Comrades in Arms Discussion Board

Fear The Reaper was the mission in Takistan? If so, then i had a lot of fun clearing out the village; lots of enemies but doable. (Splice's mission? thx)


Sub Raid was short and intense, how i like them, thx Outlaws.

co@15_foothold

Was in Doveman's team (the partisans). The armor on the beach looked scripted/was taken out by A-164s flying around. Nice fireworks, don't think it was ever a threat. We didn't see much until Zaros where we took out an artillery piece, then moved to the ammo dump on hill Riga. Only bit of action was killing some guy standing near the hangar at the end.

co10_clear_marina

Went well, though the briefing was unclear (clear town or save civs?), find the needle in the haystack syndrome, overrun by armor when we had no AT with enemy spawning right next to us. Meh.

co09_escape_drakontas

The enemy didn't fire back, so the only real threat was the artillery. I think I killed the attack wave twice over with the HMG I set up from backpacks. Also I'm certain claymores are not victim operated in A3, they didn't go off until I gave the order to touch them off. Looked promising but turned out to be a 30 min shooting gallery.

Sorry of the AT missile near the Hangar on the mission with the airport. It locked badly on the grounded planes rather then the active armor behind them. Didn't know also that i can cycle between locked targets, just like from helicopters/planes.

Heavy Rain
Nice cutscenes, and nice combat heading towards the airport. Good job on leading to fall back to the blown up building as cover against incoming enemy. It was a good firefight on the way to the airport.

I don't know how air raids go for attacking. I can't ever fly a plane in Arma with a keyboard and mouse and BIS borked the controllers so that's not an option for me (sorry I crashed the plane). I can at least fly a chopper with a keyboard and mouse, but I'm not as confident in that as a controller, but still at least doable for me.

Game of Drones
Really bright light in the beginning nice firefights. About IDing targets, some guys did complain to me about that they cannot identify targets at all in the night. Pretty much it seems that, if people are shooting, and seems like there's no NATO presence nearby because guys are shooting at you, any guys dressed up like a guerilla is friendly while people in uniforms are enemies. There seems to be a lot of explosion at the castle, seems like drone strikes. Seems like most people got wiped out from there in the northern side. The southern side was much more quiet it seems.

(08-15-2014, 06:50 AM)Phantom link Wrote:Heavy Rain
I don't know how air raids go for attacking. I can't ever fly a plane in Arma with a keyboard and mouse and BIS borked the controllers so that's not an option for me (sorry I crashed the plane). I can at least fly a chopper with a keyboard and mouse, but I'm not as confident in that as a controller, but still at least doable for me.

I have to admit, though, that the mission's premises didn't make much sense to me. Without background, some soldiers attack an airport filled with BLUE, GREEN and RED equipment, to fly an attack on enemy positions ? That did not make sense at all to me.

(08-15-2014, 06:50 AM)Phantom link Wrote:Game of Drones

In general, what's so difficult about id'ing targets ? Sure, the lighting was weird (the trees glow somewhat as if they were transparent with fire around), but CSAT is easily recognized with their space monkey helmets...

I think we should have moved the AAA away from the castle before engaging the drones. The walls and trees limited the effective angle of the AAA, so we should have moved it into more open terrain, I think...

co@15_foothold

Thank you guys for playing my first mission. I found problems didn't show up in previous alpha tests.
Feedback is very important since i'm a beginner, so feel free to make suggestions, topic opened here http://ciahome.net/forum/index.php?topic=3226.0

However running in the dark was a pain Maybe i should change the loadout on players in case they don't want to go search for gear at the beginning.

AA units can still target players, however i tried to avoid that as much as possible, luckly we got on beach in one piece that was my main concern.

Since wasn't on map until the end did you finish the mission? How long it took?

Game of Drones

Loved it, i didn't expect so powerful reply from enemies after we cleared the castle, i was expecting more resistance getting in than getting out. I was surprised and that for me is a good thing. The end was confusing for me and chaotic which in this case is a good thing.

As Phantom said was difficult to ID targets, we've met AAF troops and we didn't open fire until they started shooting at us. It is by design to shoot us or the mission didn't respond to faction settings?
However in the dark i think is safe to shoot everything that moves and is not our team

Noticed problems with revive in this mission, foothold and i think heavy rain, people dying while being healed, in my mission the medical system is set for 100% success rate on healing and i still lost someone.

Heavy Rain

Nice settings in terms of weather, good firefights, having enemies coming from everywhere worked fine for me.
I had nice time until we got on airfield. Good team coordination, nice maneuvers.

I hate author didn't use a count enemy fct and made us chase a lost guy nowhere.
Mixing foot missions with air combat doesn't work for me unless is set from the beginning this way and you have pilots in your team, i don't expect infantry to be able to fly high tech jets. And in terms of team coordination is not consistent and bring chaos in a bad way.

The blur effect was a bit unusual for me, i can't say i hate it but i personally could do better without.
I think i gave this mission a 7 but it was too much.

Escape Drakontas

I wasn't on server when you played escape_drakontas, but i know from author that was meant to be fire practice, is not meant to be a tactical mission this is one reason i should remove it from my TOP100  tactical missions. Is the mission we use to test mods and addons.

Game of Drones

Very much liked the premise, with various ways for us to choose how to achieve the objectives. A few nice engagements on the way to the ruins and being constantly buzzed by the drones made me want to destroy them all the more and felt like they were directing the enemy towards us. Was pretty much impossible to tell if contacts were NATO or enemy without long-range optics, so we pretty much just shot at whatever shot at us. Shame the drones killed most of us with missiles they weren't meant to have (naughty drones!) but looking forward to playing this one again once that's fixed.

Foothold

Leading the partisans, I was at a bit of a loss without a GPS. The armour near the beach seemed to be shooting away from the landing point and we weren't within range to destroy it before the other teams landed anyway, so we just avoided that. Very atmospheric though, with the planes flying overhead and everything. I ended up holding my team a bit further back than we should have been, due to lack of GPS, so if we'd been at the marker we might have been able to engage the Ifrit and patrol which would have been a bit more interesting for us. As it was, we didn't have any action until we moved up the hill to the chapel, where we spotted two Artillery pieces in the town. My two AT guys targeted one each and got three good hits in but they didn't move for the first couple of hits, whilst the third hit destroyed one and pissed off the other, who decided to come looking for us, so we pulled back to safety as we were out of rockets by then. Crossing the road on the way to the ammo camp to resupply, we came under fire but I think it was just one guy who we easily killed. After that, we didn't encounter any more enemies until the couple at the hanger at the end and there were none at the northern compound, so it was a bit quiet for my team, especially my two MG and medics and it sounded like the other teams had most of the action at the ammo camp. I wouldn't say it was terribly boring, unlike some missions where a squad might just be sitting in one place away from the frontline for ages but leading I probably had more to do to occupy me and I can see that the rest of the squad might have been rather bored. Probably only needed four (leader, two AT, one medic/rifle) rather than seven in the squad.

Clear Marina

I think our big mistake was to move onto the enemy depot, when our task was to clear the town within 20 minutes, before reinforcements came. It seemed quite likely that said reinforcements would be coming from the depot. I don't particularly like these "hunt the last man down" missions but the town was fairly small and we probably could have done it if we hadn't been pinned down for ages by fire from two directions.

Escape Drakontas

Could have been OK if there'd been more enemies and they'd managed to get closer and actually threaten us, maybe along with some sniper support to pin us down. I think I only came under fire once so the rest of the time we must have killed them before they were in range to return fire. Incoming artillery was nice as it's large radius posed a threat and forced us to move far away. Incoming smoke was a bit strange when it landed on us, as it forced us to reposition so that we could see but also hid us from the enemy, so it was much better when they smoke landed near the enemy positions, making it hard for us to see them and they could have used that to push up on us. With about 8 minutes to go, the enemy got bugged and stayed hidden behind a hill, so we just had to wait it out until we could escape in the repaired boat, which was never under any threat.

(08-15-2014, 12:02 PM)alias link Wrote:As Phantom said was difficult to ID targets, we've met AAF troops and we didn't open fire until they started shooting at us. It is by design to shoot us or the mission didn't respond to faction settings?
However in the dark i think is safe to shoot everything that moves and is not our team

I am not sure what you mean by "the mission didn't respond to faction settings"... The Independents are set to be hostile to BLUEFOR, so they will attack Nato and FIA alike.

The NATO specops team are intentionally placed to make people think before engaging. I agree it's difficult in the dark to ID your targets, so you have to look for shapes (Space Monkeys and Helmets vs. lighter Spec-ops uniforms).

Quote:Noticed problems with revive in this mission, foothold and i think heavy rain, people dying while being healed, in my mission the medical system is set for 100% success rate on healing and i still lost someone.

I noticed in GoD that I probably forgot to include the overlay, so no progress bar was shown. Which I thought was great, because I really dislike the gamey countdown and percentage bar. I think I am going to try and modify the script to not show them by default.

(08-15-2014, 02:05 PM)Alwarren link Wrote:The NATO specops team are intentionally placed to make people think before engaging. I agree it's difficult in the dark to ID your targets, so you have to look for shapes (Space Monkeys and Helmets vs. lighter Spec-ops uniforms).

I quite liked the idea, in principal at least, that we couldn't just shoot at anything that wasn't us and had to ID them first. I'm just glad I wasn't leading or being relied on to ID as I couldn't see them clearly enough to do so and I'm not that familiar with the differences between uniforms anyway. I'll try and remember NATO doesn't wear helmets for future reference, which should help. They seemed to be able to ID us from quite a distance anyway, far further than we could possibly ID them, so most of the time it came down to returning fire after they engaged us. The main time I remember it was difficult is when the other squad was a bit behind us and got engaged and we couldn't really assist as we couldn't tell who was who.

I did find the rain effect made me a bit dizzy and made it hard to focus, maybe I just had a bit of a headache already but I imagine it might be especially problematic for someone with epilepsy. I didn't have a problem with the rain on Foothold, maybe because it was dark or maybe it was just less heavy or a different effect.

@doveman
The rain in foothold is tweaked manually so to say, i don't really like heavy rain in ARMA and i "hand picked" parameters for rain so we can still have heavy clouds and no rain.

(08-15-2014, 04:05 PM)alias link Wrote:@doveman
The rain in foothold is tweaked manually so to say, i don't really like heavy rain in ARMA and i "hand picked" parameters for rain so we can still have heavy clouds and no rain.

I think doveman was talking about Game of Drones.

(08-15-2014, 03:31 PM)doveman link Wrote:I'll try and remember NATO doesn't wear helmets for future reference, which should help.

Note this is only true for the Recon/Special forces. Normal NATO forces wear helmets too.

Quote:I did find the rain effect made me a bit dizzy and made it hard to focus, maybe I just had a bit of a headache already but I imagine it might be especially problematic for someone with epilepsy. I didn't have a problem with the rain on Foothold, maybe because it was dark or maybe it was just less heavy or a different effect.

Yeah I had thought that the rain was fixed and didn't look like milk anymore. I'll cut back on it. I was quite sure the lighting looked different for me when I made the mission, but it is possible I didn't use A3MP for the test.

(08-15-2014, 06:02 PM)Alwarren link Wrote:Note this is only true for the Recon/Special forces. Normal NATO forces wear helmets too.

Noted, thanks. I'll just have to hope we don't get a mission with both normal and SF NATO forces, or I won't know who to shoot

Just to add to all the nice posts regarding Thursday's missions - Let the medic first aid people. Medics perform first aid faster (in 25% if I recall on Psycho's wounding system). If you are not the medic - make sure the medic gets to the fallen comrade and you fight. You may want to drag the unit to safety, but let the medic do the job.

(08-15-2014, 02:01 AM)Outlawz7 link Wrote:Also I'm certain claymores are not victim operated in A3, they didn't go off until I gave the order to touch them off.

Yep. Realistic, apparently. See here (starting from 0:46):
http://youtu.be/TEQDB5NLXBk?t=46s

What this man said^

I myself make an effort to do the same whenever i can.