IceMan

If I had to condense this guide to a few bullet points I would probably just read each of the numbered sections and none of the supporting points.

I can try and make a summary of portions later when I am done getting it all down.

Part of this is an exercise in analyzing successful and unsuccessful PR play so that I can think-tank what went wrong and what went right. By making it into an explanation I am forced to quantify and fully understand each point fully, hopefully resulting in more of the successful behaviors and less of the unsuccessful ones.

On a side note, I do not really consider myself a "serious" PR player. I don't actually spend that much time on the server and do not participate with any clans or squads or whatever. I am, however, a long term student of military science and martial practice.

My brain just thinks this way. After years of habituation, training, research and thought this is just how I go about these things in computer games or martial practice.

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"Certainly, there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter." - Ernest Hemingway

fuzzhead

So Im curious to know Iceman, what do you think about the changes from v0.6-v0.7 and v0.7-v0.75 ??

Do you think the gameplay changes have made realistic military tactics more or less useful, and in what ways would you change the mod to increase the likeliness of these tactics being used by a larger percentage of players?

imnotacanadian

Uh oh....you might have a chance to make an impact in PR right here
At least thats what I'm getting out of this.





+rep Iceman...if I could. Amazing stuff.

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Supervisor84

Very, very good points and insights, IceMan. It's the kind of things we usually only take a few seconds to think about while playing, and don't consider more deeply. Like what is the best course of action when spotting the enemy and he hasn't spotted you? It's an advantage right there. The question is when to act. Just like in reality it takes cunning and an element of surprise to be successful, provided you can overwhelm the enemy with the greatest amount of force you can muster at the time.

My take on the suppression effects is: well we can't be crawling there in the mud and hear the bullets smacking the immediate environment around us like in a real warzone, so there should be something to impair our initiative when experiencing near-misses. The normal human reaction is to avoid the bullets and the places they hit when you receive incoming fire, so having a blur effect is kind of the equivalent of hugging the ground or pushing yourself against whatever your current form of cover is. A kind of instinctive "fear" effect that makes you reluctant to stick your head out for a few moments.
btw what's this +rep thing? Only a privilege for some?

imnotacanadian

Everybody has a reputation level. Everybody used to be able to "spread" reputation around by clicking a button if they thought a post was good,they agreed on what they said,etc. You could leave a personal message with it. Now, its a supporting members only function.

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=Sonic_Striker=

Wow reallly long... But really good. I've read through the first bit but I will for sure read the rest. This stuff is really true and informative. Great job Hippo!

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|TG-Irr|Sonic

billyinorganic

Media, Examples..

Such things are complex and time that player spends playing the game is less likely to be used to experiment.

For example,
We should make a video that shows a withdrawing squad. I was with fuzzheads squad once and we have two groups of three spread out doing bounded approach, practicing covering fire on attach markers.

Now, if we could make a good video that shows a whole entire squad doing one of these massive fire withdrawing maneuvers i think more people might attempt it. It does not have to be something captured in game necessarily... We could organize two squads of 6 on a map like road to kyong-ni, one Chinese at the city and one US attacking the city from the woods. The Chinese would all take a static defense position looking south from the city, all of their squad watching that direction and able to fire on the same position.
We could have the Chinese be under cover ready to jump out and attack, with one of them scouting for troops. The US squad would move in, perhaps in a line formation, towards the city through some woods. Once they break cover out of the woods and are visible from the Chinese positions the spotter for the Chinese squad would have his squad come out of cover and assault the US squad. The trick would be to let the US squad break out of cover into a position they do not think is guarded, waiting for the right moment... some of the grass fields south of the city near the entrance, right out of the woods perhaps about 50 meters. Then the unsuspecting US squad would suddenly come under a lot of fire they did not know was there, this would simulate a "unfavorable situation for engaging" and rationally symbolize a situation which requires withdraw, or breaking contact.

Of course this would all be arranged, not something that happens randomly, it would be staged and directed so that the movie could be made, like a little experiment in a sense. Using battle-recorder we could "isolate" out certain hypothetical situations and then investigate how they look in PR, try to obtain some insight into what is really tactically feasible.

So once the US comes under fire from the Chinese their goal is not to lay down and take aiming firing positions towards their attackers, but to unload huge amounts of fire towards the general direction of their attackers while retreating. In the movie we could have every member of the US squad start unloading as fast as they could, then running a bit and turning around shooting a bit more, then run until they are all back under cover.

After the scene has been made then we can watch it with battle recorder.
Just to reiterate though, the purpose of this situation is not to play a regular map and try to win, but to isolate out specific tactical situations and investigate them visually with battle recorder. Both the US and Chinese squads would be directed so that the exact desired situation can be captured. The routes of movement for the US could be defined before-hand, and the Chinese defense positions as well...

The goal for the Chinese team is to keep all of it's members under-cover and ready to "Stand up" and shoot oncoming enemy down range at the signal of a single "observer" who is out of cover and watching the direction... This way the US Squad can even spend time observing the CITY looking for enemy and they will not find them, thinking it is safe to assault, thus entering into unfavorable situation.

The goal for the US team will be to move from the cover of the woods towards the south entrance of the city on the map kyong-ni while gathering intel on enemy forces held up there. Once they are engaged within the "unfavorable" situation then their task will be to unload as much fire-power as possible while simultaneously retreating, attempting to cover the Chinese defenders so that they may withdraw back into the cover of the woods.

Any ways, i think that making movies and setting up these types of scenes to investigate would be fun and insightful. Then they could be edited and posted on you-tube and the likes...

One other thing i think might help people use these tactics more is a very well made single player training game...

Katanama

billy I would love to help you out with your projekt, but another thing to include would be street fighting, a skill I think is lacking in PR today. people use way too much smoke and too few bullets to cover their movement in cities. For example the other day I was in a SQ and the SL desided to smoke the street before crossing, ok nothing wrong with that except it gives away our position when we hadent made contect. I would much rather have half a sq cover med and the other half moving ancross to do the same. also make some videos about people stacking on streetcorner to cover and that kind of thing.

But give me a pm if you want some help.

IceMan

Principle among the abilities of a successful infantryman in PR is the ability to meld personal and squad responsibility. While the goals and object of personal play and coordinated squad / team play are often similar, they are just as often intrinsic opposites. On the one hand, squad coherency is paramount for providing a strong base of fire and mutual support to be able to achieve objectives… On the other, squad coherency severely limits the ability of the individual to adapt in the most expedient way possible to sudden changes in a tactical climate.

Pitfalls of Coherency

Spacing – Easily the most significant problem with squad coherency is the general spacing of squad mates. Even the best squads tend to bunch up at key moments: halt orders to drop a rally point, sudden halts due to contact or stops to change orders. It is at these points that squads are most vulnerable to area of effect weapons such as grenades or RPGs or even a well placed machine gun burst.

A healthy 10 meter spread is not a terrible idea – such a spread largely increases the frontage of your unit aiding in spotting enemies at initial contact, spreading out your unit to avoid serious ambush and making the unit harder to spot.

Spacing, the converse – Knowing that a squad behaves in certain ways gives good insight on best possible times to engage a squad. When putting fire on a squad you are likely to change their posture from one of overland movement to engagement and in that transition squad mates are likely to collide with one another’s spacing in a domino like effect. After the first rounds are fired, nearest contacts belly up while others run forward to get into firing positions, often exposing themselves and bunching up. Knowing this, then, we can presume that the best moments to deploy a launched grenade can be within five or so seconds after initial contact on a squad that is moving together.

Further, the Orientation period in the engagement is likely to have a certain acceleration period attached to it in which the attacking unit has a great deal of mobility. With their enemy rushing to get firing positions or bellied up trying to survive, the attacking unit can enjoy freedom of movement for at least a limited period of time. This allows for individuals or fire teams to flank for kill shots.

Personal Initiative – The ability of a combatant to be able to force his agenda upon his enemy, to force the enemy to react to decisions made by him and then exploit this paradigm are signs of dominating combative initiative. One of the first casualties of squad play is personal initiative. With personal initiative go other traits such as aggressiveness, situational awareness and overall individual survivability.

Players in squads that are concerned about playing with their squads lose large portions of their personal initiative as a result of trying to maintain coherency and function in support of their squad. This sacrifice makes them far less likely to react in as intelligible of a fashion to sudden changes in the area around them. This is bad and is often the reason that whole squads of high performing players are wiped out by sudden attacks of isolated enemies.

Instances of High Casualties in High Level Squad Play

Overland Movement on a Bearing

Probably the most common time that my squad has been wiped out has been during overland movement as a unit. By not monitoring our spacing and frontage we were far too easily spotted a target when moving in a group. Further, our insistence on operating as a squad generally blunted the tactical awareness of members and created an unwieldy unit that took far too long to orient towards sudden appearances of danger.

Breaking into logical subdivisions such as fire teams can reduce the Smallest Tactical Unit size to a more manageable and faster thinking unit with less issues of coherency. By tracking fewer squad mates over less frontage the amount of data that must be monitored to remain in coherency and mutual support is significantly reduced thereby allowing more time to be spent scanning for targets or adapting to whatever situation crops up.

On an individual level by simply moving on an oblique path towards an objective, be it a move order or a flag, can significantly increase survivability. Moving in a straight line (ie on a bearing) makes your movement highly predictable and also provides a bearing to your enemy. The human eye will naturally find movement and then correlate this movement on a planar frame of reference – this implies that anyone moving parallel to you (your squad mates moving on the same bearing) are far more rapidly spotted and engaged. This phenomenon is responsible for the large amounts of casualties in initial contact when moving in coherency with a squad. By taking an oblique path you are able to break up the parallel quality of your squad movement as well as increase the ability to spot targets by taking a different angle at your destination. These are all good things.

Prolonged Squad Contact

We have all been here. Several minutes into a drawn out contact with an enemy squad (likely supported by a near by rally) we are over run from a flank by several enemies that were able to break contact and re-engage at a different time and place than we were expecting or oriented to.

Essentially a firefight boils down to a race for a Nash Equilibrium where the best choice is to defeat your opponent and the most direct answer (in the case of Game Theory, the action with the highest ‘weight’) is to flank your opponent. You and your opponent will eventually choose to flank each other in a kind of a Mexican Standoff. Beat them to it OR be waiting for them when they make their move.

Successfully flanking an enemy as a squad requires at least an element of your unit to break contact and begin to flank. Likewise, your opponent is doing the same thing. In either case, your squad mates are transitioning from an Engaged posture to one of aggressive overland movement… albeit with a raised level of situational awareness towards your recent firefight, but still not a fully engaged posture. What this suggests is that if you can anticipate the bearing and timing of your enemy’s flanking maneuver, you can catch them moving overland on a bearing aggressively (ie not focusing on danger – YOU) in an attempt to flank you. As per the earlier example, this is one of the highest casualty points in PR.

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"Certainly, there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter." - Ernest Hemingway

Halcyon

Great guide Ice.

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[TF21] Halcyon

Supercracker

wow nicely put together. A long read but worth it all!!!