Cyrodiil Strategy, Part 1: The Zerg Mentality

Today, I begin Part 1 of Cyrodiil Strategy, a weekly blog post on strategies and tactics for use in Cyrodiil which will appear every Wednesday

I've been involved in Cyrodiil since day -5 (for those of you who are not aware, those who pre-ordered the game were given 3-5 days of extra play time before the official launch). As soon as I hit level 10 I dove into Cyrodiil, because I have become a big fan of PvP over the years and playing a strategic game like the faction vs. faction PvP in ESO sounded like it would be right up my alley. Ever since, I have been playing in Cyrodiil on almost a daily basis, even while I continue to level my character. Yet even at an early stage, I could tell there was a potential pitfall in this PvP game. This is what I refer to as the "zerg mentality."

Most PC gamers are probably aware of the origins of the word "zerg," but I will explain briefly. In Starcraft, the hit RTS game produced by Blizzard, one of the playable factions was called the Zerg. They generally fought by overwhelming their opponents with vast numbers of weak units. It was a very popular, but sometimes risky strategy to pour a large number of weak units into your opponent's base early in the game and wipe them out for a quick win as opposed to a long protracted battle.

Unfortunately, unlike the skilled Starcraft player who carefully plans and practices an excellent zerg rush, a disorganized alliance in ESO has no overlord to command and direct it. The players within the alliances tend to see large numbers as an advantage, after all, it's one of the most common schools of thought that strength in numbers wins wars. That's how the Soviets beat the Nazis after all, right? Sacrificing millions of their own to defeat a military that was far superior in technology and organization? Your average given player tends to think this way. They want to dive right into the fight, especially many of the newer players, and so they follow the largest number of players, likely thinking that strength lies in numbers. While superiority in numbers can sometimes make a difference, the truth is that a small disciplined team with a clearly defined chain of command will have far greater success in Cyrodiil, even when outnumbered. Because the truth is, when it is peak hours and the campaign server is full (which is indicated by the lock icon), each faction has exactly the same number of soldiers on the battlefield. Thus the idea of strength in numbers is a fallacy unless the enemy has intentionally spread themselves out.

It isn't always easy to follow orders, especially if you are used to playing previous Elder Scrolls titles. In the single-player TES games, your character is always the Chosen One, or some other type of cliched archetypal hero. That's all well and good, and if you want to play such a character, I recommend you stick with the PvE quests. There are around a thousand quests in this game, hundreds of books and lorebooks for you to read, lots of crafting skills for you to train, and so on. It's more than enough to occupy that typical player for hundreds of hours if they care to explore everything like they would in any other Elder Scrolls game. And these PvE quests all essentially focus on your character alone being the only one who can save the day. But Cyrodiil is not like that. Cyrodiil is designed to be a cooperative PvP campaign where guilds and small groups of players form alliances, work together, and use chat channels to communicate efficiently.

Now obviously, it would be incorrect of me to say there is a "right" or "wrong" way to play the game. But if you are interested in earning lots of alliance points to buy PvP gear, capturing keeps, resources, outposts, and elder scrolls for your faction to benefit from everywhere (you did know that you get to use any PvP buffs currently in effect in your faction's home campaign for PvE content too right?), then you will want to play in Cyrodiil strategically. In this series of blog posts, I am going to discuss some of the strategies I have learned from playing with some of the best players and guilds in the Auriel's Bow campaign, as well as reading up on strategies posted by others and strategies used by my guild. Of course I'm not going to give everything away. I don't want the milk-drinkers in the Aldemeri Dominion or the skeevers of the Daggerfall Covenant stealing our tricks, especially considering that these two nefarious alliances have conspired against the Ebonheart Pact with prejudice on Auriel's Bow lately. But I do want to encourage players to think strategically in general to make Cyrodiil a more challenging and interesting experience for everyone.

In my post next week, I will cover some basic strategies, including some things you probably never learned about Cyrodiil if you decided to skip over all the tutorials and jump right into the fray. I will also discuss basic etiquette of participating in raid parties and how and where to download some of the most popular voice chat software so that you can communicate more effectively.

>>Cyrodiil Strategy Part 2: The Things You Never Bothered To Learn