Please leave feed back, stories or videos about the event here.
Just like last time, I’ll post my feedback in three separate topic sections:
Our Performance
Overall I was happy with the majority of our performance. Gearing up was very efficient and quick thanks to so many people having attended either the two trainings or one of the two testing sessions. The jump result was the best we’ve gotten throughout all our test jumps with only one serious injury - of course in every training I’ll land unscathed but during the actual op I break my leg. :rollseyes: Skippy did a good job taking over after my injury and making sure the elements keep moving while I stayed behind at the exfil LZ. Though we were struggling with the stamina system we found our waypoints quite quickly and made progress without blowing our cover. Next time we will definitely have to remind everybody to use jogging pace (lowered weapon & C-key) in order to conserve stamina properly. People adhered to radio discipline very well and orders were followed swiftly. The approach was very stealthy, being able to approach both OWP1 and OWP2 without being detected by the enemy.
That being said there were also negative aspects of our performance, as always hindsight is 20/20, the mission was very challenging and a lot of participating teams had high casualties. Two decisions in particular affected our performance quite a bit:
- Though I specifically mentioned in the briefing not to use more than two mortar rounds per range/degree due to the mortar dispersion being far too small we kept issuing 6 round salvos. Compounding the ammo waste issue was that these six round salvos kept missing the target due to the wind massively affecting the round trajectory. Before the correct range/degree is determined never call for more than a single round onto the target if our supplies are limited. By my count at least 18 rounds went completely off-target. When we left base we already knew we are carrying much less ammo than planned due to the box glitching out. As we found out after the op there was also a big difference in the training map VS the actual mission map in how many rounds will be present to begin with. While this is less than ideal, I believe we could have still done a ton of damage if we only fired in total 3 single-shot salvos to get the correct distance and then used the rest of the rounds in 2-shot bursts all over the FOB.
- After our mortar rounds were used up we decided to assault the base head-on and while I completely understand the reasoning behind it, I think this decision may have been influenced by the CQB experience of our regular ops, where we excel more often than not. However, Recce uses Vcom AI which is far more mobile, aggressive and deadly within 50m than our FregharAI - which only modifies values of vanilla AI but does not introduce new behaviours. I mentioned during the briefing if the infantry attacks the base we should do so from further away even if the position is less ideal when it comes to line of sight or effective firing range, rather than attacking from close range but I did not stress enough how dangerous the AI can be. During the operation, I assumed Alpha got taken out by the AI (I had no line of sight due to being 1.1 click away) but when Churizo and I landed to pick the two survivors up I was surprised to see no firefight or pursuers. After the operation I talked to Johan and he confirmed my suspicion via the mission logs: aside from 6 enemies we killed, 4 Alpha members (half the squad) died due to blue on blue - I assume one or two AI soldiers got between the two fire teams and it triggered a cascade of friendly fire due to lower visibility and everybody using AKMs.
Our Preparation
I think we improved our preparation a lot compared to the last Recce operation, I mentioned several bulletins in the last War Stories and on everyone I think we did better. There were several testing events, we did two trainings, we created our own loadouts and call-signs, calendar slotting was improved and a lot of people didn’t get cocky / actually showed up for the trainings to prepare. Due to this being an assault mission we also had to prepare our plan with more waypoints and insertion methods etc. than the previous defense mission and I think we did a really good job in the Tactical Planning thread.
However, we can always prepare more efficiently and for next time I will focus on training more than just one single mission aspect. I made the wrong assumption that the jump will have the biggest impact on our performance and thought even if we didn’t practice much with the mortar we’d be dialling in the target quickly and with minimal ammo loss. Next time I’ll create separate trainings for individual critical aspects of the mission making sure each can be trained properly in advance.
I will also during the testing double check the availability of each item in base with the PDF list. During my initial tests, it all seemed to match fine but now in subsequent testings, I noticed that everything was identical except the amount of AMK-GP25s and the number of Mortar shells. This and the bugged-out box contributed to having a lot fewer shells available than I originally thought in the planning thread.
Recce Gamers
Unfortunately, my feedback to Recce is identical to the last time as it hasn’t really improved. I’d also add to this that there shouldn’t be roles which are going to be sit-ins for an entire op. Churizo was nice enough to fly us in for 10min, then sit around for almost 1.5h and then pick us back up. I broke my leg and thus it was obvious I can’t help people on the ground, but the pilot should have some other tasks available in the mission design.
- Ensure a dedicated mod testing server is available min. 48h prior to the event. If the IP is in South Africa and the ping is terrible that’s fine as we only need to connect to the game and spawn in the base to see if we get any error messages. We do not need to play there, just assess our mods.
- The game server IP for the actual event should be communicated min. 24h prior to the event. This ensures that all our members know the event will indeed happen (we had joint-ops in the past where this was an issue) and all our members can be informed via the website, forums and discord.
- We should recommend A3 sync to Recce Gamers. Steam mod lists have a nasty habit of messing with CBA and ACRE files in a way that is not always predictable. Yesterday’s op was in part delayed due to the server setup issues on Recce’s side but also because several of our members, in the end, had to delete and download from our dev repo instead of Steam due to technical issues. We can provide them with our setup guide and some tips on how to rename folders (no spaces for example) so we can exact match their repo and set it up on our server with ease. A3Sync is also widely used in almost all organised Arma groups so I believe we would not be the only ones appreciating that switch.
- We could offer them to use our stamina modification (with credit to us of course) as well as CNTR. It could boost our image by being referenced on their site as helping them with mods etc. and we could use a stamina system we are more comfortable with. I assume though that they will not be interested in the stamina system mainly because it is not fully realistic, however, CNTR might be something they’d like to use.