How To Own At Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

We spoke with one of the top players in the world, PlayStation 3 user Astlan, to get all of the strategies for big points in Brotherhood's multiplayer mode.

Astlan ranks in the top ten on most of Brotherhood's leaderboards. In real life, 28-year-old  Peter Corluyan lives in Los Angeles and stays active in church life. In renaissance Italy, however, it's all about assassination. He's spent over four days real time in multiplayer so he knows a thing or two about what it takes to get to the top. He mostly plays in the team-based Manhunt mode, but most of these tips apply to Wanted and Alliance modes as well.

LOWER LEVEL STRATEGY
Stick with Smoke every level until you’re 50 once you get it. People underestimate Disguise because higher level players aren't usually looking for people using it. Sometimes I’ll be stunned by a level 2 because he’s using Disguise. Take advantage of those lower level skills. They'll come as a shock so you should use it while you have it.

HIGH LEVEL STRATEGY
At the higher levels there’s only really a few things that rack up points. Smoke, Charge, Poison. There isn’t much else at the higher levels. At the lower levels just try to have fun with it, but once you get past 30 you’re really going to have to stick to those specific skills if you want to get 10,000 points a game. There’s just no other way to do it. The cooldowns are just too long  with the pistol and throwing knives, and you don’t get any extra points for using them. Those strategies are definitely going to fade away after a certain level.

VARIETY
I try to go for a lot of variety bonuses. The patch really killed our points. I used to get 13,000 to 14,000-point games a lot and now it’s very hard to get 9,000 to 10,000-point games. You really have to get variety kills. I try to do everything in one match. I’ll try to get an aerial kill. I’ll get an acrobatic kill. I’ll get a hidden kill. I keep track of everything that I have so I’ll get those extra bonuses. It really helps the final score to mix it up a bit.

Also, if you do the same thing over and over again, your opponents are going to get used to it. If you just Charge the whole game, they’re going to start putting down Smoke. You’re not going to be able to Charge. Keep switching it around on top of getting variety bonuses. It keeps them guessing which gives you the advantage.

CHASING ISN'T WORTH IT
I score the most with Siena because it’s so small. It kills the rooftop, which is great. Some people just like running around the rooftop and you have to use a pistol. If you use a pistol you don’t get any points. If they run on the rooftop they don’t get any points. I don’t know why people do it. And they punish you for chasing those guys. They punish you for not chasing those guys. And they punish you for using the pistol. You can only get 100 points for the pistol. There’s nothing else you can do with it unless you get some kind of multilkill which still is only max 200.

If you chase them, sometimes there’s been a map where I’ve chased a guy for two minutes. At the end of the two minutes I did this amazing kill, probably one of the best kills I’ve ever done, and then I only got 100 points because I wasn't incognito anymore. It's really frustrating. It really makes you not want to chase targets. On Siena you don’t have to worry about that stuff. If they run on the roof you can kind of run around the building, catch them when they fall down. There’s a lot of ways to cut them off on the roof.

THE BEST PERSONA
I like the foot pad. When you do the kill animation it looks like the guy’s about to counter and then you end up getting the kill. It just add a little bit of excitement. It feels like he’s faster even though I’m pretty sure all of the characters are the same speed. Some characters are too heavy so they’re very visible. Some characters have these weird noses and masks so you can see them coming a mile away. I would definitely stay away from those personas even though they look cool.

Take the harlequin. It's a very cool looking character, but I would never pick it because it's got gold all over. The prowler, foot pad, and thief are really hard to pick out in a crowd. The brown and the green colors really blend.

READING YOUR OPPONENT
If there are three NPCs in a group, they’ll all be spaced out perfectly. If there’s someone else in the group who’s not an actual player, you’ll see them really close to one of the NPCs and that’s not normal. It’s usually a dead giveaway of which person it is. I get 90 percent of my kills that way because they can tell if you’re using Templar Vision, and Charge doesn’t always work.

PLAYING DEFENSE
In defense people try to use the camera to look behind them. What they don’t realize is when they do that their character actually turns their head. That’s a dead giveaway to the enemy which one you are. I turn my character around to look directly into the camera rather than swinging the camera around.

You want to blend for a little bit in the beginning. If you get caught right away you’re not going to get any stuns. For the most part, though, I kind of want to get seen after a certain point. I want to get in there. I want to charge them on defense. I want to stun them and then drop my Smoke. When another one comes close I want to stun him too. On defense, although I want to hide for a little bit, I really want to get into the action. Once you start stunning your enemy and see who he really is, that’s when the points really rack up. There isn’t as much incentive in the game to blend as there is to stun them, run away to a new group, and then start the process all over again.

RADAR TRICK
The radar is huge. Sometimes I’ll have the radar go off, but there will be a big group and it's tough to tell who the target is. All I do is walk behind a wall and the second the radar goes out I know which person it is. If you can use your radar very properly you never have to run really. You never have to rely on your abilities. And that’s big because the abilities take a minute or two to charge and the game is only five minutes.

If you just wait for your abilities, you’re not going to get a lot of points (especially if you fail the ability). Then you have to wait another two minutes before you can even try to kill somebody. So finding ways to kill without abilities is key to getting a lot of points. I’ve had two or three 15-kill games back to back, and you can’t get that many kills if you just wait for your abilities.