Task Force Thunder Ash Shammas

[Codreanu]

Has anyone played this mission since patch 2.03 made units a lot less likely to route from cover? I managed to force the enemy into surrender with 4 KIA 7 WIA and 1 destroyed Styker which is hopefully light enough casualties, I'm not sure how brutal this campaign is. I think I used up about every round of ammo from all of my Strykers plus JDAM after JDAM onto the Syrian Special Forces HQ and it was still a bees nest of resistance, and I probably would have lost a ton of guys trying to clear it in time if the AI didn't decide to give up. Curious how others tackled the mission as of the latest patch and how well you did.

[Bozowans]

I managed to beat it without any losses, but I didn't try forcing an enemy surrender and got only a minor victory. I didn't even bother to push for the special forces HQ or the control tower at all. I occupied the airbase HQ and the barracks and then just stood back and shot and bombed the hell out of the far side of the map as much as I could from long range, hoping to cause as many casualties as possible before time ran out.

I wanted to keep my losses low so early in the campaign, so I just avoided getting close to the enemy as much as possible. I was happy to sit on two of the objectives and hope that points from casualties would tip me over to at least a minor victory. I caused over 100 casualties, but after it was over I was surprised to see how many enemies were still there in places that I thought had been thoroughly shot to pieces.

I finished the whole campaign since then, and I'd say you're probably fine with those casualties. In retrospect I was probably overly cautious throughout much of the campaign.

[Codreanu]

Yeah, the AI is very stubborn in buildings. I found that the .50 on the Stryker is great for general suppressive fire on a building but won't really kill anything unless it actually sees the enemy inside which it will then turn into mince meat. Also to never assume a building is clear unless it's physically leveled, I JDAM'd the whole Special Forces compound but when I moved in my bombs did almost nothing because all of their troops were on the bottom floor, if I would have let the F-16s actually knock the buildings down assaulting it would have been much easier. I went for the control tower to get a good position for my JTAC and FiST and the barracks to get flanking fire on the SF HQ, ignored the airbase HQ because it looked like a perfect chokepoint for IEDs and close range ambushes, I realized too late that it was practically empty. In the future I'll try and aim for those minor victories rather than going for broke and picking a fight with enemy strongpoints. In the end I ended up with 116 enemy KIA and 82 WIA.

[Bozowans]

The airbase HQ did turn out to be a nasty mess of IEDs and I was surprised I didn't trigger any of them. I did make sure to avoid the main road and go at it from a different angle though. I blasted away large parts of the outer boundary wall before approaching so I had a clear field of view for as many of my troops as possible, then I approached slowly and cautiously. All those buildings around there do give you good cover from all the enemies on the other side of the map too.

Normally I'm a pretty aggressive player, so it was sometimes difficult to restrain myself from pushing harder to outright destroy the enemy. With how powerful the US forces are, I know I could wipe the enemy off the map if I wanted to, but the casualties will slowly eat away at you and you never get any replacements throughout the entire campaign, so it's always a hard decision whether to push hard or not. That was one of the interesting parts of the campaign for me.

Losing a squad here and there hurts but it shouldn't be too big of a deal in the long run I think. The US forces are still crazy powerful even if they are at half strength.

[Codreanu]

Seems like Ash Shammas was just a bump in the road, I've made it up to Objective Normandy with extremely minimal casualties, generally just an unlucky Stryker gunner who catches an AK round fired from 500m away, there always seems to be one of them the gods choose to smite. Even beat Objective Diane with only 2 KIA and 2 WIA which I was pretty proud of, who would have thought that 155mm airburst would be so effective?

Edited October 19, 2021 by Codreanu