Republic of Folk

The session started off with Teizan's Gang Raid, where a bunch of gendarmes tried to clear out a cocaine den in a Tanoese jungle town. Sadly for us, the night was dark and the enemies were many. Our advance ground to a halt in the middle of the compound with enemies all around us, and when someone shouted for the medic, I ran inside the courtyard and got promptly executed by a guy in the shadows I didn't have a gun, but that wouldn't had helped because I was in BLUFOR, so automatically hostile to him.

Next up we played Kale's new mission After the Disaster Part One, I really enjoyed this mission, although it was a quite long one, so next time we could limit ourselves to just one cache. But I really enjoyed the roaming patrols that were all around us. Literary in every direction from the first compound I could see heat signatures as the UAV operator. Also, I really enjoyed that the enemies came in like waves, which meant that shooting was quite constant throughout the mission.

We continued with old, but gold, Boberro's Assault, but this time without rain. I took up command in this one and I wanted to try something new, so we went a bit off-road and attacked the town from the West, looking back at it , I think this was a poor idea, what we should have done, is leave HAT there on that elevated position overlooking the road and pull back, and try to close the distance between us and the town while being in cover. But hats off to Snippers who did +/- that, and they assaulted from the South, but sadly there were many bad things in there so we all died anyway Oh and SuicideKing, I think I saved your life at that car wreck, because after you got up, a Russian came and I started shooting, I think I hit you first and you went down, and then me and the Russian shot each other and died.

It was starting to become quite late, so as the last mission I ran Fer's new Za I, where we cosplayed as a HSLD Spetsnatz team and cleared the Balota airfield from aggressive forces. We went in all sneaky-beaky like, but mid-misson I was out of ammo, so I had to ask for some mags from my teammates. I wonder how was the ammo situation for other people? Anyway, one team neutralized the first AA emplacement and we neutralized the second one, and I also missed a rocket shooting at it. So.... yeah, I helped
After the AA guns were neutralized, the control tower was stormed, triggering a air assault from VDV forces. By this time we were just mopping up and destroying infrastructure

Missions played

• Gang Raid
• After the Disaster Part One
• Assault
• Za I

As always, big thanks to everyone that came, I hope you had a good time and a big thanks to the mission makers for making us new content that we can enjoy, without your work, we couldn't enjoy playing Arma for all this time.

Gang Raid

The concept of an urban corridor shooter is great, especially as a session opener. However, the lack of a briefing meant that I had to rely on the immediate visual cues after spawn. And those were: in front of me (and beyond the sandbag wall), an ambulance and paramedics that might have been unarmed. I hastily assumed we were not in immediate contact, so went forward too quickly and died instantly. Cretin.



After the Disaster Part One

Since I'd avoided leading in the previous mission, I stepped up to take this one (at a more sedate pace). Fighting in forests and clearings is always hard against the AI, because visibility simulation never feels quite fair. The key, I think, is to maximise the number of eyes and guns pointing towards the enemy at any one time. That sounds obvious, but actually in standard movements - even bounding - the numbers can fall off dramatically with ease.

My solution is a little WW1-ish: pace (slow, guns-up walking advances) and concentration (of men). The upside is that even with not much more than a reinforced fireteam walking in line, we could collectively spot the enemies and put a fair amount of fire down on them quickly. The downside, of course, is vulnerabilty to flanking forces and even - in this mission in particular - enemies getting in behind us. Thankfully, we had Kefirz on the drone, which meant that much of the time we were able to choose which enemy grouping to face - but it wasn't always the case.

The other advantage we had was a gun truck. A HMMWV with an M2 isn't invincible, even with a shield, but it can make a huge difference if used with care. So the opening part of my plan was thus:

1. Use the drone to understand the enemy groups around compound/clearing #1
2. Use ALL dismounts to sweep through the woods NE of compound/clearing #1 and establish a firing line as close to the nearest treeline as possible
3. Bring the gun truck up at the last moment to bring fire from 90 degrees to the line of our infantry assault
4. Smoke the compound and assault with infantry

This went off reasonably well, and soon we had control of the first compound. The enemy then counter-attacked from at least 3 directions, including from where we had come. This mean changing tactic: Boberro and I split the men across north and south buildings, and the gun truck came into the compound.

Thankfully, the enemy never managed to quite co-ordinate his attacks such that we were overwhelmed, though we lost our original gunner from the HMMWV. I think it's fair to assume that ASR AI also meant that some of the original defenders of the second compound (with the first cache) were drawn off towards us which meant that even by pulling an 'Alamo' at the first compound, we were grinding down their numbers.

Still, there comes a point where you have to start moving. So we began pushing south towards the second compound, initially to an intermediate line of small trees and bushes, and then across an open field (after lobbing as much smoke as we could). The HMMWV punched a hole in the chain-link and we were able to overwhelm what remained of the defenders.

Again, we switched from offence to defence, our second 'Alamo' being the half-built two-storey structure in the middle of the compound. Effective AR and rifle fire from everyone helped us see off various penny-packet attacks from nearby treelines, and even eliminate a small patrol in a field to our south.

Now finding ourselves in a lull, we took a moment to re-equip and prepare for the next advance. Once more, I had the luxury of making a plan, which was:

1. Get the gun truck on the track that ran south to the final compound
2. Arrange dismounts in a line to the truck's left, such that they were all in forest
3. Advance at walking pace, knowing the gun truck could dominate the open space to its right

And this we did, eventually coming to and overrunning the final compound with relative ease. Then we laid some charges, pulled back, and exploded the enemy's second cache.



Assault

One of the most - if not THE most - effective runs at this mission, though in truth the town was still full of enemy troops when our attack finally halted.

We began with a drive into the hills west of the town, and began by taking the small cluster of houses at the end of a track that leads straight east, down into the town itself. That went pretty smoothly as we had the jump on the defenders, but almost immediately we had to deal with several enemy troops to our right. They had come from the bunker up there and had the advantage of elevation relative to us. We prevailed.

HAT was up above us, with orders to cover the MSR and take out anything approaching from the north. We, meanwhile, attempted to move down-slope and closer to the enemy. What followed next was at least two separate instances of us moving down before being repelled by enemy fire (the second made use of some trees a little south of the track, but the outcome was identical).

We changed tack, and fell back to the higher ground, then moved along to take the bunker. From there, we exchanged fire with enemy infantry still in the town, but it was obvious that we would need to close with them if we were to finish the job. So we moved off to our south-east and almost immediately encountered an enemy on the slope. We made short work of him and reached the woodland, after which we hooked south and took out the enemy road bunker.

Now we were on the same elevation as the town, and forced to push up using the ruins for cover. I didn't realise this at the time, but two BMP-2s and a Shilka had come in from the north and taken up positions on high ground and the MSR itself. One of those - I'm told the BMP on the road - took my head off just after I popped it over a ruined wall.



Za I

Snippers asked me to lead the sniper team and engineers down the hill with the objective of taking out the western AAA position. At the same time, the rest of our force would fire on - but not occupy - the control tower.

We got into position and were ready to fire on the enemy quite quickly. Nixy, my sniper, easily took out the walking sentry and the engineers were just starting to cross the field when my UGLs had an unexpected result: the AAA exploded!

The rest of our force was making good work of the control tower troops, and we in turn began to engage (and kill) troops at the western gate. However, Snippers called for us all to disengage and RV to the north of the hangers; he wanted to pushed east and get rid of the final AAA position and possibly attack the barracks.

Snippers initially wanted us to support from high ground near the hangers, but someone in my element suggested we could actually be ready to storm the control tower once the second AAA position had been destroyed. With only 343s to work with, we agreed the signal would be a green flare. So we waited.

We also plinked a bit.

Then the flare was spotted and we rushed the control tower. Soon we were back in radio contact with Snippers and ordered to mop up our area and join the assault on the barracks. Meanwhile, the VDV were coming in to land.

The western-most helo landed and disgorged its paratroopers. I left Nixy on the roof of the control tower and moved off with the others to clear the hangers and nearby buildings. Then Boberro was wounded by an enemy hiding under a parked helo. I patched him up, but clearly some severe mental damage had been done to him.

Boberro detonated the charges he'd earlier laid on the control tower, destroying it completely and killing poor Nixy in the process.



I told Boberro to drop his weapon, but he just sat on the ground. Obviously, he was overcome with shock. But in the end we cleared the final structures near the hangers and soon had ourselves a sweet ride south in an enemy UAZ.

Nearing the barracks, we joined Snippers in the final attack. Perhaps inspired by Boberro's actions just earlier, he ordered the engineers to place charges against the side of the barracks building. We all retreated behind a steel barn and listened as the enemy structure was blown up. Then we piled into the ruins and executed any survivors. There was a tiny counter-attack from beyond the building, but we liquidated them easily.

Finally, I was able to lead Snippers to a place on the landing strip level with the barracks, and show him the bodies of an entire VDV squad that had died there; his failure to deal with the barracks had left those poor boys totally exposed after their helo put them down.

Snippers and Boberro will answer for their crimes when we return to Moscow.

My perspective of Gang Raid was as the Mission Maker. There was no briefing (I still have no idea what caused that, since I'd never touched the briefing settings) and fifteen seconds in a friendly M2 gunner murdered Fer (He has since been excised from existence for his crime).
So minus our Squad Leader (Fer), we charged in, shot some people, and got shot up, before everything exploded and we died.

Kalelovil's new mission, Disasterthingy, was pretty great aside from the niggle of desert camo in woodland and being a bit long. Admittedly, at the start, I sneakily nicked one of the Explosive Charges from a Humvee and only at the end found out it was mission critical. Lucky, I guess.
In this mission I was bounced around the groups a lot - First to ASL as backup, then to AVic (for some reason, not sure why), then went back to A1.

The traditional Malden mission, Assault, went explodingly well.
After moving HAT around for a bit, I sat on the M2 of a Humvee shooting at random enemies - before a tank turned up, laughed at a TOW missile, and shot me in the face.
Highlight of this mission was Harakka's magical kill-everything rocket, which killed a full fireteam/squad of infantry and a transport truck.

Za was very dark.
As the mission progressed, there were AI five to ten metres in front of us that nobody had noticed, a friendly fire incident that had me dodging a lot of bullets and had downed our SL, and them some more AI five to ten metres in front of us that just shot me before going back to the barracks and calling it a day.

Gang Raid
After the Disaster Part One
Assault
Za I

As far as I'm concerned, Gang Raid never happened. We've started as unarmed paramedics, so instead of going into action I stayed in the starting location wondering on how to make medical drones work for blufor. Then some enemy came to the spawn point and killed me.
I actually think that unarmed paramedics are a fun twist, and short straight to the point missions are the best, but these two probably should't be mixed together. And this mission starts to close to action - shots where fired before game even loadouts for everybody. Anyways, it looks like a fun mission if this issues get fixed.

After the Disaster (apparently Part One) was one these missions that made me happy Fer is such an overprotective control bitch. I'm a shitty FTL. If there's one thing I realised after that mission, is that I should probably belive in my team more (eg saying "Red - west, Blue - north"), and not "do the Fer" (sorry fer) having to run around the place deciding positions for everyone. And when I think about it, even though it ended up without casualties, probably chargin on enemies at the edge of the forest wasn't too clever (though my reasoning was, there's only one or two enemies and we want to make sure they're dead before we turn our backs on them).

Version of Assault we played was a test version I uploaded and forgot about. Good thing was, Kefirz had access to artillery support (smoke screen). But on the bad side, there was no info about this feature in the briefing. If used on approach, it'd probably save us casualties before we got to town.
I'm saying "we" but my team was sitting in relative safety on a hill, waiting for eventual counter attack. Which finally came, and we botched it and lost our laucher; and hummvee. After we lost Teizan and car with backup tubes, and finding out that broken tripod plus working tube equals burned out launcher, we moved to scavenge some enemy RPG's, but we found enemy BMP instead.

Za I was dark indeed. And that was fun. Blowing up AAA emplacements with covering fire instead of explosives was fun as well. So was blowing Nixy up...

boberro wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 30, 2017 3:15 pm

After the Disaster (apparently Part One) was one these missions that made me happy Fer is such an overprotective control bitch. I'm a shitty FTL. If there's one thing I realised after that mission, is that I should probably belive in my team more (eg saying "Red - west, Blue - north"), and not "do the Fer" (sorry fer) having to run around the place deciding positions for everyone.

I don't think there's anything wrong with FTLs assigning people to specific windows or doorways in a building defence, or asking ARs to take up specific positions when coordinating a defence. It's not great when an SL does it, but in that mission I tried only to do it when I was de facto looking after troops that were away from Boberro (their FTL), such as in the northern building during the first 'Alamo'.

But yeah, I'm a terrible micro-manager and that's not 100% okay. You can always prevent this by NOT LEAVING THE CO SLOT OPEN FOR SO LONG THAT AS A HOST I FEEL COMPELLED TO TAKE IT!


I love you really. Except you Tigershark; not even your mother loves you.

xoxo Fer