Rainbow Six planning phase

Rainbow Six

Goblingee's Rainbow Six Revival.

Stage 3 Plan the action

Now that we have our teams selected it is time to plan our assault/recon (whatever is relevant to the mission)

We have a plan view of the mission map which shows our insertion and extraction point. It is possible to switch to a basic 3d version of the map for a better idea of the area. This can be very useful when assaulting buildings or built up areas.

The first thing to do really is to check your insertion points and place the teams there, these will be your spawn points into the mission, if you have more than 1 possible insertion point and more than 1 team then you will be able to place teams at different points and effect your mission form different angles if you choose to do so, you do not have to use all insertion points if you do not wish to and most missions only have 1 possible insert anyway.

It is always worth hitting the recon tab and flicking through the landmarks and so on, this way we can get an idea of the location of hostages, bombs, terrorists, ladders, cameras, phones, computers and other key mission landmarks, this is very useful for the planning of your route through the mission.

Once you have decided on the route for each of your teams it is time to give them the way points, this is done simply by clicking on the relevant team and then clicking on the map. At each way point you also have the option to give a go code, this will tell the team to wait until you hit the button for Alpha, Bravo, Charlie or Delta go codes at which point the team will continue. An example of this would be to send red team to a door, tell them to wait for Bravo and then open and frag a room, then when they reach the door in the mission they will wait until you give the code and then open and frag before moving on to the next way point.

At each way point you can also change the teams Speed and Rules of Engagement, an example here would be to send the red team to a room containing a hostage, clear the room and then change to escort and head to extraction.

The final thing we can do at each way point is to give a special action, this could be, pick lock, breach door, frag room, flash-bang, snipe and a few others, this will then tell the team to do a specific task at a specific point, an example here would be to tell a team to move to a bomb, hit special actions and then disarm bomb, then in the mission they will go to the bomb and disarm it before moving on to the next way point.

That is basically the planning phase in a nutshell, and is to many people (myself included) the thing that set Rainbow Six aside from the rest. This phase really makes you think and brings a whole new dimension to the FPS genre, I find that if I plan my missions, I tend to be much more careful that I am in any standard run and gun game, this is because it is my plan and I damn well want it to work and it will work no matter how many times I die trying.