Please share your stories, awesome moments and all mission related feedback.
Describe what you liked about the mission and what did you dislike. More specific you are the better.
I liked the premiss, but as was shown before on Altis and again on Utes, fighting enemy frogmen results in death almost always because of bullshit. Communications were poor and jams happened too, which were unfixable with ACE for some reason.
It was a clusterfuck, and had I know i’d be coordinating everyone I would have delegated authorities from the beginning. I landed on the shore with the intention of quickly sweeping and clearing the research facility by manning the hill to deal with enemy contacts, whilst bravo supported with their mobile weapons platform, and the frogmen continued through their objective and emmerged on the beach whilst we distracted the enemies. Unfortunately they got wiped. And things moved slowly after that. Which meant the entire island garrison was here with us. It should have been a quick In and Out operation. Alpha got bogged down, Bravo reported they’d ran out of ammunition, so I had to land them too to bail us out. Whilst trying to communicate with the frogmen in alpha 1, alpha 2 left the hill for the town (I didn’t even realise) and got wiped. and died leaving bravo 1 alone. I sent someone to get the surviving frogmen to provide a base of fire out to sea, but shortly afterwards a stray bullet killed me and things decended into confusion again.
Upon re-insert, having wiped out most of the island’s inhabitants, things were a little quieter. Alpha 1 and the Engineers had re-suited as frogmen again, despite knowing how well that went last time. Kind of a stupid idea if you ask me. But oh well. I let them swim around and storm the research facility whilst remaining bravo reinforcements distracted the garrison. Alpha 2 cleared in a pincer manouver through the town on their way to the research facility as well, but a couple of camping cyka blyat enemies lying in corners caused major attrition and we lost half the fireteam.
There was a little confusion. I thought the objective was to destroy the research centre it said so in the briefing. So naturally I showered it with explosives. Didn’t work. So we stormed it. Of course the research centre intel wanted us to assault the HQ… Of course. My frogmen were standing around in their dumb looking seal outfits with crappy underwater rifles with no ammo in them looking rather sorry for themselves. I ordered a weapon drop but got an ammo drop instead, At this point it was looking really unprofessional and I wanted to have a little cry. Some people were picking up enemy vests and helmets, some people were picking up enemy weapons without calling it out. It made me cringe a little.
Although most of the island was dead, it would have nice if people kept up their 360 security and waited with their thumbs up their asses for the "weapon drop" instead of sloshing around in their flippers and yelling about stuff whilst coms were heavy.
I gave the go ahead for people to pick up enemy weapons after the drop turned out to be a dud, and loaded them up in the boats to assault from the sea whilst I took bravo to form a base of fire on the hill overlooking the runway.
I coordinated an assault and it went really well. Only took a single casualty I think… Or two if you count DustyEllis exploding.
All in all, fun mission, decent if not sufficient plan, very poorly executed, communication was generally shit. Being Squad Leader of Alpha, which was scattered to the four winds, to some degree Bravo, and also being Platoon Commander for a while, I have to take full responsibility for the monumental cock-up, but also want people as fireteam leaders and individual soldiers to know the disciplines you should follow.
Some closing notes:
-I was going to have bravo be the frogmen so that alpha could stay together, but alpha 1 had already suited up in wetsuits without my permission and before we’d even properly gone over the plan. I didn’t want them to moan. But I also was suppressing the urge to throw them overboard personally with zipties.
-I was wanting for bananapeel to step up as platoon lead and go over some details with me. We didn’t have one. I can’t blame him for confusion because it’s Dachi’s mission, but it lead to a lot of painful micromanagement, people were waiting on me for things they needn’t have, but at the same time people were doing a bunch of stupid stuff without my consent which they should have consulted me or platoon commander (GM) on, hard to explain.
-I don’t mind taking platoon lead or squad lead, but not both at once. Especially when I have only hypothetical control over some of my fireteams… antics.
I’d just like to express my right to reply as I was in Alpha 1 (frogmen) and want to make sure that we’re all on the same grounds:
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There was several contradictory orders between platoonlead, squadlead and GM when we were suiting up, the fact that we (Alpha 1) ended up being geared up in wetsuits right after the mess was sorted out was merely coincidental.
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Immersion and discipline was broken from the beginning, between the carrier being a complete maze and people got lost, the fact that both boats stayed drifting for a good 5 minutes just because no radio communication was done to explicitly tell the convoy lead and the second boat looked like it glitched slowly forward while it was in fact the driver that went forward to implicitly tell the first boat to go (Use radio guys, explicit is better than implicit), the fact that in ACRE there is absolutely no underwater simulation in the contrary of TFAR (you could just yell to people swimming ~60m from you, radio were absolutely fine which is not supposed to be the case), the fact that AIs are overpowered underwater and oneshotted five out of six operatives in a single second when we reached the sub and finally the fact that our guns were completely useless on the ground just added up to simply switch to "Chill mode", which is a natural response to avoid being actually frustrated and angry at people that just tried to do their best considering the circumstances.
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Alpha 1 re-geared as frogmens probably under my suggestion but based on the fact that the objective was not completed, so we would have been reinserted as reinforcement for Teddy (he was ENG ?) that was the lone survivor of the sub encounter. It never happened and the first objective was apparently ignored (don’t know what was said on the PLT radio), so we ended up with useless weapons on the ground. The mere fact of asking (we asked, several times) if we could pick up enemy weapons instead of wasting 15 minutes of everyone’s time became an actual action after the first supply drop was a ammo drop, without any weapons, and we saw comms gradually breaking down.
It was a very fun mission, but certainly not a serious one, and in my opinion it would have been a better evening for the community as a whole as well as it’s ethos if it stopped after the first mission, which was an example of serious fun.
As my former community’s GM and co-admin, I often had to call off a mission on grounds of not enough resources to have it being "good enough" for my community to bother playing, and in my opinion, the fact that a mission was already done in addition to the fact that the actual mission’s creator was unable to GM it, not to mention the absence of member with sufficient authority to sort things out, would have motivated me to call it a day and reschedule the mission at a later date.
We are extremely lucky to have such a high resilience in this community, as it was possible to still start the mission against all logistical odds (thanks again to BananaPeel to have taken the GM role), but sadly and as I painfully experienced in the past, when something goes inadequately: everything goes to shit, and people get frustrated in addition to a potentially great mission with load of nice ideas (but a lot of testing to do) getting wasted.
Yeah about that first part… I called over the radio repeatedly that the other boat was vic1 and convoy lead, both on platoon and short range. Maybe someone stepped on coms or something.
GM and Teddy informed me over platoon that the explosives just kind of… dropped to the bottom of the ocean. I don’t think we did it how dachi intended. I’m pretty sure banana and teddy came to an agreement and said not to bother with that objective. I couldn’t pass it down the chain to you guys since I was still in the AO out of range. By time I respawned you were all frogged up on the top deck and ready to go, so I didn’t want to bother sending you to get regular gear this close to re-insert. Though I had this niggling feeling there would be more to the mission and we weren’t armed for it…
Bravo only had 343s until your death Price. I also did hear you calling out that we are convoy lead but I never got an answer to my follow up question. More than once you responded over the wrong radio which is quite confusing to be honest, especially in the beginning when we did not have the other radio.
Edit. But I do think that the overall situation was out of balance due all the problems. End of the mission was very good. Bravo did well.
Now that I know how fucked up underwater warfare is… I’d suggest to never do this again. The idea is very promising but there’s just TOO MUCH bugs to do it. But I really liked the fresh idea of frogmen. One thing I’d suggest for future missions like that is to not do any underwater objectives but rather have some boats fighting the coast side and have frog people frog out on flank with REAL guns that we took under water with us since we should avoid shootings in the ocean… A cool thing would be if those boats would carry some normal clothing after we secure the coast.
Every part of the mission that could go wrong, went wrong. Except for the final assault. That was smooth AF. It’s always a pleasure to fire some AK 
[quote user_id=“16434735” avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/16434735/avatar/medium.1655480570.png” name=“Tropical”]Now that I know how fucked up underwater warfare is… I’d suggest to never do this again. The idea is very promising but there’s just TOO MUCH bugs to do it. But I really liked the fresh idea of frogmen. One thing I’d suggest for future missions like that is to not do any underwater objectives but rather have some boats fighting the coast side and have frog people frog out on flank with REAL guns that we took under water with us since we should avoid shootings in the ocean… A cool thing would be if those boats would carry some normal clothing after we secure the coast.
Everything part of the mission that could go wrong, went wrong. Except for the final assault. That was smooth AF. It’s always a pleasure to fire some AK :)[/quote]
I somewhat agree. I like frogmen, but you can’t expect players to go toe to toe with AI underwater. It just turns into a war of attrition with a vast advantage to the AI. Maybe if there was more cover, like rocks and stuff to make use of, and the AI of enemy divers was tweaked.
Otherwise we should use frogmen as stealth units sneaking out of the abyss and striking the land and returning to the depths before anyone knows what happened.
I loved the boats. Just wish they had more ammo, and a few crates of backup weapons and vests for the divers.
I think our squad lead and GM did pretty bloody well considering! Although it might be better to fall back to a more technically simple mission in the future if the mission creator is not here to run it but then it’s easy to be wise after the event.
We do have a slight organisational problem in that we skip over platoon lead and only have a squad leader in lots of missions. I think this is a silly thing to do because we end up with not enough guys with long range radios commanding. It would be far better to have smaller squads that can operate on their own and move out of 343 range to complete objectives. To achieve this fill up from the top with platoon lead, squad leaders and then fire teams. Often a handful of people join late anyway and can fill up the fire teams. In fact his should probably be part of our default instructions for late comers: "Fill up empty positions in the fire teams that have FTLs." Then we have the radios we need, it is obvious who is in charge and we do not have a single squad leader having to deal with comms from 3 or 4 fire teams plus various special units like air or engineers.
Also I am glad I entertained people with my frantic attempts to clear a jammed underwater rifle for about 10 minutes!
[quote user_id=“9240990” avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/9240990/avatar/medium.1579262273.jpeg” name=“Teddy”]I think our squad lead and GM did pretty bloody well considering! Although it might be better to fall back to a more technically simple mission in the future if the mission creator is not here to run it but then it’s easy to be wise after the event.
We do have a slight organisational problem in that we skip over platoon lead and only have a squad leader in lots of missions. I think this is a silly thing to do because we end up with not enough guys with long range radios commanding. It would be far better to have smaller squads that can operate on their own and move out of 343 range to complete objectives. To achieve this fill up from the top with platoon lead, squad leaders and then fire teams. Often a handful of people join late anyway and can fill up the fire teams. In fact his should probably be part of our default instructions for late comers: "Fill up empty positions in the fire teams that have FTLs." Then we have the radios we need, it is obvious who is in charge and we do not have a single squad leader having to deal with comms from 3 or 4 fire teams plus various special units like air or engineers.
Also I am glad I entertained people with my frantic attempts to clear a jammed underwater rifle for about 10 minutes![/quote]
It’d be nice to have guarrenteed small platoon sized skeleton force every operation… I.E at least platoon commander, and two squads of two fireteams filled up,
I was in the first boat and this was not the intention. The boat simply drifted by itself / the driver briefly pressed W to prevent us from glitching into the moat behind (which is what I reported as we were very slowly drifting back). The issue was Cob taking Bravo FTL without there being a SL, so he didn’t have the long-range radio Price expected him to have.
I talked to Ryujin today and the 0.7 aiming is being reduced to 0.5 for divers (same as other regular infantry) - they were (are) grouped together with recon & spotters ASR AI configs, which is weird, but that’s how it is.
We (Bravo 1) actually anticipated SDARs being useless on land, that’s why we intentionally let others to take the diving gear and be meat shields later on. (Didn’t work out that well as we had to wait for everybody, meh.) This is why platoon/squad lead should have the authority to designate a very limited amount of people to use the equipment (or mission maker to make a small dedicated team).
One additional note - AI underwater is fine, we used before on 2 missions (IIRC) and other communities use it as well, it just needs some skill tuning. Some people reported SDARs jamming and being unable to un-jam - this is because it wasn’t an actual jam (ACE), these players probably picked up and reloaded the regular 5.56mm mags, not the MEA cavitating ammo, so they couldn’t shoot at all underwater.
I’ve looked at the ACE code and the SDAR cannot jam at all - it actually never even overheats (seems to be an exception).
Personally, the mission felt a bit simplistic, but that’s maybe because it was designed to be run as a 2nd mission and thus expected little coordination from players (??) … or maybe because more of the enemy strategy was left for Zeus and Dachi had bigger plans than what Banana threw at us.
Aside from one invincible LAV (took HEAT + over 200 rounds of ammo to wheels) and us losing 3 people named Zcribe (what a coincidence), I think the mission was fine, in a kind of "miniop" fine way.
I would advise against using Arsenals (even limited) in the future as players
- can pick any amount of items they already have (ie. 20 tracer mags)
- easily lose existing equipment by switching to something else and re-entering Arsenal, needing respawn
- get wrong magazines as changing weapons removes all mags + adds 3 mags (FCFS fashion) for the new weapon
- …
[youtube]v0Ib0z-G2XE[/youtube]
Please leave feed back, stories or videos about the event here.
I had a great time as A1 AT, really liked the mission.
The balance between the abundance of enemy armor and enemy infantry RPG’s was great as we could respond to all the threats and not get chewed up by the armor. Really hope to see this more in the future.
Twas great m8. as part of charlie I really enjoyed the mission. The tension rising from beginning was cool… first car bomb, then police bois knewing shit is going down and closing the gates, which didnt help. Then few spotters around us, more explosions and then first major attacks. Then we reached bit of stalemate, after aplha took posts in city and we were waiting for stuff to happen a bit, there were some minor encounterments with enemy forces, smock attacc before missile strikes on our positions which kinda compensated the waiting part. Then convo headed airport, moment were we could really embarrassingly die, as the convo was standing still for solid 4 minutes next to buildings of the attacked city, which we really didnt clear and got almost killed, if [user avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/9240990/avatar/small.1579262273.jpeg” name=“Teddy”]9240990[/user] wouldnt be so nice and first waved at me, as I wasnt able to recognize threat. One grenade from gl to face most prolly solved the problem. Attack on base above airport was cool, kudos to alpha. And then we proceeded on airfield which was shitton of fun for me, as we manned hmw with [user avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/15375208/avatar/small.1510418660.jpeg” name=“Fishgrit”]15375208[/user] ,my buddy in team, (who was absolutely amazing whole mission, dodging shots from T-34, great reports etc.) and we were basically wrecking everything we saw.
overall mission was awesome, definitly got the feeling of something new from this mission
