In every game there is a concept known as the win condition. This is the prerequisite that must be met before a person can win the game, i.e. you can only win if you meet this condition. This is present in every game, and they’re exceptionally important to understand if you want to well…win. Everyone knows that there are two main ways of winning a round in Siege: kill all opponents or plant/destroy the defuser. The defenders have a third possibility of letting time run out, should the Attackers take too long at achieving either objective. Despite a clear understanding of these concepts at a basic level, many players fail to take this to its logical conclusion, and limit their game in doing so. In the thirst for a 0.1 increase K/D or an extra frag in a scrim players often leave win conditions by the wayside, lowering their Win/Loss record and their KOST, a much more important and representative statistic of in game impact. You’ve all seen it; defuser is down with half the time remaining, its a 1v1 and your teammate has a strong position to cover defuser. Yet the kill hungry Iana goes for an aggressive peek with no information and dies, losing you the round. While there are plenty of external factors that contribute to this behavior in Siege, I want to focus on the easiest one for the everyday person to fix, which is understanding win conditions and how it levels up your individual game. This post is going to focus on Siege win conditions as a big picture concept, but this is applicable to all games and more small scale situations like deciding to take a unnecessary and risky fight when at man advantage or not.
It should be noted that despite the name, a win condition does not guarantee victory, but it pushes the odds into your favor. The opponent can still pull some crazy play to win the round just like you. But by understanding win conditions like <planting the defuser> you make it harder for the opponent to win. Now their only way to win turns into <destroy the defuser in 45 seconds> from simply <kill all Attackers> or <wait for 0:00>, which is a much harder win condition than the other two. If enough win conditions are met then the round becomes near guaranteed. Going back to the example of the post plant 1v1 from above, if the Iana only peeked when audio of the defuser sounded, and never gave the Defender a fair fight, she likely would have been able chip away enough time that the Defender wouldn’t win even if she died. Achieved was put in a similar situation and won out by playing time, the easiest win condition given the circumstances.
As already said, a win condition can best be understood as asking the question of ‘how do I win?’ While the big picture answer might be simple getting to the point in a round where the enemy team is dead and defuser is down is a complicated process. Between you and a victory is a whole host of problems like enemy players, abilities, maps, and possibly even teammates if you’re unlucky. Understanding the macro concept of <kill> or <defuser> simply isn’t enough. The trick to making this big picture understanding work while in the thick of a round is to backtrack with the ultimate goal of either killing all enemies or interacting with the defuser. You have to figure out how to get to that goal and what needs to be taken care of in between Point A and Point E.
Points A-E
When you really boil it down, the attacking side of Siege can be summarized as a checklist simulator. A lot of the things to do on that list are fun or interesting, like shooting people and opening reinforced walls, but to be consistently successful on the Attack you have to do most if not all of the list. You have to drone, take map control, roam clear, destroy utility, pressure site, open reinforced walls, hold flank, and execute. That’s not even getting into the finer details of how you actually go about doing any of those things within 3 minutes. Thing is, some of those tasks are fake, they’ve been added to the list by the Defenders. Dealing with roamers is a good example of this since the Attackers have a variety of ways to take care of that particular problem, but if handled poorly can cost a team the round. They can either roam clear or simply set up utility to cover the flank using drones, airjabs, etc. The method you choose to deal with a roam can depend on the map, Attacking line up, and time available. In an extreme example, sometimes there’s so many roamers and Defender utility off site that with a little bit of droning the Attackers can recognize that they don’t have to roam clear, they can just go for a quick execute on site. In that case <clearing out roamers> isn’t a true win condition. But what’s neat about this is that some of those tasks Defender add still have to be completed by the attackers, like <opening Garage Wall> on Consulate, even if it’s electrified. As an Attacker it’s simply easier to deal with whatever is on the wall on that side of the map rather than try a Visa side take. Now this might not sound like a win condition, I mean you can win a Garage attack without opening Garage Wall, but it’s a hell of a lot harder to pull off as consistently.
Opening Garage Wall (as an example)
The easiest way to understand why opening the Garage Wall becomes a win condition is to go all the way back to the original 2 win conditions as an Attacker. Both are challenging in their own right, but killing the Defenders can be harder because they could be running around any rat corner of the map for all you know. By trying to <plant defuser> you force them to come to you . Because, you know…its their win condition. (Plus if they’re running around explicitly looking for fights they’ll come to you when plant goes down) Now on the Consulate Kitchen/Garage bombsite one of the two bombs is in the garage, which is not only a big room with long sight lines, but also has a ton of cover for Attackers to plant the defuser, making it the ideal side to take control of. But that isn’t the only reason to push the west side of the map. The biggest reason is that the Garage Wall is the only thing between the bombsite and outside, so Attackers don’t even have to <clear the map> to start focusing on <planting the defuser>. You see where this is going?
If the Attackers can win by <planting the defuser> in Garage (the site) and Garage Wall is the easiest way to get access to the site, <opening Garage Wall> becomes a win condition. This is the same line of thinking as the rules of logic, where If A is the case then B, and If B is the case then C we can infer that If A then C. <Opening Garage Wall> is the B, it’s in between the Attackers and winning the round.
Of course not every attack is as simple as Consulate Garage, and even in that particular case things can get pretty complicated fast. Piano control and Yellow stairs are also super important to the Attack, but Defenders know that and will start holding those parts of the map to slow down the Attackers. When that happens you have to figure out what the ‘win’ condition of getting control of that part of the map is. Is it forcing the situation despite the Defenders playing hardball? Or does avoiding the confrontation and pressuring a different part of the map that’s safer have a bigger pay off? Sometimes forcing the issue is the best way to keep going down the Attacker’s checklist but other times its simpler to rotate and capitalize on the hole created by the Defenders investing resources in that offsite hold. Learning to identify the difference and why it changes your win conditions and what part of the attack you need to focus on is a huge area to instantly up your game. While it sounds complicated when put into words like this, its not as hard in game. Usually it takes the shape of “does clearing these roamers actually help?” “Should I peek this when we’re at man advantage?” or identifying if the Defenders are too kill hungry and leaving site free for the taking. After a while it stops being something you have to think about and simply becomes a part of game sense, where you understand what needs to happen and do it while thinking about other parts of the round.