ABRA

Just thought I'd drop in to fill out a quick AAR about a tactic we were employing. Nothing too ground-breaking but I've never seen it used quite like this.

It was late and after an excellent but ultimately frustrating round for MEC on Mashtuur(thank you Sausage and your Blackhawk of omnipresent death), people were leaving and it was down to like 12 v. 12 or so. I inherited the 7th squad in Mash and while I hate Zatar generally I think the key is the vehicles especially with so few players.

I made us into an ad hoc vehicle squad and told everyone to spawn engineer. And upon death to check the map and respawn where ever their is armour. I prioritized it from jets, choppers(if you can fly) to tanks, AA and lastly APCs. So hopefully my boys(by the end of it it was my full squad plus Malum commanding vs. the entire numerically superior opposing team) would be keeping the best vehicle assets in the game at all times and not hopefully winning the game through superior firepower.

My squad was excellent, talked as well if not better than they listened. At various times it included Sassy, FBMantis, Monsewer, marstein, Riza(as in game, here too I cannot recall the second half of your name), maybe ranger-six briefly with Bodark on air support. I apologize if forget anyone, take it as a sign that you played so well that I never took much notice of you since I never had better orders to give you than what you had already done.

The tactic is simple and well known. Get two engineers and two vehicles and park them next to each other to repair as you fight. Well we took it further in our initial blitz. I had everyone in their own armour as we capped flags and armour popped. We beat them to the central island narrowly so by that time we had like two tanks and 3 APCs. Most of which were driven by engineers. We found a couple of supply crates on the far side of the central island that made defending those western approaching bridgeheads from the factory and village a snap. The odd loss of armour quickly rejoined our armada and pretty soon we had all the armour from the central island east parked in one big self-repairing mass.

This is where Tau-neutrino and I think evil lemon from the USMC took to the skies. Impending disaster right? Well it wasn't that bad. They had a tough time taking us out if we were massed as engineer vehicles in convoys of 3 or more. We basically never lost the momentum of the initial blitz with the exception of a brief showdown at the factory. We soon had every base but the UCB.

Soon enough they infiltrated into the rear bases causing us to break off the attack and reform a defense and things balanced out better.

The tactic was a thing of beauty. The trick was to have all those vehicles literally in contact, bumper-to-bumper as they fought. You wanted to see sparks flying and heard metal grinding metal to insure the repair was maintained. With the slower heavier tanks in front we were able to ram the APCs in their asses and move and fight as one. It was like a great terrestrial battleship, a dreadnought, bristling with guns and turrets firing in every direction. When it stopped, as to cap a flag for instance I encouraged backing into each other so as to screen our vulnerable rear armor with squadmate vehicles. This happened some of the time but it was tough to make happen in the heat of a fire fight especially in such a tight formation.

I got to hand it to tau and lemon though in the air. They wised up and eventually started flying in their own formations. They'd both line up on the same bombing run and drop their bombs one right after another so as not to give out auto-repairing a chance to recover,. The best example of this was on the factory when they actually managed to glide the bombs in into open side of the garage to get us in the mist of a repairfest.

All in all I had a great time and thank my squad for the great round. I hope you enjoyed my squad leadership style and would appreciate any comments on likes or dislikes about it and areas in which I can improve. Personally I think I am sometimes too authoritarian a leader and such some of the fun out of it. But at the same time I find that gets us working together and getting results which I know is always popular. That's the balance, really, forceful leadership that gets overbearing and unfun vs. that same leadership getting results that everyone enjoys. Lemme know which side of it I'm falling on, just authoritarian enough to get us pulling together and having a good time or too authoritarian but at too great an intensity level to be enjoyable.

Again good job squad, nice flying tau and lemon and strong, enjoyable defense from the other team.

__________________
Xbox Live Gamertag: TG ABRA
live.xbox.com/member/TG ABRA
Friend me!

jepzilla

No, it was tau and I who were flying. I must have dumped a hundred bombs on that armor convoy. Very effective against a pair of fighters.

I wasn't sure if the attack run on the garage was going to work, I saw my bombs explode but didn't see any kills. Then a few seconds later tau (flying behind me) got 3 or 4.

tau_neutrino

Thanks for probably the only compliment I'll ever receive for my flying Also thanks to jepzilla for all the helpfuil pointers. Even a newbie pilot like me gets a few lucky kills once in a while!

marstein

My name is probably near the top of the list because just after joining I (gasp) took the direct route to our target instead of staying in the convoy. I was driving like in rush hour after that bumper-to-bumper.
Our convoy was really impressive at the USMC airfield against US armour out or their UCB. They appeared, they disappeared - no chance against our 3 APCs and one tank :-)

__________________
Gigabyte P35-DS3R, 2GB, 8800GTS 640MB, Core2Duo E8400