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Absolutely loved this mission, anything with Falcon is a win but this one had plenty of targets to engage. Apologies to Dagger for the friendly fire
Yeah, from my perspective everything was great. Good team work, good combined arms without anyone seemingly being left out, difficult terrain to work in. Also great uniforms and equipment. Really felt like this op had the best off all worlds between WW2 ops and modern.
As a highlight, JSRS made everything so much better. Also seems like people take cover much seriously now that you have those nast whizzzzzzzz near misses and so on.
Great mission, would do again. Definitely want more.
I had a very good time. Was worried a bit about having multiple powerful elements, but in the end infantry saw A LOT of action. It was pretty intense for Alpha, unfortunately we had some radio issues which sometimes resulted in lack of coordination, but tbh nothing major and we absolutely rocked.
I particularly enjoyed CQB this time around, maybe the map has some great villages, maybe having ~15 people on the ground helps not to get trapped. It was very good.
As said during debrief, the faction was really nice, even without scopes the M16s were good. The lack of radio for FT members a part from FTL is a game changer I think. You have to constantly go back and forth to make sure everyone has their orders right, constantly check if they’re good or not and it’s much, much better in terms of radio clutter which we tend to have in regular factions.
Thanks for the mission Mr. Baegel!
Will post a video tomorrow (once it’s done rendering and processing on youtube), but it was a bit hit-and-miss for me as Alpha yellow.
The start was really strong and great, but then we ended up just moving all around the place, then getting hit by artillery, then bunching up near the vehicles and then moving out. This was followed by a long and tedious resupply. Then we drove to the next objective with some light action, spent ages sweeping empty buildings and moving (alone as a FT) through the mostly-empty town, only to be called back and spend another ~15 minutes uselessly bantering. Then we mounted up and drove to another boring long resupply. Then another long drive to the final objective (finally).
So I think my main issue was pacing being broken by the resupplies, combined with us radio-less people being kept in the dark about what’s going on.
It also makes me question whether it’s even possible to handle this many different elements from Zeus and ensure something interesting happens.
I thought the mission was meh.
I think I was dead for the longest of everyone so that doesn’t help.
All in all I think I had action for about 1 hour and sitting around for 2.5. (30 mins of which I was dead)
Would have loved to see some more action but I guess we had some inexperienced members in positions and it took longer then usual to make plans. It would just be nice that during those times to have a couple of foot troops or even vehicles drive in.
[quote user_id=“3602631” avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/3602631/avatar/medium.1411590107.jpeg” name=“Shiny”]I thought the mission was meh.
I think I was dead for the longest of everyone so that doesn’t help.
All in all I think I had action for about 1 hour and sitting around for 2.5. (30 mins of which I was dead)
Would have loved to see some more action but I guess we had some inexperienced members in positions and it took longer then usual to make plans. It would just be nice that during those times to have a couple of foot troops or even vehicles drive in.[/quote]
I don’t think spawning troops to keep the players busy is a good idea - kinda breaks immersion, but also contributes to a more constant action curve, which is not a good thing in my book.
I think most of the "meh" was caused by us, players, and our perhaps inexperienced leadership if you say so (I forgot who were the leaders). The only things I can think of that could be improved by MM is (a) making the mission harder - it felt fairly easy and (b) raising the stakes - it felt like we can take all day getting the mission done, there was little tension, no reason to try harder.
As such, the mentality I observed was more akin to "a walk in the park", especially after the initial push when the action settled down. But that just might have been by us following low-level orders without ever knowing what’s going on.
[youtube]kFTKOFs4Bm8[/youtube]
(I left in a bit of everything.)
I really enjoyed it as platoon, though I definitely got some reminders from things that I forgot to do/plan for which I definitely should have and will do the next time I lead. First being that I won’t volunteer if I’m still finishing dinner - that made initial planning slower and much less productive than it should’ve been.
I went back through my footage to see what could’ve been done differently.
In all I think we performed very well in action. The clearing of towns went better than I expected it to go - as we were going up against a tank platoon. Due to the large distances between towns with no defilade, cover or concealment from enemy armour/positions the plan of assault was the same in every town: drive in fast with our mechanized assets and then fight using the hard cover of the buildings. The approaches were chosen deliberately to minimise the chances of armour firing on us as we approached, with the assumption that the armour would be positioned a bit further into the towns and not at the outskirts (relying on our air assets and dagger to spot them if they were and take them out).
Expected line of sight angles from enemy armour in Rosche.
I did not want to use the m113’s inside the towns for two reasons: The first is that a good shot from enemy armour or AT can instantly wipe a squad/element inside it. The second is that we only had 4 m113’s and a lot of ground to cover around Rosche. We lost 2 on the first objective, and we needed the other 2 to transport the rest of the platoon, but having just 2 slowed us a lot.
Logistics were the reason we slowed down a lot, and it definitely could’ve been planned better, but for real, everything that could’ve gone wrong did go wrong.
On the first objective we lost 2 m113’s on the initial assault (I thought it was only the one), causing a loss of ammo resupply I found out about pretty late. This then had to be called in to NB to pickup as we waited in the center of town, but as we waited on this we got hit by artillery (defo my bad for keeping us on a position the enemy was aware of). Had we not lost the ammo crate we would’ve been out of there before the first rockets hit. We then had to wait a while for Alpha to medic and everyone to resupply at the town north of the objective before we could step off.
On the second objective I warned my element leads to tell me as soon as they ran out of enemies, so that we could leave before the artillery would hit. However, it hit way before any of us expected, since about 1/2 of the town had not been searched yet (they only occupied the city centre).
Status of the town as artillery hit, north of the MSR and far east and west had all not been cleared yet.
The second objective going faster than expected caused a two-fold problem:
- Dagger lost their tank early on in the objective. I sent them south in one of our 2 crucial m113’s to repair one of the two we left behind which was repairable. This should not have taken more than 10 minutes. However, it took Dagger 25 minutes to drive 2 km south and back due to desyncs, flying around and idk what else (no blame, just circumstance). In the end they didn’t even bring back the m113, since it had lost its fuel
- Nightbird actually got shot down by artillery. A wildcard reinsert was used 5 minutes later to get NB back in so we could have resupply ready at the meetup in the north, however NB had gone AFK not expecting the reinsert, and therefore only set off 10 minutes later.
In the end this meant we spent 10 minutes waiting for dagger to return, and another 5 minutes for the NB resupply to come in.
It’s a shame because I really wanted to kept everything fast-paced. The main problem was that I hadn’t planned for redundancies in the logistics chain. On the first objective I was confident we had enough supplies in the M113’s. In the second I was sure Nightbird could quickly bring over supplies to the regroup at the tank north as soon as I knew the town was clear. I don’t think it’s something that can always be done in every op, but on this one it could’ve been done.
Then finally the last city, Rosche. I don’t think we did anything wrong here. I was under the assumption that we had till about 23:20 server time to mop up the city (which would’ve been tight but doable). However, apparently the cutoff was at 23:00. Based on intel we had gotten that infantry had retreated, and the initially very light contacts in the city I told my elements to quickly sweep the city to take out remaining enemy elements. This spread us out and allowed the enemy to "hide" behind our lines. Infantry basically popped up within 30m of some elements (MAT) and around/behind us on all sides. I kind-of froze when this happened, having no clue what to do when surrounded by a force 3 times our size in the span of a minute or two. I know Alpha lead was also confused, since he didn’t believe at first we had enemies on all sides in such a short time. My best suggestion was to "hunker down in a building". I did really enjoy that though.
In all, as I said at the start I really enjoyed the op.
[quote user_id=“13633351” avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/13633351/avatar/medium.1434890353.jpeg” name=“Freghar”][quote user_id=“3602631” avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/3602631/avatar/medium.1411590107.jpeg” name=“Shiny”]
I don’t think spawning troops to keep the players busy is a good idea - kinda breaks immersion, but also contributes to a more constant action curve, which is not a good thing in my book.
[/quote]
I would not have spawned troops but moved them from other garrisons. In the end we didn’t finish the assault on the main town and we skipped another town as well as all the secondary objectives.
It would be fully realistic to have the enemy launch a counter attack after firing the rockets at us. So I actually felt having no counter attack felt very immersion breaking and unrealistic.[/quote]
[quote user_id=“3602631” avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/3602631/avatar/medium.1411590107.jpeg” name=“Shiny”]I would not have spawned troops but moved them from other garrisons. In the end we didn’t finish the assault on the main town and we skipped another town as well as all the secondary objectives.
It would be fully realistic to have the enemy launch a counter attack after firing the rockets at us. So I actually felt having no counter attack felt very immersion breaking and unrealistic.[/quote]
They did on the first town with the BRDMs. The counterattack was limited because they had no air support and Falcon was in the sky. The Shilka was unable to down falcon and thus they were busy hiding their heavy armour in forests/towns and awaiting the arrival of more MIGs before counter attacking, hence the entire premise of the Op.
You were there to take advantage of the lack of Russian air support, and you did. The slowdown for resupply was not planned in the mission at all. It was meant to be a speedy combined arms op.