Do I suck at leading?

[mr reality 0]

This is the main reason why i don't like leading a squad. If you have to make your weapon obsolete in combat situations, then that is not the purpose of a tactical simulation.... at section/squad level its basically leaving your squad 1 man short.

A leader's weapon is not his rifle, but his men. This is a difficult point to understand, even after military training.

A squad leader's job is to maneuver and target his element, not to score kills with his weapon.

I can understand your point to some degree, but at squad level (8 men) every man should know what to do. The commander should only have to split his squad into 2 fire teams and give the order to assault a certain area. Fire and manouver is vertually impossible in Arma as having to micro manage every squad member isn't realistic. I gave up trying to form 2 seperate teams in my squad as it became doubly difficult.

Also the point about giving individual squad members targets while ontop of a hill looking through binos isn't all that realistic either. It's only made simple because of the stupid AI not getting into cover.

I've set up a basic ambush scenario and found a quarter of my squad did not fire because they were behind trees/foliage. I had to order the soldiers to move left/forward 1 metre so the target was in there line of sight. It's just little things like this that make having trees and obstacles a burden when the AI cant or wont adjust there positions accordingly.

Maybe my expectations are a little higher than those who think the command structure is good, its just i've seen some ridiculus things while commanding a squad in Arma. I wont go into great depth about it but one thing i will mention is when 2 of my squad members, while set on danger/hold fire, stood up in the 'safe' stance while we were only 30 metres from the enemy  

[firemane 0]

It is reasonable to presume that everyone in a squad should know what to do.

Reality is a lot more like a session of ARMA BERZERK. People just go nuts at the first shot. Some guys run forward, some run back, some hide behind a bush, and some even come out of the engagement without firing a round. Some will do things that will make you wish you could trade them for a couple of ARMA AI's.

That is why we have a leadership system in place.

The first thing I do when breaking in a new Squad/Team leader is to take away his personal weapon before throwing him into a squad-level engagement (Using MILES or military lasertag). That drill gets the guy/gal thinking (his new job) and keeps his/her head out of the sights and into the bigger picture.

Those picture perfect teams depicted in the movies can but only after exhaustive training and/or battlefield experience.

ARMA has its flaws. However, give or take, it puts you before a pretty accurate picture of what you'll find for real.

[sputnik monroe 102]

I have not bought ARMA yet however I will offer this major point of advice I learned years ago in Operation Flashpoint.

Once you have located the enemy do not have your men in formation with you.Instead order them to where they need to go and have them in combat mode. In this way they will move slowly to their waypoint and once there they will concentrate more on fighting. When they are in keep formation mode with your self they will concentrate %100 on keeping formation with you as you move rather than shooting.

I have downloaded the ARMA demo and I do have one question as I am having trouble leading AI in the demo. When you use 9.9.X you can assign your troops to color coded teams. However unlike flashpoint I have not found a way to select the color coded teams. For example in the bigger demo mission you unlock in the demo I end up with more than 12 men. I put 13 through 15 as team blue, yet there seems no way to just select team blue, to select them again I have to push F12 then F1,F2,F3, to select those three men.

In flashpoint if I wanted to say select team red I would push 9.1 what is the new way to select a color coded group?

[Bracken 0]

Sputnik,

You can hold down space and scroll through the different colors with your mouse wheel.  Or hold down shift and press the f-number of anyone from the teams color you want to select and it will select them all.