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First time in ages fearing not to succeed the mission.
I was blown away by the immersion you managed to keep on the first 3mins of the insertion, it was really cool. Unfortunately comms were broken and the fast roping went foobar but it was quickly fixed.
I’ll skip directly to the escape as it was most of the mission to me. Leaving in trucks sucked, we were quite literally at the other end of the map in enemy territory and finding alternate routes in hills covered by forests where there is only one road viable for the trucks didn’t help in dealing with the enemy outposts along the way. But IMO it was still a better choice than walking 7kms in Arma.
I was genuinely scared when we took the exfil on foot, enemy patrols were all over the place and a helicopter was looking for us quite closely. But in the end we managed to avoid being spotted so good job everyone who survived!
A few unrelated points:
- the drone you mentioned was reported multiple times in the last phase of the OP, but was by everyone (myself included) labelled as ANGEL so we didn’t worry about it. Spotting it while running away from enemies chasing you down with NVGs in the middle of a forest was no easy task to be honest
- for future missions I agree with [user avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/11341464/avatar/small.1553522842.png” name=“Clarke”]11341464[/user] that having fewer, consolidated elements makes the experience better for people who otherwise risk spending 2.5hrs staring at the bushes
Thank you for the mission, the glowing patch on our helmets was absolutely dope!
The frames of my game screamed IMMERSION as they plummeted to low 30s during the first half of the mission. I really enjoyed the second part, especially the final escape - people were super focused, no casual jokes, no banter, no overwhelming chatter, just pure "get it done" mentality. Really glad I survived that Bravo massacre.
Regarding the optimal plan being walking for ~7 (?) km instead of using the vehicles – yes, that’s what a real military unit would probably do. But our element leaders have to consider the fun aspect of the game, swapping elements around so that everyone gets a share of the shooting fun (well, some leaders forget that), so taking that into consideration, the long-walk option was an obvious no-go, as they couldn’t have relied on the GM making up something more interesting than the occasional forest patrol.
Giving the players vehicles and a long way to go and expecting them to not use the vehicles is kind of like giving them guns, enemies and expecting them not to shoot. 
[user avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/3749902/avatar/small.1500023987.jpeg” name=“Churizo”]3749902[/user] I wasn’t mad or anything, it’s just that I got teleported into the AO short moments before you appointed me the pointman, so I was disoriented a bit and my "which way do we go" question was genuine (not having GPS open), so telling me that I should know better because I was there on the briefing didn’t exactly help. … The other time we (blue) were on the other side of green, so it took us a few seconds to catch up with you.
[quote user_id=“13633351” avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/13633351/avatar/medium.1434890353.jpeg” name=“Freghar”]Regarding the optimal plan being walking for ~7 (?) km instead of using the vehicles – yes, that’s what a real military unit would probably do. But our element leaders have to consider the fun aspect of the game, swapping elements around so that everyone gets a share of the shooting fun (well, some leaders forget that), so taking that into consideration, the long-walk option was an obvious no-go, as they couldn’t have relied on the GM making up something more interesting than the occasional forest patrol.
Giving the players vehicles and a long way to go and expecting them to not use the vehicles is kind of like giving them guns, enemies and expecting them not to shoot. :)[/quote]
That’s definitely fair, like I said, the escape plan was up to Delta entirely, no right or wrong way to do it imo! The comment I made at debrief was simply how I’d have done it.
As feedback I think what was much more critical is that the JTAC didn’t PID targets before calling in angel support which was specifically part of the RoE. That wasn’t all his fault because instead he ended up leading Charlie, which was 3 men strong and could have been divided among the other fire teams. A lot of pain could have been avoided if the Russians were left alone.
The other point is that no one decided to do anything about that drone following you around. Its true, the JTAC has a drone, but thats an AR-2 Darter. You may not have known that, but why not confirm that with Delta? Instead that drone was broadcasting your position until it had to RTB for fuel which was just after you guys called angel on the checkpoint. If that drone weren’t around, the Russian mortars that decimated Alpha probably wouldn’t have fired.
I guess part of that has to do with expectations of MM/GM, kind of like I mentioned ambushing players with AI set to "hold fire", sneaking up on them, in some other thread. There are some unwritten rules to the game that we abide by, and it’s easy to deviate from them and say: "Well it’s obvious you should have thought of that." - and it is obvious, but only outside those unwritten boundaries.
It’s like if we decided (in some other mission) to leave the civilian population to its own devices (after saving them from occupation) and then got told that they all died because there wasn’t enough farmland and/or trade to sustain their living needs, mission failed - we should have evacuated them.
In a similar sense, a sound glitch seemed like a much more likely explanation, especially since it sounded like a big helicopter and I couldn’t find any helicopter in the sky. Also, GM using drones against players, in a mission with an allied drone, basically never happens.
I know you meant it more on the platoon level and not me personally, and maybe it’s indeed on the line of what players should expect (I’m all for pushing the boundaries, FTR), but I guess it’s just something I wanted to point out from the other side. It’s like killing a DnD PC because they fell into a spike pit, because they didn’t check every 5ft with a long pole - you’ll train players who never move 5ft anywhere without tapping a pole.
You can view it like that, thats true. I see it as a failure of communication as the drone was pointed out by Angel and had lasers pointed at it on multiple occasions.
In the end it wasn’t the failure of not shooting down the drone, but not sticking to the RoE that had the Russians retaliate. The drone was there for reconnaissance, it was after Angel engaged a Russian Hind and a squad of volunteers at a checkpoint that things got ugly.
[youtube]GBMsuuShKJA[/youtube]
Arma 3 CNTO: Never too close for Angel
