With dark environment, realistic ammo management behavior, and DOOM Marine's various new capability and equipment, DOOM3 BFG Super Soldier needs to be a thinking man's game. When facing the decision what to prepare before entering a room that could be dark, could have many enemies, could have strong enemy, following is a list of strategy to think:
1) Turn on cloaking.
Benefit: self-explained, first strike capability, scouting
Trade-off: walk half speed, cannot run. Do not use it for too long, leave enough battery to engage slow mo. Once weapon is fired, cloaking is immediately disabled, except fist, pistol, and grenade. Cannot equip soulcube and chainsaw in cloaking. draining battery 2X rate
2) Slow mo mode 1 or 2
Benefit: mode 1 slow down enemy, but player is normal mode 2 slow down both
Trade-off: slow mo does not last long. mode 1 drains 4X rate, mode 2 drains 2X.
Save mode 1 for occasions that needs time critically, such as checking rear camera, time consuming actions in the middle of battle (selecting weapons, reloading), and life death situation. Otherwise use mode 2.
Mode 2 however has a drawback too. The bloom effect of mode 2 exaggerates muzzle flash brightness that it can obstruct target view. So also refrain to use it too often.
3) Time freeze mode (experimental, not working well in all cases)
Time freeze is only available after possession with soul cube or artifact. As offense you can use HellTime to slow down enemy, select the desired weapon, enter time freeze, then deactivate HellTime. One hit weapon gives you the chance to fire then retreat, to be most effective. It does not work well with automatic weapons such as machine gun and plasma gun that requires continuous aim and fire. However, it can be compensated with HellTime feature immediately after unfrozen time. Another use is to retreat to long range, then use ZOOM and HellTime to take precision headshot.
As defense, use time freeze to retreat.
For soul cube, it requires ready state (5 souls) to enable, then it costs two souls per use. For artifact, it costs one per use. For soul cube, it can be chained: enter time freeze —> kill an enemy and exit time freeze —> kill one more enemy —> enter time freeze again. For artifact, it can be used as long as there is a soul is available.
4) Turn on night vision
Benefit: see better in darkness than naked eye (depends on how you tweak reshade settings, mine is very effective). Does not drain battery. A good scouting method together with cloaking mode for dark areas. Night vision can coexist with slow mo mode, unlike flashlight.
Trade-off: the peripheral vision is severely limited. HUD info is also gone.
5) ZOOM view
ZOOM view is usually for long range shot. DOOM3 does not have too many environment for long range fight. For those where it does, pistol, machine gun and plasma is good for zoomed view. crosshair is shown in zoomed view. It can serve sort of like sniping. It is useful for head shot because head shot deals with 2x damage.
CON: The drawback using zoomed view is losing situation awareness, as it is zoomed in at frontal direction.
6) Turn on flashlight
Benefit: see better in darkness. When not in fight, night vision is better. In fight, flashlight is better with full situation awareness.
Trade-off: it drains battery in 1X speed. Cannot use while cloaking. If slow mo is engaged, flash light is automatically turn off as they share the same battery source.
7) Rear camera view
It provides a useful 1/4 screen size of window of rear view at upper right HUD. However, it can be distracted to look at as player has to take the focus from the center to the window. Sometimes it is advisable to turn on slow mode 1 before looking at the window, to relieve the distraction problem. With the zombie undead feature, it becomes more useful to check the six often.
NOTE that turn on rear view may impact graphics performance.
8) Call on AI sentry bot. If fight situation is dire, deploy the sentry bot, otherwise you will most likely die anyway.
9) Gib enemy
Decide to gib enemy or not. If yes, it eliminates the half chance for enemy to come back to life. But it costs more ammo, or more time if use weapon that does not require ammo such as chainsaw.
10) Update mouse wheel weapon list
For fast weapon switching, decide the best weapon list for the situation. This is one of the innovative feature of Super Soldier mod.
11) Check ammo
11.1. Because of realistic reloading behavior, to conserve ammo, need to make decision to reload or not. Please refer to my decision flow chart. Note shotgun is not affected by new reloading behavior, so please feel free to reload any time.
11.2. For pistol, shotgun, grenade that do not have built-in current/total ammo display, needs to check ammo for them. Rocket launcher has visible rocket in clip, except not sure about the one in chamber.
11.3 If you want to go ultra realistic for every fight to be a challenge, keep auto reload off as default.
12) Equip soulcube
Benefit: sense enemy as early as possible, so that player can be prepared
Trade-off: sometimes when it senses enemy, enemy is also about to senses the player. Prepare to fight!
In summary, with DOOM3 BFG Super Soldier mod, you would have 12 strategy to think about. All the strategy are well balanced with benefit and drawbacks. But for vanilla game, you mostly only worry about one, that is #7 flashlight, actually shoulder lamp for BFG version. So 12 vs 1, that is how much deeper the game play with Super Soldier mod vs original DOOM 3. With so many different ways to approach the fight, DOOM3 BFG Super Soldier mod is approaching to the level of genre of "Immersive Sim", with emergent behavior how the game is played or re-played.
