I have a story of a game that wasn’t nearly as elegant, but it was still extremely satisfying. I’d been playing for about an hour and a half on a server that rotated through all of the default maps, and since both teams (this was a pick-up game) were extremely good, each match was essentially between the same two 12-person teams. Most of us were cooperating with each other and our strategic abilities seemed to be about the same, so red and blue had each won around 50% of their matches.
Anyway, my team had won on offense in the last several Assault rounds by opening with a fast, extremely aggressive soldier + demo push that was supposed to (and usually succeeded in) steamrolling the defenders before they could establish decent turrets. The other team caught on to our tactics, and so two of our players took to starting each round as scouts, rushing ahead to soften up the defenses, and switching to a medic + heavy combo once they had been killed. This worked ideally for a while, as the scouts raised enough havoc to keep the front line soft enough for our soldier/demo force to stay effective, and if our heavy caught up with the rushing force it was typically because we’d run into a well-guarded area, and the extra firepower really helped break through.
However, the opposing team began to seriously screw with our day: as best I can tell someone had the bright idea of forming a heavy-hunting squad, since a group of three coordinated, depressingly effective players started hanging just behind their defenses, and went straight for our heavy every time he tried to break through. We didn’t catch on to this tactic for a few minutes, which was more than enough time for the other team to build a crapload of third-level turrets and related nastiness around their final command point. We only had one medic-heavy combo at the time, and after several failed uber-rushes someone on our end suggested an extremely mean strategy: our medic-heavy team continued to spawn, uber, rush, die, and spawn, partly to keep the other team from scouting ahead and mainly to make them think that we didn’t have any better plan than “Keep ubering, maybe it’ll work *this *time”.
What they didn’t realize is that while that single medic-heavy team was acting as a distraction, eight of our remaining ten players had formed four additional medic-heavy teams and had fully charged their uber. (Our last two players had changed to spies, which becomes important in a second.)
When we finally had everything set up our decoy squad charged and hit their uber. A few seconds before it was due to wear out two of our remaining four teams stepped in and ubered, acting as a shield that was (hopefully) intended to keep our now-vulnerable decoy from taking more damage than his medic could handle. Once the newcomers were vulnerable we repeated step 2 with our last two teams, leaving five heavies and five medics advancing on a defensive line that had, by this point, been largely reduced to rubble.
The greatest part, of course, was the fact that our spies had both cloaked and sprinted to the last command point when the last of the turrets had been taken down. Our heavies had, by this point, gotten close enough for their guns to reach the command point, so all that was left was keeping the squishies alive long enough to register the capture. 