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Do You Fight or Infight in Doom?

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There could be piles of cells and rockets in a level and I would still dodge and weave just to get those bastards infighting. I even go to the point where I reload spam just to get the infighting match ups just right. Shooting gallery of hitscanners? Yep, I'll strafe-dance in front of a hell knight just to get him to take out a chaingunner. They wear down those HKs quick.

It probably makes playing Doom less fun overall, mostly because I take it so seriously, but I find manipulating infighting to be strategic fun. Even more than finding the right weapon to monster match up. It's one of my favorite elements of Doom. Even when it's inconvenient, I'll lead a baron of Hell from one area to another place sectors away just to attack a trio of cacodemons. It's a guilty pleasure of mine.

The title says it all. When you're faced with a mixed group of mid-upper tier monsters, what do you do? Or even just a variety of any monsters? What's your best infighting experience?

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I love taking down monsters with infight, barrels, and/or crushers. I find it generally more satisfying than killing them with weapons.

Though I do also like taking out monsters immediately by charging a BFG before opening a door or jumping through a teleporter, and timing it just right. Like there's a map in Epic 2 where you "open up" sarcophagi which contain arch-viles that immediately teleport to who-knows-where in the map to resurrect a whole mess of monsters. With proper timing, you can kill them while they're still waking up, before they teleport away, and the dead monsters get to stay dead.

But generally, infight.

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I mostly just shoot my way out. But if I feel like saving ammo, or am just low on/out of ammo, I'll round 'em up and let them duke it out with each other.

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Depends entirely on the situation. If the opportunity arises (without too high a risk), I'll stand back and watch everything tear the shit out of each other though.

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Usually I want to kill them. But I'll try to position myself so that some of them start infighting. When I'm through the enemies I wanted to kill first, and have the ammo, I'll kill the infighters before they finish their fighting, unless it's some interesting or funny looking fight.

If there are barrels or crushers near the enemy, I'll try to lure them into them.

And if there's some Arch-Vile plus Zombies, I'll let the Arch-Vile to resurrect the Zombies for some time to get lots of ammo.

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BaronOfStuff said:

Depends entirely on the situation. If the opportunity arises (without too high a risk), I'll stand back and watch everything tear the shit out of each other though.


Same. I never provoke infighting just for the sake of it. If it's faster to shoot, I shoot. If it makes sense to let them infight, I let them infight.

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infighting is the greatest thing in this game and I'll often go out of my way to provoke it, but of course the decision to do so is 90% dictated by map layout, monster composition, available resources..

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I love infighting and I never interrupt one, I always wait to kill the winner. Even if I die, I don't restart the game if there's any infighting going on. I love infighting to the point I don't interrupt it even if I'm just hearing it at the other side of a door. I run to the center of nuts.wad and die in the middle of it just to see the infighting. I spawn friendly cyberdemons in it to see they fight. Heh I think I've answered the question already :P

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I will go to painful lengths to provoke infighting, then dance around like a bar patron cheering for both sides, reuse the winner for more rounds, get close to cacos to make them fly down to infighting heights, even watch a vile suicide humping a cyberdemon. I will also risk gruesome death to lure monsters into crushers, barrel traps, lift freezes or telefrag positions.

Infighting is the main reason why Doom beats other games.

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Infighting is #1 da best, and part of the reason slaughtermaps are so appealing to me - the orchestration of mass infighting is fun to see and do.

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I will let monsters infight on accident, but usually I'm too impatient to let them beat each other to a pulp.
I do, however, like pitting hoards of zombiemen against one hell knight and watch who wins, but I have to be pretty bored to wait that long.

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I often find myself losing health and wasting time by trying too hard to force infighting even in maps and rooms which are obviously ill-suited for it, and where I could just spend some ammo instead. That's how much I love it.

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Maes said:

I often find myself losing health and wasting time by trying too hard to force infighting even in maps and rooms which are obviously ill-suited for it, and where I could just spend some ammo instead. That's how much I love it.

Yes, this. Anyone have some good infighting match ups or stories? Not much of a story, but just recently, I got two nightmare spectres to infight (without a barrel) on the PSX Doom TC and the Lost Levels. I had forgotten they could do that and was pleasantly surprised.

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kmxexii said:

Infighting is #1 da best, and part of the reason slaughtermaps are so appealing to me - the orchestration of mass infighting is fun to see and do.

Pretty much. I can think of a good number of times I designed an area specifically to encourage use of in-fighting. It can be as much a mechanic of gameplay as a basic crusher if you utilize properly. Distraction can often be the key to surviving a fight (especially in low-health scenarios).

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You may want to take a look at this. It seems that some things have not been successfully implemented in other games, which is one of the reasons I keep playing this goddamn 20-years old game. I love this old shit.

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In Devilution, ammo is often scarce with the forced pistol starts I'm doing, so its infighting whenever the area screams thats its a good idea. Large area that I can circle? Monster hordes? Im making them fight no questions asked.

Besides, there is nothing better than leading a revenant rocket into some guy's ass, or getting a cyber to take down an army by himself while you practically eat popcorn and watch.

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infighting has saved my ass in ammo-scarce levels and in maps with really tight spaces, but generally, if I have the ammo, I kill everything on my own and try to cause infighting simultaneously to maximize the speed in which everything dies.

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Personally, I prefer fighting the monsters. It's much more satisfying slaying them yourself than letting them off each other. But infighting is going to occur, these forces of chaos don't seem to be that concerned about each others safety.

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Normally I go for the shoot my way out myself method, and often ruin surprised infighting by killing the victim of the 1st hit in before they can retaliate. I've tried to try manipulate infighting more, but I don't go too much out of my way for it, just try and be stragegic with it

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What they said. Its an excercise that pushes Doom in an RTS direction. Its fun.

Besides, if Adrian Carmack's (and Kevin Cloud's?) sprites are little masterpiece paintings, then creating infights is a bit like peeking behind the picture frame and finding another painting hidden behind there. You get fresh perspectives on the art of the game, it helps keep it fresh.

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I have a theory they created infighting because otherwise monsters attack sprite rotations would never be seen by the player. But maybe is the opposite, they had to make the sprites after infighting was introduced.

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Darch said:

I have a theory they created infighting because otherwise monsters attack sprite rotations would never be seen by the player. But maybe is the opposite, they had to make the sprites after infighting was introduced.


I know! Who knows though. It was maybe a need that surfaced during Wolfenstein and they decided to go with it? I've come to the conclusion that I'm preferential to the 8-directional sprite display in FPS'es, over the current standard of 3D rendering. Its just... neater. Plus, it makes it slightly harder to guess the exact location of opponents and missiles, when you're ducking and weaving. Somehow, that translates into better gameplay.

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Darch said:

I have a theory they created infighting because otherwise monsters attack sprite rotations would never be seen by the player. But maybe is the opposite, they had to make the sprites after infighting was introduced.

Actually, they almost certainly made the sprites because they were planning multiplayer support, and it would look very weird to see a monster still face you while attacking another player.

I have a theory that infighting also arose from multiplayer, as an AI bug: monsters were originally intended to attack whichever player was actually damaging them, to make them seem more intelligent, but the code didn't check that it was actually a player that caused the damage, resulting in infighting when one monster accidentally hit another. id apparently thought the results were hilarious enough to leave it in as a legitimate gameplay feature. As further evidence that infighting is an unintended side effect of monsters' retaliation AI, there was originally (before version 1.2) no check that the monster didn't damage itself, which is even more hilarious.

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