Crispy129

Well when you see the tank stop and start turning its turret toward you, you know to evade, but to have them do it as soon as they spot an enemy tank even if in a well covered/concealed area. I have no problem with them automatically doing it as long as they stop when I give them orders to stop. I have tons of trouble controlling light armor in the mixed armor battles because my light armor completely ignores me and just scatters all over the place popping smoke in front of my tanks and letting enemy tanks know where I am.

Is there a way to get my Strykers and other light vehicles to stop auto evading when they see an enemy tank? I gets really annoying when your recon vehicles see a tank long before it sees them but immediately pop smoke and reverse until they hit the edge of the map (which also most likely alerts the tank when it sees a gigantic cloud of smoke) while I'm trying to pull up something to kill it. Afterward I end up wasting valuable time cleaning up the scattered units, and normally there is so much smoke it's hard for me to get a shot with whatever I was going to use to kill the tank. Whenever I dismount a javelin team to kill the tank, this also means that the Stryker or whatever it was is going to leave them stranded (and of course alert the tank and block the team's shot with smoke). Is there some way to set them to not automatically try to evade like that, or at least do it only when threatened and listen to orders? On the side, this is completely unrelated, but is there a way to make it so that I just have ot hit the right hotkey to give a unit the command instead of clicking over on the correct menu before I hit the hotkey? To me, having to click to get in the right menu BEFORE I can hit the hotkey sort of defeats the purpose of hotkeys.

oh ok. Does routing count the same as dying? I was always wondeirng what that orange "!" was.

What about missing? I always wondered how men ended up missing.

How does the game decide which men are killed, wounded, and lost? Also, is there a way to specifically tell my men to give first aid to a casualty in their squad? I've seen them do it on their own maybe a handful of times, but other times, they'll sit there perfectly safe from enemy fire with the casualty lying right next to them, and no one will start treating him. Crispy

I'm just saying, sometimes you DO end up getting reinforcements, and other times they say you will and you don't. The one where I do a zone recon actually tells me specifically to wait with all of my men at CP7 until the assault force comes through, and it never happened. As for being able to occupy the SF HQ, I did that and got a big red X by that objective. And yes, I'm not stupid, I didn't go strolling up the middle of the street, and I did use smoke. Please, I was giving very detailed accounts of how I went about doing the mission to avoid getting obvious answers like that. Anything like "use better tactics" or an obvious answer like that is not helping. It looks like I pretty much just have to micromanage the living crap out of my men in MOUT and baby sit them through the whole building and hope that the buildings aren't magically blessed by Allah to be artillery-proof. Crispy

Anyone know if it is actually possible to search for intel in the SF HQ? They need to be more descript with their OPORD's. Also, there must be some other way to destroy the SF HQ other than using all of your fire support. I would highly doubt that they'd give you a bunch of different types of fire support just so you can blow a building up. And if they did intend for you to do that, they should state in the OPORD that that is how you're supposed to destroy it. The same goes for the Mission where you are doing a zone recon south of Palmyra, where they tell you to wait with your units at CP7 for some other company to come through and conduct the assault, but the company never came, and I just did the assault myself. In these cases they really do need to make their OPORDs more detailed.

Another thing that sort of goes hand in hand with this is vehicles automatically popping smoke and reversing like mad men as soon as they see a tank, no matter how far away. If they're a fancy recon vehicle with good observation equipment and can spot a tank a long way off, I'd rather they found cover or stayed in position instead of killing their own LOS and letting the tank see a big giant white smoke cloud to let him know enemies are present. It's also annoying when I tell them to get to a certain spot to observe fires on the enemy tanks, who seem to not be able to see them, but as soon as they get in position they absolutely refuse to stay put and immediately pop smoke and reverse. Not only that, but they will keep doing it as long as the tank is in view, so I have a whole stryker platoon scattered everywhere because they refuse to follow orders and stay put. This also causes them to abandon their dismounted infantry when I give them javelins and tell them to get out and shoot an enemy tank. Crispy

Another thing that sort of goes hand in hand with this is vehicles automatically popping smoke and reversing like mad men as soon as they see a tank, no matter how far away. If they're a fancy recon vehicle with good observation equipment and can spot a tank a long way off, I'd rather they found cover or stayed in position instead of killing their own LOS and letting the tank see a big giant white smoke cloud to let him know enemies are present. It's also annoying when I tell them to get to a certain spot to observe fires on the enemy tanks, who seem to not be able to see them, but as soon as they get in position they absolutely refuse to stay put and immediately pop smoke and reverse. Not only that, but they will keep doing it as long as the tank is in view, so I have a whole stryker platoon scattered everywhere because they refuse to follow orders and stay put. This also causes them to abandon their dismounted infantry when I give them javelins and tell them to get out and shoot an enemy tank. Crispy

Another thing that sort of goes hand in hand with this is vehicles automatically popping smoke and reversing like mad men as soon as they see a tank, no matter how far away. If they're a fancy recon vehicle with good observation equipment and can spot a tank a long way off, I'd rather they found cover or stayed in position instead of killing their own LOS and letting the tank see a big giant white smoke cloud to let him know enemies are present. It's also annoying when I tell them to get to a certain spot to observe fires on the enemy tanks, who seem to not be able to see them, but as soon as they get in position they absolutely refuse to stay put and immediately pop smoke and reverse. Not only that, but they will keep doing it as long as the tank is in view, so I have a whole stryker platoon scattered everywhere because they refuse to follow orders and stay put. This also causes them to abandon their dismounted infantry when I give them javelins and tell them to get out and shoot an enemy tank. Crispy

If the AI knows what it's doing, it will wait for you to get close and not shoot. That's what it does for me. Whenever a point target makes itself available, I usually DO kill it. Normally if they are shooting, from what I've seen, they have a good enough shot to do damage. I've rarely seen them miss with RPG's because they normally only fire from close range. And YES, of course when I do an area fire with an MGS main gun, I expect the squad hiding behind that wall to be messed up. When a do a full-on barrage on a group of a few tiny connected 1 story buildings, I expect them and the men inside to be decimated. I would also normally expect a highly trained sniper/spotter team to be able to hit a gunner on a technical, in perfect view, from 600m away or watch a group of only 4 windows from 400m away before a WHOLE squad can get up, look out of a window, aim, and fire an RPG or automatic weapon at my men. I do area fire because a lot of the time a unit will be taking fire, but another won't be able to precisely see the unit shooting at me (which is of course required for a point target), so I will unload on the building to prevent an infantry squad from getting nailed by a PK. It also often takes forever to kill a person in a building even with a point target. I have also not noticed a unit being pinned down by just a few shots. I was in a shootout in T shaped complex and had 1 squad start taking fire from one of the legs. As soon as it happened I told them to cancel movement and return fire and told 3 other squads to start firing (they all also had a point target) from close range and from 2 sides. It took a few MINUTES for them to put their heads down and only 1 or 2 died in the process, while they managed to wipe out a large portion of a squad.

I realize my advantage in long range fire. I also realize that clearing unnecessary buildings is bad. This is why I chose to blow the hell out of the large circular complex and the half destroyed complex near the SF HQ instead of storming them. I also really do not like 95% of the units indoors, because most of the Syrian squads have at least one RPG guy, who often has an RPG 29 that is capable of taking down vehicles, so I try to avoid letting them get a shot off, and when they do I quickly kill/suppress them. Also, when I do a lot of suppressive fire (enough to get the enemy to not shoot) on buildings, my infantry freak out and delete their waypoints, so doubling up on suppressive fire is not likely to help. You can give me whatever BS you want about Middle Eastern construction being more solid, but a tiny one story building is not going to withstand a 120mm mortar round, much less a barrage of them. A small, half destroyed office complex with no roof is also not going to provide perfect cover against a 120mm mortar barrage. Many modern Middle Eastern buildings, like office buildings and barracks you would see at a Syrian airbase (where the mission takes place), are made of the same stuff as buildings in the US. The Special Forces HQ is also an office building. I was mainly wondering if there was some certain way I had to "gather intel" at the HQ building and blow it up. The complex took a serious beating and didn't have have a hole in it, so it was looking like it would take every bit of my support assets to take it down, which didn't seem too reasonable. I was also wondering what was going on with clearing some of the buildings because I seemed to have some AI problems and lost a freaking platoon trying to clear out a couple of buildings. I used Assault + smoke and/or suppressive fire to cross any open area and get into the ground floor (little to no casualties during that part) and then Hunt all the way up to the top floor and repeat the process on adjacent buildings (during this part my men would delete waypoints, keep walking with enemies right in front of them, or get shot through the floor by enemies 2 floors above them). It helped to micromanage them to death, cancelling all movement and directly telling them to target the enemies, but even then, when clearing the SF HQ, they spazzed out and just didn't shoot or kept deleting waypoints.

I'm not worried about winning. It's not too hard to win on the US side. The trick is winning without many casualties. I was trying to bypass the half destroyed apartment complex looking building and the circular complex because they weren't part of the mission, and I'd already lost a lot (in my opinion) of men trying to clear out other buildings, so I wanted to avoid trying to clear out buildings I didn't need to clear. I also assumed that blowing the crap out of the buildings with artillery would tear up the people in the buildings and the sniper with a perfect LOS on them would be able to see any threats in the windows, but apparently they were made of 10 ft thick reinforced concrete or something and my sniper was unable to notice a squad of Haji's pointing a large RPG at one of my MGS in the small area I told him to watch. Anyway, how did you all go about doing this mission without taking an inordinate amount of casualties?

I'm not really understanding all of that post. Not all of my men can see the enemy when others can, so I use area attack to suppress them. Usually they will get a few shots off and wound or kill your men if you wait until you can see them completely. You don't lose as many men if you pin them down so they don't shoot back. I also don't care if a 120mm HE round doesn't hurt my men as much as it should either. 90% of the time, it will be a US round going into the house considering the Syrians are almost always on defense and rarely have a big gun to fire into a house. When going into houses I AM using "Hunt". They were not getting shot at and deleted their waypoints about 4-5 times before I could get them to go in. BTW, I HAVE played Red. It is more difficult to actually win the battle as Red, but it requires much less micromanagment and tactical reactions, and the objectives for Red are about equally as challenging as they are for the US, maybe a little less. As Red you don't need to have very coordinated movements and worry as much about covering all directions and keeping vehicles safe from RPGs in an urban area. Anyway, this is not a Red vs Blue discussion, it's a suggestion post.

After playing for a little while (I'm only done with Ash Shammas, the 2nd mission in the campaign), I've seen a few things that could/should be improved with some sort of patch that may not have been mentioned yet. Here is what I've found so far: 1) US snipers need to be improved. Our snipers are damn good IRL, but in the game they seem very underpowered. In Ash Shammas, I had a sniper team on top of an Air Traffic Control tower facing a huge clearing where they had view of over half of the map, a perfect spot. My sniper was consistantly missing the gunner on a stationary technical 640m away. On top of that, he was unable to see an RPG soldier, 300-400m away, come up to a window and fire at an MGS after I specifically gave him a targetting arc over those buildings. He also couldn't see any of the enemies in the complex I was raiding (where he had a PERFECT LOS) despite a major fire fight going on in the complex. 2) Artillery barrages should do way more damage on targets inside of buildings. I did full barrages from 120mm mortars on a large half destroyed complex (would've been very little cover) and a small circular complex of 1 story buildings (1 or 2 shells from a 120mm would have leveled one of the buildings). I scored several direct or near direct hits on the buildings, but when I checked the map afterward, the enemies inside were almost completely untouched (and still managed to fire off RPGS at some of my Strykers). 3) Larger weapons still need to do more damage to buildings and units inside them. Sometimes I haven't had a problem, and an MGS round has torn up a squad of enemies inside. Other times, I'll pound away, doing no damage. The MGS's also need to do more structural damage to the buildings (it shouldn't take more than 1-2 shots to knock a LARGE hole in a building). The 40mm's and .50 cals need to do WAY more damage to people inside. I've had MK19's and .50 cals UNLOADING on enemies inside of a building and done little more than scare them a little. 4) Room clearing AI needs to be improved, or there needs to be a specific command to clear rooms. I know this has been mentioned before, but I'm taking way more casualties that I should be when clearing rooms, and it needs to be stressed. My men are deleting their waypoints in the buildings, so I have to repeatedly tell them to get in there and clear them which wastes a lot of time. They refuse to stop and shoot enemies they see even though they are on "Hunt". Enemies also seem to be able to fire at them from 2 floors up, sometimes even from connected buildings. 5) I noticed the manual mentioned cooperative multiplayer. This would be a very nice addition to help limit the amount of micromanagement that needs to be done and allow for a realistic chain-of-command style battle. A multiplayer version of the campaign would be really cool. Maybe you could have each player pick which officer(s)/elements they would control, and the higher up officers could attach/detach other units to them (like detaching an MGS for 1st platoon to use) and have priority of support fires for each unit. Maybe higher up HQ units (Company CO's and such), if they're not directly controlling units, can send commands to the other players commanding lower units which would show a visual waypoint, target, or order to that subordinate leader. Those are my suggestions for now. I'm not trying to rant or anything, those are just some things I noticed. [ May 19, 2008, 09:11 AM: Message edited by: Crispy129 ]