How do the 7-man Sections hold up in-game?
Much better than the 1-man Section Lead elements.
But as has been already said, comms discipline in Group Channel VOIP is going to have to become a thing. Our run of To Arms last night was a bit of a lesson in that especially at the start. I could have stabbed myself in both ears with a knitting needle and it wouldn't have reduced the usability of VOIP by very much for me during the first ten minutes or so of that run (whomever said that I could have stabbed myself in both ears
at once with a very long knitting needle and still have been as effective anyways, hush
). Don't take that as a whinge - it was fun - it's just that if we'd hit contact in that first few minutes, we'd have been wiped out before the last man had time to ask what was going on.
I'm not sure how our banter-friendly (or at least banter-tolerant) approach will live with that little problem, but these things have a habit of working themselves out with time I guess. I wouldn't be leaping for the rulebook and a sharpie myself just yet (besides, I
like the banter, when it doesn't get me shot - if I wanted to do this seriously, I would have joined the army twenty years ago. I don't even like the shooting bits, I like the moving-around-and-figuring-out-how-to-do-stuff bits).
Oh, and yeah, STHud. It's now a bit past being useful really, and is damn near essential. I nearly had a panic attack as section lead when STHud took a few seconds to sort out who was red and who was blue at the start of a mission. It's not realistic to try to track that in your head, and having a notebook by your PC to play this seems terribly 1990s...
How does FAXORBAT-4B change the leadership experience?
In terms of handling comms,
Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhmybrain.... just about covers the initial shock and workload, at least right now. Once we get past the
"OH GOD, SO MANY BEAUTIFUL SPECIAL SNOWFLAKES" reaction and on to the
"Red moves, Blue covers, and screw remembering their names, they're all dead soon anyway, I have bigger things to worry about" mindset, we'll be grand.
In terms of fun, yeah, it's like being given more margin for error, more capability, more ammunition and less anti-tank capability in one package. Changes the feel from
"bunch of lads from the pub quiz team trying not to die" over to
"yeah, we can get this done". Not quite Rambo, but also not quite final-crying-about-the-PTSD-scene-from-Rambo either. It's a nice step up.
In terms of pucker factor when taking a section lead slot, it's very squeaky-bum time because now you can ruin six people's fun not just three. You find yourself reciting Shepard's prayer quite a bit.
It also seems like sections need a real job now. You can't just point one at a single task ("Go clear that building"), it has to be a big task ("Go clear that compound"). Otherwise it feels wasteful (and seriously, seven of us with heavy weaponry clearing an empty building is something that you know is going to cause two to three casualties...)
And in terms of what you have to do as a section leader, I think it's actually become a real job now rather than one poor schmuck doing a half-job and everyone trying to survive including him. Situational awareness has gotten promoted from
"bloody useful" to
"your life and six others depends on it" and if your SA-fu is weak like mine,
everyone is going to know soon enough.
Oh, and as a nice side effect, speaking of real jobs, MAT just became a real boy. One RAT per fireteam even with only the RPG or PCML and every fireteam is an effective anti-tank asset that is more capable than MAT, at least for one or two contacts (and if you have three or more armoured contacts near a fireteam, the gods hate you anyways and it's a very academic debate you're getting into). But now, with one RAT per section, MAT's got a real role back again. That will have some interesting second-order effects, like requiring more coordination between sections and squads and attachments to avoid (a) people being mown down by IFVs and (b) friendly fire vehicular incidents...
Has FAXORBAT-4B had a positive effect on the use of Fire & Maneuver?
Not so much (for me anyway). "We're bounding, Blue covers, Red moves" is still as easy to say and still doesn't happen even after you say it unless you micromanage and with six people, micromanagement is a blink-and-they're-all-dead sort of mistake. That's nothing to do with the ORBAT though, and is just a consequence of us having lives and families and full-time jobs and not being sixteen anymore and so not having eight hours a day to practice this stuff. Also, it'd put off newbies coming in to try Folk out if we made this sort of thing a thing. The old hands get it. The new hands will pick it up. It's not a huge deal and doesn't (to my mind) have much to do with the ORBAT really. Get in a four-man fireteam in the old ORBAT with Fer, audiox and Pickers sometime (or any other three old hands who tend to survive missions) and you'll see a lot of fire-and-manoeuver. It's purely down to experience, not the ORBAT.
Based on this particular session, do you like FAXORBAT-4B?
Yes.
What do you mean, more detail? An engineer just gave you a one-word affirmative response to a direct question. You'll find hen's teeth more often than that.
/sigh
Okay, okay...
- We have serious conflicts with trying to add in new maps or weapons or mods or that kind of thing, for good reasons; it conflicts with the Party's goal of being friendly to people who don't have ten hours to set up their machine just so. And that's a good goal that we shouldn't abandon (seriously, I have a 3-year-old and a full-time job with on-call duties, I can't drop everything to learn six new things like ACRE and different mod setups and so on). But it does cause some samey-ness to develop and that tends to be problematic too (comrade, I yearn for new weapons and scenery, if I just didn't need to spend a day installing them and learning new things to use them). This new ORBAT is like our vehicle missions - it gives some novelty to the game, refreshes it a little, gives us new and different challenges that we can rise to, but doesn't compromise the Party's goal. This is a Good Thing™.
- Small 2 and 4 man teams are great for some tasks; not for others. A one-size-fits-all approach means not every mission is going to fit the ORBAT, which reduces the fun and increases the if-only-we-had-X frustration. Having a new ORBAT (assuming we don't completely ban the old ORBAT, which humbly, I think would be a mistake) means that we can have a better mission-to-ORBAT fit and therefore a more satisfying challenge. This is also a Good Thing™.
- One grenade to an old-ORBAT fireteam means that fireteam is not a fireteam anymore, is not combat effective, and someone is going to have to run half-way across the map and join up with some other fireteam, forgetting their old objective, figuring out what the new fireteam's objective is and how to slot into that, while that FTL is going to have to figure out what to do with the survivor. With FAXORBAT-4B, one grenade means that a section is now an angry, mobilised,
pissed-off ARMY OF DEATH THAT IS ABOUT TO SWARM ALL OVER YOUR PUNY FACES AND.... is that a second grenade on the ground here? Who dropped tha{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER