Hi all. I'm throwing together this guide because I've seen a lot of frustration expressed among brand new players who find it difficult to stay alive and get kills. While the name of the game is Instagib (you kill quick, and you die quick), there are ways you can play to mitigate the time you spend looking at the respawn screen.

As far as credentials, for what it's worth, my rank usually sits at about 2000 in FFA, and I win most of the public FFA matches I play in with between 30% and 40% accuracy on average. I wouldn't fret about rank though at the moment; the current player population isn't big enough yet, such that there is often a large skill disparity in most 8 person games.

That's alright though, that's what this guide is for! Hopefully it can help you get up to speed and close the skill gap.

*Disclaimer: I don't claim to have the best or most correct advice, but I do pretty well for myself in game, and these are just the guidelines I follow that work well for me.

This guide was last edited for version 2.0.61

Even most new players can probably skip this section, as controls for this game are pretty basic, but I have seen "how do you jump so high" posted more than once in chat, so here's some words on the next steps beyond WASD.

Bunny Hopping
Perhaps even more important than jumping high, is jumping fast. I've seen many many players slowly walk around at molasses-level speeds, which makes them an easy target. You need to be moving fast almost all of the time in this game, and if you're moving across the ground, you should be doing so by bunny hopping 99% of the time. In this game, this is accomplished simply by moving in any direction, and continuously hitting your space bar to make your rat do continuous hops. You will find that you will gain and maintain much faster speeds like this, making you much harder to hit. If you stop hopping and change to walking across the ground, your rat will maintain momentum for about a second, but after that he will quickly decelerate. This is good for turning around a small tight corner, but make sure that once you start to slow down, you immediately regain your momentum by...

Boost Jumping
Boost jumping is how you can gain height and/or speed quickly. It is executed by right clicking against any nearby surface, where what constitutes "nearby" can be shown with a visible in game indicator by enabling the "Boost Range Indicator" option in the options menu.

It is difficult for me to test by myself whether boost strength changes with distance from the boosting surface, but my general "feeling" is that I maintain faster speeds by boosting off of a surface sooner rather than later when I come within boosting range of the surface. Regardless of whether this is truly the case or not, it is still better to boost sooner, as it makes you a less predictable target, and you avoid risking collision with the surface, which would kill your momentum.

One thing you will notice is that near the peak of a boost jump, you will rapidly lose momentum mid-air. Floating helplessly without cover makes you an easy target, so practice chaining together boost jumps to maintain momentum.

This section will begin the meat of this guide. Listed below are some general tactics that will help increase your survivability, and in doing so, give you more opportunities to get frags yourself.


Aggro management is the #1 thing that needs to be going through your head at all times in a Free For All type environment. Aggro management simply means managing how many people are looking/shooting at you at once. There can be up to 7 other ratz around, and even if every one of them only hits 14% of their shots, if they're all shooting at you at once, that's nearly a statistically guaranteed death to you. The best way to mitigate this is to...

Break Line of Sight
The ideal way to frag and not get fragged in FFA, is to consistently position yourself such that you're only fighting one other rat at a time. Generally you'll want to dodge perpendicularly to the rat you're engaged with, but if a second rat in your peripheral vision engages you, dodge the original rat you're engaged with such that you move behind cover which protects you from the second intruding rat. This will ensure that you get a "micro 1v1" wherein you can get a shot or two off against the original rat, before the second rat chases you behind the cover. This won't be so simple in full 8 rat matches, but there is almost always a favorable way to dodge; it's better to be seen by only 1 rat instead of 2, and it's better to be seen by only 5 ratz instead of 7, and so on and so forth.

Don't get Stuck in the Middle
Often a situation will occur in which 2 ratz are engaged with each other in the open, a 3rd rat will take note, and start also shooting at one of them. This creates a situation in which 3 ratz are in a line, where the ratz on the outside are both shooting the rat in the middle, a rat sandwich of sorts where the "bread" ratz are shooting at the "meat" rat. DON'T BE THE MEAT RAT. It is very difficult to dodge both a rat in front of you, and a rat behind you at the same time. The best way to fix this is to boost jump backwards over the rat behind you's head, and make him be the new meat. This leap-frogging maneuver may catch the rat you jumped over off guard, and you'll have a half a second to take advantage of this and get an easy shot off of him. Be warned though, this does make it a little easier for the rat who was in front of you to line up a shot on you, as you'll be probably moving parallel to his aim, and in a predictable direction as you boost jump.

Also, note that long, narrow maps like the blue hotel and train are essentially giant rat sandwiches, and if you spawn anywhere but on the ends, you're at a disadvantage, so make it a priority to reposition quickly.

Don't Persist in Fruitless Engagements
It is generally much easier to shoot ratz in the back who don't know you're there, but if you find (as I often do) that inexplicably you can't land the shot, don't chase that rat forever, just break off and find another target. The reason being is, if you stay engaged with a rat and just tunnel vision on him forever, other ratz are going to notice that you're behaving predictably, and then you'll be the rat that gets easily shot in the back. This applies to 1v1s where you're not just trying to shoot someone in the back as well; other ratz will take notice and create the "sandwiching" situation discussed above, which is unfavorable to your survival. Learn to just boost jump away sometimes. It's better to forgo a kill and live to go on a killing spree than to get stuck looking at a respawn timer.

Mind Your Laser Beam
One of the few situations where it may be more effective to stand still is if you get a lucky spawn, high and with cover, and all of the other ratz are below you preoccupied with each other. In this situation, you can take your time to line up some shots, but be warned: other ratz will see your beams, and every additional shot you take alerts more of them to your location, and odds are that one of them will be able to turn around and line up an easy shot on your stationary self before you notice him doing so among the crowd.

Mind THEIR Laser Beams too!
Mind your surroundings! Again, you don't want people shooting you in the butt. Utilize sight and sound to mitigate this. Take note of:

• Laser beams grazing the edge of your field of view
  
• The sound of the laser itself
  
• The boost jumping sound
  
• The sound of a rat spawning behind you

That last one should particularly demand your attention. It means a freshly spawned rat, who has temporary invincibility, has been presented with your back to be clicked on. If you hear a rat spawn behind you, it is almost always the best choice to disengage from your current fight, and reposition yourself accordingly. Once again, better to live to frag another day, than to remain in a risky situation for 1 kill.

Get Moving ASAP Upon Spawning
More often than not though, you will not spawn with an easy kill right in front of you. In fact, a freshly spawned rat is arguably the most vulnerable rat. Other players will be able to hear you spawn, and have a good idea of where you are even if they don't see you spawn. You, on the other hand, won't have any idea where you are on the map and in relation to the other ratz. This puts you at a huge disadvantage because while you will have to take a half second to orient yourself, everyone else will know exactly where you are, and you're a stationary target upon spawning. The only advantage you have is a half second or so of invincibility. Use this time to get moving quickly with a boost jump or by bunny hopping depending on the danger you're in.

Now that you have a better idea on how to stay alive, you'll have more time to get more kills. But you shouldn't just be going for any kills. Who you shoot matters, and it may not always be apparent who is the best choice. There'll be a little overlap with the above section, but it will be from the offensive perspective instead of the defensive perspective.

Shoot People in the Butt
Generally, it's easier to shoot the people that don't know you're there. If you see two ratz engaged, position yourself behind one, and line up an easy shot. Not only will you get an easy kill, but it will likely throw off the rat from whom you stole the kill, which will give you an opportunity to line up a shot on him. Bam, double kill.

Switch Targets to Intruding Ratz
On the flip side, say you're the one engaged in a 1v1, and you see another rat trying to steal your kill. Instead of trying to kill your original target before it gets stolen, switch your aim to the guy trying to steal your kill. Less experienced players dive in for kill steals expecting the other two ratz to be too preoccupied to pay attention to him. As such, they likely aren't dodging very hard (unlike the rat you're currently engaged with) making the intruder the easier target. This may result in the bonus effect of throwing off your original target. He may notice your beam shoot way off what he thinks is your mark, assume there's a rat behind him, and turn around, giving you the opportunity for an easier shot.

Spawning Players
This may be a point of contention, but the bottom line is, as it stands, a freshly spawned player is unfortunately the easiest kill in the game, even with the temporary invincibility. He gets a half second of invincibility, but immediately upon spawning he has the disadvantages of:

• Not knowing where he is on the map
  
• Not knowing where enemy ratz are on the map
  
• Having broadcasted his spawn location via sound to the area around him
  
• Being completely stationary

You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to use all of those things to your advantage. You can hear the spawn sound, and while he's orienting himself, you can hop over to him at high speed, rest your crosshair on his stationary body, wait for the shield to drop, and then just do a total drive by kill on him.

You could take the "high ground" and let him live, but there's a couple good reasons not to:

• A) If you don't take the kill, someone else definitely will if they can
  
• B) If you turn your back on a spawner, you're highly likely to immediately become his first victim

It's unfortunate, but that's the way it is. The bottom line is the game is won via frags, and all frags count equally regardless of how "honorable" they were. The good news is that the respawn timer is very short, so the other player will have another opportunity to get in on the action very quickly.

Strafe aiming is a technique by which you move your crosshair over the enemy via your WASD movement, with little to no movement of the mouse. This method is most effective for shooting targets at your level at long and medium range. It fails at close range because at close range players will be moving faster than a strafe would be able to keep up with them. But the advantage for new to intermediate players at other ranges comes from that strafes will typically move your crosshair at a more smooth, predictable acceleration than what you could accomplish with a mouse. This makes it easier to anticipate when the enemy rat will fall under your crosshair, at which point you simply click to kill.

Most commonly long fights in the open will boil down to two ratz 1v1ing, trying to out strafe aim each other. When in this kind of fight, there's a point at which the enemy rat will change his strafe direction, and there will be an instant where he is not moving at all. It's at this point, that ideally you'd like to strafe your crosshair over him and click to kill. Keep in mind though, the other rat is going to be looking for the same opening, and as you fight better and better players, you'll need to supplement your aim with more and more mouse aim, as a mouse flick-click will always be faster than a strafe aim.

Sensitivity is probably the most asked about setting in any shooter. Probably because there isn't really a clear cut or "correct" answer due to it's subjective nature. However, if you have no idea where to start, I can give you some guidelines.

For a general start point, lower your sensitivity as much as possible while still being able to comfortably track a rat moving at high speed right past you. This is the fastest thing you'll ever have to shoot at, so there's almost no reason to increase your sensitivity past that point if you can already track it. This is a good starting point to experiment with what you're comfortable with because it gives you the most versatility in what you can respond to while minimizing the potential margin of error from over-aiming your shots. The only advantage to raising your sensitivity any higher, is that you'll be able to turn around more quickly to respond to threats behind you. Technically, watching a player with the theoretical maximum aim skill would look like an aimbot of course, which would would suggest you should raise your sensitivity to the maximum to more easily immediately snap to targets, but you have to keep your human limitations in mind.

Because everyone's hardware/mouse/DPI/windows sensitivity/etc differ, it's useless to simply suggest a point on the sensitivity slider to start at. Instead, a point of reference that can be used across players to compare sensitivities is distance/360. Or rather, the distance (in whatever preferred unit) you have to move your mouse across your mouse pad to complete an in-game 360 degree rotation. There are websites where you can punch in your DPI and other settings to calculate your distance/360, but I find that it doesn't really match up with using a ruler on your desk at all. Currently, measuring with a real ruler, I come out to a 7inch/360 following my above guidelines.

By default, Ratz has a lot of special effects enabled that make the game look nice, flashy, and colorful, but it also comes with a really nice set of options you can disable to give yourself an edge. Listing a few of what I consider to be the most effective changes first:

Map Saturation Walls/Other
These sliders control the color saturation on the maps. If you slide them down to 0, the maps go greyscale, which will greatly increase the speed at which you can zero in on a enemy rat when used in conjunction with...

Enemy Model Color
This allows you to make enemy ratz any color you want. Choosing a bright color will help you to hone in on enemy ratz at even the farthest distances, especially those trying to snipe from behind cover.

Auto Contrast Color
This option is an excellent alternative to using the above two options. It's a compromise which allows you to keep the map colors, but automatically changes the enemy rat color to one that contrasts heavily with the dominant map color. This may be a good option for the majority of players, but for people with moderate color blindness like me, it doesn't work to my advantage for a few of the maps. For example, on the classroom map (light yellow), Auto Contrast turns enemy ratz to a color which to me looks like a light orange/green which I have trouble distinguishing from the map, so it's easier for me just to grey out the maps and leave the enemy rat color bright pink.

How many ratz do you see here? I may not have noticed the rat creeping up the stairs on the back left were it not for my color settings. Also note you can determine that there's probably a rat around the lower right somewhere based on the beam.

Field of View (FOV)
You can slide this slider around and get a live update of what the effect is in game; it determines how much you can see around you. I keep mine at 90 because I've spent thousands of hours playing TF2, and that's the FOV I used so that's what I'm used to. As with sensitivity, this setting is a matter of balance and preference, but you probably don't want to go below 90. Below that, you're probably sacrificing too much information of what's around you, things that could be in your peripheral vision. On the other hand, theoretically, you get the biggest advantage by maxing out your FOV, as that allows you to see more, but at that causes a jarring "warping" effect on the periphery of your screen, and it shrinks targets at the center of your screen, AND it makes it difficult to determine how fast you and other ratz are moving. Most people feel comfortable between 90 and 110 so I'd experiment around there, or if you're feeling really daring, Wikipedia says the normal human FOV is 135. But really, just stick with a max of 110. [These suggestions are made based on a 16:9 aspect ratio monitor]

Vsync
It depends on the game, but as a general rule of thumb, Vsync increases input lag, and every microsecond counts, ESPECIALLY in Instagib. Turn it off unless you can't stand the screen tearing.

Crosshair
Another preference, but as a general rule, balance the size/color such that you can see it in your peripheral vision easily while you're glancing at the far corners of your screen, but keep it small enough so that it doesn't cover up long range shots. I personally use a small green dot with a black outline.

Other Settings of Moderate Impact
We're now venturing further in to preference territory, but my recommendations are to turn off Beam Decals (less busyness on screen), turn on Full Bright Ratz (more contrast), turn on a black Ratz Outline (more contrast), turn off Extra Bloom (decreases fuzzy bloominess), turn off World Outlines (so as to make rat outlines stand out more), turn off Vignette (extra black stuff you don't need on screen).

Audio
As discussed above, sound is important for self awareness. Just make sure you can hear sound effects over the music. I suppose if you want to be SUPER HARDCORE you can turn the music off altogether to hear spawn sounds from across the map, but honestly, you'll find another target before you get across the map, and the music for this game is really quite nice. 'Really good for keeping you chill and mitigating the RAGE.

That about covers it. Fight in cover. Shoot Ratz in the butt. Strafe aim. ALWAYS GO FAST.

Note that this guide had next to nothing to do with improving your accuracy/aim, despite it being the most important skill in playing this game. This is because practice, practice, practice is really all that can be said with regards to that. That might sound bad, but the good news is that most of this guide comes down to learning how to give yourself an advantage by setting up easier shots, all things that you can incorporate into your play and improve with immediately.

Outside of in-game changes, if you had to pick 1 hardware upgrade, by far go with a 120Hz+ monitor if your PC will push 120+FPS. It really does give a clear and distinct advantage. To give you an idea of the change, go into the options menu and set your Max FPS to 30. Play at 30 FPS for a few games, then bump it back up to 60. The change from 60 to 120 FPS is almost as significant as the change from 30 to 60.

I'm sure I'll think of a few things here and there to add, maybe some pictures to punctuate my nerd essay, but there is more than enough information here to help you think about how you play, especially if your old strategy was simply to spawn and do the best you can.

Hope this helped, and happy fragging,

-Slider

P.S. Pink Map is Best Map