You guys know what I think about vehicles in Arma 3, right? I think they're death traps. But I kind of
like that. Certainly, it's better than it used to be in the alpha version, when you were virtually invulnerable in a vehicle.
I remember one mission Turd and I played. The AI enemy infantry were just impossibly good. They could spot us anywhere - at night, in dense cover - and were killing us with one shot from clear across the map. So we grabbed a Hunter (or maybe an Ifrit, I don't know) and drove right up to the camp - and suddenly they were completely helpless. They had AT weapons, but they didn't know how to use them.
At the time, it felt good to blast them all with RPGs at close range, just because we were so frustrated at how superhuman they were against infantry. But it wasn't much fun being invulnerable, either. Well, those days are gone. Now they
do know how to use AT weapons.
Most of the time these days, I'd much rather be on foot, even against armor - at least, if I've got a missile launcher, myself.
But,... I was just thinking. I know nothing about the military, except from watching old World War II movies. But don't I hear a lot about combined arms? You don't send even tanks alone into enemy territory, do you? Certainly not territory with lots of cover (hedgerows, buildings, etc.). Don't you use infantry to keep the tanks safe, while using the tanks for extra firepower? (Helicopters add another layer to this. I'll get to them later.)
DTRAX, we didn't get to see the other half of your mission, but that's the half with armor, right? But I'm wondering about fighting a
combined arms mission, instead of keeping these things separate (not necessarily tanks, but any vehicles with armor and weapons).
This is just an idea, and I'm still thinking my way through it. But say we have a mission with ten players. Two of them could take a vehicle - a Hunter or something else with a weapon - but stay
behind the infantry. (If we had more than ten people, we could have two vehicles. And I'd suggest that both carry extra supplies - perhaps even a virtual ammobox - expecting that we might easily lose one of them.)
The task of the infantry would be to move forward in a broad line, attempting to find the enemy and keep the vehicles from being destroyed. At enemy contact - any significant numbers, at least - they could call in a vehicle for extra firepower. But until then, the vehicle would concentrate on moving from cover to cover, so it couldn't be taken out with a missile (and when an enemy strongpoint was destroyed, the vehicle would go back to doing that).
The basic idea would be to use the strengths of both infantry and vehicles. Note that if you just needed
transportation - if you didn't want to walk long distances - I'd put all of the infantry onto quadbikes. The advantage to quadbikes is that they could be spread out, and that even an AT missile would only take out one or two people, not the whole team.
But in general, I think you'd want the infantry on foot. Just make sure that we didn't have to walk
too far without encountering enemy soldiers. (Walking is only a pain if there's nothing else going on.) Instead, I'd fill up the respawn point with quadbikes. In general, of course, we'd want to revive fallen comrades, but if someone
did have to respawn, a quadbike would let him rejoin the others (after a suitable delay for respawning, of course.)
Another advantage to this would be that you could have bigger concentrations of enemy soldiers without making the mission impossible. After all, the infantry would be tasked with identifying those concentrations so that the armored vehicles could take them out. Then the infantry would mop up any stragglers (as the vehicles moved back to cover again).
Helicopters are a more difficult problem. Not only is it
much harder to bring them down with AA than it is to destroy armor with AT (because they have very effective defenses), they often attack at ranges where we can't even
see them. In one of DTRAX's earlier missions, I remember seeing tracer fire coming at me, but I had absolutely no other way to tell where the helicopter was. I couldn't see it and I couldn't lock onto it with my missile launcher, and before it got close enough for either, I would always be dead.
If you don't have an AA guy, you're
completely helpless against helicopters, but it's certainly not fun carrying around AA weapons if there aren't any targets for them, either (which is why most of us avoid the AA character slot). Even then, you're far better off on foot than in a vehicle! If there's an attack helicopter in a mission, vehicles are even more death traps than otherwise.
I'm not sure if there's an ideal solution to this,... but it's not
much different from the previous situation, is it? It's more dangerous for vehicles, but that just means they have to be even better at staying in cover, so missiles can't lock on. If they quickly move from cover to cover, that might work.
Also, we need enemy helicopters to come from
in front of our line, so they pass over the infantry first (and make sure there are at least a couple of people with AA launchers coordinating their fire, because of those chopper defenses). If we're moving from friendly territory to enemy territory, that would make sense, wouldn't it? After all, if they were coming from behind us, we'd have fixed AA positions already set to take them out. During wartime, you can't just fly a helicopter anywhere you want, right? (Certainly, the AI is pretty good at taking out
our helicopters when they stray.)
So I think that this combined arms plan would work whether they had helicopters or not. But I definitely think that enemy helicopters, or the lack thereof, should be part of the mission briefing. As I say, it's no fun being an AA guy if there are no helicopters in the mission, but it's also no fun having enemy helicopters but no one took the AA slot (because it
isn't much fun, unless there are things to shoot at).
With or without enemy helicopters, a mission can be lots of fun. But we probably should know one way or another, don't you think? Just for the enjoyment value of the mission?
What do you think? Sorry this is so long. I suppose I've lost you all by now, huh?
But this is both a mission idea and a suggestion of how we might want to play some missions. Vehicles in Arma 3 are very, very handy - for supplies, as well as for firepower - but they're also extremely vulnerable, these days. So I think we need infantry to lead the way.
On the other hand, it's not much fun to hang back with a vehicle - especially with an unarmed one. I think it would be a lot more fun to have an armed and armored vehicle, but one which the infantry called forward when needed. It would concentrate on staying in cover, as much as possible, until an enemy concentration was identified. At that point, the armor guys would know exactly where the enemy was, so they could drive forward and quickly obliterate them.
Thoughts?
Bill
PS. In this kind of mission, the vehicle guys should probably be repair specialists, don't you think? Or maybe a repair specialist and a medic?
