Discuss The Maps - Presidential Plane

[The3rdWalker 1,268]

This new series has been created to facilitate the gameplay, metagame, and strategy discussion that often gets buried or lost in the abundance of others posts that flood this sub.

The goal of this series is to not only give new players a primer on a specific map, but also for midlevel or competitive players a chance to share the knowledge that they have accrued in their experiences and maybe let people know something that they did not know before.

Today's map is Presidential Plane.

• Iceycat's Plane Guide 
• Serenity17 Plane Tips & Tricks 
• Plane Wiki

The community has outlined a couple of things that they want to converse about with every map, but feel free to branch out should you feel a piece of information warrants its own discussion.

• Overall map and team strategies for attacking & defending.
• Secret areas, kill holes, and other techniques that can be used on the map.
• The best operators to use on the map and different abilities that work & don't work with this map.
• What strategies have you adopted while playing this map? What is something that a new player should know when playing this map, or what is something you know that would help a veteran player take that next step?
• Does the map offer an unfair advantages to attackers or defenders?
• Will Epi ever give us a release date for Bartlett University?
• What is your overall opinion of this map?

[The3rdWalker 1,268]

• Glaz is a monster when playing against lower level players. They're usually standing up carelessly so you can pick them off (assuming they're not underneath in the cargo area) and then wait for another sucker to pick them up.
• Barbed wire is essential for slowing down the attackers. Bandit has three, so you could lay down a whole corridor down or put them in high traffic areas. It gives your team a good audio cue when you hear the rustling or banging of the wire.
• When the defenders are in the Meeting room you can place a thermite charge on the wall closest to the front office, then place a normal charge on the office wall (usually not reinforced) then hang back behind the computer desk, blow them both and pick off any defenders in the room with ease.
  • Also it's impossible to reinforce the far left wall panel (against the couch inside the room), so you can always breach it with a regular charge, and defenders often don't know about it. It's a narrow panel, so it's not always obvious where you're shooting them from.
• You can pllace a Valkyrie camera on the tail of the aircraft by tossing it from the upper level through the hatch.

 

Seems like this is a love it or hate it map for the vast majority of people. I probably come down on the love it side just because I like smaller maps a bit more and this one has a very unique nature to it, but it's not without some issues either.

• Top floor cockpit is really cool but the rest of the upper deck feels like an afterthought. Okay servers and stuff live up there but I feel like more could have been done with the layout, it's so empty, especially that section in the middle with that one destructible wall put there just for the sake of having something there. A good tactic up there is to lock down the ladders with frost traps at the top, they can't see them until they're already coming up the ladder and they often miss them resulting in an easy DBNO. Partial breaches above the presidential suite are also very effective.
• The middle deck is of course where everything happens. Meeting room seems fairly well balanced, my only complaint here is the cheap tactic of making wall reinforcements only half size for this room because there's not enough breachable surfaces to cover otherwise. That feels cheap. Glaz of course can make use of the windows on the map which is VERY unique. It's actually kind of cool. Even if some people hate it you can counter it by several ways, shooting back through the bullet holes he's opened up or putting deployable shields in front of the windows, etc. Presidential suite seems fairly well balanced too. Press section is awful though. Easily the worst objective zone on the map. It's so small, so cluttered, it's just a mess.
• Luggage hold is a cool spot, especially like the semi hidden breaching path next to the stairs, clever design. The luggage hold itself is well laid out. I like the half cover points that can be vaulted as well as the full floor to ceiling structure in the middle of the room. The main view down either front or back hallway can give a commanding lockdown but can be countered by the trapdoors or breaches. The connecting section behind it though is meh. Seriously what is up with the mounted animal heads in this room? WTF? Also across from it the hall narrows and you can't breach any of that section. Could have been a narrow room or another breachable path like the hidden one at the front of the compartment, feels like wasted space that could have been used. The baggage hold is not bad overall but feels like maybe it could have one or two more angles on it as the loading crates really block views on everything in here. That can be an advantage though.
• Roamers can really work well on this map as it's very "lane" based but if you're on the wrong side of the map from where you need to be you can have quite the run ahead of you to get into position Epic flanks can and do occur on this map regularly. The narrow confines mean shields are useful (watch out for nitro as always) but it also means placed traps are much more viable as well. Doing things like preplacing smoke's gas grenades is much more effective in a map like this due to predictable choke points which don't exist AS much on many other maps. I also like how there's the unique dynamic of having no exterior cameras on this map. It would make spawn killing worse. But THAT is the other problem with this map. Spawn killing can be a nightmare if you're facing an aggro defense. There are ways of dealing with it of course, but it's still a bit more of a problem on this map as compared to others.

Probably the only tubular defense map we'll ever see unless they do something like a double decker train or a submarine.