The greatest offense is a great defense, or something like that. When attacking as the T side in Counter-Strike 2, you’ll be tasked with holding a defensive position once the bomb is planted. Known as an afterplant, this 40-second stage of the round is essentially a role reversal of the two factions, turning the CT side into the aggressor, and the T side into the defender.

A successful afterplant is one where the bomb reaches the end of its 40-second fuse and explodes, or all CT players are eliminated. In today’s blog post, we’ll be covering 5 tips to increase your chances of a successful afterplant.

Tip 1: Prioritize Crossfires

Getting into strong positions early in an afterplant is key to ensuring you can hold the line. Part of a strong position can often be a teammate in a complementary angle, holding a potential vulnerable area for your position.

Crossfires work best when the CT side can’t throw much utility to nullify or flush you out of your position, so choose where you stand wisely. Some examples of strong crossfire positions are Dark and Newbox on the B bomb-site of Inferno, or E-Box and Pizza on Anubis. How effective a crossfire is depends on where the bulk of the enemies will be coming from, but if you can read the situation effectively and organize quickly, there’s no cracking your bomb-site defense.

Tip 2: Note how many are alive

Generally, how many players are alive on the map will dictate how you should play an afterplant scenario. If you have one or more players alive more than the enemy team, chances are you should consider playing a bit more passive. Use your utility early, run the clock down, and force the CT side to make a move. If you’re down by one or more players, consider looking for opportunities to make it even. Flash back into a choke point, sneak your way into an advanced position to flank the retake attempt, or just take a fight.

If you get too aggressive early while you have a man advantage, you’re giving valuable fights to a CT side whose win condition often is “get kills early, otherwise save.” On the other side of the coin, if you play too passively in a man disadvantage and play the trade game, you’ll almost always lose because they have the manpower to out trade-frag you. The best way to avoid both of those is to take note of how many players are alive, and act accordingly.

Tip 3: Plant smart

A bad plant position can ruin an afterplant defense. There’s nothing worse than getting into strong positions, only to find that a teammate planted in a spot that makes your seemingly strong position, utterly useless.

You can avoid this by planting smart. The default plant spot isn’t always good. In fact, sometimes it’s the worst spot you can plant. It all depends on the situation. Planting the bomb in a position where you’re safe from enemy attack is a start, but it certainly doesn’t end there. If you’re planting the bomb, you have the ability to dictate where your bomb-site defense will set up. It’s best to choose a spot that is visible to multiple angles, preferably those that your teammates have cleared, or are actively clearing.

As the bomb carrier, you call the shots here. It’s also imperative that you call out exactly where the bomb is planted, so nobody is confused when you inevitably lose to a smoke defuse. If you aren’t the bomb carrier, listen or look for where the bomb is planted, and position yourself accordingly.

Tip 4: Utility is your friend

Utility can make or break your afterplant defense. One well placed smoke or molotov can completely stifle a retake attempt. Overextending to throw said utility can also get you fragged, putting your team in a disadvantageous state.

Chaining smoke grenades at a chokepoint is one way to stomp out an attempted retake. Communicate with your team as to who’s smoking first, and you can have a position smoked off for almost the entirety of the bomb timer. Incendiary grenades, when used properly, can completely ruin any advance onto the bomb-site, or stop any attempted defuse. One potential side effect of using incendiaries on the bomb is that it will almost surely induce a drop of any remaining smoke grenade onto the bomb.

As is true in most situations where you throw utility, lineups reign supreme. Freehand utility is sometimes necessary, but often times a good freehand grenade is made great with a set lineup. Some great afterplant utility can be learned in NADR, which is included in your Refrag subscription. Over 400 pre-loaded grenades means the lineup you’re after is probably already there!

Tip 5: Use Refrag’s Retakes to practice your afterplants!

Repetition is one of the best ways to improve in any discipline, and there’s no better way to improve your ability to hold the line as the T side than to play through as many of those scenarios as possible! The Retakes mode is an excellent way to do this. Only one problem: public retake servers are often full, leaving no room for your friends to join. Additionally, you have little to no control over server location, map choice, and sometimes weapon selection. Don’t waste your time. Subscribe to Refrag.

Your subscription to Refrag includes a fully featured, on-demand retake server that you and your friends can use at any time. No more waiting for open slots on a public server! Simply start your Refrag server with the Retakes mode selected, or type .retakes in the in-game chat to set the server to the Retakes mod.

Once in server, you can change weapons by typing .weapon-name, such as .ak for an AK-47, .awp for an AWP and so on. .start will restart the game. For a full list of commands, see the Refrag Wiki.

The best Retake experience is waiting for you on Refrag. Click below to get started!