Splatsville is the heart of the turn 3 community. The in-game hub works like a social media platform where players can post art and messages tied to their characters. While these posts often pick up on memes and jokes about current events, I’ve also noticed people sharing cryptic yet desperate messages like “INK BASE DAMMIT” and “Ink base, please!” This debate quickly took over my twitter and TikTok Feeds also, which highlights a debate about strategy in Splatoon. How much ink should you spread on your side of the field?
In Splatoon, you shoot ink instead of regular bullets. You can easily swim through your color ink while the enemy’s ink will slow you down and make you more vulnerable to attacks. In a game mode called Turf War, two teams of four compete to try to cover the map with their ink. Whichever team covers more of the map wins.
Now some players are confused about how much time they should spend inking their side of the card. Players are both frustrated by teammates who don’t shoot ink on their side of the field, and by teammates who appear to spend entire minutes on that side of the map. So I asked a pro Splatoon player and coach to foot the bill: do we ink the base or not?
ProChara, a professional Splatoon player and trainer who played on a team that finished second in Nintendo’s 2019 North American Championship at PAX East, explained that players generally want to start playing “most” of the spawn- Points to paint, but not the whole. “Leaving a bit on your spawn can be good for getting specials when your team goes down later in match 4, but leaving too much means you may have to paint your spawn when you need to be in the middle , which is a bit late,” he told Polygon via Twitter DM.
Basically, players should paint a decent portion of their side of the map, but not so much that it prevents them from holding the center of the map when they face off against the other team. “Make sure you have enough control of your own card early on, then play to try to stay in the middle and finally play at the end to stay alive,” he said. If you die and respawn, you can also paint parts of your end of the field, although it’s best to stay alive and hold the middle section of a map in Turf War for as long as possible.
Here you go. As with many game strategies, the real answer is a bit more complicated than the memes, but now players new to Splatoon and shooters can get a good idea of how best to start a match.
