I Do Not Understand Encounter Tactics

The_Chieftain:   Allow me to disagree.   There are two ways you can win in an encounter battle if you go for the cap, and only one way you can lose. That one way to lose is that if you get killed. All fifteen of you. And if all fifteen of you are massed together, if you manage to lose the fight against anything other than the vast majority of the enemy team, you bloody well deserved it and your strategy had little to do with it. The two ways to win are that you manage to kill all fifteen enemy vehicles, or you cap the enemy out. If you go with the first option, then it doesn't matter where on the map you kill all fifteen, it can be at the cap, or at the other end of the map. If you cap out, then that's something that can only happen on the cap side of the map. Which is rather dramatically helped if the enemy team doesn't try for it and is instead swinging its punch at some empty space the other end of the map. Since 'mass' is probably single most important factor in determining who kills whom, why not mass at the cap? Where's the downside?    Flanking in most encounter battles is impossible unless a team allows it. Ensk, Erlenberg are two exceptions given the location of the cap circle near the middle. People seem to have this bizarre conception that your 'front line' is a line which faces the enemy's startpoint. For example, your flanks are the East and West sides of the map in Steppes encounter. And, by common consensus, 'flank' on that map means 'West'. I refer you to Ender Wiggin's concept of "The enemy's gate is down", it's all about perspective. If all fifteen of you have gone East on Steppes, ROFLStomped the half-a-team (or usually less) of enemy that actually went to the cap, and set up on the ridgeline facing West, where is your flank? Your flanks are now North and South. And the half-team (or more) which is coming at you from the West is now coming straight into your front line, while you're holding lovely defensive positions facing West. (If you've sense, again, go heavy North). Finally, for the love of God, don't defend on the cap itself. Engage the enemy before they get into LOS of the cap, be it Himmelsdorf or Steppes. It's not about the capture, although it works. It's about the threat of capture which forces the enemy to attack and get killed piecemeal.   The problem is that too many people in random battles (company battles tend to be a lot more reliable, for some strange reason called 'teamwork' ) are convinced that they must engage the enemy in irrelevant places on the map. There's nothing in the West of Steppes except rocks and bad guys. There's nothing on the hill on Himmelsdorf except a castle and bad guys. And bad guys with nobody to shoot at don't affect you. They can keep the rocks or castle.