Approaching Kavala
1. Guys, not reading the briefing, especially if you are leading, is not cool.
2. Vehicles: We sure see an improvement in vehicle survivability in our missions, good job to everybody on that! I think the lesson learned about not keeping vehicles in the open, although the temptation to cover by eyes and fire a lot of ground, has sunken in and thanks to that we can see vehicles surviving almost until the end of the mission. It's a tough tradeoff between aggressively engaging and seeking out enemies and preserving the safety of the vehicle. From what I saw, Manuel's team did great in that respect. They took long pauses in cover to search for hostiles and repositioned fast to the next point to repeat the process.
Fire Bird
Another good use of a vehicle: Great job Freeman on handling the BMP on that mission. Anything short of what you've done would have probably meant mission failure. It was awesome to see your missiles and cannon rounds fly above us. It's encouraging and makes a poor infantryman feel saferÂ
Agreed, that moment when the TOW was flying over our heads was priceless
(12-09-2015, 12:37 PM)Variable link Wrote:Approaching Kavala
1. Guys, not reading the briefing, especially if you are leading, is not cool.
2. Vehicles: We sure see an improvement in vehicle survivability in our missions, good job to everybody on that! I think the lesson learned about not keeping vehicles in the open, although the temptation to cover by eyes and fire a lot of ground, has sunken in and thanks to that we can see vehicles surviving almost until the end of the mission. It's a tough tradeoff between aggressively engaging and seeking out enemies and preserving the safety of the vehicle. From what I saw, Manuel's team did great in that respect. They took long pauses in cover to search for hostiles and repositioned fast to the next point to repeat the process.
Let's assume the briefing had a quick glance. My mistake and it won't happen again. :-[
The Bobcat was mostly fine at the church. It got shot in the gun 2x. :-[
School is out
Short, simple no-frills mission. I liked location/milieu and scope of the mission. Infantry action, simple CAS. Pilots even survived the crash and took part to action as infantry. Thanks to fighters of Bravo team, solid job guys, especially when eliminating reinforcements. More missions like this!
Wild Weasels
I liked this one as it was, even if the mission would be real treat with minor changes (I comment technical details in mission release thread). This is good example of a mission where you have lot of fun even if you don't fire a single round. Sometimes laser designator is mightier than a rifle.
Using IR strobes to mark position of friendlies sounded like a good idea at a time, until Evans took danger close LG which was accidentally locked to our Strobe! I had no idea you can lock LG stuff to strobes. Now that I think of it it does make sense but it was nasty surprise. Fortunately there was no casualties but it likely messed up things. I counted at least 2 LGBs hitting our strobes instead of lased targets.
Overall much improvement this time. We split FACs to 2 teams, and each had their own sector. Thanks to Variable for coordinating air team, transport, and pilots for their hard work. It sure wasn't the easiest job and I was glad I wasn't flying. Ground team did great (special thanks to Swedish section for co-operation) and we managed to destroy twice the number of targets this time.
Mission like this really stresses LR and comms discipline. 5-6 pilots and multiple FACs all operating on same channel! Good habit is to formulate message in your head before pressing transmit. My own messages aren't best in this regard as my tongue trips over when I have to talk. Ground team has to pay attention to LR traffic and let one FAC speak at a time unless it is real emergency like active SAM/AAA situation. Overall we did better job with comms this time.
If we want to improve..couple of things. Even more clear comms. Now I was unsure in couple of cases if my 'ordered pizza' aka gun run had made their attack and missed or if they were still maneuvering. When you have many pilots and many FACs, I strongly encourage use names as call signs. It removes ambiguity.
Like:
One attack going on at a time to preserve sanity!
- Air Lead. Stag. Target, marker Victor-4, static truck, on road. Rcmn approach from WEST. Target painted. Over?
- Air Lead copies. Victor-4. X, you're up.
- Stag, X. Going in HOT. (Now fac knows aircraft is really allocated and is lining up)
- Copy, in hot.
- Guns guns guns / bomb away (Announce release. FOV is really narrow in designator on max zoom. FAC knows ordnance is inbound, and if no visual in next few secs he knows to declare miss right away)
- X, Good hit on target / near miss / No visual&clue.
- X copies. RTB/Loitering/bugging out (Important message: THAT attack run is now COMPLETE and Air lead/FAC can work on next one!)
- Air Lead. McGregor. Target I-2...blablabla rinse and repeat.
I don't want to sound like nitpicking, it doesn't have to be that formal, but even small messages clears confusion. I stress that comms discipline was at least OK from my point of view. I have no idea how confusing/fucked up our calls were to guys in air : )
When marking targets to map:
Now both teams marked targets with different colours which was better but we still used general names like tanks, etc. We had several markers with name 'shilka' or 'tank'. Better use unique markers. Example: like A-1. For example A means AAA/Sam threat. V means vehicle. I means infantry. If you want to nitpick, every fac team has own allocated numbers. One team uses numbers > 20 and other < 20.
Examples:
A-1Â
I-31 (sqd, mob)
V-2 (stat)
First means some kind of AAA. Second example means infantry. Info in parentheses means further info, in this case mobile squad. Third example means static vehicle of some type or German ballistic missile from Peenemunde, depending on map / mod : PÂ
Definetely want to try this again, especially if small adjustments are made : )
great AAR stag
wild weasels
I only got one addition to stags post
For marking targets on the map i think it wuld also be a great help if the FAC marked the ingression route on map with a Line on the map towards the target, since the GPS only covers a small area at full speed its hard to line up with the targets via map.
[not really mission related]
I probably am a bit spoiled because i played some DCS in the last month, but if BIS would have put half as much work into the Planes as they did with the helicopters and might even have had heard of laser codes, there would be a lot less confusion. [[[[of course the targeting pod of an A10 would be much much better xD ]]]]
Wild Weasels
I would like to say for an attempt it was great leading from Variable and Ground Team Commanders. I think the Harrier could help infantry next time with describing next approximate location since they can see other vehicles on Radar/HUD.
One possible suggestion I would like to try is to have 2 loitering areas. One West and One East of objective and vehicles flying from one to another on bomb runs. That way it's faster to respond to target and if West to East approach doesn't work, it's much faster to get a East to West one.
Another possible suggestion (which might be a shit one), is to have somebody in charge of air assets from the ground to allow them to have map open more of the time without the worry of crashing their jet into the sea. I'm not sure if Variable had a hard time with this. They could mark recommended approach routes with lines, keep map markers updated or removed etc.
(12-11-2015, 09:45 PM)Stagwine link Wrote:When marking targets to map:
Now both teams marked targets with different colours which was better but we still used general names like tanks, etc. We had several markers with name 'shilka' or 'tank'. Better use unique markers. Example: like A-1. For example A means AAA/Sam threat. V means vehicle. I means infantry. If you want to nitpick, every fac team has own allocated numbers. One team uses numbers > 20 and other < 20.
Examples:
A-1Â
I-31 (sqd, mob)
V-2 (stat)
First means some kind of AAA. Second example means infantry. Info in parentheses means further info, in this case mobile squad. Third example means static vehicle of some type or German ballistic missile from Peenemunde, depending on map / mod : P
Good ideas there but perhaps rather than allocating groups of numbers to different teams, it will be more intuitive for everyone if the teams start their markers with the first letter of their team, so A-A-1 would mean Alpha-AAA, B-V-1 would mean Bravo-Vehicle, etc. Then the air team can instantly see which team they should contact if they want to discuss a particular target. It's probably still sensible for each team to use a different colour as it helps the ground team identify their own markers on the map but that's less intuitive than an A or B for the other teams to see which team a marker belongs to.
Good suggestions everybody. Next time we pick this mission we will recap them all directly from here.
OFP Revisited
Great job Evans on a well executer and bold plan! Got to hand it to you, I thought that going all the way up there with vehicles was risky even for my standards but it sure paid off! I was sure we will take a missile or two and burn in our vehicles, you lucky bastard
Green Monster
I really enjoyed this one, we had it going nicely until Monster 1 was has taken a missile hit. Luckily I ejected without a scratch and managed to patch Alwarren and Stag. We joined up with Ferret 1 and had some nice action. Solid leading McGregor, and wonderful vehicle management once again Mr. Manuel.
Good games everybody.
OFP Revisited
Great effort Evans. I'm also amazed we weren't blown up. Turned out to be a solid plan (with a tuch of luck)
Green Monster
You are being way too kind Variable. It was a bit of a cluster fuck tbh. And Manuel I don't know how you manage to survive so long in vehicles... Great job man
Green Monster
Cool mission, I loved the beach landing
The rest of the mission was great too. In time I would have wished to be able to talk faster, that vehicle commander business is damn stressful... Thanks to my crew, great job by both of them!
We lost the first APC (the first Monster2) because I missjudged. We engaged an armored vehicle, I thought we could take it out but that was a mistake. Instead it blew us up. Fortunately the first hit didn't kill our APC right away so we got out safely.
After we got a shiny new APC we carried on but didn't do much fighting anymore. We encountered some MBTs but had nothing to engage them but an RPG42. We managed to get to about 1km away from the airport, were we saw a stationary MBT. I decided to leave the APC and sneak closer on foot to take an RPG shot. We got rushed from behind by another MBT though.
I don't see anything we could have done, we didn't have enough AT capabilities. Even with our original APC we would have been out of AT ammo by this point.
Prince of Persia
Even though we didn't get to finish it I loved it. I don't want to give any details since we still have to finish it, so just a few things:
Taking out the first objective was awesome. Sneeking up, studying the target area, making a plan... we took a lot of time for that. And then the execution took maybe 20 seconds (?), clean and fast. Just awesome.
Along the way we lost unnamed, I wonder what happend. I suspect friendly fire because we didn't hear unsilenced gunshots (I verified afterwards that enemy weapons were not silenced).
In any case, this is what I take away from that: we were on a slope, in cover (or concealment at least) waiting to engage some infantry. Unnamed was in the line of fire of somebody further back. I noticed but thought it was ok because of the height difference. Apperently it wasn't, so in the future I'll try to not allow positioning like that anymore...
(12-14-2015, 02:58 PM)McGregor link Wrote:And Manuel I don't know how you manage to survive so long in vehicles... Great job man
By beeing a coward and having luck i guess
(12-14-2015, 04:33 PM)Manuel link Wrote:Unnamed was in the line of fire of somebody further back. I noticed but thought it was ok because of the height difference. Apperently it wasn't, so in the future I'll try to not allow positioning like that anymore...
I thought so too since i was lower than the targets even (i was firing up towards them while the rest of you were higher) i also thought that the guy i hit 5-10 times(silenced 9mm need really good aim) shot me. unfortunately there was no possibillity to spectate in this mission. the lack of a revice script probably only adds to the sneaky atmosphere (or I just got lucky and someone shot me in the head)
OFP revisited
I agree to sentiments above. Great job Evans. Mission was simple enough with some technical quirks but there's nothing wrong with short quick snacks. Mission moment: I don't usually care for kills, but I was a vehicle gunner in first Hunter. I saw contacts at point blank range to our left and hell broke loose. I cut them down and when I started to scan additional threats my scope was full of thermals in 120 degree sector. Inf, AT-gunners, static MG-nests, etc. I got the oh shit panic mode on and continuously fired until the HMG was smoking and empty. I must have racked ~2-3 squads of infantry including two MG nests and half a fuel truck. What is surprising is that I managed to survive it.
Green Monster
It was fun to be in a vehicle again. Co-op with Variable (commander) and Alwarren ( gunner) was smooth and it was awesome to engage targets at landing beach. Then inevitable happened and despite our best caution we got blown to orbit. Crew survived and joined as infantry.
It sure wasn't boring but with small adjustments the mission would have been better. Now we had to cover ..almost 4 kms of distance on foot and we had no proper tools to deal with the MBT threats.
McGregor/Monster-2 did great job under tough combat conditions and I suppose our Charge of the Light Squad to airfield was a suitable ending (we werent't mowed down by Russian battery like in Balaclava, just a regular dull .50cal but it was a only proper way to end mission like this).
Ofp revisited
I guess we had a bit of luck
I was'nt really counting on the enemy contacts we had on the beach though.
Also the enemy force might have been a bit underwhelming, but i don't know.
Hopefully it wasn't too boring for bravo.
Green Monster
I had alot to do as the medic in this one, think I even lost a bit of weight running around and getting everybody up.
Great job managing the cluster fuck McGregor.
Ofp revisited
Bravo was assigned to recon from a hill and support while alpha flanked the objectives from the right. I personally didn't have much action as the EOD specialist because my m4 rifle had a low power scope and because we were engaging enemies beyond 400m. I don't think many of us were effective at engaging the enemy because of the volume of ammo we needed to spend to dispatch small groups of enemies. Our marksman and m249 gunner seemed to be functional enough at that range but i think we would have been more effective if assigned to support Alpha rather than being assigned a spot on the hill until the evac objective.
Green monster
I made this CA mission, great job apc crews and mcgregor. It was harder than i think a few might have liked because i didnt account for monster 1 to get hammered by the first ifv we encountered near the beach, also i think both repair specialists died pretty quickly(we should keep them alive). We were short on AT because the pcml/titan operators died pretty early on as well and the rest of us had to use rpg42's,
[size=1em]once the guy carrying it dies [/size][size=1em]we should immediately go to retrieve the fallen titan launcher before moving on. I tried to rectify the AT problems in an update where i removed the MBT tanks and added more missile specialists(i also try to address other problems which you can read about on the mission page). [/size]
Mcgregor did a fantastic job coordinating monster 1/2 and ferret 1/2(it was real chaos at some parts). [size=1em]As part of Alpha i think we were suppressed pretty heavily at time from multiple directions(which is [/size]weird[size=1em], i maintain a ratio of not more than 1:2.5 units to enemies per hundred-meter-square) and suffered casualties at the beginning. [/size]
Ferret 2 got wiped out except for UnNamedGer. Perhaps it would have turned out better if the infantry squads didnt go separate ways just after landing.
I think we should "get on our feet" first when taking transport to a new area by securing the space in a radius of a few hundred metres around us before going splitting up and going on the offensive. It went really well after the first section and our first brief period of respite, evident by how much fewer deaths we suffered, the infantry teams joined and we had much better success because we had established some "momentum" and could concentrate on attack without worrying about immediate survival.
Past the middle of the mission, me and icecreamsoldier were the only 2 soldiers with launchers, he, unfortunately met his death quickly after contact with APC while i managed to avenge him >
. My strategy was to keep far from him so that if our group lost one AT riflemen we would have a second, which turned out to be successful.
[size=1em]It was an interesting combined arms mission for me personally, sad that we made it so close to the end and we lost both the Gorgons. But i have updated the mission based to balance difficulty so it should be more achievable now.[/size]