New to the Arma series

[AsphaltRanger 1]

I'm Active military and just build a PC...used to be an Xbox player be gentle. I've been playing Flight Sims and BF3 so far but ARMA 2 has caught my eye, is there still alot of people playing this? Should I still pick this up with the up coming ARMA 3 coming out? This game looks amazing and has to be way better then going between BF3, DCS A10c and world of tanks :)

[Tankbuster 1733]

There's a couple of thousand players, maybe more at peak times.

If it's cheap, then yes, don't wait for ArmA3, which we probably won't see this year. It's not necessarily better than the other games you mention, but it's different to all of them. Why don't you pick up the ArmA2 Free and see if it floats your boat?

[tremanarch 6]

Just buy ArmA II - Combined Ops, and ther two DLC's for the Models if you like it!

YOu can try Take on Helicopters too (Heli SIm), you have then volumetric clouds in Arma too..

[gunso 10]

Recommendation:-

1. Get Arma 2 CO and 2 DLC (BAF + PMC)

2. Go through all the training mission

3. Play the armory for practice (It's random)

4. Get some buddy and play the campaign as coop, start tinkering with MP too =)

5. After a few week playing vanilla, start using mods JSRS and Blastcore

6. Play around with the editor and more mods

7. Start downloading custom mission in armaholics

8. Profit $$$$

[JojoTheSlayer 35]

I would get Arma 2 CO (Main game + Expansion) You can get it at Steam for 25EUR or less depending on where you live. After that if you are looking for a bit more advanced experience over BF3 I would suggest you find a community you have similar gaming interest with.

Examples I can recommend are:

Arma WarGames

(PvP weekly battles in campaigns over several weeks with a high level of organization between two sides. Good number of exMil guys here actually.)

United Operations

(PvE ACE mod clan that host "drop in drop out" military like missions with structured command, realistic *radios (*YouTube Arma 2 acre) etc.)

Thats the basics, but besides that there are two tools I also recommend to keep track of mods and stuff because most communities at this stage use a a few mods.

(A) Arma Launcher

(A basic launcher gui where you can tick click what mods you want to start etc. Linking this to Steam as a none steam game will also enable shift+tab Steam ingame browser for CO)

(B) SixUpdater

(Its a must of contentiously updated mods like ACE. Basically its a tool that you, after configured of course, you just run to auto update all your selected mods in one go. A one time hassle to remove xx amount of manual time sinking hassles later...)

Lastly, a place to keep up to date with everything Arma 2 related:

ArmaHolic

(Arma related news, mods and mods download site.)