Hello All,
Please leave feedback for the mission Swordfish or just your stories from the mission.
Couldn’t stay for the whole thing unfortunately, but I have a couple of thoughts.
Overall, fun mission. I think the difficulty was a bit much though, especially as we were apparently fighting a guerilla force. (Where the fuck did they get an MBT?) Felt like we had to rely on Reaper a bit too much, since we were running out of AT so frequently. Also, I think the carrier may have to be a little less detailed in future, so save our poor frames. i personally didn’t suffer too much, #humblebrag, but Price tells me that some of Bravo 2 were having serious problems, which slowed them, and therefore all of Bravo down quite significantly. Also, the map had a serious lack of cover.
Otherwise though, I had good fun playing BSL while I was there. And once again, sorry for bailing. I probably shouldn’t have taken the SL role considering, but I didn’t think of that during role select. Looking forward to more missions from this campaign.
Thanks to the bad intel that was provided to us we were definitely ill equipped for this mission. Reaper had their hands full with transporting our guys in and out of the battlefield while also trying to provide air support and AT solutions. Since the map was lacking in cover and most of the engagements were medium to long range we couldn’t use our squad AT to great effect. That’s why I think we needed another Reaper team or at least a MAT team to provide further support to Alpha and Bravo squad. It was pretty difficult to even get to the objectives because for every 500 meters we managed to gain from the enemy infantry we got pushed back by their APCs and armor. This forced us to hide and wait for further reinforcements or Reaper to step in and clear the threat. But still I enjoy tough missions like these, puts more stress on the players and gives us more stuff to do and forces us to improvise to solve difficult situations. Communication in the platoon was much better compared to previous missions from what I could tell and I think it was thanks to the comm. training so I definitely encourage more people to participate in future training sessions!
…Russia? I hear they sell their cold war stuff like used Ladas
To be fair, I think the mission could have gone a lot better had we not lost the gunship so early - cob had to go afk for a couple minutes and then I got disconnected a minute later while he wasn’t there to take controls. We did what we could with the rockets on the huey, but I imagine you would have gotten on a lot better if we still had the hellfire-equipped viper
Did you get the "can’t read memory" crash, because I got that 3 times during the mission. or just disconnect.
Things I liked:
-Mission was intense, lot of action going on constantly. Made things really immersive but the mission was really hard as we were expecting to fight a guerrilla force. Enemy armors did not do too many stupid things, we had some problem taking them out and it felt good having such challenge.
-I was only autorifleman but I can tell that the comms were great and I think that comes to us having PLT lead. We had some good coordination between squads and reaper.
-I liked that we retreated when we realised we couldn’t push any further without more assets. As I already said, I don’t mind failing a mission, what’s important to me is the immersion and the "gameplay", and I liked both of them for this op.
Things I didn’t like:
-Night. Or rather night visions. Being limited to one third of the screen is horrible. I had a bit of a headache yesterday and somehow this didn’t help at all. I’d really love to see a night mission where we would use flares and flashlights rather than NVGs (would that make the AI unfair ?)
-I felt the last "suicide mission" wasn’t needed. To me it just felt that GM just wanted to launch that nuke to make a bit of a show which is somewhat understandable. but in my mind we had fully retreated and the op was over. But also I was tired and had a headache so that could explain my bitterness)
Overall really fun mission, really hard too but since it is only your second mission I guess you’re still tweaking the number of ennemies and stuff. Also I agree with the overpopulated carrier: I don’t know how much it affected the fps but we shouldn’t play around with too many props … this is arma after all 
I’ll make sure to provide more Anti-tank solutions in the future, I had relied very heavily on the viper staying up, and when it went down I didn’t account for the Huey not being anywhere near as effective as viper, this lead to me sending way too many armoured units and not accounting for the lack of AT capabilities. I’ll also be toning down the frequency of squads I send somewhat, I hope to send enough to keep it intense but not to the point where it feels you’re just fighting enemies in waves. I was worried about you guys having too much downtime but in the process of worrying about that I didnt give you anywhere near enough down time. I will take all this on board and strive to make great improvements for the next OP in the campaign
I quite liked the level of enemies and armour. Bravo did have some fun running around buildings hiding from a tank scrambling about looking for any AT we might use to save ourselves. 
I second Jash that the carrier was over-detailed in terms of objects. I had some serious FPS issues when trying to land the Huey in the end although at that time other factors might also have influenced.
Losing the gunship was due to unforeseen and unfortunate circumstances (outside of game), so I too think that we would have done better have we not lost it so early.
A quick technical thing to throw in for the fps issues: the dev server was running 100% CPU all the time. That might have caused some too!
I am going to point out few points I percieved so you have some things to consider. These are not to to discourage you but to point out few issues in mission making as I see them.
OPORD Mission satement should be the distillation of the mission you created. The goal stated as simply as you can. Preferably answering the 5 questions. This is what needs to happen so one can declare a mission successful. No other BS or secondary information. Just the very essence. No information of how we got it or any encourangment. Just the thing that needs to get done so mission would be a success with very minimal additional content. Mission statement is the thing absolutetly every soldier has to know.
OPORD being accurate. This is a thing I bumped into when I started first making missions. Assumption of the community is that OPORD always has correct information. Even if it is not true in reality this is the perception. Thus if you say we are facing guerilla units one does not expect regular army with standard infantry tactics, using MBT-s and Sergeis. Even if there is a hint of MBT-s one will want to atleast have the MAT team with them. The attacking unit (us) based on the the reality of the situation was by far, too weak and small. I do not know if that was your intetion.
Pacing. Mission is like a story. You need a clear pacing to it. The most classic one is the slow and steady build until you have the hardest confortation at the end. That is not necceseraly how one has to do it but there has to be atleast some link with realism not just endless flow of enemy. Your goal is to create a good experience for the players not to just keep them in action 24/7. You as zeus have much more knowledge than the enemy or the players do so this endless slamming doesn’t make sense in the context of reality. So giving a moment to breathe not just to consistently manage chaos is a good thing.
Mortars. Damn man, if the real life mortars were as accurate as you then it would be great. It is difficult to make the first mortar hits hit their target. Sometimes mortar spotters order couple of strikes before battle to set up (Leaves a crater, assumes mortars aren’t moved, wind doesn’t change) or use single shots to create a baseline to correct during the battle (Slower targeting). The spotter should be somewhere in the enemy lines aswell so he doesn’t have the all-seeing eye of the zeus to detect where we are thus the perception of our location should be much more vague.
I assume the performance issues were there mostly because of the DEV server.
All-in-all the mission was interesting and unique. Keep up the work.
Aside from what was said above, a small tip - delete dead AI bodies which are slightly away from players. Keeps the FPS at a reasonable level.
Following up from this, to learn a bit about how good pacing works in the context of a video game, you should read up on something called ‘interest curves’. Extra Credits, the Youtube channel, has a great video about it, but I’ll parse it down a little here.
Essentially, if you were to graph out how excited/interested your players are through the course of a game, you want that graph to look kind of like a wave, rising to a peak, then falling to a trough, to give your players a few minutes to breathe, plan their next move, and execute it, or to deliver some exposition, introduce some new characters, etc, before the graph steadily rises towards the next huge exciting scene, over and over again. The intensity of these exciting scenes should be increasing too, as you go along, with the most exciting part coming just before the end. Massive oversimplification - Check the video out if you have time.
Hope that helps, for anyone interested.
Alpha 1 Riflemen AT PoV http://media.lastmikoi.net/player/20161014-CNTO-COOP_Swordfish.mp4
Not much to see sadly, both because of night vision and because of silent mortars :o