fa3_c64_airport_salient

[kalelovil]

My mission fa3_c64_airport_salient was first played during the session of Tuesday 29 July.

Unfortunately I was not able to attend that session, but any suggestions, feedback, or identifying any issues here would be appreciated.

Some specific questions:
How did the flow of engagement feel? Too much or too little down-time?

How was the strength of the enemy opposition? Should I beef up the enemy numbers, give them more heavy weapons, or build more fortified enemy positions, for example.

Were the briefing and objectives clear and rational? Did the ending trigger (if the contingent achieved all objectives).

Did the mission feel too long or too short?
(I was worried about it being too long, hence why I made the northern and eastern objectives optional. I'll rewrite the briefing to make them mandatory if that won't make the mission too long.)

Which objectives did the contingent tackle and in which order? Were they approached one at a time, or in parallel?

[Kefirz]

We cleared out the airfield and went for the town.
The trigger that the airfield was clear didn't go off (there was probably someone hiding somewhere), but for the town it did.

I was MMG, and it was ok.. there were some shooty bits and some waiting bits, but Alpha squad, with whom I was embedded, made it out without any causalities, same for MMG. So..... make it a more of an meatgrinder?

P.S Also, in the briefing you were mentioning Stratis airport. *OCD Twitch*

[audiox]

Hi. Hosted this (and died first..(universal doesn't count since he could respawn! )) So i had a good eagles eye view of it all. I also started it up before session, so i have one thing i need to say.
- The AI is dumb as bricks with the pickups. On the pre-game run 3 or 4 of them crashed into buildings/rocks, and one couldn't get through a fence blocking it. Once they start taking fire i assume they are jolted, but the farther away you put them the more of them won't make it.

As it was, we played the mission on medium difficulty, and that proved not much of a problem for 2 squads of 2 fireteams each with an attached Marid. How much more pain there would've been on High is unknown, but you could probably add more "stuff" to the initial airfield assault. With two full squads +1-2 attachments i think it would be a cakewalk on High as well, but i'm not entirely sure.


The first engagement at the airport was nice, assaulting the town with two understrength squads proved a bit too easy. We didn't hit the solar plants, mostly because i didn't want to force everybody to run back and forth too much, and thats my only real problem with the mission. With the new fatigue system that kind of "lets all run over there, and then doubletime it back over to the other side again" becomes really annoying, since you constantly have to stop along the way. Having to do it on approach to a village is perfectly ok, but then having to do the same thing once more just seems a bit much. Leaving some transports on the airfield or in the village/plant site would alleviate that somewhat (but would of course introduce good ol' logistics sim 2007....).

Objectives well thought out, would prefer it if the optional ones remain optional, since that makes sure that CO's primary focus is on the airfield. It also makes it easier for the hosts.
As it was we went for the village with the 2 ft Bravo, and airfield for 2ft Alpha + IFV and MAT. Personally, i'd like it if it resembled the old A2 airfield mission in that all troops are needed to defend the airfield at the start.


Everything written made sense, and gave the outline we required.


Also, it would be really, really nice if it used the F3 Briefing Template in description.ext for endings, as it makes it possible for the admin to see and trigger available endings when needed.
Also, maybe make the airfield task completion approximately <4 blufor present rather than 0 blufor present (if that is what it currently is... for this run there was two guys to the far north that made the task completion not trigger, if i saw correctly.).


As for whether it was fun to play i dunno, i died first.....

[wolfenswan]

Played this on Sunday. While the mission concept is fun (though the AO could be a bit smaller), Server performance suffered heavily (low 20s) and as a result client performance as well. This is most likely a result of using too many 1-person groups and third-party scripts executed through the init field (I didn't check if they thus run for every client or have a locality restriction. I'd suggest removing those and using the FA-F3 version and the included functions for garrisons etc. instead. That way you can avoid having to place many small groups of AI which should help performance a lot.

Some other misc. issues:

• Ifrits were confusingly designated as "IFVs" in slotting.
• No endings assigned via description.ext
• AI vs AI seemed to account for most of the death, might need some fine-tuning balance wise. Maybe make the AAF more dormant or reduce their numbers.