First of all, thanks for the invitation.
The concept of "puppet masters" is really intresting, and I'll look into how to incorporate this for Tier1. Generally speaking we really missed ACRE but nevertheless had a lot of fun as far as I've grasped from other members.
Here is my AAR as Kilo Squad Lead for the first mission:
1. Insertion
We got inserted to the LZ just fine and I decided to split up my three teams, sending K3 to the south of the first objective acting as a recon/BOF element while K1 and K2 assault the objective from the forrest directly to the east.
On our way in we encountered a group of enemys right in the middle of K2 and K3, basicly advancing on top of K3. Due to comms issues (Could not hear my K3 lead over TS) we lost a man in K3 due to lacking fire support. Finally we decided to open up and mow down the enemy, K3 lost a man. Luckily we managed to proceed. By the time we actually made it to the objective, we lost allmost entire K1 due to an attack from the north wich they had to fight off allmost alone. Sadly we continued the sweep, clearing the objective. K3 did an awsome job of attacking and fighting off enemys comming in over the open fields from the west, effectivly setting up a blocking position, enforcing it with a curtain of bullets.
K3 advanced further on the south side of the valley towards a new BOF/recon position, south of objective two, while I was advancing with K2 in the treeline towards the nw, setting up an OP north of the 2nd target. By that time I was promoted to overall lead, increasing my workload drastically. Alpha has been anilhilated by that time and the correct status of Bravo was not entirely clear to me.
We commenced our assault on the 2nd target, blew up an ammo truck and solidated our position. K2 was sent to the northern treeline to block the position towards the west, engaging enemys comming in from Zeleno while K3 moved onto target from their southern position.
By that time Bravo informed me that they're good to go again and even collected some Alpha survivors. I asked them to move onto the first Alpha objective, not knowing the exact enemy strength and location. But I assumed that they're assessing the situation themselves and formulate/exectue a good attack plan. Sadly Bravo was eaten up very qickly, so I ordered the remainders as gunners into Alpha and Bravo choppers to give CAS for Kilo. Sadly no Bravo member arrived at any chopper.
HQ gave us new intel: The last cache was at Alpha Objective 2, so I ordered BlackAlpha to pick us up and drop us in a safe spot to the west of the objective and do some fake landings on the other side of the objective. Bravo Chopper was shot down and got picked up by Alpha chopper, to provide some CAS.
While we were advancing east towards a position north of the target, I asked the CAS to do some runs on the target to distract and thin out the enemys. Sadly the chopper took an SPG-9 very quickly, leaving us without airsupport.
All of a sudden, hell broke loose. Trucks were incomming from the east, just to get a warmly welcome by 5.56 from rifles, SAWs and 203's. Those are some very effective beasts.
By that time we got the attention of myriads of RPG and SPG guns, obliterating the forrest around us. One rocket exploded in the tree right in front of me, allmost ripping me to pieces. I decided to not use hit&run tactics to thin out the enemy but to push onto the objective, to die a glorious death for the entertainment of our fellow spectators.
The situation looked very bad. I had the feeling that troops from the northern caches would move in because of all that noise as well, so I urgently pushed towards the target. By that time it all got dirty and messy. Using fireteam bounding we advanced to the first set of buildings, having SPG's and RPG's exploding everywhere around us. K2 informed me of enemys comming in from the north, fighting them off and enabling K3 and KL to move towards the next set of buildings.
K2 allmost was decimated and a hail of bullets, RPG's and other stuff was comming from all directions. I took my 2nd hit and got patched up again, enabling me to make my way into the objective. Charging into that alone was not the best idea but I did fairly good. Waiting for K3 was not an option because I wanted to get some hard cover between me and the enemy guns. Roaming around and securing the poorly defended objective single handed, I ran past the cache without noticing it just to catch some bullets from enemys incomming from the south.
By that time K3 arrived at the scene and got eliminated by enemy forces floating into the compound. We simply didn't have enough manpower to effectivly defend the compound and also failed to secure a defendable position. But all in all we would have died in the hail of russian bullets anyway. I was very surprised that we survived that long, but some training in tactics and the exeptional marksmanship of some Tier1 guys apparently pay off after all.
Mission 2:
I was CSL, using fireteam bounding towards the objective. Sadly my C3 FTL wasn't really on the toes and lagged behind the movment plan quite often. We finally secured the buildings north of the factory complex, helping to get some stress off Bravo. On the NW of the factory, we encountered an enemy squad + technicals. While assessing the situation I took a bullet to my helmet wich decided to be not protective enough and let me die instantly.
All in all it was a great session. I really missed ACRE tough. What I also missed and found a little annoying was some AI improvements. I don't know to what skill level the AI was set to, but they were all like super snipers. On our server we run ASR_AI mod. This is a serverside mod, so not a problem with the "no mods" policy. It enables to set the skill independently from the shooting skills again, enabling you to have very smart AI (aka Skilllevel 0.9 o even 1) while having reduced shooting abilities. So they don't headshot you with a pistol from 800 m anymore. You can even set the stuff for diffrent unit types independently, so a Spec Ops team has a high level of marksmanship compared to the takistan farmer brigarde who has most likley a lower skill in shooting and maybe a little less inteligence in therms of tactics and all that.
If you guys are intrested in testing this out, I'd gladly help out and explain you the config and all that.
All in all, thanks for the invitation and congratulations to two years of folk!