[Sun] 09 Aug 2015 (Hogs of war)

[Aqarius]

With 31 brave comrade joining us tonight, we got to see a mix of old and new faces (splattered across the bunker walls).

Missions:

• Corporate Synergy
• Squirrels
• Hedgehogs

Afterparty:

• Skyrangers
• Shipping problems x2

[Ralian]

Cry havoc and let slip the hogs of war!


This pretty much outlines my entire experience in Squirrels.


Thanks for hosting a great night aquarius

[SuicideKing]

So I was watching a friend play Arma with you guys, on my PC. He couldn't understand what was going on most of the time, but still enjoyed the session. Maybe the Party will have a new recruit soon!

BTW congrats on making it that far in Corporate Synergy (EDIT: I meant Hedgehogs but it's valid for both I suppose).

p.s. Apologies for the friendly fire in Shipping Problems, Sparks. Wasn't really me!

[Sparks]

p.s. Apologies for the friendly fire in Shipping Problems, Sparks. Wasn't really me!

"A friend did it", eh Tovarich?

[SuicideKing]

p.s. Apologies for the friendly fire in Shipping Problems, Sparks. Wasn't really me!

"A friend did it", eh Tovarich?

SIR, THE DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK I SWEAR

[Peasant]

Squirrels FIA MAT Gunner

So, Nim and I are the key to blowing up this dastardly IFV eh? I even get a PCML? Well, this will be easy.
10 minutes of not finding a decent vantage point later...
Eagle Eye: I have found the best vantage point ever! look at all the things I can see!
IFV: (somewhere to the north west) boom boom boom
MAT: can we go play with the IFV?
Eagle Eye: No. Stay in your room and do your homework. Why does that rock look hungry (Eagle eye is then eaten by a rock. Kefirz is promoted to CO)
Kefirz MAT go play on the hill. Watch out for the lookout on the hill.
MAT goes and plays on the hill. Look! a man! lets shoot him! woops. He's Friendly. Good thing we're both terrible shots.
Nim can you hear rumbling?
Peasant why yes, I can hear rumbling. And it's getting louder.

MAT does some highly tactical sneaking and finds itself 75 metres behind a parked IFV.

So... the perfect shot. Right lock on.. Lock on does not appear to be working... Well its only 80m this shouldn't be too hard. Get the IFV in the center of the target, hold breath and, fire.

Rocket streaks off erratically and impacts low and right.

IFV disapears in a cloud of smoke. hmmm. No earth shattering kaboom, but I am not currently being blown up by 30mm cannon rounds. So we disabled it?
Wait why are there dismounts? who's shooting at me? this was so not the plan. What happened to Nim? I die

good fighting IFV crew, good fighting.

[ZeCatnip]

This pretty much outlines my entire experience in Squirrels.

I passed you io the stairs going up, no idea how I managed to survive that barrage

Corporate Synergy
Real life got in the way and I missed the matches opening. I spectated and it seems like it went a lot better than the last time I played.

Squirrels
We were all sneaky beaky but to no avail, supply caches were blown up in quick succession.

Hedgehogs
It seems like the game wanted me to recreate and episode of Naked and Afraid, started off with no equipment but my trusty rifle. My trusty comrades soon supplied me and we set off on our merry way. We had issues with slow comrades and disconnections, but we soon made it forward to have most of our squad aerated. Sparks assumed command and we pushed forward towards the airfield. I pushed forward to scout a bunker and was promptly shot and killed for my arrogance. Oh well, maybe next time I will actually make it through the mission alive!

[Nick]

Squirrels AAF IFV Gunner

It is i, Eski. Breaker of human rights and master of not managing to die horribly via PCML.

I may or may not have made it rain 30mm gorgon cannon mounted anti-personnel rounds. In hindsight, having seen that there was something like a fire team in that building, the decision to not follow the first barrage up with a Titan missile was a poor one. Woe my firepower modesty.

But hey-ho, maybe i'd get another chance, i mean it wasn't as if the MAT contact that we had spotted earlier would somehow break visual contact with us, flank us and 'oh-uh!'...


After the initial thud, and getting over the shock of not being a fiery ball of metal, the IFV crew popped out of their hatches and legged it through the smoke cloud. 'Behind us! Close!' The driver yells. 'Got one!' Net Kev hollers, 'i'm flanking around the right!' i yell back at him. by the time i wheel around the rocks, it's too late, the enemy, who is obliviously making Swiss cheese out of the corpses of my newly deceased colleagues is all that stands between me and Saint Peter. I march forward with gritted teeth and dispatch the body defiler skillfully with a great many SMG rounds. It was at this point that the PTSD kicked in and my memory fades. I think i proceeded to climb into the IFV, lock all of the doors and sit there in the dark until night time.

Corporate Synergy Bravo ft2 iirc.

Attacked Fort Knox successfully and made our way through the north west side of town. Sporadic and biblical mini gun fire from circling choppers aside, we made it right the way through to the end. During the final dash myself and the SL got incapacitated. I was revived and told to run for the boat, to which i gleefully agreed. I sat down in the back of the boat and within a matter of seconds get launched out of it and onto the rocks by care of a helicopter gunship. "the boat seems to be beached on the rocks" a confused and frustrated soul cries! i lay strewn across the rocks and let out a sigh, we were so close! Defeat from the jaws of Pyrrhic victory.

Hedgehogs Bravo ft1 Machine Gunner

After i heard that we were heading towards objectives named 'hel' my eyes glazed over and i accepted my fate early on. After some bounding and some squinting at hedgerows and sandbags, Bravo Squad came across a downed attack chopper. B1 was sent forward to engage contacts and it was at that point that people started dropping like flies. I got lit up like a Roman candle on a bounding maneuver and promptly met my maker. Apologies comrades!

Thank you to the host for the evening and thanks for the fun over the past few session!

[Nim]

Squirrels: FIA MAT Spotter

MAT does some highly tactical sneaking and finds itself 75 metres behind a parked IFV.

I need the emphasize that we got into that basically perfect position based purely on our reckoning of ENGINE NOISE and no visual confirmation at all.

Rocket streaks off erratically and impacts low and right.

Not your fault man, that PCML was obviously defective.

...good fighting IFV crew, good fighting.

You guys were great; that smoke confused us so much you have no idea. After the shot I had us re-position a couple meters down the slope, because I was expecting retaliation from the 30mm and I wanted to break LOS. I'm going to be honest, the fact that the 30mm wasn't shooting had me convinced that it was disabled. We couldn't see your movement between the smoke and the bad position so well done you.

After the initial thud, and getting over the shock of not being a fiery ball of metal, the IFV crew popped out of their hatches and legged it through the smoke cloud.

You have no idea how gutted we were when we realized that your vic was fully operational.

It was at this point that the PTSD kicked in and my memory fades.

Well you got back in the vic and then you drove down the hill for a bit, turned around, and drove back up the hill, all of which I found rather amusing.

[Sparks]

Sortof a frustrating night after the fact, this one. I don't know quite why yet, but OBS had an upgrade just beforehand and I think that broke things, but I haven't confirmed that yet. Short version: my recordings have no sound from my mic, but perfect sound from the game. Gah. All the funny banter was lost...

Also, I bluescreened from a hardware overheat shortly after the start of Hedgehogs and the video from that is completely thrashed, along with the maps and everything, so it's a somewhat incomplete AAR this week.

Corporate Synergy
Demo specialist, Bravo 1 with Eagle_eye (FTL), Cowless (demo), Tigershark (R), Ecsi (R) and Netkev (R)



Kefirz had a plan right from the get-go and jumped at the CO's seat. In hindsight, that was our first warning sign. Then we spawned armed only with pistols and a large quantity of high explosive strapped to our back, and that should have been the second...

The plan was for Alpha to take up residence in the hotel and clear it and use it as an overwatch position (or bunker, depending on how badly things when wrong and how fast). Bravo would, as usual, go do all the actual work. So we watched the IFV, planted explosives where we thought it'd be going, took up an overwatch position right by the hotel and then realised it was a terrible position, so we booked it up to the top of the hill by Fort Knox. After some fun with Eagle_eye's land navigation in forests ("I'm over here by this tree"...) and some thoughts on how to obtain better weapons than we had (you sure got a purty gun there eagle...), we lined up on Fork Knox, Alpha went loud, I blew the IFV, and we charged the Fort. We met a lot less resistance than I was expecting initially and cleared the fort with pistols and grenades quite quickly. I tooled up with a real rifle and UGL, came round the corner to watch the forest to the north of the technical in case we'd missed anyone, the technical came under UGL fire and retreated back from the ridgeline, and right as I was thinking we'd consolidated well, a PCML flew across my field of vision and the technical was toast.

Bugger.

Then eagle did his usual FTL trick of getting shot. Double bugger. I patched him up as best I could (the psychological stuff will need a trained professional), and we pulled off that ridgeline and pushed south through the woods in the general direction of the shrine, killing as we went. Then three helos with miniguns showed up and I was down for the first time. Netkev revived me, we pushed south to the road and I legged it across to rejoin Eagle and the others, and literally ran out of the smoke into a charnel house, with five or six bodies just scattered everywhere, which wasn't terribly encouraging at the time. Meanwhile everyone was trying to shoot down the helos. Eagle got off a PCML, but I didn't see if it hit from where I was cowering and focussing on sphincter control tactically concealed from the minigun fire. Tiger ate a few rounds, I got him up, then we pushed on south, then Eagle and I both caught more minigun bullets. I got revived, but Eagle was a spectator and suddenly I was FTL. Triple Bugger.

I got on CC and tried to figure out our situation. ASL wasn't responding, BSL wasn't responding, CO wasn't responding, so I guessed the entire platoon had just had some field promotions. SNAFU, in other words. I took over as BSL, Gemoxy as ASL, and we decided that there wasn't time for COing because we were all going to run away. I thought we'd hole up in the Alamo to regroup, but Gemoxy had a boat so it was decided we'd say screw this and go for boat drinks.

Unfortunately Tiger had bought it by this point and Netkev was down in the open, so I had to pause the running away to lob smoke, throw some recon grenades, and revive netkev, and then we all ran away - a total of three survivors with Ecsi at this point. We actually made it to the boat, and somehow A2 managed to not kill me with friendly fire, I revived netkev and Ecsi again after another minigun run (this was getting repetitive at this stage) and we all ran for the boat and made it in. It became obvious nobody else was coming so I told the driver to go.

Then I told the driver to not beach us on the rocks.

Then I lamented the ignominious end we'd come to, got on the rear gun of the now-beached boat, and lined up the boat's minigun with the helo that was coming in to strafe us... and discovered the minigun was out of ammo.



And so ended Bravo squad, hosed down with heliborne minigun fire while trapped and helpless in a beached boat, watching Pickers slowly swim south to freedom...

It was a bit of a fun scramble right up until the end really. But I think maybe giving us guns might help the mission a little...



Squirrels
AR, Alpha 2 with Pooter (FTL), Cowless (AR), Mindless (RAT), Rinku (R) and SuicideKing (R)



Ah, *this* mission. And now Carson's on the other team, so expect the sneaky-sneaky. And my first thought was "they'll come from the north this time" and that we weren't really positioned to have eyes on that. Ah, what would I know

Feck. They came from the north and we didn't have eyes on them.
/sigh

I might have pushed a bit more northwest than really was strictly necessary for fireteam dispersion I guess, but I thought the building I'd moved to gave me better visibility west and east over the roads they'd be most likely to take. Shortly afterwards, pooter spotted their MMG teams at the gas station to the north and we engaged them, but had no visibility of their main force or the IFV, which had us worried. I thought that if Carson was being sneaky, he'd either distract us with the MMGs and push all the way to the east in the IFV, circle round the town and come in via our original spawn point, or - and this would be faster and so more likely - would push in along the northern edge under cover of the hill, clear down the western edge of the town and push east while the MMG team covered from their position. So I reoriented to face west, and sure enough, someone popped up the next street over a few minutes later. I drew fire to get them to come to me, then after making it clear-ish where I was, pulled out of the building to the courtyard out back to avoid UGLs and settled in for a tense wait while pooter and the rest of the fireteam came in from my south to try to catch them in a crossfire.

Unfortunately, Carson got there first. I did get one of his fireteam (despite hitting the reload key instead of the grenade key at the worst possible moment), but then I got clever-girled by Carson, who was that quarter-second faster on the trigger than I was and then I was spectating. Oh well. The plan was good...

Then we watched as the MAT guys engaged the IFV -- and I thought the PCML had hit, myself. But you know, that's PCMLs for you. Arma's answer to the question "How can we make the RPG-42 less effective, less fun, harder to use and easier to spot for snipers looking for a target?" The MAT guys would have won too, if it hadn't been for that flank by Nick. Oh well. This mission would have ended a bit differently if Peasant had won that last gunfight - I don't think even Carson would have won against a FIA-captured IFV

Carson and Kefirz went toe-to-toe (albiet with a street and three buildings between them) for a while, then the mission was called as a loss for FIA. Boo-urns.



Hedgehogs
AR, Alpha 1 with Carson (FTL), ZeCatnip, Lugnut, and others (this is why I record these things dagnamit, old geezer memory isnt' reliable!

Got to watch a bit more of the cinematics on the roll into this, so the loss of the video is sad. Also, I know we laugh at Carson's waypoint names, but Danish? Really? Next time I'm using Irish placenames if we're doing that, and I'll expect all radio calls to pronounce the fadas correctly too. WP Dun Laoghaire anyone? OP Áras an Uachtaráin? AP Dunshaughlin?

ZeCatnip materialised naked, which I thought was my trick, so we had some fun getting him some basic kit at the start. I handed over some of my grenades from the truck (who says larceny isn't a useful skill?) as he'd be up front with the rest of red team and we pushed off into the AO.

And then bang, right as we kick off and push in, my machine bluescreened thanks to some bit of RAM deciding it was bored. Took a while to get back into the game, during which my AI managed to get me injured somehow and we lost our RAT to AI as well. Gah. Once I rejoined, we hooked back up with the rest of the fireteam and continued to push south, doing quite a bit better than last time (those RCOs really make the difference by the way Eagle, huge improvement). We set up for a time on a small hill at OP Death (well that escalated quickly) and spent a while hosing down every enemy we could see (I think those were my sole kills on the mission) while Tigershark decided he was bored COing and stood on the top of a hill with lots of people shooting at him and trying his Neo impression. I decided that my ass coated in black leather wasn't on my to-do list and got off the hill and pushed south with the rest of the fireteam, but as we got within sight of the airfield, Carson ate a lot of lead, and then so did our other AR and I was FTLing, again. Yeesh. Stay alive people.

At this point, several of us were down, so we got people up, regrouped, and decided to leg it out west and try again from another angle. Before we got to our RV point, ASL pointed us back at Alpha 2 to link up with them and assault the airbase through a gully. We got to A2, synced up with them, discovered I'd just become ASL as well as FTL (ah, feck's sakes lads!), and then we pushed slightly north of the buildings we were sheltering in, got into a sort-of-gully-thing which in reality wasn't much more than a ditch with a bad attitude, and we pushed east towards the airfield. I spotted a bunker, and just after telling someone else to go take a peek as they were closer, someone in the bunker shot me in the head. Doh.

Also, spectator was busted for everyone, so we all watched the dirt for a while before the mission was called. Oh well.

Afterparty

Afterparty was fun, but again, lousy video sans banter. Skyrangers was an eyeopener. The last time I remember running this and this run had some... visual differences! Is that down to some VR time setting or something?

I did try to bail out of the helo in skyrangers, and managed not to die this time (open parachute before landing is the trick it turns out), but the ARs from the ground aren't as effective as you'd think so it was pretty much a waste of time.

Shipping problems was a bad exercise in friendly fire Whoops... though it was fun playing it at night (but we need flashlights or chemlights or flare pistols or something (other than NVGs which would be too much).