Coop - Tangle Tango

Arma Lounge War Stories
1

Anders’ operation on May 20th on Fata.

What did you guys think about it?

Even though it seemed like the AI was able to see us through bushes, I loved it. There’s only so much and so long you can play against braindead AI that can’t hit the side of a barn. These guys felt like we were playing Find Waldo, except everyone was Waldo and they were all out to murder our ass.

I hope we play versus such AI more often.

I also like how tiny the mission area was relative to our standards. It gives us time to think and play more safely/slowly, we should use this to our advantage and actually slow down. :wink:

2

The problem with bushes: http://i.imgur.com/gdIfeKm.jpg - yellow is the actual collidable object / what AI sees. Vanilla AI thus over-exaggerates cover (as only a small portion of the player will be obstructed), but our AI engages better. Furthermore, if there’s a clear path between AI and the player (because of the player not being behind the yellow object), it’s as if there was no concealment at all - consider ie. http://i.imgur.com/aAXJSEC.jpg which is the same object, but submerged into the ground for aesthetic purposes - it’s completely see-through for the AI.

AFAIK all Arma 1 objects are like this and some A2 as well, … all A3 bushes/trees have proper collision meshes and AI doesn’t see though them for the most part (if you hide inside them, AI can walk straight past you, even when you’re standing).

A neat tip - bushes, while fragile, provide awesome protection against explosions - just hit the ground having the center of any bush (medium-sized, Arma1-Arma3) between you and the explosive and you’ll be fine, even if it blows 3m away from you. :slight_smile: … As you can see, while concealment doesn’t always substitute hard cover, … Arma is Arma …

3

I think you guys should have taken the mission much more slow in order to combat the new AI properly. You were good at seaking cover behind stones - especially when you got engaged by the marksman in the start. But for some reason you just wanted to push and push and push when you should just have engaged or changed position instead. 23 min into the mission you had gone from 12 players to 4 and most of the kills I saw was because of nades or running/sitting in the open.

I still think we can handle this AI we just need to learn the new hints for death incoming instead of the old. I saw an AR take 50.cal fire over his head - to the left - to the right and on the ground right infront of him kicking ricochets and dust up. He didn’t flinch until he was hit and the shooting was going on for almost a minute. Now you can argue that because it was Akado there’s not much to learn but really I think we should begin to take the mission much more slow from now on.

4

Agreed entirely. I really don’t mind dying in Arma though. Dying means you were out-played and hopefully learned something for your next attempt. Playing against easier AI, to me, is like playing Chess or Civilization or whatever game on the easiest difficulty - you do it for learning the basic mechanics of the game - but then you want to move on to higher difficulty, where you will be challenged and probably lose, but that will give you the tools to win in the future.

Freghar, the AI vision in vegetation misconception has been floating around for years but in reality this isn’t the case and most maps are configured properly.

[youtube]cADPPbYZceY[/youtube]

In one situation we were sprinting through a plantation field and I was sure it would be the death of us but the moment I went prone, the AI lost me completely (We were being shot from Northeast/East).

5

The grass/plants on that picture Bull is bullet proof which could lead me to believe they see it as hard cover because of that.

6

Hmm, I did get shot while running through it, are you sure it’s bullet proof? That would mean I got shot in the head but didn’t die. :geek:

7

Note that I’m not talking about grass - that’s a very different technology (it doesn’t have collision objects) and can be calculated based on terrain surface type (like ie. footstep sounds) - that’s why we can get A3 grass on A1 maps. Bushes are actual "cover".

I don’t have a fancy video, but if you place two soldiers 50m from each other and place A1 bushes between them in a way which obstructs the vision, but doesn’t put the bush object in the way, the AI will see/engage each other.
edit: Seems I was wrong, this worked with AiA, but not in CUP, where the opposite problem seems to be present - me and my CSAT buddy chilling out.

Note that I also don’t know the full story and there are ie. A3 bushes that look like 3m high grass (ie. Altis marshlands) that also block AI vision while being pass-through, so it’s possible to create such bushes, but Arma 1 ones don’t seem to be like that.

[quote user_id=“12211388” avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/12211388/avatar/medium.1649779431.png” name=“Bull”]In one situation we were sprinting through a plantation field and I was sure it would be the death of us but the moment I went prone, the AI lost me completely (We were being shot from Northeast/East).
[/quote]
That might have been due to the surface type + you going prone, not necessarily because of the field plants.

Regarding the mission - I find it hard to "take it slow" when the enemy has us pinned most of the time. This would work if we had better equipment (ie. fixing the enemy for air strikes), but just holding position and waiting for the accurate fire to kill us or the grenades to do the same seems a bit … suboptimal. It makes sense from a superior firing position, but I wouldn’t say we had one - that’s why we tried to push on the compound. We really couldn’t see almost anything because of the bushes, so one element covering the other was mostly out of question and with the (mentioned) grenades landing left and right, we figured the best approach is to smoke the path to the compound and kill whoever was launching them, gaining a defensive position in the process.

I don’t know, we could have just pulled back to kill the flanking enemy (to the West, I believe), but that would open us to the town and even if we split forces, the vision was so bad that we would have probably taken equal losses either way.

"Taking it slow" is a valid tactic, but best employed when you can surround the enemy / cover all possible attack vectors, which kind of wasn’t our position.

Anyway, just my 2CZK.

8

As Freghar said, I was watching the guys getting picked off one by one from enemies we had only rough locations of. My aim was to get the guys darting from rock to rock until we could breach and clear the first compound, which worked. Most of the survivors made it, though we did have some of the usual issues, like me full auto firing at an AI at point blank and he still had time to turn and one shot me (thankfully he bleed out before he could execute me).

9

Well I don’t know how it looked from the field. From the top down it just seemed like when you were stationary casualties were very minor but as soon as the rock to rock movement started shit went down. It might have been different from the ground.

10

Liked it very much! Hair raising and very entertaining op. Managed to stay alive with a little luck and a big fat angel on my shoulder.

11

A2 was two man strong when I gave the order to move forward. A1 took two casualties from underslung grenades on the approach after sitting still for a bit on the advance. I don’t think anyone got shot, well, unconscious or dead, anyway.

12

I’m very sad I missed this. On the subject of tactics we often go into automatic find, fix, flank and finish with one team suppressing while the other tries to moves round and flank the enemy. This often works well but it only needs a undermanned suppressing/fixing element of a slightly too large an enemy force for the suppressing team to not have enough firepower to the do the job. Perhaps the most important decision for our squad leader is to decide when both fire-teams are required for suppression and the flanking maneuver has to wait until we have achieved the "fix". Or if this is not possible we withdraw. Just my thoughts on what is perhaps one of our most common types of engagement.