The callvotes

There are two kind of commands in Tremulous. The chat commands like !help, !register, !info… and the console commands like \team, \disconnect, \m, \me, \follow, \kill… and of course \donate, \share and \callvote.

These last ones, the console commands, need to be performed through the console (the console is a kind of MS-DOS that scrolls up and down) by pressing the key at the left of number 1 (it may differ depending on your keyboard setup).

Tremulous waiting queue (or the damn team unbalance)

Ooooh! Yes I know what’s that! You want to play hummies but it’s full. And people keep entering before you can even click. Here’s the trick:

Tip 1:

Do a bind for it: \bind k "team humans"

And keep pressing the key twice per second. You can even declare it in-game through the console.

Tip 2:

Ok, so you can’t get your rifle. Whatever you do, do not ever say “can anyone join aliens?“, remember that there is a bunch of starving people also waiting for someone to go aliens. Saying that will denote your impatience and will reinforce other spectators to keep waiting until YOU join aliens. If anyone of them was about to choose aliens, he/she’ll wait.

Most people want to win, so say things like “aliens are pwning humans!“, “this map is for aliens“, “human team is feeding lol“, “hahah aliens are near s3” or “aliens are owning this round“.

What’s Tremulous about?

It’s aliens versus humans. Aliens can evolve into bigger creatures and humans can buy weapons and armors. Both teams have bases. Those bases work like StarCraft, Age of Empires or other similar games. There are buildings that heal, others attack, defend or power units…

The game is very very very intense and awesomely fast (you can die in 2 seconds or survive for 30 minutes without dying). Rounds can last from 5 minutes to 2 or 3 hours (really, it has happened more than once to start a round, play a bit, do something else, get out to the pub and meet with friends, get back to Trem and continue the same game).

By the way, Tremulous is totally free to download and play. The code source of the game is open too.

Tremulous is a team based game

One thing is clear, you can’t win without working together with your team. When attacking, try to go in groups. If someone says “help at base”, go back to base and help. If you’ve got some spare money, donate it to the team (you will get it back).

Evos/Credits

Those two are Tremulous free money. Evos are for aliens and go from 0 to 9. Credits are for humans and go from 0 to 2000. You earn 175 credits when you kill an alien (if you do half damage you get half, etc.) and you get 1 evo when you kill a human.

Stages

Stages are phases of the game. There are 3 and you begin on Stage 1. To go to the next stage you need to kill enemies (the number of kills depends on the number of players). Stages 2 and 3 provide your team with new evolutions or weapons/armors. Same goes for the other team so do not get killed.

Life (health points)

Aliens regenerate automatically every second their health points. Being near a Tyrant (without being one) will heal you faster. The buildings also regenerate automatically.

Humans wear an injection, when used it, it will restore your health. Once you use your injection, you need to step onto the Medistation. Only one human can heal at a time, wait your turn. Once your life is restored, you get another injection. The buildings need a builder to repair them (hold right click while carrying the construction kit).

What are the aliens?

First of all, remember this:

Aim to the head and don’t stand still neither in front of the human, always try to find his back or flank them

You can only begin (spawn) with Dretch or Granger (the builder). Pick Dretch. When you get some evos pick Dragoon (3 evos), then Tyrant (5 evos). Aliens have a radar by default and can see proximity enemies (blue spots) and buildings (red spots).

1. Dretch (free, 25hp, stage 1): This is the basic one. It is fast and small which makes you less aimable but you’ve got only 25hp (same as 5 rifle bullet shots). To kill humans you just need to touch them and you will bite automatically. Aim to his head to increase the damage drastically. You must master the dretch first of all, if you are good with dretch you will be feared in duels and clan wars.
2. Basilisk (1 evo, 75hp, stage 1): This one is really hard to master. Do not evolve into this during your first months playing Trem. Wait to get the Dragoon.
3. Marauder (2 evos, 150hp, stage 1): This one is a bit hard. Do not evolve into this. Wait to get the Dragoon.
4. Dragoon (3 evos, 200hp, stage 1): Hold right click, wait 1-3 seconds and release it to jump. While jumping like this, if you hit a human, you will harm him (even kill him). This is the first attack. The second one is the left click. Don’t forget what I told you: aim to the head and don’t stand still even less in front of the human, try to find his back.
5. Advanced Basilisk (2 evos, 100hp, stage 2): hard one to master. The difference with the normal Basilisk is that this one throws toxic gas.
6. Advanced Marauder (3 evos, 175hp, stage 2): like the normal marauder but can electrify (although it is spectacular, it is really weak and a waste of time).
7. Advanced Dragoon (4 evos, 250hp, stage 3): it jumps a lot more than the normal Dragoon. It can also snip projectiles. The advanced dragoon is good for snipping buildings. You need to master the normal Dragoon first to attack humans with it. Bet for the Tyrant.
8. Tyrant (5 evos, 400hp, stage 3): This one rocks. When attacking, do not stay at aim of fire for more than 5 seconds, start killing one human and run away when your health is below 150hp (keep a look at your remaining HP every time you “rush”/attack). Watch your HP and estimate how long you can keep being shoot. Oh, and never ever stand still while destroying a building (Lucifer cannon can deal huge amounts of damage), keep moving side to side with random movements. You can attack with left click or hold right click, walk forward and release it to sprint (you can also kill like this although only do this when humans are not very well protected).

Humans

As a human you begin choosing Rifle or Builder. Choose Rifle and stay away from aliens, distance is your greatest advantage. Once you kill some aliens you will gain credits. Go to the Armoury (green box near the Medistation) and sell your Rifle (press Q and select Rifle to sell it). You can buy:

Weapons:

1. Pain Saw (100 credits): Do not get this one yet.
2. Rifle (free): The
3. Shotgun (150 c): 8 short-distance shots. Get this if there are a lot of dragoons.
4. Lasgun (250 c): 200 precision but weak shots. Perfect for dretches and small aliens. Similar to a Rifle but you won’t run out of ammunition (as a newbie, you will be killed before).
5. Pulse Rifle: Do not get this one yet, you need to calculate enemy movements and this takes time.
6. Mass driver (350 c): 7 precision shots. You deal 70hp aproximately with each shot. You’d better improve your aim before buying this.
7. Chaingun (400 c): 300 bullets. Mid-distance. Get BattleSuit or crouch to aim better.
8. Flamer: This one is quite a waste of credits. You will kill yourself. Only get it when there are a lot of dretches.
9. Lucifer Cannon (700 c): It is awesomly powerful but very slow. Try to aim where the alien will be in the next 3-5 seconds. Do not die, it’s 700 credits worth. Spec experienced players to master it. In close maps it’s really useful to get the Helmet for its radar capabilities.
10. Grenade: Quite a waste for newbies, spec experienced players before using them.

Armor and tools:

1. Light armor (70 c): Not really useful with dretches but useful to prevent Dragoon pounces.
2. Helmet (150 c): Buy this! Without this, dretches can kill you nearly instantly (96hp in one bite) and dragoons in 1 hit. You also get a Radar which is really worth it.
3. BattleSuit (400 c): High protection (a Tyrant needs 3 hits to kill you) but very noisy and can’t crouch. You will feel safe although don’t overestimate yourself.
4. Jetpack: Don’t waste your money on this, or try it just for fun. It can be really useful for specific maps but can also be very annoying and pointless in some games. In some servers they have limited fuel so be careful.

Building

This is another sweet feature about Tremulous and what makes it the best free game ever. You can play to kill (as the common 1st person fast paced shooter games), but you can also build and study base tactics.

Although sounds promising, as a newbie forget about that for now, first learn to kill and let other experienced builders do their job in base architecture tactics. Observe them and look at their different defense designs on every map (building positions can be optimized every Stage but it takes time and experience to master this).

Important concepts about Tremulous (read this!)

Blocker

The basics in Tremulous are to kill and not die (aka feed). That’s why players go to attack and then go back. Do not block your teammates escape way by staying close to their back. This is illegal and you can be kicked for it.

Feeder

We said the game was about killing and not getting killed. You should avoid getting killed besides killing. If you die a lot, you just give stupid advantage to your enemies. Try not to be so Rambo and do not attack alone (specially humans). Teammates may complain if you feed (get killed) a lot and may vote to kick you.

Bleeder

Some servers have Friendly Fire ON and some have it OFF. If it is ON, when aiming at the enemy, you may accidentally hit one of your teammates. Try to avoid that. It is sadly easy to kill and be killed by your teammates. Imagine you just bought the best equipment wasting 1000 credits and someone behind you kills you. Those credits/evos are lost. And you may also loose credits/evos in compensation to the teamkill.

Camper

This game is about bases, and the fun of it is to attack-deffend-attack-deffend. If you just stay at your base, you ruin the game since the enemy can’t attack (it is suicide to go inside a base with 5 players and 7 machine gun turrets aiming at you, you may expect to last 5 seconds with Tyrant, honestly), neither defend (because you are still at your base) and the game stops. You can be kicked for this.

Jetcamper

Same as camper but flying with a Jetpack staying at the same room/area waiting for enemies to come.

Battlegranger

Builders are not designed to kill, so don’t ever get away from your base while being a builder. You will just feed, hence, make your team loose the match and get kicked or hated.

Deconner

Deconstructing structures stupidly and repetitively without building others is considered “deconning”. Some newbie or bored silly players try to ruin the game by deconning and leaving a team defenceless.

Don’t do this, nowadays servers incorporate commands to revert deconstructions by pressing just one key. This also means getting banned PERMANENTLY.

Voting system

Another nice thing about Tremulous is democracy power. You and all the players can vote for whatever they want. You vote by pressing F1 for Yes and F2 for No.

• Change or restart the map
• Extend the time limit or call Sudden Death
• Run polls (about anything you like)
• Kick or mute a player
• Deny a player from building

Teamvotes are also available. You can vote through F3 and F4 (or by pressing Escape and following the menu).

Sudden Death

To avoid boring games, there is Sudden Death that disallows everyone to build anything. So when a structure is destroyed, it can’t be reconstructed. This makes the game end quickly.

Become a pro

Best advice is to spec the top players of each team. That is the best way to learn how to move, aim, etc. Do not play modded servers (try to avoid Unlimited ones). Master the Dretch, Dragoon and Tyrant and the Rifle, Shotgun and Lucifer Cannon.

As an alien, aim to the head and understand the radar.

As a human, keep distance and understand the radar (free when buying helmet).

Want more?

Ok, now you know everything to start. Have a look at the Tremulous area to learn cool stuff or Tremulous bind and autoexec to master the art of key binds or the admin tricks if you are a server admin. You can also search for more advanced Tremulous tutorials.

Also, once you’ve played for at least 6 months, consider entering a Clan, there is a big bunch of them around the Internet, request becoming an admin of your favorite server and visit the official Tremulous forum, there are a lot of good tutorials and guides there.

unbindall Resets all binds, useful to detect uncomplete binding
seta com_hunkMegs 256 Allocate Max RAM to Tremulous
seta com_maxfps 77 Set Max FPS to 77 (Reduces latency)

Wide Screen

It’s really simple and works for any resolution. Paste this in your autoexec.cfg:

r_mode -1
r_customwidth 1280
r_customheight 800

Remove ban from a server

How to get unbanned when getting kicked & banned

1. Delete qkey files in applicationdata/tremulous section of c: drive. NOTE: This will remove your admin rights in any server.
2. Did it work? No? Then renew your IP address. If you’ve got a router and access to it, check that nobody is using it and turn it off, wait 2 minutes and turn it on. If this is not feasible or it hasn’t worked, try this:
   • Go to Start menu and click on Run command
   • Then type in cmd press Enter.
   • Wait for command prompt window to appear then type these command’s:
   • ipconfig.exe
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
exit
   • That process should give you a new IP address and so, get unbanned (your IP won’t match the ban list).
3. Remember to change your name if you don’t want admins to get angry and play nice!

Enable lagometer

This is useful to see your ping and latency. To see anyone else’s ping and latency just spec them.

/cl_lagometer 1

Nick and in-game colors

I recommend to paste this into your autoexec.cfg so you don’t need to remember them or Google it every time:

// 0-Black 1-Red 2-Green 3-Yellow 4-Blue 5-Cyan 6-Pink 7-White

Donating money/credits/evos to other players

Use:

/donate 1000

or

/share playername 1000


Advanced autoexec tweaking

Have a look at Quake FPS visuals to read an advanced and complete guide on how to tweak Tremulous (Quake engine) to get the best of its performance and gameplay. Note that the guide is intended for Quake so some stuff may not work with Trem. Also, if you are going to supercustomize your autoexec (to make it work smoothly and playable in the Asus Eee PC like I did) always test commands one by one and check if that suits or not.

Tremulous Aimbots

I should state that I am one of those big admins in some Tremulous Servers. After testing nearly all of the aimbots out there for server admin purposes, I must say that learning to use such a tool without being caught by an admin is pretty much more painful and hard than learning to play without it. You may have some advantage but fearing being caught and without any challenge avoids an enjoyable gameplay. Impulsive aimbotters get banned at first sight.

Quick and last notes

Backup your autoexec! Save it in a USB or attach it into an email and send it back to you. It may not seem so important, but when you get a cool and pretty personal autoexec, you will have your mouse sensitivity, name, binds, performance config… everything there. So if you ever need to reinstall Tremulous, a simple copy-paste of the file will save you a lot of time.

Other good files to backup are your maps and QKEY which will avoid to download everything again and to request admin levels and name unblockings. In fact, a backup of all the Tremulous folder may be worth it.