Splatoon 3 pro explains the best way to start your Turf War matches

Splatsville, the heart of the Splatoon 3 community. In-game hub acts as a social media platform for players to post messages and art related to their characters. While these posts often riff on memes and make jokes about current events, I also noticed people sharing cryptic, but desperate messages like “INK BASE DAMMIT” and “ink home base, please!” This debate quickly took over my Twitter and TikTok feeds too, highlighting a debate over strategy in Splatoon. Which side should you use to spread ink?

Splatoon allows you to shoot ink, instead of bullets. You can swim through your color ink easily, whereas the enemy’s ink will slow you down and make you more vulnerable to attacks. Turf War is an online game where four teams compete to make the map as complete. The team that covers the most of the map wins.

Some players have difficulty deciding how long they should spend inking their own side of the map. Players are both frustrated by teammates who won’t shoot ink on their side of the field, but also with team members who seem to spend entire minutes hanging out on that side of the map. The question was posed to me by a professional Splatoon coach and player: Should we ink the base or not?

ProChara, a professional Splatoon player and coach who played on a team that placed second at Nintendo’s North American championship at PAX East in 2019, explained that players will generally want to start with painting “most” of the spawn point, but not all of it. “Leaving a bit by your spawn can be good to help get specials if your team goes 4 down later into the match, but leaving too much means that you might have to be painting your spawn when you need to be in mid, which is a bit too late,” he told Polygon via Twitter DM.

The idea is that players should paint at least a portion of their own map. However, they shouldn’t be able to hold the center of the map against other teams. “Make sure you get ample control of your own map at the start, then play to try and hold mid, and finally at the end play to stay alive,” he said. As you die and respawn, you can also paint bits of your end of the field as well, although it’s best to stay alive as long as possible in Turf War and hold the middle section of a map.

There you have it. Like many game strategies, the answer to this question is not as simple as the memes. However, new players to Splatoon or shooters will be able to get a better idea about how best to start matches.