Don't waste your bots

Just did it again. Used only my Carnage in Shenzhen. My team lost. I ran away from a Gareth which ran from its spawn to our spawn and captured our beacon. I hid behind the buildings to conserve my Carnage's hp. This is not a good way to play.

I never understood the concept behind "cowardness" and "honest fight", too.
It's the same in streetracing here. My 4wd can outperform any BMW in bad road, rain, dirty asphalt, mud asphalt and of course in winter.
And every BMW owner is shouting: "It was not fair!! We should try to do it fair way, in a situation where everybody's equal!"

For me it sound like: "Let's pick situation where I am at advantage, and call it "equal"".

Same here; if you are smarter - you can use cover, ambush, distance to your advantage.

Simple situation - I am in Molot Griff, and I'm shooting Thunder Carnage in Canyon, who is running at me from 800m, while backpedaling.
Am I being coward? Do I need to wait until he will be at 100m and start shooting only then?

Questions, questions...

bilbobaggins
I think with time and experience, you'll be able to quickly tell if you have an advantage or disadvantage against an incoming red. And it'll become more of a snap decision of "can I engage directly" or "should I use cover/play this one smart"? It's not about playing a run and hide game all the time. It's about knowing when it's a smart decision to wait a situation out.

Example would be me in a Griffin/Orkan/Piñata against a Gareth(of any variety). I know I have a huge advantage, so I'm good to engage directly - as in I don't need, actually I don't want, cover between me and him. The next part of that engagement though is to not let that specific advantage pull you out into a disadvantage. If you can kill the Gareth without using your jump, then do that. Often times jumping or over-pursuing will pull you out into the open and you get obliterated. So in this scenario, I will try to use my surroundings to provide me cover against the rest of the field while I'm dealing with the Gareth.

In your scenario earlier with your Carnage, I would try to keep either cover or my own teammates between myself and any red with plasma. I'll give you a real life scenario (let's make it comparable to your Carnage v Gareth). Let's say your in a very strange, but very real war. You have an enemy coming at you, and he's equipped with a rifle. You have nothing but a set of brass knuckles, but you're one of the best in the world at close quarters combat. You wouldn't rush out into the open from 300ft away trying to take this guy out, because a couple shots from his rifle will put you down quickly. You'll use cover until he either comes to you, or you sneak up on him. Then, in close quarters combat, his rifle is much less useful and you have a huge advantage.

Playing it smart doesn't make you a coward. It makes you the winner.

But the Gareth was not afraid of my Zeus Carnage... he confidently ran towards me to capture our home beacon. He didn't chase me around... he waited for me as I hid like a coward. What should I have done... spawned in my Orkan Rog (the only bot in my hangar with missiles)? I'm not fond of ejecting out of healthy bots.

bilbobaggins
Personally, I'd wait it out and keep the Gareth on the opposite side of the building from you. Zeus Carnage vs Plasma Gareth is almost literally an impossible scenario for you. Your only option to save your bot is to "keep him busy" until a teammate kills him while he's distracted with you. Then if the Gareth turns to face your teammate, you can pop out and zap him in the tushy.
The problem here is you have to rely on teammates, and those aren't always reliable. Try to gauge the field and see if any of your teammates are even close by. If they are, wait it out. If there are none anywhere nearby, and this Gareth has you cornered in your spawn, then I would scrap your Carnage in favor of the Rog. (Possibly let the Gareth shoot you until his Taran runs out and then immediately scrap into your Rog) That way you'll have 5 seconds of no Taran. The net result of this is essentially a 1:1 bot tradeoff, which isn't bad for worst case scenario.
In my story of an example, I did get lucky in the fact that my teammates arrived for support just in time. Moon Map is also a map that naturally funnels people through the middle, so I was bound to get support eventually if I waited long enough. The luck part was that the Ancilot was just getting close enough that I wasn't going to be able to use the pillars as ample cover anymore.

I know there's a ton of things that go into mastering this type of strategy, so it isn't something you'll get great at immediately. It'll be something that has to develop over time and many games. I've been playing for about seven months and I hit google and these boards immediately looking for skills and strategy to start developing. And even after seven months of practice and development, I sometimes still don't follow my own advice, and sometimes I simply fail at it. The story above happened to be a game where I played almost all my scenarios nearly perfectly - which is a very rare occurance.