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Half-Life 2 Hints
Barricading Strategy
1 of 11: The main idea of this strategy is to heavily fortify a small area so that the soldiers can't get to you or easily knock over your sentry guns.
2 of 11: My favorite place to barricade is the short hallway with the infinite SMG ammo crate, but the hallway with the health and armor rechargers is also a good choice for obvious reasons.
3 of 11: You could even set yourself up in an open prison cell to make sure you couldn't be attacked from two sides at once, but you'd be in big trouble if the soldiers managed to toss a grenade in there with you.
4 of 11: Once you've picked a spot to fortify, be sure to set everything else up before you get the sentry guns from the storage lockers. Remember that placing the last one of those somewhere is what triggers the soldier attack.
5 of 11: You'll want to carry any portable supplies into your area and drop them. This includes any health packs, armor batteries, and ammo that you can find.
6 of 11: After you do that, you'll want to find all the barrels and crates you can and set them up as barricades. If you put your sentry guns behind such a barricade, they'll be much harder for the enemy to knock down.
7 of 11: TIP: Before you jump over a rail and drop down into the lower cell block D8 area, you could go back through the previous areas (all the way back to the zappy-water room) and find supplies to toss over the rail so you'll have them when you drop down there. Also, use the gravity gun to move some big items down so that you'll have a lot of barricade material to work with. For example, the open office on the upper floor of the cell block has several large and small filing cabinets and a large desk that you can export.
8 of 11: If you've gotten yourself enough barricade material, you can totally barricade one end of your chosen hallway and just defend the other one, or you can partially barricade both ends and have sentry guns covering each end (with you in the middle either helping out or hiding under cover).
9 of 11: I found that the best barricades to have sentry guns fire over are the two big green file cabinets lying on their sides at one end of the hall and the big desk at the other end. There's *no* way soldiers can get past that! (Do watch out for grenades and manhacks, though. You might want to have the gravity gun ready to deal with those two menaces.)
10 of 11: TIP: The soldiers don't usually use grenades against sentry guns with this setup, so if you keep under cover so they hardly ever see you, you probably won't be getting any grenades tossed into your fortified shelter. (An interesting note is that I had more trouble with grenades knocking around my barricades when I used the recharger hallway than when I used the SMG ammo crate hallway.)
11 of 11: If you did a good job fortifying your spot, you can basically just crouch behind a bit of cover and wait it all out.
