falls with the waves. When there’s a lull in the fighting, you have the time to reload. And if someone does try and sneak around that corner, then you have the audio cue to warn you.

Reload cancelling is pretty easy: you swap weapon or sprint mid-reload to cancel it. In most reload cancel requiring situations, quickly swapping between your knife and primary is usually the best option (for muscle memory purposes).

Once you bring your primary back up it’s ready to fire – much faster than it would have been ready to fire if you had let the reload complete.

Just as a reload can be cancelled to your advantage, it can also be done accidentally. For example, you’re reloading and you take fire so you sprint to different cover, resulting in the reload being cancelled. This isn’t ideal. One trick you want to keep in mind that there exists a “point of no return” in the reload animation. Once this point is reached, the reload cannot be cancelled. In other words, if you start sprinting at this point the reload animation will still continue to compleition.
This is unique for each gun, but in general it’s usually when the magazine/round clicks into the gun. This might only shave less than half a second off of whatever you’re trying to do, but sometimes that time matters.

I’ll give you an example of one strategy I use on Dog Red Invasion.

I’ll take Support, pick up the STG and a grenade. Usually I’ll take a position at the top of the hill that allows me to take down any Americans who are making the dash to a side bunker. It’s a quiet life, but I expect to get several kills without dying. In fact, if it’s Offensive I can expect to survive the whole time. By using two round bursts for each kill, each mag can in theory yield me 15 kills. Of course, I’m not that efficient so it's more like 5 kills per mag. This level of reliable ammo usage is largely because of defenders advantage, and as an attacker there's no way I'd be willing to use ammo in such an efficient manner.

At the end, as the Americans use their final wave to make a mad dash. And this is where my ammo conservation comes into play – I reload and place my final full mag into the gun. The entire time I’ve been alive, I’ve been making sure that I have that one mag left to allow me to head to A and clear it out myself.