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2/2 This week for leading you all to your horrifying and bloody demises. You will be happy to know I will refrain from leading next week.
It’s not your fault Goat, it’s not your fault.
I liked the principle of the mission, having to extract from unknown hostile territory makes things really tense.
I thought the first assault on the ruins went reasonably well at first and we moved in an organized fashion until then. Unfortunately we got bogged down once inside the ruins. There was a lack of communication with platoon on my part when Templar started suffering casualties.
The second assault also started off well, we tried to take the radio tower as fast as possible because we were being flanked from the West. Unfortunately we took a beating yet again…
I don’t know if all this is because CSAT is that much better than what we are usually facing or if there was just too few of us. Although I suppose getting shot through trees didn’t help.
I thought Templar 1 & 2 did a great job, coordinated and communicated well. It was a real pleasure.
I liked the mission. We however didn’t play well. I’d like to talk a bit about our tactics and mistakes which we make very often.
- I don’t know why, but we rush almost all the time, like there is a time limit somewhere (this is true for most missions we play). Take note that Zjosua really didn’t create a huge mission where we need to run from A to B to make it on time. One leg on the ground, gentlemen!
- We didn’t apply movement techniques (bounding overwatch only once even though contact was expected almost immediately).
- Using entire Templar as lead element without scouts was very risky considering they were 60% of our entire force. They were engaged at every firefight and couldn’t be maneuvered around to our advantage.
- Please, I can’t stress this enough, use scouts. Send a lone scout, or two men scouting team forward of our platoon and trail behind them. They will be harder to spot then squad of 10 roaming players. Let’s not make hard contact every time we see the enemy and allow platoon commander to make a deliberate plan instead always going hasty and losing a lot of men in the process. Imagine if this was no respawn mission, or even worse, mission against humans.
Sorry I had to go before the end I was really enjoying myself. I cannot speak with any certainty because god knows fighting in this type of terrain is always going to be more tricky than keeping the enemy at a distance in Takistan, however I think there might be more to the difficulty than the enemy being able to shoot through trees or even spot through trees.
What they can do is track through soft cover. Once spotted they follow a bead and shoot through cover. Really you cannot complain about this since it is exactly what we do. If you look at the first attack in the ruins we more or less cleared the ruins then the enemy outside slowly worked their way around us on three sides and finished us off. We waited to fall back because to be honest things were looking pretty good until we realised we had lost so many people. I was lucky and decided to fall back slightly before everyone else by chance in a slightly safer direction. Once in some cover and with some clear ground in front I saw the enemy in the open and managed to kill a few on my own. Once exposed they were kind of easy to kill but obviously if they stay in cover and get close then they became very deadly as the big delay in spotting and setting up for a shot did not matter any more because I didn’t know where they were until the moment they fired and even if they could only get me on the second shot that was enough.
Possible methods to deal with this could be falling back as soon as you sense the enemy have closed to within a 100m; we often do this but it isn’t possible in an attack. If we only know the rough location of enemy then perhaps spreading out slightly more than usual and suppressing areas might be the way to go. If we are spread out it divides enemy fire and suppression on an area is usually pretty effective with the amount of ammunition we carry. To aid in suppression ftl and sl should probably have a red smoke loaded in their gl rather than try and shoot an enemy as it is more useful to mark an area than try and get kills. The problem with spreading out and suppressing is once the enemy get close compass directions become more inaccurate to a force that is that spread out. At that point HE and smoke grenades could be used and we could withdraw until we can reform at a useful distance. Scouting could be very handy as it might help us avoid just rolling up to an enemy into that lethal close range, but those scouts would have to be pretty sneaky 
The distraction fire at the second attack was pretty interesting but I am not sure we gave it enough time to work. Perhaps you guys discussed it at the end of the op.
Distraction fire was a secondary thing as Templar was spotted, so it was unlikely to draw off nany forces.
Friendly reminder to watch the CNTR replay. The replay is actually quite informative and I’m glad we managed to make it work again.
Other than that I don’t have much to say, but it did seem we did rush when we didn’t need to and stuck around when we shouldn’t have. The low numbers and the lack of scouting/rear guard made everything worse.
As [user avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/13688253/avatar/small.1433248519.jpeg” name=“Highway”]13688253[/user] said, we never use scouts for whatever reason. Especially in missions like this you’d want to know what you’re getting into, so kudos for mentioning that.
I’d like to apologize to [user avatar=“https://assets-cloud.enjin.com/users/9739220/avatar/small.1451318459.jpeg” name=“Volken”]9739220[/user], seems I did kill him by accident due to unusual camo we and the enemy had:(
Distraction fire was a good idea IMHO just it didn’t work because we took again hard contact with Templar. Platoon commander can’t do much if we keep on ghosting ourselves all the time. It’s something we should contemplate on all levels. For example there was a nice application of using the smallest element possible to make contact when Goat and Teddy went a bit further from rest of platoon element to scout the town on second tower. They were extra careful and when I mistakenly went looking for them I almost stepped on Teddy hidden in the bush. That’s what works, two veterans of the game and proper movement.
Compare that to 10 men jogging through the area, it’s ghosting TM.
A shift in mindset is required. Most mission makers put two infantry or mechanized infantry COMPANIES against us. Think about this for a minute. That means we can’t use anything else than special forces or recon tactics. Because ultimately that’s what we are looking realistically at our numbers.
Mission was well thought out, I liked the idea. Still, it was very frustrating for me since we were just getting mowed down. Also, there was a strange issue with the Ifrit I was driving. I was driving the third one and I had Shakan and (I think) Zjousua as passengers. When we made contact with enemy armed Ifrit, whole convoy stopped on the left side of the road after the enemy Ifrit passed us. But, when i stopped the vehicle, I just died. I didn’t crash, I didn’t get shot, I just braked and died.
When Shakan tried to drive away with the vehicle, he got stuck in it and could not move when he exited it. He died there as well, not sure was it by a bullet or by some glitch.
When you run out of squad mates and cover…
