Republic of Folk

Missions

• Old Men (ASR AI radios)
• Old Men (no ASR AI radios)
• Assault
• Dynamic Recon Patrol Dress-up

We were rusty, and we were few ... but we died like the pros hoes that we are.

The newly reformed Third International Fighting Brigade of Takistan in the name of Ronald Reagan consisted of 8 happy volunteers: Boberro, Bodge, Bormanov, Fer, harakka, head, MrKev and Wafflynumber (who was in command). I want to say that in Old Men we bravely fought their way to the airbase, commandeered a Russian helicopter and flew to safety in the West. Except I can't, because we all died barely a block from the mosque. Twice.

After that, in Assault, Bodge led us on a brave ... er ... assault ... of a small town on Malden. It went swimmingly at first: we spotted the enemy bunker before it could obliterate our truck, set up a BOF and stealthily moved our assault element to a position perpendicular to the enemy's position. The first engagement - taking down the bunker team and flipping their KORD around to face the town - went very smoothly. However, after that things began to go downhill for us. The town was, shall we say, amply garrisoned. Russians poured out of buildings, and then a truck, and then a BMP-1 showed up. We engaged them from positions in and around the bunker, until gradually our numbers were diminished and the enemy was able to flank us on the high ground to our left (west). As Housemaster liked to say 6 years ago: we all died.

Finally, and not at all because we'd run out of missions*, we parachuted back into Takistan, this time as elite VDV troops in a run of Dynamic Recon Patrol Dress-up Simulator 2017. This went exceedingly well at first, since we basically landed, ambled down a ridge to take a look at the town of Shakulurakay (sp?) - and were promptly told we'd completed our mission and had to extract. Naturally, we ignored that order and moved in to kill everyone in the place. Except the marines in the AO didn't want to co-operate with this plan.

We managed to get down the ridge a further 100-150m, and watch an enemy vehicle drive up the road past us, before their forward patrol popped-up 20m to our front and a firefight ensued. They were ahead of us on the ridge, they were across the valley, they were down in the valley. I got wounded and rolled down the hill (this must be a feature). Then there were grenades landing all over the place, and then there was some chatter about whether or not those grenades were ours or theirs, and then I was running away from rock to rock, thinking about how I'd never wanted to be in the army anyway. Then I died, and I think everyone else was dead or bleeding out on a barren hillside nearby.



I'd love to hear from the others here - but personally, even though we were few in number and died horribly in all the missions, I think we're on the right track, and that with a handful more folks showing up we could be back to something really special. Thank you to everyone who came along tonight, I hope you'll be back.



* We had a mission for Tanoa, but not everyone has Apex yet; we may be better served avoiding making missions on Tanoa for a few weeks whilst people recover from the financial calamity that is Christmas.

It went... well... It went well.

Old Men (ASR AI radios)
Due to everyone's amazing confidence in my superb piloting abilities we decided I was the best fit for the vital pilot role. Armed with the lethal PP-2000, I was a force to be reckoned with. Reckoned with by a horde of soldiers converging at us from either end of an alley, 100 metres from the start point.

Old Men (no ASR AI radios)
So with our hostile unit homing beacon removed things went much better with the second run through, we bounded over streets, took cover in buildings and engaged enemies to great effect. We passed the alley where we got murdered the time before and then got shot about 20 metres further on. SUCCESS! Also i managed to kill 4 people with the PP-2000 i feel like that deserves some kind of medal.

Assault
The plan with this was to get eyes on from the road South of the target to work out the best way to push into the town. I wanted to get hard cover rather sharpish and the first bit of it was the enemy bunker pointing towards us from the road. We pulled off the road to work out an assault on the bunker, from which we could take on the rest of the town. Bob and Waffles set up on the road to keep eyes on the bunker and open up if anything went south while the rest of use advanced through the cover of the forest to get a shot on the KORD gunner.

As we took the shot on the gunner the MGs opened up and the bunker was neutralised rather sharpish and I took up position next to the bunker ordering the MG gunners to bring up the vehicles and join the squad. Unfortunately the AI had miss-interpreted the mission name and figured they were the ones that should do the assaulting. We cleared a fire team or two and started to push but as soon as we were away from the bunker it became clear that the enemy was not about to stop pushing. Amidst much smoke, gunfire and cries of BMP our numbers dwindled as our bodies were left on the verge of the road. Must say the rain along side the coast was super pretty.

Dynamic Recon Patrol Dress-up
We haloed in, looked at the town and got told to extract, we should have. We didn't so we went a bit further and got mowed down on the side of the hill from multiple directions.

Good to be back! First 'proper' bit of ArmA-ing I've done in 18+ months, here's to many more sessions.

Old Men (ASR) - Rifleman
Lots of radio testing and checks, and then we're off. Jump up to the top of the walls to scout the area and spot an enemy squad pretty close. Someone shoots by mistake but the AI doesn't seem to notice, so we make it across the road only to get completely surrounded and shot to pieces very quickly.


Old Men (NO ASR) - Rifleman again
There are some suggestions that ASR's settings may have played a pivotal part in our speedy demise previously, so said settings are changed and off we go again. Things seem to be running a lot smoother, moving forward without detection, until point man Boberro, via radio, goes 'enemy patrol is HEEEERE!! *bam bam bam*' and the chaos ensues once more. I think I might have died in the exact same spot.

Credit to the AI for the way it attempts to surround us once it makes contact. Puts an emphasis on needing to move quickly if you get detected, otherwise you end up bogged down and up against the odds.


Assault - RPG man
Objective: drive up the road, take the town, hold the town.
We all hop into a truck (commander Bodge excluded) and drive along until a bunker's spotted on the horizon. Some nice use of terrain and planning helps us knock out the bunker with little resistance, digging in at that position as the Soviets respond. Despite being in a seemingly strong position and utilising the bunker's HMG, I get killed outright by a lucky shot. Grumble Grumble.



Dynamic Recon Patrol
HALO drop in and some confusing intel telling us to extract ignored, we make our way along a hill, avoiding contact until, well, we made contact. I'm not sure if it was an error at my end, but I had no map markers for units in this missions, which made things pretty confusing as people started to fall. I managed to revive a few people before I got shot down myself.

Thoughts
STHUD - Occlusion makes things a lot harder, but I'm not sure whether that's down to increased challenge or simple inconvenience. Happy to carry on giving it a try, but I think sessions work better without occlusion.

Revive - We really need a drag function! The new revive system works pretty well, I like the timer, but with the time it takes to revive someone being able to drag them out of harm's way is pretty essential.

thekev506 wrote:STHUD - Occlusion makes things a lot harder, but I'm not sure whether that's down to increased challenge or simple inconvenience. Happy to carry on giving it a try, but I think sessions work better without occlusion.

We'll be disabling occlusion in the next version of our mission template, so this issue should go away soon.

thekev506 wrote:Revive - We really need a drag function! The new revive system works pretty well, I like the timer, but with the time it takes to revive someone being able to drag them out of harm's way is pretty essential.

Agreed, although I guess we'll have to wait to see if this can be modded in. Bear in mind that the bleed-out time is currently set to a generous 5 minutes, so even if you don't have a medic around to do the rapid-healing, you have 2-3 minutes to win the firefight before attending to your downed comrades. Or run away until you can't hear their cries for help anymore. Just saying.

Truth is, we would be very interested in using ACE, if only it didn't force it's medical cosplay on users. Even the basic version of their medical system completely deletes FAK and adds all different medical syringes, and body parts.
Now if we were able to overwrite basic medical module, and turn it into non-cretin medical module...