Terminal Boy wrote:If we're going to continue with in-game briefings, can we have at least a minute for the FTLs to brief us Meatshields as to the overall plan and our first couple of movements.
Ideally, such a briefing should happen before we embark any transport vehicles to avoid us looking at the pretty scenery rather than following the briefing.
In the third mission last night, I went from Briefing screen (without briefing) to being in a Chinook 30 seconds from a possibly hot LZ with no idea of the mission plan apart from what I learned from the Notes and a cheery "Watch West when we land... 5 seconds out..Get ready!" which wasn't the best mission prep the Party has ever provided even though I did get a shiny M16A4 with Aimipoint sight.
Which was nice.
This was regrettable...perhaps more time was needed before kicking the mission. But on otherside, this was exactly the immediate objective of the opening of the mission. Survive the LZ landing. What more information did you need? You had an objective, watch west and engage contacts. Doesn't get any simpler than that.
Which was fine until my FTL had to leave and I became FTL with no idea as to what Charlie 1 was supposed to do until I sync'd the map markers with the traffic heard over CC and the GPS.
Fortunately, Charlie was under cover within a compound while I figured out what was going on.
IceRaiser wrote:Charlie 3 AR: Moon Moon (New guy. DanceMoox? MooxDance? Something funny. Forgot your name )
It was me dancemoox, I'm glad to hear my death was avenged with flaming AT vengeance, I wasn't having much luck when it came to guys hiding out in secret hidden places inside compounds.
First time on the server and it was rather good fun, I'll be back for more I'm sure!
Tigershark wrote:I will be penning an explanation as to why the SL only briefing technique is not only good but has shown terrific results in the past.
We could have provided some more time for SLs to brief their squads. But whether you get it from the CO or from the SL it should make no difference. In fact I would argue getting it from the SL means it is more targetted to exactly what your squad needs to achieved and you receive signal vs noise.
I can agree with your point. Briefing only SL's makes the whole scene less confusing for everybody involved.
But i really don't like it from a learning perspective. Part of the sessions fun has, for me at least, been to get to listen in to the Commanders explanation of his plan. Losing out on this part of the experience and having it filtered by an underling isn't as fun. If more people are to step up to positions such as CO then cutting everybody but SL's out from the planning phase seems like a bad idea. I play this game to play around with all aspects of it. If we are to compartmentalize everything for efficiency's sake then this becomes less of a playful learning arena and more of a "be quiet and follow these limited orders w/o a broader understanding of what we are trying to do".
In so far as comrade Tiger wants to do this for his CO-stints then by all means, but if it becomes a general trend we'll lose something i consider to be important for the further development of apt SL's/CO's, and for my enjoyment of the sessions as a whole.
Numbers! A full Squad of dudes wanting to learn! Fantastic! We focused on the bread-and-butter infantry stuff at first, running several of our newer folk through our typical fire-and-maneuver drills as caught on film by Comrade IceRaiser. Then we moved onto helicopter drilling, something that we still have some difficulty with in the sessions themselves. While a lot of how a helicopter works in our session depends on responsible, competent, sober pilots, communication is important too. A quick summary:
The helicopter is at its most vulnerable when embarking or disembarking dudes. So to minimize the amount of time spent in that vulnerable state, you have a few ingredients:
1) Fire Team Leaders tell the Squad Lead when their fire-team is in or out. STHud really helps with this, as icons show up different when their owner is mounted in a vehicle or remains on foot.
2) When all their FTLs have reported that they are on or off of the chopper, the Squad Leader tells the pilot to go.
3) At any point, if the pilot thinks they're about to get rocket'd / machinegun'd to bits, they are totally justified in spooling up the rotors and leaving the ground-pounders in the dirt.
This is not to say that we are SRS BZNS all day erry day in the workshop though. Comrade IceRaiser, fresh from his video documenting, arranged a shrine for us!
Rook Valley Deployed as Weapons Team 1 Leader
The mission started off awesome. Our helos spooled up, the jet sat unadorned and unloved, and vehicle crews from the 74th Tank Brigade continued their inspection and briefing in our rotor wash. 2nd Recon Platoon was off to save the day! We even had music!
Unfortunately, our pilot didn't appear to be sober. We capped off an extremely leisurely ride to the AO by popping high over a huge ridgeline, approaching our LZ perpendicular to the valley it was in, then spending 2 agonizing minutes auto-hovering down into the 100-meter wide area of open space. Seriously people, if you're going to be taking the game experience of 18 other folk in your hands, please be competent enough to do something as simple as a taxi-run.
Staggering off the whirlybird and running away for fear of it spontaneously combusting, Weapons Team 1 attained some commanding height atop the ridge our chopper had popped over. From there, I gave my HAT gunner some practice in setting up and disassembling his mounted Metis, then set up progressively closer firing positions for my two weapons. Dan with my MMG chewed through his magazines like crazy, and the enemy still kept spilling out of buildings. The streets were very quickly filled with corpses stacked three high, the gutters running red with blood. And they still kept coming. Our ammo count wasn't the only thing this company-sized mass of infantry was depleting - I had overestimated the beefiness of the server, which was crawling along at a nice 6 FPS. Also, we were getting absolutely slaughtered by enemies inside the buildings as well as the odd patrol wandering the hill-sides.
Combined, Alpha, Bravo, and the remnants of Delta managed to make it maybe one or two layers of buildings into Shukurkalay, but no one uncovered the cache of American weapons we were supposed to find. The survivors were ordered to retreat, and the Mi-8TV-3 ordered to expend its rawket-pawds on the town. There was a horrific cloud of explosions, and half the radios in Alpha went to static. "Enemy fire," Draakon was muttering, a dazed look on his face. "It was all enemy fire..."
Crateresistance Deployed as BluFor Alpha Squad Leader
Through some strange fluke of our science department, we ended up SHAZAM!-ing into the middle of all the caches. No, seriously, they were scattered all around us. Must have a talk with R&D...
Alpha was tasked with taking out two caches. I decided to advance my guys down a nice gentle ridgeline, eyes to both sides in this deceptively thin Chernarussian Forest... and then a pair of NAPA dudes drove up behind us in a UAZ. One massed volley of fire later, the UAZ was perforated, and the two unfortunates down for the count. I think. This set the tone for Alpha, though, as we took fire from our right. Bullets flew back at our unseen assailants, as did some GPs (I think I killed two with those blessed things) but then we took contacts front as well. I stalked someone for about ten seconds as he crossed our axis of advance from right to left, but then a tree passed between us, and when I had come out the other side, he had a bead on me.
Sour Feruzablues Deployed as Bravo 1 FTL
So this entire mission was an exercise in frustration.
The briefing was spent sitting for five-and-a-half minutes in awkward silence, with me paging through the notes, then getting bored while we listened to gun-porn, eventually diverting my attention to some thoroughly captivating reading in The Salvation War. When I heard BSL start to talk, those five-and-a-half minutes later, I payed attention, only to hear "We'll start in choppers" (this much we know from the "Units" tab and having played the mission before) "We'll land at the Blue Bravo marker" (ditto) "We'll watch North and Northeast" (okay, that's useful info) "We'll head to Bravo 1 Marker and provide overwatch" (okay, warmer, warmer, do continue!) "..." (that's it?) "that's it." Overwatch for who? What's the purpose of the overwatch? In what direction are we watching? What are we expecting? What comes after that? From the map markers, I surmised that Bravo was to be Marathon-Squad after that point, but I couldn't tell what the heck we were supposed to do at each of those locations. Some of them made absolutely no sense (500+ meters away from anything worth overwatching, no cover, no avenue of assault to anything worth seizing). Even worse, there was no explication forthcoming whatsover, attempts to elicit some further details were shut down almost instantly ("I already told you what we'll be doing, and you're not an FTL!"), and even if our SL had felt like letting us know what we were being asked to do, we were kicked into mission before any reasonable person could have finished briefing his squad.
Finally, it is very, very difficult to actually command a fire-team when your AR is ramboing off in the distance whenever you try to take a breath and make sense of what you're supposed to do from that location. Do not do so in the future.
Two Days to Retirement, Berezino Deployed as Copper #11
A shotgun! Yay! With slugs! Wait... drat.
My fire-team and I got split up because our car piled up with everyone else in some random godforsaken intersection where all the vehicles started sparking from incoming fire. I dove out the right side of the car, everyone else dove out the left side, and the other three guys died in very short order. So I set off on my lonesome, looking for a decent avenue to flank around to the North. I happened upon a small archway. I shot a guy skylined on the edge of the Hospital roof, but unfortunately I only winged him - his humerus slowed the slug enough that it didn't reach anything vital. Then I continued my attempt at an end around and came across a suspicious looking intersection...
~ Ferrard
"Take a boat in the air you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turnin' of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she's hurtin' before she keels... makes her home."
Ferrard Carson wrote:
Sour Feruzablues Deployed as Bravo 1 FTL
So this entire mission was an exercise in frustration.
The briefing was spent sitting for five-and-a-half minutes in awkward silence, with me paging through the notes, then getting bored while we listened to gun-porn, eventually diverting my attention to some thoroughly captivating reading in The Salvation War. When I heard BSL start to talk, those five-and-a-half minutes later, I payed attention, only to hear "We'll start in choppers" (this much we know from the "Units" tab and having played the mission before) "We'll land at the Blue Bravo marker" (ditto) "We'll watch North and Northeast" (okay, that's useful info) "We'll head to Bravo 1 Marker and provide overwatch" (okay, warmer, warmer, do continue!) "..." (that's it?) "that's it." Overwatch for who? What's the purpose of the overwatch? In what direction are we watching? What are we expecting? What comes after that? From the map markers, I surmised that Bravo was to be Marathon-Squad after that point, but I couldn't tell what the heck we were supposed to do at each of those locations. Some of them made absolutely no sense (500+ meters away from anything worth overwatching, no cover, no avenue of assault to anything worth seizing). Even worse, there was no explication forthcoming whatsover, attempts to elicit some further details were shut down almost instantly ("I already told you what we'll be doing, and you're not an FTL!"), and even if our SL had felt like letting us know what we were being asked to do, we were kicked into mission before any reasonable person could have finished briefing his squad.
Yeah, sorry about that, but time was against us and there was just No time to explain
Ha! Strange to hear that from Bravo! I was MMG gunner in this one, and from my POV, I would have sworn that the frustration was on Alpha's side. They got mown on the same ridge we always get killed, trying to assault the military compound on top of the hill. Myself and my assistant (was that Skabooga? I'm pretty sure, but can't tell for sure if it wasn't Crocuta. I'm getting old. Cheers to him, though, I had fun, and he did a good job at leading my fire) anticipated this and took advantage of our relative independance to set up a BOF somewhere south of that and kill a fair share of dudes.
After Alpha finally unmessed themselves (Assault. Regroup. Assault. Regroup. Assault. Regroup. Do it again. Again. One more time. Almost there. We lost two thirds of the squad), we moved back to their position only to find them getting shot at even more at long range. At this point I was convinced that our only chance was to find a way to get down into Feruz Abad itself, and I took upon myself to lead my two men team there without finding us exposed on the hill side. After quite a few ridiculously failed attempts (and a few enemies shot a very close range), we had a good laugh and the mission was called.
Also, regarding the helo landing in Rook Valley. A good thing when trying to land in a relatively large space like this, keep some forward momentum until you land. It can seem stupid like that, but you'll notice it's a lot easier to land fast and precisely that way, just because airspeed keeps your chopper from drifting sideways.
Especially in large helicopters like the Chinook or the Mi-8/16, because the autohover thingy doesn't keep them very stable.
The speed you can keep depends on the chopper and the terrain, but as a rule of thumb, at 15 kph you shouldn't have any issues hitting the ground.
In the case of a straight approach in a valley, you also want to be lower during the whole approach. If shit hits the fan, you can still get on the ground with a minimal vertical speed, and if you do bleed too much speed and come to a complete standstill, you can put her on the ground without having to manage too long of a hover.
Finally, Crateresistance was, errr... I killed daf. So it was cool. But would probably better if it was some kind of safety to prevent Blufor to spawn in the middle of the caches.
Ferrard Carson wrote:
Unfortunately, our pilot didn't appear to be sober. We capped off an extremely leisurely ride to the AO by popping high over a huge ridgeline, approaching our LZ perpendicular to the valley it was in, then spending 2 agonizing minutes auto-hovering down into the 100-meter wide area of open space. Seriously people, if you're going to be taking the game experience of 18 other folk in your hands, please be competent enough to do something as simple as a taxi-run.
What chopper did you ride with roookitpods or not?.
Pretty sure i took the low route through the valley into a low hover.
But yea , i tend to be overly careful while landing due the fact i don't want to ruin the mission for 20 peeps.
Rocket one, since you were flying Alpha, Alpha was in the rocket podded one and Weapons Team 1 was attached to Alpha inside the same chopper. IIRC. Anyway, I didn't see anything wrong with your landing head. The matter of the fact is, you got the people on ground safe, and that what matters. In fact, from a pilots PoV (and not from COs, even though I asked you to do so), you did a right thing IMO: You landed before the marked LZ, which was placed next to the AO border. As a pilot, it is your duty to get the troops safe on the ground, if it means walking a few extra hundred of meters. And who cares if auto-hover is used? I personally use it as well. Not because I suck, but because Arma flying is not so good with mouse (I only tend to use mouse in attack variants of planes/helos, for aiming). /nitpicking
head wrote:But yea , i tend to be overly careful while landing due the fact i don't want to ruin the mission for 20 peeps.
Your efforts are well appreciated! And your rockets towards the end brought great mirth to Weapons Team 1!
More seriously, I can't judge how good or bad your landing was, because I was riding in Goose 2, and Goose 2 took twice as long as you did to get to the AO.
Draakon wrote:Rocket one, since you were flying Alpha, Alpha was in the rocket podded one and Weapons Team 1 was attached to Alpha inside the same chopper.
We were not with Alpha, a point of some confusion in Wep 1 when we were asked to go to Alpha's channel at the start. It states right on the slotting screen, "Weapons Team 1 Leader (Goose 2)" To make room in Goose 1 for the CO element and Engineers, Weapons Team 1 is mounted in Goose 2 and Weapons Team 2 is mounted in Goose 3. I'll write down a section in the Admin tab detailing who is pre-mounted where.
~ Ferrard
"Take a boat in the air you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turnin' of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she's hurtin' before she keels... makes her home."
)
~ Ferrard
