Republic of Folk

Missions:

• Su Casa Es Mi Casa
• Bunker Busters
• Drizzle
• Podgotovka

What a way to kick off our second year as a Republic, eh? We had a terriffic turnout from citizens, mainlanders, military advisers and even a space nazi. Huge, huge thanks to Aqarius, Boberro, Bormanov, BrightCandle, egg651, Halop, Head, kalel, Kefirz, Kefirz, Palm, Pebs, Shock, Teizan, Tigershark, Wolf and a welcome to new face ProFilip. But I think Kefirz put it perfectly:


There's a lot I'd love to write about the session - we had truckloads of atmosphere - but to get the AAR going I'll re-post some of the images people shared in the Discord channel (with credits of course!):

Teizan's ill-fated tank platoons; barely 20 minutes after this photo was taken pretty much everybody was dead, most at the hands of 'White Tiger' Shock. Head's Russian tank platoons - including 'White Tiger' Shock, who would go on to command the tank responsible for all comabt kills of Teizan's tank force. (Credit: Halop)


In Podgotovka, space nazi Head elected to do possibly the most dangerous Uber job in existence. (Credit: Pebs)


Seemingly powersliding his way towards danger at all times, this was Head at his finest. (Credit: Pebs)


The element with the biggest Uber bill was Kefirz and Halop's ST1 (but they never complained about the scope). (Credit: Halop)


In the end, though, maybe the real hero was th UAZ itself. We never did recover Head's body. (Credit: Halop)


FAC and map-click specialist egg (left) calls in only harmless smoke rounds whilst CO Fer looks on. (Credit: Halop)

Eventually, we turned to experienced (old) VDV reinforcements. (Credit: Boberro)


That helicopter in the background is clearly - clearly - an unarmed transport. (Credit: Egg)



If anyone has them, I would love to see images from Teizan's super atmospheric mission, Bunker Busters.

Fer, the tank platoon picture is actually of OPFOR. Now on with the AAR!

Su Casa Es Mi Casa, the classic (and somewhat worn out) 3IFB parachuting house invasion. I was A1 FTL, and Shock was CO.
When we finally got started, two people suffered a parachute collision and died on impact. Those two people happened to be Shock, and the New Guy, ProFilip. After they were respawned (and Shock spent the rest of the mission half naked), we got on with it.
A1 served as a relatively ineffectual (due to lack of visibility) base of fire element while A2 moved up on a different angle, and then we moved up and got to shooting things. Eventual Victory Fire.

I, as the mission maker, was completely blindsided by how well Bunker Busters turned out. I'd worked on it for a while, figured it was mediocre, and then stopped working on it sometime in October - which caused quite a few issues.
Then we started it, and it was incredibly atmospheric, if a lot foggier than I remembered. I don't actually really know how to do the mission justice in retelling how it went in text, considering we didn't actually do much before we all died.
This mission is one of the rare few in which we actually interacted with landmines - The outer minefield claimed Egg's life earlier, and inner-fort mines laid next to Barbed Wire and concrete walls - undetectable with the loss of myself and Egg - claimed the unexpecting lives of Tigershark, ProFilip, and someone else.

Then Drizzle happened, and I was suddenly the Commander of a Tank Platoon. There was much tactical planning of the assassination of OPFOR lead, and so on and so forth before we got on with it - and B Platoon got eaten, possibly without firing a shot...because our AI thought the enemy was friendly. Fer's metaphorical (possibly literal) facepalm when he realised after the mission was a highlight. A Platoon suffered a worse fate, when one of our AI tanks flipped, and the other one flipped the Player tank, so we were down two tanks without even seeing combat.
Suggestions: Get rid of HC, it was bad in this case. Make the AI tanks grouped regularly under Players, so they can (attempt to) have sweet rolling formations and report enemy contacts and be generally better. HC is for distant simplification.
Also: Lack of Intel was crippling this time (Nobody attacked directly forward at all and Shock's flank was very, very wide) so a UAV would have been excellent to have, and Infantry moving to occupy Vybor would have put a lot more urgency and focus into the mission.

I had reservations with playing Podgotovka so soon after the last time, and after the long-ish mission we'd just had. I didn't stay around for very long, though, so I couldn't really tell how things went.

as you can clearly see the chopper was unarmed - Credit to palm with taken the picture



and a picture of me on the first misson walking away from an exploding police car