Leader, crucial player in your team, your goal is letting your teammates know what to do and lead them to win the map.

I've seen a lot of people as of late attempting to lead but not really understanding how to be a successful leader, so I thought it would be good to make a guide explaining how to be a successful Zombie Escape leader.

The leading fundamentals, I've seen a lot of people that have a wrong view of leading, or they are leading but doing it in less than ideal way. You should remember these things below!

You have to understand a map and strategies before leading:
There is no clear cut definition of leading, but you're not really leading by just telling people when to fallback and when zombies teleport, or just repeatedly saying defend guys.

The one thing: It is okay to learn from another leader but you shouldn't merely repeat them. You still have to understand how their strategies make logical. Just because you're repeating someone elses' leading that you saw before, doesn't make you a good leader. you could easily find the flaws of the strategies that people use if you had a close look at the strategies. (Which means these strategies are often used but they're not perfect) Every strategy can be improved upon and made better.

The point of leading; how you should play as a leader:
You don't need to be taking risks, you're much more helpful to your team alive than dead because you overdefended. Often it's better to just stay alive so you can show people where to go and defend.

You shouldn't be toxic no matter the situation:
This is the most important thing! expressing frustration won't help the team, rather than complaining, insulting or talking trash, people would like to hear what the problem was. You can explain to them what they should've done instead of flaming them!

The important thing as a leader is to have confidence in your leading. Everyone makes mistakes in leading, even skilled players do. Also often your strategies can be vary. When you use your own strategies, you need to explain why your strategies are good. Because people generally are going to do the set strategies and and they're not going to know the strategies you use.

You may lose several rounds in a row at times- but most of the time you are losing because of the players. Often you get players who don't listen to leaders or are new at the game, often you get people playing solo and playing their own way, just because you're losing a lot of rounds does not mean it is necessarily your fault.

If you feel stressed out by leading, you should take a break from it. You don't always to have lead even if you know the map, Sometimes you will find it impossible to win, you can take a break, remember that no one is forcing you to lead.

Being good at zombie escape helps you when leading, here is why:
You won't always be getting the best team and players, sometimes you will have players who are relatively new to the game and can't do things like lasers or kz. You can have an easier time leading the less people you need to rely on, of course you need to rely on people, but if for example on Diddle you don't need to rely on anyone else using big ♥♥♥♥ (which little people know how to use), you always have an easier time relying on yourself than another.

For example: it is easier to have a player who knows when and where to use an item rather than having being told when to, as this will always have a bit of a delay and they're more likely to make mistakes (Someone might even troll and tell them the wrong time to use the item) versus a player who can do it on their own and knows the map/item.

Not every map is the same, on Bioshock you need to make your items hit the boss directly, but on other maps you usually only need to be inside the boss fight. It's important to know the map you're playing on.

There are essentially two ways to learn a map, one is playing the map offline, the other is to decompile the map and check with the Source SDK, but if you have time to practice offline you should play it on a server to learn the map and listen to other people leading it.

Keeping your team informed about what's going on can be important, Example of things to keep in mind are basic set stategies, triggers, zombies teleports and boss patterns.

Your leading needs to be simple, most players don't speak very good English, use simple words and sentences, for example use directional callouts (left, right, top) rather than descriptive callouts (Tree, Truck, Train), you also need to speak slowly and at a decent volume, don't whisper but don't shout.

You also don't want multiple people leading/talking, this just leads to confusion especially when two people give conflicting orders.

I wrote about this before on the basics section. This time I will write more in depth about it.

When your team is losing many rounds in a row; you can often see the problem; sometimes you aren't able to kill the laser boss because too many people are dying early on the lasers or you are losing because not enough people are defending. What you want to do is tell people what they should've done and work out a different idea if necessary, like if people are dying to first laser, have them stay behind and overdefend.

This is the most common mistake I've seen recently, when you're leading and a round is lost, you start to blame something completely irrelevant and try to do the same thing the next round, while the round might not have been lost because of you, you need to be able to change your leading to adapt to different scenarios and players. sometimes you need to use a different strategy, you may lose items, anything can mess up your strategy quite easily.

One thing you should remember: don't use the same strategy every time! They are the norm, they can work some of the time, but you need to be able to adapt to the situation rather than use the same strategy. Obviously there are simple maps that can be won without leading or with the same strategy, but this doesn't apply to all maps. I will explain about this in more detail later.

One thing I've noticed recently from new players that want to get better, they often misuse items. You can definitely make the difference between winning or losing with an item.

Just because you have an item doesn't mean you need to use it, you can save it for a better chance to use it if no zombies are around.

You don't always need to use items where they are usually used, a lot of the time they can be saved by good defending, using an item when no zombies are around just because it's a common strategy can make it easier for zombies. In this instance you should use items where it might save someone behind the zombies, or stop a bhopping zombie.

Here's an example: on Mako v6, you would usually use gravity on the boss fight because it does a lot of damage, but if you used it to defend you would've saved 10+ people.
[If you had more people alive you would have an easier time killing the boss as well as easier defences later on. Basically you will have 10 more zombies to defend with less humans.]

It might be more advanced tips. If you save an item and zombies know you're saving it , it puts pressure on them. For example on Minas, tnt or Balrog wouldn't want to get close to WK if they know he can use nuke. The fact that you're saving items can put pressures on zombies. (It's more like about the players, certain maps are heavily based on items and the skill of their user, like Minas, a lot of the time rounds are lost on Minas due to mistakes or bad players using Gandalf/White Knight.)

A good example for this is S_A_M, where you can put pressure to the zombies, there is a ZM item called ZM Shield, which when used gives the zombie immunity to knockback and he will gain speed the more he is shot, you have a lot of items to defend with but you need to save at least one always in case of zombie shield.

This part isn't for leaders, it's for normal players. You cannot win maps just with leading, you need players who listen to the leader.

The definition of a good player is how helpful they are for their team. Just because you can dodge lasers or bhop doesn't mean you are helping your team. Good players understand what to do in every situation and respect the leader. Just because you're individually skilled player, doesn't mean you can do whatever you want.

What If you have an idea that might work better than the current one? You can ask the leader to let you lead or to try your strategy. But remember, that you're not always right. If you're not saying anything no one would know what you are trying to do.

Nowadays some people are practicing on training servers, it's a complete waste of time. It will only make you better at dodging lasers or surviving a few boss fights, but it won't teach you how to use items or defend.

For my definition of a good player; you cannot practice lasers or boss fights offline, if someone is good at defending he played ZE a lot to learn how to defend. If someone is good at using an item it's because they watched others or used the item a lot themselves.

Think about it, you're practicing Deadcore Stage D ending with 1.5x speed, will this ever be of any help to you on an actual zombie escape server?

As I said before, a lot of new players misunderstand the definition of a good player and practice incorrectly. If you're trying to get good, there are better ways to go about it.

What you should do to get better: play more, grind and practice mechanics of the game, like movement. If you are a new player you aren't certain on what to do and you are likely making mistakes. You can see that good players aren't taking unnecessary risks and adapt to the situation. If you're playing risky and dying; you're much more helpful by just staying alive.

This is a something that eventually becomes subconscious, and you can finally look towards your own strategies, or something harder than that. There are players who are not very good at lasers, but better at defending than most of players.

*. Header picture is taken from ze_last_man_standing.[gamebanana.com]
*. Big hype to the deadcore videos recorded by Sedna and Somast.