How to Lay Suppressive Fire in First-Person Shooter Games

Learn how to suppress the enemy using an unending spray of bullets.

Suppressive fire is a real-life military tactic used to give a force an advantage. NATO calls this “the application of fire, coordinated with the manoeuvre of forces, to destroy, neutralize or suppress the enemy.”

This technique can also be practiced in first-person shooter games. Very few people understand the purpose of suppressive fire due to the sense that suppressive fire is only truly useful in a coordinated team setting. Suppressing an enemy force is useless if your own team doesn't know what to do about it.

Suppressing fire is laying down a barrage of bullets upon the enemy. It does not always have to be directly targeted, though it should close to enemy locations. Doing so will usually keep enemy players bunkered down and immobile.

Why? Well, if you're lying below cover and you see a stream of bullets whizzing past you, you're not going to leave your only form of defence right? Or if you're moving accross an open field an a gunner starts laying fire on you. Naturally, the first thing you would do is to make yourself a small a target as possible, which means crouching or lying down, rendering yourself immobile.

And how is this useful? Firstly, if the player walks into your bullets, then your job's done. Secondly, if they don't, they should be left in one spot. If you're playing with an organized team, they would know to take the advantage and circle the enemy. This would cut off the enemy's escape routes and basically leave them incapable of doing any significant action.

To set up an effective suppresive fire, one should use weapons with large ammunition supplies (machine guns usually) or explosive ordnance. Of course, spraying indirectly at an enemy doesn't necessarily mean that it will earn you kills. Laying down suppressive fire drains a lot of ammunition very quickly. Therefore, you must make sure that you have a surplus of ammunition before considering this tactic. If you're using machine guns, simply spray or use short bursts at the opponent's cover. If you have an explosive weapon with many charges, then feel free to do the same thing.

Games from the Call of Duty series can be put into example. Modern Warfare 2 will be used in this example. A machine gunner will take an overwatch position high in his team's base building. He sees several opposing troops advancing. He fires repeatively unto them. He doesn't necessarily get any kills, but he did manage to injure a few. The advancing troops go behind cover. The machine gunner doesn't stop his firing. Those advancing troops are now pinned and can't move. The gunner's allied troops take advantage of the suppressive fire and quickly maneuver around the enemy troops, and swiftly cut them down. In this example, the machine gunner has burned through a huge amount of ammunition, and doesn't score any kills at all. However, this contribution ultimately leads his team into getting an advantage over the enemy. Do you now start to understand the concept of suppressive fire?

Remember that suppressive fire is a team-based maneuver, and requires a competent team to be able to be put into effective use.