Originally Posted by beita

There are 32 players. 16 per side. There are 10 or so towns. You generally never see more than 4 players in one area, actually fighting. And if they "know what they are doing" they will have 4 tanks with them. It has promise for a "Command and Conquer" RTS style of gameplay, but for actually player versus player fighting ... not really.

I've noticed a lot of that. A lot of it seems to be a pace thing, and the fact that you can nuke the enemies UCB for an early win doesn't help. ARMA, done properly (I.E. without appalling casualties) is played at a very slow pace.

Long moments of messing with the map, coralling AI troops, discussing objectives, followed by long moments of sitting behind a hedge wondering who the hell is throwing grenades, and why, and whether they're throwing them at you, followed by hiking.

If you're doing that essentially alone, with the other players on your team acting in an uncoordinated fashion it can be remarkably boring. If you work together with your team, you can get a real sense of working together to accomplish something, and the game becomes less about fighting and more about working together in a coordinated fashion to achieve a goal.

It doesn't really fit with the standard first person shooter crowd, because the object is to take and hold territory, then advance to take and hold more territory. Fighting the other guy is largely incidental, and while it can be helpful, your primary objective is still to capture all the cities on the map. The map is small enough, especially with fast travel, that conflict points can erupt as one side or the other decides that it is really quite fond of a particular piece or real-estate and decides to invest some tanks in taking and holding it.

Something to keep in mind, a single player can command up to 11 AI troops, so four players working together may have something like 40 troops running around with them, in addition to RACS insurgents. The Warfare games really can get hairy if you have a coordinated player group, and you yourself can experience the rare joy of working out how to remove and ornery BMP when you've got two HMGs, a M136 LAW, and twelve warm bodies to work with.