Lessons learned: Shootouts

[Richard Winter]

I would like to note here a few of the things I learned during the shootout at Windyridge

1. Cover is King
Light cover (+3 TN) [Free Action] and Medium cover (+6TN) [Simple Action] determine whether you can live to see the next day. So as long as you are in cover, and the enemy has no insane dice rolls that are beyond the Gaussian normal distribution, the chance of being hit is very small.
So if there is cover, use it in any case, plan your movement so that you have if possible always at least light cover, or go prone.

2. Flanking is Key
While Cover is your greatest friend, it is also equally your greatest enemy. To eliminate the enemy efficiently, you must keep moving and always try to outmaneuver them. This requires you to break cover yourself, which can be quite scary, but may be necessary if you want to hit at all.
The Free Action to walk 5' (~1,5m) is not much at all, but it's movement into a direction if you want to keep firring at the target.

3. Automatic Fire & Suppression
Automatic fire allows for multiple attacks for twice the ammunition cost. That means if I attack twice, I use four bursts. In addition, the second attack is increased with 2 raises. (the third with 4, the fourth with 6 etc.) This maneuver can decide a fight, if you trust yourself to either hit or hope for high dice luck.
The SMG is king here though, as it can launch four attacks, each requiring only one more raise (Attack 1: 0, Attack 2:1, Attack 3:2 Attack 4:3) The only two drawbacks to this is that it only has an effective range of 50' (~15m) and you would need to reload every other round.

Suppression on the other hand can save your ass by directly attacking the target's dice pool, something that can stop a high roll. If you suppress a single enemy with multiple people you can even make them not fire at all, but it's not quite as effective as you might like.

4. In doubt: Centre
If you have good covers, it can definitely be worthwhile to center a round. Hitting someone is hard enough, and the ongoing consumption of ammunition caused by failed attacks will sooner or later only lead to you running out and having to melee or retreat.