This is the trickiest mid battle there is, in my opinion. It's not like badlands, which is decided by 1. which demo gets their first and 2. who has better spam - it needs real strategy. So, what are your usual and unusual strats or counters?

As a medic, my biggest problem with the mid is that you're extremely vulnerable behind the crates. How do you balance your heavy classes being on top and defending yourself?

For the middle of granary, different players have more than one option to get to mid. There's the left and right side. When the combo is on the left side, usually 1 of 2 things are done, the pocket soldier jumps with the roamer and the medic heals the demoman or the pocket stays down and the medic stays with his pocket.

I tend to see the euros do the medic with demoman moreso than Americans. Basically both soldiers jump on crate, and the demoman stays near the health pack while being fully buffed and spams the other team. This of course is a passive playstyle but that seems to be what european teams focus on. Then when the demoman sees an exploit (soldiers from other team off crate, scouts hurt opposing team) he will jump onto the opposing teams crate and finish people off/heavily damage them. During this time the soldiers come off the crate and go with the medic on the point or help the demoman.

The other way is for the pocket soldier to preferably wrap around the crates towards the opposing teams health pack. From there they can usually easily spam the demoman (if he's still near his health pack) or cause a lot of damage on the opposing team (if they're still in their back corner). This is a more aggressive playstyle and one I see more often in the United States

Then there's the alternate strategy. In this strategy the team goes to their right and pushes out from the garage. The point is it surprises the other team. They will either send both soldiers up and the demoman/medic go to the right side of the crate. Or they send 1 soldier up and the soldier/demo/medic go right.

Now my question is, which is better when going to the right side should someone send both soldiers up or just 1? With keeping a demoman down, the soldier with the medic can push the opposing team back into the demoman's spamming stickies. IF both go up top the soldiers are guaranteed control of the top, yet the people the demoman is facing could decide to rush him instead of falling back causing him and his medic to die.

One thing I've thought would be interesting is using FaN scouts on granary mid. The FaN is useful for two reasons: one, it enables the scout to get onto the crates more easily. Two, once he's on top of the crates, it allows him to harass soldiers attempting to RJ onto the crates. I'm not sure what it would look like in actual practice though, because the only time I've had the chance to try it out is in gathers.

As an aside: from my experience, granary mid seems to be the most popular place in the game to use Kritzkrieg. I think that part of the reason for this is that, due to the structure of the map, you're not at risk of being unable to engage the enemy combo during the brief window where you have kritz before they have uber, whereas on badlands the enemy team can pull back to choke and wait until they have uber.
Now my question is, which is better when going to the right side should someone send both soldiers up or just 1?
A lot of it depends on circumstance. Obviously if the enemy scouts are behind your team you need a way to cover your medic and that usually means a soldier needs to drop.

I was speaking of at the beginning. I personally prefer the 1 soldier jump, demo/medic/soldier go right, esp since it caters to the demoman :P But I also think its overall the most effective for killing the opposing combo, keeping the medic alive from enemy flank and killing anyone else who goes back to the 'corner' unknowingly.

I see rushing garage vs the opponent rushing tunnel as an all-in for the guys rushing garage. IMO you have to go super aggressive here because if you let the fight prolong you have given up control of your half pack to the enemy scouts and the opponent pushing tunnel can easily retain control of their health pack. I think that given 2 equally skilled teams this difference in health is enough to turn the tide. So then before you let it get to that situation I say you must jump both soldiers and if the opposing team isn't prepared for this they will most likely have one roaming soldier on their crate with the small pack. For this soldier at this location getting an airshot is not only unreliable but likely won't prevent you from being the first frag of the round.


For perspective if I expect a garage rush from the opposing team instead of jumping early to my crate with the pill, I will walk further make sure I have 300 and then jump to the far crate. Usually doing this I will meet the enemy soldiers RJing in the air but I will have the advantage of more maneuverability as their jumps can't have much horizontal velocity given the short distance between the garage exit and the crates. This gives me what I consider a high probability airshot against their aggressive soldiers and one that will likely send one flying away to be cleaned up by our scouts. In my experience, even if this ends up being my only contribution to the mid fight it allows the fight to extend to the point where the health pack advantage comes into play and we come out on top.

I'm wondering what you all think of sending the demo solo through garage. From a scout's pov this plays out one of two ways:

If the blue scouts peek far left together looking for a one shot on a red scout, they will likely lose the fight because the demo can sticky around the corner and damage them both badly. I often see demos put them above the door on garage, and I think this indicates a mistake because they can play that corner very aggressively without having to leave the garage, if their timing is correct and they coordinate with the scouts.

On other hand if blue's scouts don't peek left and their demo goes pack they should be in a better position for the scout fight, since their demo will be active earlier. This also leaves the red scouts a bit trapped if they tried to hit corner, since they'll only have one viable avenue of retreat that doesn't expose them to solly spam from tunnel.

I'm interested in hearing what you consider to be the up/downsides of this and what the play means from solly/medic pov.

A tad off topic from #6 for a second. But I forgot to mention the way the demoman goes right stickies garage and then goes up top to spam pipes onto the opposing team. They do this while watching the garage and popping stickies if a scout decides to try and flank through there.

Also, American demos get to mid so on granary and I'm not sure why. They don't do the 2nd sticky jump inside their 2nd costing them like 2 seconds and most of them also don't charge their sticky to the opposing teams healthpack. I feel like I get 2-3 stickies on there before the other demoman goes out, causing him to take a lot of damage and forced to fall back.

#6 explain the 3rd out of 4 paragraphs to me. I don't quite understand what you're saying.

To elaborate on Jaegers "all-in" concept, I see it this way.

If soldiers/medic/demo go garage, they pretty much HAVE to be aggressive otherwise they will find themselves falling back to corner while eating a bunch of spam, they are in a terrible predicament if they do not succeed in taking the point and forcing the enemy heavy classes to retreat from the point.

So while the soldiers and demo push garage, one soldiers jumps onto each crate on the right side, with 2 soldiers throwing rockets down on the crunched up enemy team they will be unable to jump up and take both crate. While the soldiers jump the demo is spamming stickies/pipes while being healed.

This all relies on the fact that your scouts can somewhat handle the other ones, otherwise your medic will get rocked.

tl;dr

everyone goes garage. soldiers jump to each crate and spam corner, demo spams as well while with medic. scouts kill other scouts/flank by enemy healthpack.

http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/66/granarymiddlestrat.jpg

I know this seems like a typical strat, Im just trying to emphasise that if done without wasting ANY time, if the enemy pushes through tunnel then they will be pinned down easily. Your scouts cant play that aggressive and go die, or else the strat will fall apart without anyone covering the left flank that would rape your demo/medic.

Thanks for the pic and ya, you can easily see in that pic that the enemy scouts can easily come around from their garage and take over your health pack area and IMO if all 12 players stay alive long enough for that to happen then the garage push should fail. The team coming out of tunnel just has to hold out and not relinquish full control of its health pack or crates until its scouts can get in position and start to get damage in.

tbh, this can all be seen by the loaded vs eg match from the other night

eg sent both reptile and phelon garage every round with destro going left every time except once or twice. destro pretty much from what i remember jumped from spawn to 2nd door and then walked the rest of the way usually waiting for casey and soldiers to catch up and then receive a buff from casey right before they went right and he often jumped onto either opposing catwalk or crates going after medic/soldiers and did it with relative success