This week we take a look at Cobblestone and show you a range of Terrorist and Counter-Terrorist strategies that your team can employ when playing this map. The map is notorious for its important Drop Zone and is often disliked by high level players due to its inherent Terrorist side bias. Throughout the article, smokes, flashes, and Molotovs will be shown in videos for you and your team to learn. The viewmodel shown, is the preset classic viewmodel.

The Counter-Terrorist Side

The two most common Terrorist pistol rounds are a Drop to A or B Platform rush. As such, your Counter-Terrorist pistol set-up should be aiming to directly counter these Terrorist pushes. To begin with, nobody should play in Drop, due to the close range advantage it gives to Terrorists over the Counter-Terrorist USP-S. Instead, you should have one player dedicated to A, who should be aiming to be as aggressive as possible towards A Long and Danger to get as much information as possible. Another player will play in the Drop Window. His job is to spot if the Terrorists are doing a Drop rush and, if they are doing so, he should aim to try and get one or two kills, while falling back to A Ramp through Connector. He might even prefer to have a Five-SeveN over armour, given it does much better damage to the body and has a greater magazine size, so it is better at dealing with Terrorists rushing through the tight choke points. On B, I recommend your strongest pistol player is situated around the Statue on Site, as he is able to have maximum impact on the round, no matter how the Terrorists rush B. One player should buy a kit and a smoke and go to Chicken Coop, keeping the smoke for a ninja defuse, mid-retake on the A or B bomsite. Finally, your last player should hold around Rock, watching for Terrorists pushing Sidewalk and out Drop via Generator, however he can also help pick off Terrorists as they cross to the B Site from Platform.

When playing anti-eco rounds on the Cobblestone Counter-Terrorist side, the main threats that you will face as a team are B and Drop rushes, due to the close ranges and advantages they offer to the highly mobile pistols. Therefore, if you are expecting a bit of a forcebuy from the Terrorists, I would recommend playing a similar set-up to the pistol. However the A player should aim to play slightly defensively, by always being in a position where he can safely fall back to site when pressured. Thus, he is able to buy time using his utility for the Window player to rotate to the Connector door and help hold off the Terrorists pushing A, while the Rock player can move to Generator if he wishes to keep a closer eye on Drop. However, if you feel the Terrorists will have no armour and just a few pistols, I would recommend playing two players on A in close proximity to one another, for example around A Long. Then have two players play close together around Drop, with one towards the Window and one towards Generator. Finally, the last player should try to stay close to the rest of him team while watching B. I recommend he plays around Rock, using the range offered by his rifle to pick-off Terrorists as they cross to the site from Platform.

On the gun rounds, it is important to be constantly varying your Counter-Terrorist positions, using the many boosts, one-way smokes and off-angles available to you on Cobblestone, such as at Tree on the B site or by the telephone pole on the A site. As well as varying the overall tone of your Counter-Terrorist defence. Do you show heavy presence in Drop? Are you aggressive towards B Platform? Or did you gamble stack three players over towards the A Site? However, due to the prevalence of rushes executed by the Terrorists to take B Platform and Drop control, it is important you and your team talk about how you want to react to different rushes. For example, you might agree to pre-molly B Platform every round and follow it up with a HE grenade to stop any B rushes, whereas you might decide that if the other team rush Drop, you will let them do so, while you reposition to retake Drop control off of a predetermined flash. I cannot tell you how to best do this, as this is greatly influenced by the types of players on your team and your opponents. All I can say is that you should try the same reactions against multiple different opponents in practice, so that you can learn which reactions work best, against which types of opponent.

That said, generally teams play with one dedicated A player, one dedicated B player, one dedicated Drop player and two swing players. Generally the A player is a versatile and aggressive player who is happy to secondary AWP, whereas your main AWPer heads towards B, in order to fight for B Platform control. The last two players are your “Swing Players” who will need to rotate based off of the information that your team have. By default, one should go towards Drop Window and help hold this highly important area of the map, while the other “Swing Player” should be doing the majority of the rotating. Often he will start off towards A and will rotate to B, if nothing is seen on A by the dedicated A player.

One way of getting aggressive on the B Platform is to smoke at the back and use a couple Molotovs, coupled with an AWP to clear all the corners on the B Platform. For this push, I recommend you play only one player on A, two riflers in drop and have your AWPer and a rifler head towards B Platform. When the initial smokes on B Platform fade, the rifler can simply smoke the back as shown, whilst the AWPer holds the close right cubby and watches for any Terrorists to run out after the rifler Molotovs it. Then the AWPer can throw a Molotov for the back left corner and can watch for anyone running out to avoid a fiery death. Then, you can have the rifler push up and hold B Platform from a highly aggressive positon and hope he can hear the Terrorist’s footsteps around Dragonlore. Another approach is to leave the AWP alone watching the long B Platform angle from the wooden box and stack an extra player or two over towards the A Bombsite.

The Terrorist Side

For a strong and simple Terrorist pistol round, I would recommend a simple Drop to A split. To begin with, your strongest pistol player should go to mid and try to quietly lurk up towards A, baiting your main unit of players. The other four players will head towards Drop together and walk in B Lobby, waiting for a few seconds to see if the Counter-Terrorists prenade the top of Drop. Three of the players will buy Kevlar and one of them will buy a Molotov and two flashes to throw as shown. Before throwing the last flashbang, let the three players who jumped down Drop to all get close to the Window and strafe jump out of the Window. These three players will take the bomb and rush towards the A site, with two players heading towards Balcony and one player towards the Connector Door. The player with no armour should stay around Drop or Connector to try and get one or two kills as the Counter-Terrorists rotate to A from B.

A good anti eco round to run on the Terrorist side is to have three players head towards B, with one sat at the top of Drop and two players sitting passively on B Platform. The other two players head towards Middle and wait for the Counter-Terrorists to push. If none of the Counter-Terrorists push, then two players with SMGs can group up above drop and use the Drop control nades shown to take control of Drop and rush on to B. At the same time, three players with UMPs or rifles push out B Platform, playing contact with no smoke at the broken wall to avoid Counter-Terrorists with pistols sneaking through the smoke. If anybody has an AWP, they can hold up on Platform and play an “overwatch” role.

On the Counter-Terrorist side of Cobblestone, it is very difficult to get information about where the Terrorists are, as there are few positions you can easily push. Therefore, as the Terrorist side, if you can limit Counter-Terrorist control of A long and Middle, then they have truly no information about where the Terrorists are. You can throw a few simple flashbangs and smokes as those shown, to help take control. If you are looking to take this control, I would recommend having one player play passively in Drop, one player towards B Long, with an AWP if you have it and three players who take the map control around A. Once you have this control you can leave a player to hold it whilst you take control of Drop, or you can play off of the control and do a set strategy on either bombsite using the limited information of the Counter-Terrorists to fake them, or delay rotations. To take control of Drop, you can use the same utility sequence as that shown in the anti eco.

One execute you can run on the A site is the A Long execute. This execute relies on you having Middle and A Long control, before having four players group up towards A Long. The final player is left to lurk in whichever way he thinks will benefit your team the most. If the other team are aggressive towards B Platform, he can take an AWP and hold it passively. If the other team are good at falling back behind executes and playing for the retake, he may be better off going for a backstab though Drop. The main group of players will need to throw four smokes and at least the two Molotovs for the back of site, as they clear two common angles that the Counter-Terrorists use on A. After getting the bomb down, one player should stay on site, two players should retreat to A Long and try to kill Counter-Terrorists as they cross to the site and the last player should try to get aggressive towards the balcony off of a teammates flash. However, it is unlikely all four of you will survive the execute. The player furthest back on A Long can also head towards Middle and aim to lurk up the ramp and kill a Counter-Terrorist in the side of the head.

Another execute you can do is towards the B site with all five players. Two smokes go towards site, one smoke for broken wall and one smoke for sidewalk. The AWPer should hold for an aggressive Counter-Terrorist peeking stairs, whilst the rest of the team throw their smokes, followed by Molotovs for Tree and Chicken Coop. It is also a good idea to throw a Molotov for the B Platform stairs to delay any aggressive Counter-Terrorists. Then you simply explode out B Platform together as a unit. This execute is better to use on a half-buy or force, due to its all-in nature, as well as it giving you a good chance to overwhelm Counter-Terrorists with you Tec-9s, however it would also work well with guns if your team were struggling to get your initial Terrorist round.

In Conclusion

Overall, Cobblestone is a map that far favours the Terrorists, if they are able to consistently take map control as there are so few avenues for the Counter-Terrorists to get information. I would recommend that in practice you force your team to practice the process of taking Long, Middle and Drop control as much as possible, as it makes it so much easier to win rounds. Off of that map control is where your team's style, be it an execution based or individualistic style, can shine through and win your team rounds. Once again, here is a Youtube playlist with all of the smoke videos shown in this article.

Thank you very much for reading and I hope to see you again on the Team Dignitas website, for the next instalment of the Team Dignitas Weekly Map Guides, where we will be discussing the strategy behind Cache.

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