Why warfare fails as a game mode

[Earion 1]

Read the whole thread as I was busy waiting for huge loading time on the dreadful "Dogs of War" SP Campaign end mission, which is warfare at its worst. So here are my own conception of those "failures", In hope they won't be reproduced in ArmA 3 (has Warfare been confirmed in A3 ?). Now, Idk if those flaws have been fixed in various custom warfare mode as I've never tried any so please do tell me if they were.

"Big deal" :

- Spawning and fast travel, silly and terribly frustrating when a unit just "pops there"

- Economics and money (same thoughts as OP)

- Construction : Building placement is a mess, and "building" or "buying" Hinds from an helipad, M1A1 from a "Supply point" is quite silly... And they pop in, again (and never at the right place)

"Minor" aspects :

- Could I radio in reinforcement when I'm in enemy territory, pleaase ? having to be at HQ to "order" units is quite silly in the era of satellite phone...

- Enemies that respawn in your back, mounted at static guns next to empty strongpoints...

- Static guns disappearing after some time (I know it's "performance reasons")

- Big maps, but feeling of emptiness (big SP fail, you expect an epic battle retaking chernogorsk but enter a ghost town with a couple of pickups, 1 gunner at each strongpoint and maybe a t72 if you are lucky...

- AI, but I feel it is still the most acceptable part of the game - the worst part is the driving AI and some lack of control over other squads in vanilla.

The thing is, warfare could be real good. I think I can sum up my gameplay nightmares here in three part : Spawning, Buying and Constructing. This are things I dislike the most about so-called "Realistic" RTS (i.e, StarCraft doesn't pretend to be realistic so it's all good)

- No spawning : nothing should "pop in". Breaks the immersion too much. So no fast travel, and no magic unit construction.

- No buying : if there is some kind of resource, it shouldn't be money. Scope is too short term to have such thing as economic growth.

- No construction : fortifications are ok IMHO the rest should go away.

Actually there is one RTS that totally complies with all these rules and could be considered as the high command cousin to Arma, which is "Wargame : European Escalation". Wargame pretty much got the above things right by virtually avoiding them all along, and still provide a very good interesting and strategic gaming experience :

- No Spawning : there is no fast travel, no unit building, you have to seize a sector at the edge of the map and deploy a command unit there. You can then call reinforcements (they will smoothly travel inland from the edge)

- No Buying : you have a limited number of command point. Command point allows you to deploy an initial set of unit and then call in reinforcement. Each unit costs you command point. You can't spend command points beyond the initial budget. Now, with an high enough initial allowance, the battle could still go for days.

- No Construction: no buildings at all (not even fortifications), no magically buying Apaches or M1A1. You have a customizable "deck" of units you choose at mission start. You can deploy some straight away and call in some reinforcement after having secured some key locations.

Now I would love to play an arma warfare mode like straight like this... But maybe it does exist already ?

It could be refined with some additional mechanics :

- having "command" sectors inland (and not only on the edges) is quite mandatory, but only for infantry (player character respawning) and light vehicles. "Spawning" could occur by transport helicopters, HALO/paradrops, dropships or other sensible methods I can't think of right now (and are not totally safe)

- "spawning" armor should be restricted to the edges of the map (landing craft or just "crossing the border") or require you to control an airport inland (transport by C5 or C17)

- the more "difficult" a spawning method is, the more command points it costs

- building fortifications is quite mandatory but should take more time than currently (configurable) and require you to assign some AI units to it (can be interrupted and resumed in case of contact)

- various types of command units (so you don't have just a "Single Point of Failure HQ"), but they cost a great deal of command points.

- basic scavenging of fuel and materials from destroyed vehicles and cities, towing damaged vehicles for repairs, militia recruitment and training...)

- game mode fine tuning such as invasion/defence...

If something like this doesn't already exist, I would love to see it in A2/A3.

[Jex 1]

I agree and disagree. Arma is a game and should be enjoyable.

I remember in Battlefield 3 when there was this automatic shotgun firing with the accuracy and speed of a rifle but with the deadliness of a point blank shotgun blast and penetrated thick building walls.

Somewhere I remember hearing that automatic shotguns will be the unrivaled weapons of the future but I wasn't applauding because it was ruining the game.

A bad balance in Arma could do the same thing and since people are douchebags there will always be someone everywhere using the really effective weapon and prevent players from playing the game the way they want.

It would be bad even if we were seeing an outphasing of all other weaponry other than automatic shotguns in reality. Basically they would remove the shotties and say they weren't invented in this timeline or something.

Anyways I agree in that in reality there is no clear advantage with nearly any weapon and in final Arma should have a basically Counter-Strike like balance where any weapon is very deadly in the hands of a pro.

I think Counter-Strike really hits the spot because on a pro level all that really matters is hitting your enemy's head and most weapons are pretty accurate with single shots so there are few clearly disadvantegous weapons and even they have their situations.

The answer to douche bags is very very simple - you ban them for life. If people can't play fair, then we don't care about playing with them right? Another good thing about Arma series, servers are controlled by the players, not by the companies so it's easy to make a ban list, or a whitelist, password etc.

Weapons in arma are fine, I never feel as though one weapon is better than any other tbh - certainly not enough that I think wow that's OP. Games like BF don't have realistic weapons or movement so you might as well say his banana is way OP and you can't stand playing with this maple leaf, meanwhile another player is using a comb and swears by it.

BF3 and their ilk are just cross hairs with statistics coming out of them - the actual model of the character holds could be anything since it's not modelling anything. Arma at least tries to model the guns they put in the game, at least I like to think they do as it comes from VBS.

[On_Sabbatical 11]

Warfare is the most complex mission and is very limited by performance issues ! the warfare subcommunity is dying slowly too ...

[MiGeL_B 1]

big map is ok, for more towns and vehicles spreading, problem is server capacity, it should working with 200vs200 for a great gameplay...so warfare gameplay(arma style) fail by low performance in actual hardware technology

I disagree. Infinite scale and numbers is not always better. Take a look at Planetside 2, the battle goes on and on and your actions don't translate to much in the game.

With those numbers teamplay is pretty much lost as well.

If you check the success ( the multiple tournaments and many clans ) of Operation Flashpoint's cti back in the day. The right mix was just there:

- No JIP, for balancing teams and tactics before hand.

- Medium sized islands with only 3 front-line towns, 3 safe sector towns and 2 towns on each flank, so players had to engage each other on 3 fronts in order to gain town momentum

- Limited view distance, so AI had a chance to retaliate and were hard to exploit and bases were more like fortresses that could withstand quite some punishment

- 1 source income system, so base expansion limited unit output and the quality of gear used by players.

- effective ai, the ai was sometimes better than a player

- Short 30min -1 hour exiting games

- Meaningfull actions. ( I just shot a player in Montignac and secured the town. Giving my ai and team players time to advance and to dig in, having 1 or 2 extra m1's pumped out the heavy factory the next coming minutes )

- Balance between air/armored and infantry

Strategical wise it had the level of starcraft2, company of heroes etc. You pushed a certain town with tanks, then that move would mean the absence of tanks in other areas, giving opportunity to the other team to excel. If the enemy player was losing battles with tanks and saw that you bought a lot more to finish the job, they went for the at chopper upgrade. If you failed to see the lack of output from their base in time than boom, that chopper takes out your ground advantage, leveling the playing field. This translated very well in the higher end tournaments.

Tanks battles lasted 3-6 min long, so during that time reinforcements, retreats, flanking all that good stuff came into play.

Teamplay wise the game was quicker than warfare, but because of the manageable scale the oversight was never lost. Even starting players usually had a sense where to go because everybody was tightly connected. If I engaged a town a certain way it wouldn't take long before those tactics got copied by teammates.

That said I completely agree with the topic openers title, but I think the problem is more severe than people notice though.

The teams are always off or change during the long game, the missions revolves more about taking a town by exploiting the ai with range advantage and better equipment, the island and town placement have no strategical value to them, the bases are sitting ducks, the obscure money system ( like op stated ) , the weird non existing front line, the random loss of vehicles by advanced weaponry, the long uninteresting games, meaningless battles that have no direct output to the combat situation.

I can see how a person enjoys playing it, but since it doesn't force people into a competitive mind set it's not going anywhere.

[PFC Magician 10]

If you check the success ( the multiple tournaments and many clans ) of Operation Flashpoint's cti back in the day. The right mix was just there:

- No JIP, for balancing teams and tactics before hand.

- Medium sized islands with only 3 front-line towns, 3 safe sector towns and 2 towns on each flank, so players had to engage each other on 3 fronts in order to gain town momentum

- Limited view distance, so AI had a chance to retaliate and were hard to exploit and bases were more like fortresses that could withstand quite some punishment

- 1 source income system, so base expansion limited unit output and the quality of gear used by players.

- effective ai, the ai was sometimes better than a player

- Short 30min -1 hour exiting games

- Meaningfull actions. ( I just shot a player in Montignac and secured the town. Giving my ai and team players time to advance and to dig in, having 1 or 2 extra m1's pumped out the heavy factory the next coming minutes )

- Balance between air/armored and infantry

but if things change, warfare would cease to be called?

As I would like to just be able to "only" build radiotowers for each city(no money system), the ability to request parachute (terrestrial vehicles/squads) one request for each player in the town conquest, free air vehicles at airports just conquered!

Transition only notice it when the tower is destroyed.(player have time to reach hot zone before other players build their radiotower)

something like a "domination" mode but PVP

[Stlkrash1 1]

Would be nice to have an ultra realistic game mode. Like exactly how real life would be. For example a real command structure, the need to move supplies, no respawning a thousand times, use medevac and all that. This sim has so many capabilities it can bring the rest like battle Barbie to their demise... Take VBS2's command structure maybe, Both opfor and blufor. It could be ground breaking stuff... Maybe even in time the ability to inject different time period mods, like I44 and Veitnam.

---------- Post added at 19:02 ---------- Previous post was at 19:01 ----------

It Is neat to see the AI out setting mines now. Now put in some road side bombers or something... A group of dredded ai, set out too a road and start booby trapping it... On the other side of the map and you have no clue they do it. Patrols out in the bushes wandering around..

---------- Post added at 19:06 ---------- Previous post was at 19:02 ----------

Ohhh here is an idea, the Commander slot is who sends in the calvary. In my ww2 dom mission mod, I used the A2 Reinforcement script, and a set of fighters would come in and do a sweep and leave etc, supply frop, AI drops..

[jgbtl292 0]

i will the the arma1 mhq back - the good real mhq with a tent on there rear . and not the im here hill unter it - no placing handicaps

the mhq where i can place in a small street , under a hanger or garage.

and not only in a free good spotting place - with a hill under it where said " hey the mhq is here look me - bling bling ^^

working camoneds for factorys - for build a hidden small base in the wood to

[dnk 13]

Would be nice to have an ultra realistic game mode. Like exactly how real life would be. For example a real command structure, the need to move supplies, no respawning a thousand times, use medevac and all that. This sim has so many capabilities it can bring the rest like battle Barbie to their demise...

You might just like the MSO modular system for A2.

Basically, if BIS hasn't done it, and people want it, someone in the mod community's probably done it already.

[Beagle 684]

i will the the arma1 mhq back - the good real mhq with a tent on there rear . and not the im here hill unter it - no placing handicaps

the mhq where i can place in a small street , under a hanger or garage.

and not only in a free good spotting place - with a hill under it where said " hey the mhq is here look me - bling bling ^^

working camoneds for factorys - for build a hidden small base in the wood to

A real Battallionsgefechtstand consists of two M113 and one tent and a Funktrupp on LKW2t gl ;)