[Sun] 30 Aug 2015 (Special Forces)

[Ccrasus]

Appropriation, Part 2: FIA A1 RAT

Killing chapels never was this fun


Video of our flanking maneuver



Overrun: A2 FTL

First time FTL, died within the first 5 minutes. Such is life.

[Peasant]

castle crashers bravo1 ftl

This was a fairly simple mission until we hit the town, at which point the ifs chewed us up. Sorry for going quiet my team, I didn't notice three of you dying. (Future standing order for anyone on my fire teams: if there is a vehicle moving close, and you don't have an AT asset find a hiding place and stay there)

quds radio hour alpha 1 medic

After bravo lead bumped a patrol shortly after landing and we lost our glorious leader, the first half of the mission was fairly uneventful. Then we loaded up in the chopper and got shot down. Ah well.

overrun bravo 2 rifleman

so highlights: dragging a casualty to drop in on ferrard's medical centre, engaging AAF close at the North east of town and realising that no one had covered that arc and that they had got right into town from that angle. Bleeding to death and luring jigsor to his doom. The Sparks and Soviet church defence. Dat victory screen.

approprition part 2 AAF commander

So this went poorly. Judging by costno's vid, the initial ambush force was three people who put down two full fire teams. Good work eagle eye. With 20/20 hindsight, I should have had at least one fire team further east, or scouted the advance much more aggressively, rather than having both fire teams clumped up in ambush friendly situations. Or I could have ordered the fire teams to spread out into a long line which would have bumped the ambush force earlier? I'm not sure: please provide some criticism, it's the only way I'll learn.

[fer]

Sometimes, comrades, I worry about our reading comprehension and recollection skills.

Comrade Ralian writes:

Quds Radio Hour: MMG Gunner

Soon after, comrade Soviet writes of his experience leading Bravo 2 in the same mission:

... squad leadership from Ral ...

Which is incorrect, because I was BSL Later still, comrade Peasant, claiming to be part of Bravo, writes of the same mission:

Then we loaded up in the chopper and got shot down.

Which, I believe, more accurately describes what happened to the unfortunate Alpha (since Bravo survived the mission with only 3 KIAs).

All of this leaves me very concerned about our ability as witnesses. Thankfully, a solution is at hand: the Party will determine the truth and issue guidance as to what you will, henceforth, recollect. Releasing you from the burden of having to remember things all by yourselves is yet another way in which the Party provides for you.

Full AAR post from me to follow later, but a few special mentions: comrade Ferrard Carson for both hosting an outstanding session and providing some wonderful missions; comrades Soviet and AJAX for some super element leadership in Quds Radio Hour (Bravo was easy to lead thanks to two strong FTLs); and as mentioned before, their success in Overrun means comrades Sparks and Soviet have been nominated for medals (a long conversation in the Politburo will follow, during which their nominations will be used as mere pawns in the political battles of Bodgist/Anti-Bodgist factions; when the fruit baskets eventually do arrive at their apartments, they will have been found to have died, old, alone, and in abject poverty; obviously - and it will be the fault of the Bodgist faction, too.).

[Eagle_Eye]

Ralian, Costno and Ccrasus, Awesome videos guys.

DryToad: Good to have you man. The most important thing to remember (or at least its what I need to keep telling myself) is to just come along to sessions and relax. Dont worry about how many guys you kill, dont worry that you didnt last through the whole mission, and certainly dont worry about your plan falling to pieces 4 minutes in to the mission. Once you can show up, enjoy the banter and try your best to make sure everyone is having fun, then everyone will have fun. Some nights I spend sitting in spectator mode 80% of the time, but the few games where you make it to the end of that hour long struggle (or even just get to see amazing last stands like last night) will make up for that in a heartbeat. PS even the most veteran amongst us still end up throwing grenades at their teammates when trying to radio or open inventory every once in awhile, 2xG is probably the single best change to your binds you can make (followed by switching your VON button to only transmit on group).

I was CO for "quds radio hour", so along with my FAC Netkev I spent most of my time looking at a map, scratching my head and listening to 3 radio channels: Me and FAC in group, helos in TS and squad leads in CC. That meant that I dont think I even got to see most of what actually happened on the ground. Makes the footage from the front lines all the sweeter to see and hopefully it was as exciting for everyone else as it was for me. Next time I think we have all learned that maybe making the infantry have a bit of a run to the LZs is in everyones best interest.

Peasant: With regards to your plan in Appropriation, I think you were probably a little bit unlucky, and probably got caught a little by the fact I have played this map a few times. In my mind, I see this mission simply as such:


The defenders have 4 points to consider. Hill 1, Hill 2, Defending the trucks, and making sure no one sneaks past in the valleys. Our layout was thus, A1 on hill 1, A2 on hill 2, and B1 in the middle to act as reinforcements and plug any gaps.

The attackers have 3 options, Blue route, green route and valley of death red route. I think the optimal thing here is probably to send one team up the middle to draw fire and send the others around the sides to try and flank the defenders on the hill. Having had some previous pitched battles over that church at hill 1, I figured thats what would happen. Being tasked with defending that exact hilltop, I put my 2 ARs looking down into the red valley line (pretty much exactly where you walked up on us), I stayed on the top of the hill trying to spot with binocs, and I sent my red team to cover our eastern flank (tip of the green line), where they could also get into position to head south west down the edge of the AO and flank (or be supported by blue team on the hill on the off chance you sent everyone around to the east).

What this meant was: As soon as you walked in front of us, I could call in red team to come around the south side of the hill and flank. And also we have B1 in position toward our trucks that could sweep in behind you. Really I think you had two things working against you. One was that you were rushing, as Fer (I think?) pointed out in spectator. This tends to happen in adversarials. Because no-one wants to wait around for a fight, attackers tend to rush and try to get into the fight asap, which in this case led to some of your men standing 50 metres in front of my blue team guns with their rifles down.

The way to combat this is probably to be a bit stricter with your squad bounding. If you have 2 fireteams moving up through a valley, ensure that either the teams are bounding (if there is cover to bound to), or just have one team stay 100 metres back. This means if the team in front gets engaged, the other is hopefully far enough out of the fray to maneuver or start covering the flanks. In my perfect ideal fireteam moving through the woods, I would probably even put my blue team about 50 metres separated from red, so that if red comes under fire they can retreat while blue lays down suppressing fire, or if blue come under fire, they can drop and spray while red move to flank. Obviously I dont know what was going on on your side during the mission, so I may well be talking out of my ass. In fact if you listen to me in the posted videos, I miss at least two casualty reports from people, and mix up east and west twice when reporting contacts, so even I wasn't in full tactical control of the situation (especially when that rocket hit the church about 20 feet away from me).

[Sparks]

Aww, you guys! That's more heartwarming than one of Netkev's dad's special hugs or Comrade's Carson's kind words about my flying!

Managed to miss the first mission slotting (family dinner), but that got more than made up for by one of the most fun evenings in Folk so far...

Castle Crashers

Mostly spent this watching the assault on the castle, diverting for a moment to watch a truly disturbing drowning party off in the southwestern corner of the ocean, then back to watch all of Bravo get horribly mangled by an IFV that nobody ever killed...



Quds Radio Hour
Pilot, Goose2 with Ferrard Carson (stewardess/copilot/poking stick)



I'm not sure yet if this or HS;LD is the best Folk helo mission ever - HS;LD is fast, uses nimble helos, gets right up into hot LZs, and is generally frantic; this was longer, more measured, and the helos had GREAT BIG FUPP-OFF GUNS AND ROCKETS ON...
Seriously, a stonkingly awesome ton of fun for the helo pilots here. And having copilots for this op was an enormous help as well, everything from having another pair of eyes watching for traffic, to watching the terrain in the final approach to the LZs, to managing loading, the copilots earned their pay on this one.

We all lifted off in a more-or-less coordinated fashion, and formed up on the way to the IP, broke cinematically from there into our respective LZs, dropped our chalks successfully, and all but Goose2 scarpered cleanly - we wound up on the ground for a way-too-longass time waiting for the 'we're all off' call, but it eventually came and we were off and out to our loiter point where we practiced our formation hovering. I suspect Goose 1, 3 and 4 were cheating with autohover

The assault sounded like it was going okay, then we got a CAS call to hit the AAF outpost in north-south strafing runs. To make life more interesting, Goose 3 took the north-to-south run and I took the south-to-north run. I hit my IP at the coast, turned north, selected rockets and watched the entire AAF outpost go boom as Goose 3 annihilated it with rockets and then cinematically dropped flares and flew 20 feet over our heads as we lined up our rocket run and put four rockets inside the compound walls to avoid the danger-close friendly units in Bravo that we were flying over. I think Ferrard might have had a moment watching the carnage, I know I did...

Sadly, FAC had no more CAS work for us, so we loitered offshore again until we got called into extract folks. Goose 1 and 2 headed to RV Charlie so we missed the death of Goose 3 but I hear it was subterranean and on fire, so at least it wasn't a little death. We landed at RV Charlie readily enough despite the island's attempt to kill us with power lines, and Goose 1's chalk got onboard double-quick in a professional manner, while Goose 2 sat around fretting while its chalk took its time getting to where we were sitting helplessly on the ground. However, we stopped bitching when Goose 1 lifted off and immediately ate half a drum of an IFV's autocannon and went into the ground close enough that we could hear the burning screaming corpses that had been Tigershark and his minions. Then our chalk showed up and we had to lift off, so we did as little of the lift part as we could (we had power lines behind us and were lifting off backwards so we popped up a lot more than I liked). Apparently Tigershark's screams had appeased the IFV gods though and we got clear without incident, but now we had people back on the ground and no helos to lift them out, so we were sent to drop off our chalk immediately at LZ Delta and then head back to rescue folks.

Delta was right in the open beside the broadcasting facility and its troops so both Carson and I decided nuts to that, and we'd loop around the big-ass ridgeline to the north and do a pinnacle landing on the ridge and let the troops walk the extra ten metres. We had to keep low to mask with terrain, but it proved uneventful enough that the landing went smoothly. We then booked it back around the ridge, out to sea and down south to help extract the remnants of Bravo. By the time we got to our hold point, Goose 4 was landed and trying to load up a very slow-moving Bravo who'd burned all their stamina on frivolous things like running away from IFVs. Eventually they loaded and when we headed in to grab the last few elements, we landed further inland to get closer to them to reduce the on-the-ground-and-vulnerable time.

So Bravo opted to sit down and have a picnic. Comrades. We had ham sandwiches and coffee - the Party's finest - on the helo. Why were you sitting on the ground out in the cold wet night? We had to send Comrade Carson to gather you up in the end, and you know how his delicate vocal cords react when he shouts loudly enough in Direct to be heard inside a running helicopter (and probably by the IFV a mile away as well).

Our suitably admonished comrades thus loaded, we made a very low exfil back out to sea (I don't think we popped up more then six or seven meters at the highest point) and looped north, around our primary idle point and the hovering Goose 4 and then headed inland to LZ Echo, where we dropped our chalk without any incidents and headed back out to form on Goose 4 again. People went and assaulted and stuff and then FAC had us head to a tertiary loiter point, which was where Carson and I had been earlier, north of the ridgeline north of LZ Delta. We held there for a few minutes - long enough to hear that Goose 4 was cheating with autohover, the cad - and then got called to LZ picnic, just south of LZ Delta. But enemy locations meant the only safe approach was to retrace our steps around the ridgeline and fly its southern edge to LZ picnic, which we did. While we landed at picnic to pick up CO and MMG and anyone else left alive for exfil, FAC sent Goose 4 after an IFV to our south. It did not end well, but at least he died like he lived (on fire).

Right about this point, I was getting nervous about FAC's plan for them to plant the virus and book it, while Goose 2 dropped our remaining 8 rockets and 2000 minigun rounds into the broadcasting tower while an IFV tried to swiss cheese us. However victory was then declared! Huzzah! And I killed 2 infantrymen and 41 civilians? War crimes? Eeek...

A tour de force of a mission. Nicely written Carson, it was a ton of fun.



Appropriation, Part 2
Alpha 2 AR with Soviet (FTL), Davix (AR), Tigershark (AT), Dabbo (R) and DryToad (R)



This mission proved to be a wonderful lesson in how to run face first into an ambush Alpha 1 and 2 were intermingled in the woods coming up to the chapel because of earlier connection issues and the like; we'd taken the lead to blackadder, but it got confused who was in the lead after that and when some CSAT blokes started shooting at us from way out east, it got even more so; so Alpha 1 and 2 crested the plateau edge facing the chapel more or less together and ran face-first into sustained small-arms and grenade fire. I managed to get about three or four AR rounds off towards the only enemy I saw, then I was down to either a bullet or a grenade fragment, not sure which. The next minute was us lying there, bleeding, and trying on the radio to find out how many were down (all of us, more or less), where the enemy were (right in front of us) and where the medic was (behind us throwing smoke and healing).

I was lucky and got revived; I threw an RGO and fired some rounds and then legged it south to regroup and loop around; as I ran I saw Carson was down and injured and realised that the medic was further back up the slope and wouldn't get to him in time, but I was right there with a FAK so I revived him. And since no good deed goes unpunished, I was shot in the place my spleen used to be seconds after starting the heal animation. But the heal action is like Magnus Magnusson, so while I lay there and twitched, Carson got up and shot all the bullets at Costno in revenge, only to get capped a few seconds later. Then I bled out and watched the last of the mopping up. From first contact to game over was approximately six or seven seconds; the rest of the time just took longer to figure out who'd won...



Overrun
Bravo 1 AR with Soviet (FTL), Robin (AR), Ralian (AT), ZeCatnip (R) and Grumpy (R)



Holy fuck.

Does this mission fire up extra servers to run headless clients for all the AI? Jeebus.

So we start off with a simple plan and buildings to garrison. Bunker down, wait till you see the whites of their eyes, then shoot them between the white bits. Grand. Except when we spawn, the sturdiest bit of our building is the still-standing doorframe. So we pick another building (after running about and nearly dying from being Arma'd with fall damage on the flat) and garrison there. Then we spend a good ten minutes shooting at shadowy figures in the encroaching darkness, hiding pressed up against walls listening to strider HMGs on the far side of the wall, hearing striders attack other teams, and finally hearing artillery land about 20-30m away north of us. At that point Soviet had us all regroup and after he'd shot me and someone had shot him through a window and I'd revived him and we'd bonded, we booked it north to the church. Or past it. We ganged up on a corner, ZeCatnip poked his head around and I got ZeCatnip's virtual brains splattered all over me, I got whatever had shot him, then someone shot Soviet and me.

Fer bravely charged enemy fire and operated while under fire on myself and Soviet, got us both back up, shoved us towards the church and then took a round to the back from the cowardly enemy. They surely couldn't have shot you from the front brave Comrade Medic, they would have been paralysed with fear!

Soviet, Carson and myself pulled back into the church, calling for anyone left to fall back there as well and to call before entering lest we friendly fire them. AJAX responded by grenading me. I didn't think I'd called his mom anything bad that mission so I was surprised Carson revived me, and after a few moments I realised we couldn't hold the position to the left of the door, so I got back behind the altar with Soviet, set up the bipod and spent the remainder of the mission there, hosing down anything that I saw move outside the church, a few things that I thought had moved, some things I guessed might have moved, and some things that hadn't moved at all, just to keep them all guessing.

Then the tank showed up. After we'd changed our trousers, Ferrard suggested we go face it like men and char--and then an AI shot him in the face. So we opted to stay in the church and make them earn it. They got close - one was right on our patio at one point - but they never managed to get past the door and we lived to see the darkness and make our escape through a fortuitous tunnel we found under the altar in the church, which led up into Netkev's dad's house. And that Comrades, is how we escaped attack helos and main battle tanks using only our wits, 6.5mm caseless ammunition, and Netkev's dad's affections.



Afterparty
Glub Glub Glub
Fishbait

GlubGlubGlub is an absolutely brilliantly simple idea that's proving enormously fun
If we do that thing we mentioned with the flares attached to people though, then please give us chemlights we can use underwater for the distracting and stuff.

You could take the grenades of some off us to compensate, they'll only hurt themselves anyway...

Oh, and never rob a corpse wearing a wetsuit. It takes too long and you'll only get shot with your hand trapped in someone's rubber pocket.




Best Folk night in a while folks, thanks for making it a 43-person riot with strawberry jam and hugs!

[Freyja]

My poor attempt at a poster.

FUCKING Y-ES!! GLUB GLUB GLUB GLUB!!!¨

Also Sparks, that is some truly wonderful footage and write upping, I am amazed you weren't kidding when you told me Bravo was having a picnic, that is wonderfully entertaining.

[SuicideKing]

Based on Sparks' video, I believe I shot Soviet (I was prone right next to the rock and shot someone crouched), then Grumpy, and my grenade got Sparks (or maybe the second grenade was mine). Unfortunately none of them actually died I see, and then Grumpy shot me.


Full AAR later!

[darkChozo]

Castle Crashers A2 Assaultman

Relatively uneventful as missions go. We supported A1 as they made the main assault on the castle, which for us mostly meant taking potshots at patrols and killing a very unfortunate man hiding near a shed. I fired my sole rocket into the back of an artillery piece; technically our objective was just kill the crews but we had rockets we determined that a scorch and burn strategy would be optimal for the situation.

After that we got bogged down in a valley, half because of enemies and half because of allies that we weren't entirely sure weren't enemies. There was something about an IFV too but I don't think we ever saw it. A few room-clearings and revived team members later, the mission declared itself complete.

Quds Radio Hour B2 Automatic Rifleman

Fun mission with a shockingly organized fireteam. The initial assault on the AAF compound was textbook; B1 and CAS annihilated the opposition before I had a chance to shoot much of anything, then red team did a fine job of flanking around and taking out any stragglers. We then proceeded to faff around for a bit as the QRF, uh, reacted quickly, showing up at the base and shooting down two of our helicopters in spectacular fashion.

(for future runs of the mission, CO should probably emphasize the urgency of getting away from the base after setting it on fire; I'm not sure if people realized that we were minutes away from an unfortunate rendezvous with some autocannon shells.)

We proceeded to run a thankfully uneventful short marathon to a secondary LZ, keeping a friendly hill between us and the IFV. One helicopter ride later, we arrived near the broadcast station, took a hike up a hill, and supported another beautiful assault. And then we hid from an IFV again, just for nostalgia's sake. Then a helicopter exploded and we finished the mission, leaving absolutely no trace that we had ever been there. Definitely.

Appropriation, Part 2 A1 Automatic Rifleman

A rare example of a plan working out perfectly. SuicideKing and I took up positions behind rocks in the trees in front of the chapel, Eagle Eye hid in the chapel, and red team took positions to the southeast side of the hill. I spotted AAF walking in our general direction, we held fire until they were basically standing on Suicide's back, then lots of people got shot. I think I ended up hitting four people, not counting grenades, but apparently only one of them stayed down. I blame modern medicine.

Overrun A2 Assaultman

A very short one. A2 took up positions in what we thought was a compound; turned out it was actually a deathtrap. Five seconds later we were down to two. Three seconds after that I died trying to retreat to safer ground. Unfortunately I had to go before I was able to witness what was apparently an excellent last stand.

[Peasant]

Peasant: With regards to your plan in Appropriation, I think you were probably a little bit unlucky, and probably got caught a little by the fact I have played this map a few times. In my mind, I see this mission simply as such:


The defenders have 4 points to consider. Hill 1, Hill 2, Defending the trucks, and making sure no one sneaks past in the valleys. Our layout was thus, A1 on hill 1, A2 on hill 2, and B1 in the middle to act as reinforcements and plug any gaps.

The attackers have 3 options, Blue route, green route and valley of death red route. I think the optimal thing here is probably to send one team up the middle to draw fire and send the others around the sides to try and flank the defenders on the hill. Having had some previous pitched battles over that church at hill 1, I figured thats what would happen. Being tasked with defending that exact hilltop, I put my 2 ARs looking down into the red valley line (pretty much exactly where you walked up on us), I stayed on the top of the hill trying to spot with binocs, and I sent my red team to cover our eastern flank (tip of the green line), where they could also get into position to head south west down the edge of the AO and flank (or be supported by blue team on the hill on the off chance you sent everyone around to the east).

What this meant was: As soon as you walked in front of us, I could call in red team to come around the south side of the hill and flank. And also we have B1 in position toward our trucks that could sweep in behind you. Really I think you had two things working against you. One was that you were rushing, as Fer (I think?) pointed out in spectator. This tends to happen in adversarials. Because no-one wants to wait around for a fight, attackers tend to rush and try to get into the fight asap, which in this case led to some of your men standing 50 metres in front of my blue team guns with their rifles down.

The way to combat this is probably to be a bit stricter with your squad bounding. If you have 2 fireteams moving up through a valley, ensure that either the teams are bounding (if there is cover to bound to), or just have one team stay 100 metres back. This means if the team in front gets engaged, the other is hopefully far enough out of the fray to maneuver or start covering the flanks. In my perfect ideal fireteam moving through the woods, I would probably even put my blue team about 50 metres separated from red, so that if red comes under fire they can retreat while blue lays down suppressing fire, or if blue come under fire, they can drop and spray while red move to flank. Obviously I dont know what was going on on your side during the mission, so I may well be talking out of my ass. In fact if you listen to me in the posted videos, I miss at least two casualty reports from people, and mix up east and west twice when reporting contacts, so even I wasn't in full tactical control of the situation (especially when that rocket hit the church about 20 feet away from me).

Thanks for the comments Eagle Eye. Fer you were right. I was rushing things, both strategic and tactical levels. This was the first source of our problems. The other source of problems was that I left myself behind the advance and therefore didn't understand the terrain. That meant I had no idea where the enemy was (recon is important and super overlooked in FolkARPS being both slow and involving most of the platoon sitting and waiting.)

So I first considered going down the western (blue) route, but I thought, no that would take too long. So I decided to copy what others had done successfully without knowing exactly what, how and why they had done it. I never had a solid assault plan for the chapel and the one I did have (co and b1 act as base of fire while a1 and a2 assault couldn't be made to work on the terrain I had: the terrain meant that we couldn't get eyes on the chapel until we were 50m from it on the plateau. I didn't really think bounding would be appropriate on the terrain, and I didn't consider having one alpha fireteam in reserve (which would have been better). Alternatively, I could have pushed further east and flanked the chapel from there but I didn't want to do that because 1) the CSAT would have shot us in the back and 2) the only FIA forces I did know about were somewhere East. I could have taken people west but that would have left us exposed to forces west. So, I put on my self imposed tactical straight jacket and sort of just pushed everyone forwards into a shockingly well organised ambush. Shockingly a plan:
1) that the CO didn't want to execute
2) was barely there at all
3) was not adapted to the terrain
4) was poorly implemented (by the CO himself)
5) and had been predicted by the enemy

Resulted in the death of everyone involved.

My advice for myself and other commanders is: 1) execute the plan you want to execute, not the one that is convenient.
2) take your time
3) if you don't know where the enemy is, don't use 2 fire teams to find out where they are.
4) have a plan.

At the very least, it was short and exciting.

[Tubby McChubbles]

Castle Crashers ASL

I managed to be utterly incompetent and yet still somehow scrape to victory here. The mission began with a longish trek behind a hill to our first objective, which seemed to be completely empty. I then proceeded to confuse the hell out of A1 FTL by alternately forgetting about them and tasking them with point assaults. I then forgot I hadn't told the MMG team to move up with A2, and then managed to get horribly burned attempting to rescue the CO from a flaming vehicle. After a little pile of brave men built up around us, the fires died and we were revived. We then pushed fairly successfully into the town, the men encouraged by my inspiring shouts of "I think there's an IFV somewhere".

The end was a bit of a blur, CO died and I remember basically telling everyone to do their own thing. Napoleon I am not.

Quds Radio Hour A1 Automatic Rifleman

Machine-gunning my way to a fiery death. A pretty successful assault on the first two objectives where I may have once or twice hit something? (Need to practice that) I relegated myself to the rangefinder, spotting targets for the more competent members of my team. We rushed to Goose 1, and due to some communications issues (Tigershark's request to leave sounded fuzzy to my radio, not sure if that was the reason) we stuck around until the IFVs arrived, then got blown out the air. In retrospect, Goose 3's fate should probably have warned us.

Appropriation, Part 2 Indfor SQL

My second command of my short and unstoried career, my first words on announcing my plan were something like "I think we're doomed". I had to contend with terrain that did not at all lend itself to defence (because the slopes were all too far away or too hard to see from), and I couldn't be sure how much time we had to position. Luckily, my placement of A1 at the church paid off, and our supersoldiers held off the entire enemy advance, with me helpfully lobbing 40mm rounds that missed just about everything, and shifting A2 back and forth like a tennis ball.

Second victory in spite of my failings!

Overrun A1 Rifleman (AT)

The enemy arrived with an Ifrit. I moved out of cover to engage and was immediately blown to bits. The end of Tubby.


I had a good time with my first major commands, and have now resolved to learn to aim and identify!