Basics
Every new player goes through several stages. It looks something like this:
- A player drives after a ball and gets excited when he touches it. When there are six of these players, it looks like a pack of dogs rushing after the ball and touching it with their noses.
- The player finds the boost button, rides behind the ball quickly, and actively picks up the boosts. That way, you get to touch the ball more often, but you don't always hit it. Thinking at this stage is not necessary. ヽ(◉◡◔)ﾉ
- The player starts hitting the ball with high probability. Sometimes the second point falls out of the sequence, and it turns out that the ball is touched, and it flies very slowly (aka "sluggish ball"). This is not very good.
- Suddenly, it turns out that just kicking the ball is not the most effective thing to do because you can suddenly ruin everything, and you have to think about where you hit. This is where the super-diagram of which directions to hit the ball is good and bad comes in.
And here it is:
It looks confusing, but in a nutshell - you're a right-handed player. If you hit the ball from any number on the arrow next to it, you're an idiot if that arrow is red.
To summarize, the basics = the player moves quickly and actively always has a booster and kicks the ball toward the enemy goal so that the ball flies fast and hits the ball (and sometimes the goal) well. This is usually enough to make your teammates trust you and not try to take the ball away from you for your uselessness.
Teamplay
After mastering the basic skills, it usually turns out unexpectedly that the game is a team game, and in a 3x3, everything is very complicated. Everyone gets confused and gets in the way.
In fact, the time play formula for a game without communication is very simple.
Defense
Once it's clear that the attack has stalled, the enemies have intercepted the ball, and you can't take it away, turn around and drive the booster/twist to your goal, picking up the booster along the way.
Enemies bring the ball to the wall/corner/turn area, and everyone starts to dumb down and flounder.
And then there's the magic of this - if you're standing in the goal and you see an ally or two next to the ball (or with you) on the screen, you stay in the goal. Your allies will take turns knocking the ball out of the corner. If the ball is still in the corner (i.e., the allies screwed up and didn't kick out), you go to kick out, and immediately after failing, you go back to the goal, and the cycle repeats.
If you shorten the wording, you get something like: "whoever is closest to the ball kicks out, whoever is second covers/assists. The first, whoever is last, is the goalkeeper and waits his turn, and whoever failed to kick out returns to the goal.
If everyone follows this pattern, you get a cycle of machines, where always one player does the clear, the second prepares to shoot in case the first one misses, and the third covers the worst outcome (the ball in the goal). It sounds complicated at first, but gradually even with randoms in matchmaking, it works itself out that way.
Attack
Enemies screwed up the attack; we take the ball away and lead into the enemy half.
Immediately a magic scheme - if you see two allies in front of you on the screen, you don't drive in with them but stay behind in the midfield and only drive-in when one of the allies is back.
If you are first to the ball and there are no allies on the screen, your job is to push the ball through until it either flies or centers or until you are out of position.
If you drove first and screwed up, go back for the midfield boost (you can rub the enemy goalie on the way if you screwed up around the corner and the team scores), recalibrate and see which scheme to use next (whether to take the ball away from you and rush to the goal, or whether the offense continues there).
Again, in short: "the first to the ball - pushing and all sorts of rage, the second - a little behind / in the center in case of a pass, loss of the ball or alignment, the third - far behind in case of a strong knock in your goal, and who screwed up - returns.
If it's still not clear, I've got some more of those weird arrows. Here they are:
Here the left side attacks, and the right side deflects. The numbering of the players and their behavior is described in the diagrams above.
Again, don't be intimidated and try to manually set up this interaction with your team. It starts to work itself on an intuitive level sooner or later. In 2x2, the same, but without the player with the number 2.
And lastly, a little bit of crap about the same thing, but in video format and English.
Settings
Most people drive with the default button settings.
With the camera settings, everyone experiments on their own or looks at what the professional players use.
The two settings used by veterans:
Kronovi settings - default settings with a slightly stretched-out background and a slightly distant camera, you get a little more tactical overview and potentially more convenient spin trials.
Lachinio settings are more "arcade" settings, with maximum FOV, low and close camera. Because of this, there is more sense of speed. It is more convenient to ride without a ball cam and focus strictly on the ball.
Parameter camera stiffness is responsible for the stiffness of the rubber band, on which the camera hangs behind the car - at a stiffness of 10 when accelerating and turning, the camera will not move away/shift at all (fraught with loss of sense of speed).
Usually play with Ball Cam on all the time, turning it off when collecting boosts, when running the ball in front of you, and sometimes on the walls.
Regarding machine selection - all hitboxes are rectangular boxes, but they differ slightly in height. Visually, flat machines are a little more comfortable when flying, convex ones when ground-handling (dribbling). On the official forum, a comrade compares[psyonix.com] stuff, but pro players' general consensus is to use what you like.
Techniques
Beginning players usually have quite a few questions about how to still fly like superman and do all sorts of cool stuff, but as nerdy as it sounds, the most effective way here is to do all the in-game training several times a week, restarting attempts when you fail, until you start to feel confident with the ball.
Basic non-intuitive points:
- All turns should be made with the drift button held down.
- When flying the ball, you don't have to hold the boost the whole time. Sometimes it's more useful to let go and redirect the car while it's moving on inertia.
- The easiest way to skew the ball away from the wall is to go after it along the wall, keeping the car parallel to the ground. In this case, a somersault away from the wall will send the ball into the center-field (or into the goal).
- When purple sparks fly from under your wheels, you have reached maximum speed - the boost can be released and not wasted. You can reach maximum speed without the boost by somersaulting forward twice.
- After flying on the ball, use the drift button to level up the car relative to your inertia, so you don't lose speed on landing.
- The fastest way to get out of the enemy gate if you drive straight into it is to drive forward and then level the car in the air with the drift button. You can somersault forward when you start driving upside down to speed up the process.
- The goalie can reach the goal's crossbar without the boost if you make a double jump, bouncing the nose of the car in the process (the main thing here is not to somersault backwards accidentally).