If you have just escaped after been seen by an enemy and identified as a spy while disguised, quickly change disguise to something different. Having just seen, say, a pyro run through their base and sap all their buildings, the enemy will be on guard for any scouts that they see for a while after. Changing disguise often not only helps in the short-term, but it will prevent the enemy from subconsciously associating your chosen disguise with ‘enemy spy’ over the course of the game.
Choosing a good disguise is vital to any spy who values his life. I’ve seen plenty of enemy spies who seem to be capable of only a single disguise, usually pyro or demoman. While these tend to be good disguises, a good spy needs to know what disguise to use and when. There’s a few fundamental pointers to follow to choose your disguise:
Location: Decide what part of the map to hit the enemy at, and disguise so that the enemy wouldn’t question your class being there. For example don’t try sneaking into th eenemy intelligence room as a scout, or blending in with the enemy attack on Dustbowl as engineer.
Acting: The once you’ve uncloaked, almost all the spy’s skill comes down to acting, looking as unremarkable as possible. Once you’ve chosen the type of class (i.e. assault, defence, etc.), narrow down the disguise options to those that you can act as. For instance don’t go heavy if the enemy is defending, since they will all be looking to you to let loose with your minigun, which of course you can’t.
Number: If possible, try and go a class that the enemy has at least a couple of. This point takes less priority than the previous ones, but if you can it’s a bonus. Disguising as the sole enemy pyro for example will adopt his name, and if he doesn’t get suspicious from seeing another pyro on a one-pyro team, seeing his own name will probably tip him off.
If you see an enemy spy in the middle of their ranks, not difficult considering they’ll be surrounded by troops of the opposite colour, but you’re unable to kill him, at the very least report your discovery to your team so that they can be on the lookout when the uncloaks among them.
There are a number of ways a spy can be detected when cloaked or disguised. Check out the Spy Detection guide for a pretty comprehensive list, and make sure you’re not unknowingly falling victim to folks that know something you don’t. The most important thing to remember is don’t run into anyone.
When a cloaked spy is shot by any weapon, he shimmers momentarily, allowing enemies to spam the area around where they believe the spy is and keep track of his position to finish him off. Many enemies will do this to you if you try and run away after they see you cloak (for example after you’ve just knifed someone in plain sight). If they are uncertain of where you are, they will just shoot the air in the direction they would expect you to run, i.e. the shortest route to cover. However you can sometimes outwit them by cloaking, running in the expected direction, and once completely invisible, turn around and run backwards. They will keep shooting where they think you’ve gone and all the while you’ll be behind them. This works especially well if you have a lot of cloak charge, but if you only a have a few seconds get behind your pursuers and attempt to knife them before running away again.
The most important buildings to use your electrosappers on are sentry guns and teleporter exits, since they are the most threatening to your team. If there are many buildings near each other, quickly placing sappers in all of them forces enemy engineers to prioritise, since they generally can’t save all of them. They will normally start with the sentry gun in case you try and knife them, followed with the dispenser because it helps them, and often forget about the teleporter exit because it’s less directly useful to them. Amateur engineers will often not rebuild teleporter exits as well, which can have a crippling effect on their team’s ability to maintain control of the map.
On a similar note, you can place as many electrosappers as you want as fast as you want, what with there being no ammo and no reload. Therefore by continuously spamming sappers on any and all nearby buildings, you can not only put pressure on the enemy engineer but confuse him to the extent that he may lose track of what is still being sapped and end up losing a critical building like the sentry gun. Also useful to know is that if an engineer and spy constantly repair and sap the same building, the spy will end up winning since he can place the next sapper before the engineer can repair the damage from the previous one.
A highly effective strategy against average engineers defending their sentry gun is to place an electrosapper on the sentry gun and as the engineer goes to wrench it off, knife him in the back. The sentry gun won’t attack you since it’s still disabled, and you can then sap his other buildings without resistance. Experienced engineers will predict that you will try this, so instead of planting the sapper and standing there waiting for him to turn his back, act as if you are going to do the expected thing and sap the rest of his buildings. He will assume he has more time to repair his sentry gun, when really you turn straight back and knife him as soon as he looks away.
Another way of dealing with engineers sitting behind sentry guns is to jump on the engineer’s head, sap the sentry gun and then quickly knife the engineer in the back of the top of his head. This will count as a backstab and you can claim both engineer and sentry as victims. For more on dealing with engineers, check out The Spy, Versus.
posted on March 18th, 2008 at 6:02 pm