fa_c72_lightningstrike

[Sparks]

Random thoughts:

• Thanks for not starting us in the base and not putting the RAT in the driver's seat, that helped the startup enormously, no logistical funnystuff was needed.
• There's a really heavy comms load on this one as BLUFOR is whittled down.
• The OPFOR air units are horrendously effective.
• The OPFOR MBTs are... somewhat amorous.
• I'm not sure if it was just me, but I had the impression that the soldier's movement speed was appallingly slow in this mission for some reason.
• This is shaping up to be a whole bundle of fun, but it really does take a long time to run. "Lightning" isn't really an apt name

[Kefirz]

CO of the last run:

I agree with splitting this mission up in two parts, it just took too long to get to the end and many people dropped out by then.

On the last assault, we already went down the command chain quite a bit, and there were some CC issues as well, which slowed things down.

Sparks, it's hard to do a run and gun assault with the Hunters, when there are AT men and IFV's with clearly better target acquisition than us. (That 1st hill that we took was a prime example)



Judging from the past and present, all of the plans involved taking out the AAA guns first and then the motor pool, so maybe put the emphasis on the primary objective or delete the marker for the AAA guns, so people focus on just the motor pool?

[Eagle_Eye]

Yo guys, thanks for the feedback.

So in this version that you played the other night. I tried to focus the enemies more towards the roadblocks (1st contact), the objectives in the town and motorpool (2nd contact) and then a ridiculous reinforcement attack to punish the players for dilly-dallying (3rd contact). Obviously when it comes to playing an actual mission with 40 people, things dont go according to the plan in my head.

Luckily, the real crux of this mission (in my opinion) is the NATO ORBAT, and not necessarily the enemy composition or objectives. I just wanted to make something with a fully mounted force because I had just watched generation kill. With that in mind, I think I might have to take a step back and try to plan out a redesign of the AO. I like the idea of a strike on a motorpool/AA battery/Airfield, and like to keep that theme. Obviously however one primary objective is more than enough, and some though has to go into the composition of enemy AT/Armor that will be faced.

So basically what I think i will do is keep the NATO forces as they are, and try to find a new suitable AO (or rethink the existing one) that is small enough to not make the mission hours long, but big enough to give choice and not bottleneck the 8 hunters that are being deployed. (the current AO is just a bit too stuck between loads of towns, and too much empty space, it needs to lend a more focussed direction to the mission) If anyone has any suggestions about a new AO, and where on the map might be nice terrain for a mounted platoon to fight, let me know. I am thinking that it might be cool to attack an airfield, with one end of the field being refuelling bombers, and the other having an AA battery.

[Kefirz]

We could still keep the current AO, just make it larger. Since we have Hunters, we have more mobility and more freedom of approach.

And to my knowledge, none of the plans actually went through the North and towards the motorpool first.

[Eagle_Eye]

I just realised now reading some of the AAR, that there was actually enemy CAS. OOPs, they probably werent supposed to have any ammo.

[wolfenswan]

Oh I noticed there were plenty of stocked CSAT ammo caches around. I'd probably empty those and (if they were intended as a means to resupply in the field) replace it with a NATO supply drop (either by using the THs, Hurons + slingloads or the support module).

[Sparks]

I just realised now reading some of the AAR, that there was actually enemy CAS. OOPs, they probably werent supposed to have any ammo.

It made things a bit sporty though

[Ferrard Carson]

I've been both an ASL (field promoted to CO), a random AR and a pilot reinforcement for this mission. Some of my opinions reflect those already expressed by other folk.

I think you have, like Wolfenswan's old Rolling Matryoshka back in A2, a very solid pair of missions here, somewhat hindered by the size of the AO, the terrain we fight through and the composition of the enemy.

Mission #1 is the attack on the Triple-A vehicles. This involves controlling the major hill, assaulting through a checkpoint and construction site, and dealing with CSAT forces emerging from the town in a counterattack. This is a very interesting exercise, albeit somewhat limited in sane approaches. It does take quite a while to accomplish, however, due to a few factors that I'll expound upon later.

Mission #2 is the attack on the depot itself. The depot defenses are surprisingly light, given the number of times scratch blobs have been able to make significant dents in its garrison. The counterattack in the latest version of this mission is intimidating, but petered out long before it could crush the NATO survivors underfoot. It's hard to tell how interesting this stage of the mission is because by the time we reach this point, it's been 40 or 50 minutes into the mission, the platoon is usually light a few elements, and generally things have devolved into "Charge for Glory" mode from the chaos and logistics.

Earlier I mentioned a few of the factors leading to a somewhat awkward mission:

1) Size and terrain of the AO - This mission is huge, there's no way around it. The bounding box indicating the AO is several kilometers along each side. No matter how we approach either the Motor Pool or the SPAAGs, we have to cross at least a kilometer of open terrain, sometimes two, and open, coverless terrain is very much the name of the game here. The distances involved combine to greatly devalue footmobile infantry - the platoon is effective so long as we can babysit our ma-deuce Hunters from vantage point to vantage point, but the moment we are unable to use our Hunters for whatever reason, everything goes to hell. Infantry can only cover so much distance in a certain amount of time, and infantry weapons are effective out to about 400 meters... which doesn't come close to adequately covering some of the gaps in cover. The only effective weapons for the majority of the mission are either vehicle-borne or AT launchers. Speaking of which...

2) Enemy Composition - The NATO platoon is ill-equipped to face CSAT's defending forces. CSAT has so many armored vehicles that NATO has no answer for, forcing us to prod CSAT with a stick until they expose themselves to an AT shot. In fact, CSAT has so many armored vehicles that it's debatable if we actually have sufficient AT to take on this force. My guess is that without the random caches of AT assets placed at the Checkpoints and within the SPAAG city, we would not actually be able to complete this mission with a typical platoon. (Side note: Ideally, we never want to have ammoboxes of any kind sitting around in our missions unless they are empty and there for flavor or as an objective - they tend to encourage Domination-style loadouts and box-worshiping, neither of which have a place in our socialist agrarian utopia.)

The combination of those two factors very much emphasizes the armed Hunters and AT troopers, while relegating infantry to providing security while the Hunters kill everything, or charging across open ground after the Hunters have either run out of ammunition or brewed up.

The focus on armed Hunters also leads to uncertain behavior at all levels of command due to the way it parcels the platoon's force into itty-bitty penny packets. Each fireteam is split in half by the Hunter - regardless of the specific combination of dismounts we choose, two people are crewing the Hunter, and two people are dismounted, providing security. A two-man dismount is too weak to maneuver forward under the Hunter's BOF, so our fireteams are very much tied to their vehicles unless specifically told to abandon them, and Hunters with their CROWS interface are very poor at CQC. Because of this, every Hunter (and thus every fireteam) will naturally gravitate towards the BOF role - it's the only way to keep the fireteam together.

This leaves our squads without any maneuver elements. Every single element in the platoon naturally gravitates towards a BOF role, especially on such wide open terrain where a BOF with a range of 1000+ meters is ridiculously effective. Actual maneuvering tends to appear only when we've lost a few Hunters due to either lack of ammo or lack of structural integrity, and by then the situation has usually devolved into a blob.

Solutions

1) Smaller, tighter terrain is certainly one balm for all of those issues. More urbanized areas, or areas with large hills and valleys lend themselves to dead-zones that encourage a strong infantry presence to work our way through.

2) Another solution would be to re-work the motorization of the platoon. I know you mention Generation Kill as a major inspiration for this mission, but one key thing those characters could do that we can't is stay in the vehicle and fire out of their windows. There is no earthy reason for passengers to stay inside an A3 vehicle while it is under fire as opposed to getting out and returning fire, but 2 passengers alone aren't sufficient in strength to actually do anything on their own. Instead, consider putting each squad in a HEMTT each, then including HMG Hunters as 2-man attachments of Driver and Gunner. This allows for the continued use of armed Hunters as superb BOF elements while also preserving the infantry as a maneuver unit that isn't tied down to their vehicle. By breaking the fireteams free of the "We need to protect our HMG" mindset, we can enable and encourage more mobility, more maneuver and overall more interesting tactics.

3) Tone down the enemy vehicles and tone up the enemy garrisons. The more troops the enemy keep in cover, the less effective our BOF elements will be at clearing the map from a hill-top a klick away. The less we have to hole up in the sparse cover and wait for our AT dudes to nuke something, the faster the platoon will move through the mission.

So, those are my thoughts about the mission and what could be done to improve it. You aren't doing anything wrong at all - there were certainly moments that I really liked in both runs of this mission I've been in. What issues this mission has come from some systemic second-order effects of things that seem simple and reasonable on the surface.

Good luck!

~ Ferrard

[Kefirz]

I agree that we don't have enough AT assets in this mission, but that might be also emphasized in slotting, to take more attachments.
And that without the random AT crates around we would probably die in the town, with the AA guns. I myself took down a ZSU, and a Marid.

I don't think we were able to snipe that well to be honest, the AO consisted of a lot of concealment and without thermals we couldn't see anything, even the bad guy who shot one of Alphas Hunters at the start.

I would also argue, that the FTL has the right to determine how his fireteam is placed. And if I was FTL'ing in this mission, I would leave the AAR in the Hunter to one-man it. Doing so, you would get a BOF, and the 3 players can maneuver. Then the Hunter would push to the 3 guys, make a BOF there and the 3 guys would move again. Basically bound through the engagement. Also, since it is a BOF, it is pretty much static and the driver is only needed when doing the bounds. And since the place he is going to drive to, was cleared by his teammates there wouldn't be much use of the HMG.

[audiox]

About ferrards suggestion #2. Please don't. We have a ton of infantry-centric missions that deal with dismounted squads that show up in transport trucks and roam around on foot.
Its great and refreshing to actually have something that forces us to do something completely different, also, its friggin' cool to drive around with something that packs a punch for a change. Taking away what makes the mission different (lotsa HMG Hunters) would make it just another iteration of the same thing we always do, and if we don't occasionally break the standard pattern then we'll grow stale.
Its a different problem set and if our solution to that is to turn it into the same problem set we usually have we're not properly challenging ourselves.

Also, i must say that my experience from Fireteam AT last time was not one of a constantly superior HMG. It had plenty of comms, movement and visibilty problems which made me definitely feel as if the presence of the people on foot was important. Running alongside such a heavy fireteam asset was great fun, and i'd really like to do it again.