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What not to do when being platoon: Rush into the mission too fast and lose half your team. Shock&Awe doesn’t always work.
One big problem I had was that we used the classical "let’s cram everybody into Alpha and attach even more guys that are extra or make them play in PTL element". I outlined my issues with this in a separate thread, but this mission highlighted it quite nicely.
Demzee was the official PTL, but Lastmikoi essentially commanded all of infantry, with one medic. This resulted in both fireteams being split far apart, both with heavily injured people. At one point, yellow was put in a chopper with one pretty heavily injured person, without a medic (who was busy with blue). Without a long range radio.
I don’t know, I feel like we always, without an exception, need at least 2 separate elements and pretending we don’t just does us disservice by splitting Alpha.
Playing in PTL is not playing a regular infantry element, the gameplay is very different (providing security with little action) to playing A/B/C and pretending otherwise is again just lying (I have some cntr captures to prove this).
Flying with Churizo was nice, though. 
My worry was that the shipment was already hidden in some forest, so as soon as we lost eyes on it, I think we lost a realistic chance of getting it back.
The problem is Freghar if you have have 13 guys on an event then you should always have Plt and then 6 in Alpha 6 and 6 in Bravo. Obviously any less than that then you should really have a full Alpha and maybe a support team and no Plt is really needed this should prevent the case where you have Plt Commander commanding only Alpha which is pointless.
Having 4 guys we have in fireteams separated is not effective at all it is also not how we should be using them at all. If you are only one squad on a mission then act as one squad if you have multiple objectives achieve them one at a time, know your limitations and do not exceed them. GM’s should Taylor the mission to the size of the platoon and objective can be interchangeable from a full size platoon to a single squad.
I enjoyed your post in brainstorming but I do not think we should make it easier for squad to be used in the wrong way on the contrary we should reinforce good use and the biggest one is knowing our limits as a squad so we do not try to achieve what we can not with a squad.
I think if we played with a full platoon or even with 2 full squads on a regular basis this problem would dissipate. So when we don’t have a platoon to use then don’t try to use the squad as a platoon use it as a squad.
[justify]I only really played the second mission. But that one was by far the worst mission I have ever played in CNTO. And to make it clear from the start this was not the fault of the mission maker Skippy.
From the very start Bravo was designated as the driver team. This is not what we do, this what we never did before and what we shall never ever do again. It’s a terrible thing. People choosing to be driver for Dagger is fine but if you choose AR you are looking for something very specific and driver the whole mission is definitely not that.
The second idea was then to make Bravo a dedicated overwatch team which never happened. Even if it happened this is still an equally terrible idea. Making one squad playing the actually operations while the other ones just watches from 400 meters away is not fun. It might be very fun for the one squad but the other squad just sits there doing nothing.
I want to never see either of these two issues again. They absolutely ruined my evening and I can image also some other people of Bravo. Resolving the first issue is easy: If Zeus/PL needs a lot of drivers they should say that in the beginning so people can take dedicated slots for that, for example Engineers. The second issue can only be resolved if SL and PL want to make an enjoyable mission for everyone. In this mission it seemed Lastmikoi abused his position as an experienced SL to get the more interesting objectives while Teddy and DMZ just let that happen.
In future SL should not only consider their Squads enjoyment but the one of all the other players in the mission. I hope that the new leadership training will fix those issues.
Onto some issues in Bravo: This Squad was very unorganized. On the first engagement Freghar, Jacop and I were ordered to sit 500 meters away from the town on a road not seeing a single enemy or do anything useful for that matter. In addition to that there was a huge issue with the radio channels where half of Bravo was on Alphas net while the rest was on the other net.
On the second engagement Bravos medic was sent to fight with Alpha inside the town while members of Bravo bled out hundreds of meters away. Those bleeding members were later naded by Alpha. There seemed to have no communications what so ever between the squads at this point to either get the medic back or at least tell them not to throw grenades at our bleeding bodies.
All in all, this mission was thoroughly disliked this mission and hope to never experience anything like that in CNTO again.
[/justify]
Thanks for making you feelings known Flo I want to make sure that sort of thing never happens again. In the past we have organised things according to the rule everyone goes in alpha and the spares go into bravo and end up playing a secondary role. Not every mission obviously but it is very common. In the future I would like to ensure that if we have more than 10 people then we should evenly spread people with two squads and they should each take an equal part of the more active parts of the mission.
In addition I would like to make it known that transport vehicles should be driven by AARs firstly and everyone should have a chance to say no they would rather not drive. Any vehicle that is not an actual combat vehicle to be used in an attack should be fully dismounted for combat and placed somewhere safe.
If we have roles for the active armed vehicles that are actually going to spend most of their time in the vehicle fighting then a special role that has its own group should be used. If a vehicle should be used as a squad support and is part of the squad then there really should be roles in the squad picked for that role (as was suggest once). Obviously if we do not have dedicated squad vehicles then those roles are not needed.
Like I said thanks very much, one of the important things about this community is we give feedback and if we don’t speak up for ourselves and others who might be more hesitant to then we can’t fix stuff.
About the second mission, I really enjoyed the way the "mini training" was done by Churizo and Berenton. I liked the practicality of looking at the map/briefing and going over some of the basics or most common issues that arise while completing those specific objectives.
All that in contrast to practicing generic tactics & procedures, of which I really hate being "forced" to pretend like there’s an imaginary enemy, with over half the people being AFK and the other half really not wanting to do it and just playing along. That feels very unnatural and demoralizing, whereas getting a theoretical refresher on stuff that might come in handy in a few moments feels very good.
I made a big mistake leading Bravo (one of several) as we attacked the main objective. Alpha is on the right moving around the east to get into the town while Bravo has been told to follow and support them. I have sent our medic with Alpha because I thought we were going to stay in cover and be safe while they were going into more danger. A bit stupid when we can be shot at from everything in the town. The thing is we have just spotted light armour in the middle of town through the bushes! I have been told Alpha has no AT so one man in the platoon has AT, Berenton. The enemy BTR is about 350m away, too far to use with any certainty of hitting it.
Now what I did was send a team of Flo, Berenton and Stuka down to get closer to the BTR and kill it. I tell my other guys to mount up on the armed Humvee and move to the east to see if they can engage it from a different direction as it is facing us on the hill and might not spot them.
It spots the poor sods I have sent south because there is no cover and it was looking right at us. So it shoots them all and because I have stayed on the hill talking to platoon I am so far away I can only see that Stuka is still alive while in fact all three are wounded but still alive. The BTR than moves up to stop right next to them and I loose contact with the armed Humvee on short range. Thinking I have lost all of Bravo except Stuka and we have no weapons capable of killing the BTR I desperately fire several GLs at it trying to take out its wheels. I don’t think I achieve anything because what actually causes its crew to jump out is the armed Humvee that engages it. Almost certainly the only thing my GLs achieve is to kill Flo and Berenton.
Now looking back on this I think I should have immediately fallen back to the north and bought the armed humvee with me to the east and followed Alpha into the town from the East with buildings to protect us we could have engaged the BTR from close range with the AT and stayed close together with our medic and I would have been able to keep track of my people and had good communications.
Anyway I post this because I think it is a good failure to learn from. I messed up so you don’t have to.
[user avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/17128302/avatar/small.1476712345.jpeg” name=“Lastmikoi”]17128302[/user] and I cleared things up. We agreed that there is an underlying problem that’ll hopefully be fixed with the upcomming leadership qualifications.
