Optimal Strategies for winning in CS:GO
CS:GO is a first person shooter video game that is based on search and destroy. There are two teams, the terrorists and the counter-terrorists; the terrorists’s goal is to plant the bomb and defend the bomb until it explodes, and the counter-terrorists’s goal is to defend the bomb sites and defuse the bomb if it is planted. The structure of CS:GO is that there are 10 players in the server, and thus each team has 5 players. The game is played until one team wins 16 rounds. In regular gameplay, there are 30 rounds played, and if necessary, there is overtime that is played until a winner is declared. Thus, there are very clear objectives for each of the teams, and subsequently, at a high-level overview, CS:GO is a very simple video game.
Nevertheless, because there are two teams and differing objectives, I can see there are optimal strategies for winning games of CS:GO and rounds. In particular, I can apply game theory to CS:GO to discuss the best ways a team can response to the opposing team. In this paragraph, I will discuss game theory for the terrorist side of CS:GO. There is usually a similar map structure in CS:GO with two bomb sites (there are bomb paths to each bomb site and there is a path for the middle of the map), thus because of this map structure, there is usually a default layout for the 5 players (2 for one bomb site, 1 for the middle, and 2 for the other bomb site). At a very basic level, you would want to take advantage of any team advantages such as the number of players that are alive during a round. Thus, if your team is at an advantage of 5 to 4 players, you would likely want to plant the bomb at the site which you believe has less players. In more detail, consider you teammate kills one of the defenders of bomb site A, thus there would only be one more defender at A and your team should try to plant the bomb there. This is the case for many of the rounds in CS:GO. You should continue attacking the site as long as you are killing the site’s defenders because then the counter terrorists’s teammates will have to rotate from their respective positions and this leaves the terrorists with the necessary time to plant the bomb and set up in good post-plant positions.
When discussing the counter terrorists, there are a number of formations which can prove to be sufficient defenses against the terrorists. In CS:GO, there is an economy (an amount of money per player with which the player can buy armor and guns). The economy can dictate how a counter terrorist team defends the bomb sites. Thus, this side of CS:GO is not as simple as the terrorists side of CS:GO. Usually, counter terrorists’s optimal strategy is also playing a 2, 1, 2 strategy (2 at both bomb sites and 1 guarding the middle). However, if a team’s economy is low and the terrorists cannot buy any guys or armor, the counter terrorists may switch their formation to become more aggressive and end the round faster. Additionally, counter terrorists can ‘stack’ bomb sites if they believe the terrorists will be heavily attacking one bomb site which changes the optimal strategies for winning a round in CS:GO.
Clearly, there are many factors that come into play when discussing the optimal strategies for terrorists and counter terrorists in CS:GO. In fact, there are so many factors at play that there are no Nash Equilibriums where one side will have a best outcome. This results in an ever-changing game environment that adapts to the current situation of each round.
Game Theory Optimal CS:GO – Playing perfect Counter Strike from GlobalOffensive