More infantry improvements

[My Fing ID 0]

As a former infantryman, there were some things that we used/did on a daily basis that I'd like to see in the game.  Here goes:

PAQ2/PAQ4:  We should have these, I've seen them in screenshots and some mods have them, but they never work. I'd also like to see M136 for machine guns, red light lazers (civilian models, don't know of any actual issue but hey, you take it to war and your commander doesn't complain you can use it), SureFire flashlights, ect.

Tracer Loads:  When firing rifles and machine guns, not all rounds are tracers, infact most aren't.  I'd like to see a 3 ball to 1 tracer ratio on rifles and 5 ball to 1 on machine guns.

Stop hitting the ground:  Yes if you take fire you want to get down, but if your flanking the enemy you don't want to low-crawl into possition.  If the AI is not taking direct fire they should run to possition as fast as they can and get down if they start taking fire.

Suppression:  This is a big one.  The machine guns in this game always target 1 person and fire a burst.  Machine guns are for suppression, not kills.  They should fire a 7 to 10 round burst across a line.  Make it reasonable, though.  Say there's 5 enemies within 20 degrees of eachother, the AI gunner should start at the left most guy and sweep across to the right most guy.  Doing this will keep their heads down and keep them from firing which brings us to...

Don't fire accurately under fire:  AI should not put accurate rifle fire on a machine gunner that is blowing ammo right at them.  They should get cover, get down, or die.  Machine guns are not friendly and I don't know of anyone that's going to put accurate fire on that gun with 800 rounds per second flying at them.

Mortars/artillery:  Yeah, it can be done (and is) by people afterwards but it'd be nice to see if BIS could integrate this and give it a good interface.  

Individual weapon equipment:  Yes your designated marksman will always have an ACOG and your sniper will always have a scope, but sometimes your unit has extra/less gear than usual.  It'd be nice to have an in editor menu that allowed you to say, give a machine gun a M136 scope and a PAQ2.  Maybe you want to represent an under-equipped unit and give your riflemen some iron sites instead of M68s.

More russian gear:  I admit I don't know what they have, but I'm sure they've got something comparable to the M68.  Don't know the availability of information regarding their gear, but I never looked, either.  

Trigger to change what side 3rd faction is on in game:  This would be nice.  Maybe you have a scenerio with guerillas are hostile to both sides but they see the US shooting the enemy, so they stop shooting US and just shoot whoever the US is shooting.  Another example would be an SF mission where the guerillas your helping decided to stab you in the back midway.

Drop ramp!: Guys just jump through big metal doors when disembarking an armored vehical. The inside is there already, just open the door then have them hop out. Sure no one's dumb enough to open the door infront of the enemy and let a machinegunner take out a squad before they can get out, but someones bound to be dumb enough. That and it's just one of those little details.

Radio man: I've wanted to impliment RTOs in many of my scenarios. Kill him and and enemy command won't know what happened, well for a bit. It's just another thing to toss in a scenario. Should you impliment artillery and mortars they could be required to be alive inorder to call.

I know some of this is advanced. Some of it has a direct affect on the game, some of it doesn't. Their just little quirks I'd like to see.

[Thunderbird 0]

Indeed, such additions might bring a lot to a game like ArmA, and I sincerely think that time comes for BIS to seriously focuse on polishing such aspects, not only almost all of the features you put are doable, but coming directly from BIS and not from the community would represent a little '+'.

Regards,

TB

[SaBrE_UK 0]

Some excellent ideas, but as you say it's only a few of those all-important details that will make or break the immersion of a game. To make a game such as this what we truly want it to be would take so much work. Still, as technology progresses more and more of these things will be implemented and hopefully in a few years we'll get a truly amazing combat simulator