Here are my thoughts on what we played.
SimHQ Patrol 04
I have to start off by giving a bit of grief to whoever coordinated the 150 meter 5-ton trip. I was very amused.
As I said on TS, the mission felt like it was being taken as a covert attack on a base, and our general pace and level of caution matched that. It was simply slow - we took a lot of time to skirt around the town and it seemed like we didn't really gain anything for that effort (first contact resulted in at least two KIA).
One other thing I mentioned on TS is regarding movement speeds and postures. Lots of people were playing "follow the leader" and using crouch-walking. This really does not work well - the downsides are that you move very slowly and incur a significant stamina penalty. In adversarial, the heavy breathing also becomes a factor. The only upside is that you are a smaller target, but this is made up for by your slow movement speed.
Here is a screen of one of these crouch-walk fests:
In such a situation, the better course of action is to stand up and move at a walking pace, or dart quickly from covered position to covered position. Corners, alleys, and other danger areas can be covered by single player(s) while the rest of the team(s) continues moving forward. Those covering players can then fall in at the rear of the fireteam once their team has moved past.
Another thing worth mentioning in this mission is interval. I saw a number of situations where players were too close together while either in contact or in imminent danger of contact. This resulted in a number of casualties on at least two occasions - one enemy engaged someone by surprise, and he was then able to engage and kill another before that person could react due to how close they were.
Finally, we come to comms. Ideally a squad should not be broken into multiple fireteam channels. When operating in such close proximity, most of what is said is going to apply to everyone. I can't think of any time during the mission where someone could have said something that would not have been useful for everyone to hear. Since we were split up into fireteam channels, comms ended up being compartmentalized and I did not feel that there was enough usage of VOIP to make up for this (and even if so, it's still the "wrong" way to do things as far as I'm concerned). I would ideally like to see squads split up on a one-squad, one-channel basis (ie: around 12-14 people in a channel). VOIP will help a lot in this regard, but the public version of 1.09 is not totally up to task on VOIP yet.
SimHQ Assault 11
I ended up pulling in a bunch of ShackTac members on short notice to help flesh out the playercount. Lor, Red Barron, Staneth, Evil Koala, Xiathorn, Henk, kevb0, HunterHR, Silent, Squint, Rg, and Madcows jumped on, and several other ShackTac people were shooed away to prevent an overflow.
The comms in this mission ended up suffering from the same compartmentalization issue from the previous mission. I would rather have had Alpha/Bravo/Delta/SL as one squad channel, Snipers in another, and the CAS in a third. As it was, SL and FTLs talking over chan command made it difficult to communicate with people in my channel and oftentimes confusing compared to the way ShackTac normally runs comms. It also resulted in a lot of redundancy with FTLs having to pass SL orders to their guys, when the SL could have been saying it to a squad channel instead. VOIP would help this, but, again, it would be easier to not try to compartmentalize things so much and instead rely on good comm discipline.
I was happy to see that ShackTac members were leading many of the teams, as it meant I had familiar leaders to work with.
First contact in Chantico resulted in me hopping onto chan command and giving a lot of orders to the other fireteams. I didn't want to take over from the SL, but at the same time, I knew what we needed to do and knew how to quickly communicate that to my fellow FTLs. After the urgent things were done I stepped back off chan command and tried to let SL lead more and do things how he wanted to.
One of the amusing highlights of this part was watching my automatic rifleman blast at least five cars' tires out. I gave him ROE to disable any vehicles that didn't stop, and he was happy to comply, as were the innocent civvies.
The movement from Chantico to the comm tower went off smoothly. I kept two of my guys in the Stryker and emphasized that everyone else should be dismounted for the movement. It worked well.
The rest of the mission went similarly smooth. One thing I was reminded of (we don't use Javelins much) is that the Javelin CLU works great as a recon tool. The magnification level it has is phenomenal, and when I remembered that, I was able to use it to good effect to spot for my Stryker and communicate threats to the other fireteams.
My closing comment about this mission would be that it was a bit easy with the assets we had - mortars, a Cobra, lots of vehicles, Javelins, a whole sniper section, etc. Taking the same concept and beefing it up some (add more enemy infantry, take our Javelins away, give us AT-4s instead, severely limit the amount of mortar fire available, turn the Cobra into an AH-6, give most people ironsights or aimpoints) would be interesting. This is no fault of
TG's - SimHQ likes to have these kinds of assets readily available in their missions, and it was their mission, after all.
All in all it was interesting and enjoyable. I'm guessing there are several ShackTac members who would be up for playing in future missions should you guys need a few extra players.
It's nice to see the weekly
TG games show up in a no-respawn format, too.
