TeckHybrid

1.) You've got the ability to build the Mobile Respawn Point, which is a Medical Hemmt. Very useful for those towns within 1km of a base or so to roll in with. 2.) After you disconnect and reconnect, those AI are no longer part of a squad and therefore can't be commanded. As a habit, we disband our groups before logging via the squad management system. On occasion, the server owner (me) flys/redeploys to our different FOBs and pops a cap in the leftover AI to "clean up." I do this on nights when we're not playing as a unit so as to limit the non-milsim nature of murdering our own people in cold blood.

The good news is that a UAV can trigger a zone. What our group will do fairly often is fly a drone over an area and have it loiter. This keeps the area active, even if all the friendly units go down. It also give us the ability to laze targets for CAS, or do an occasional mortar strike. I personally wouldn't want towns to manually trigger, as this would stop some situations where we've planned poorly and instigated multiple towns at once. Those end up being some of the best fights we've had.

Hey zbug! Your mission inspired me to come up with an idea of my own for a Secondary Objective. I've never done any ARMA scripting before, but I'm finding your code easy enough to follow and I've made some great progress in the course of the evening. Here's what I'm thinking for the new secondary mission: Underwater Intel CSAT divers are spotted near one of the wrecks off the coast of Altis. They're searching for lost intel of some kind among the wreckage. Mission is to go obtain the intel. I've placed a bunch of markers on the underwater wrecks around Altis. On mission start, I pick a random one. My intention is to then spawn some sort of object that BLUFOR will have to interact with to cause the mission to complete. I'll also be spawning in an enemy dive team to patrol the area and a couple of attack boats directly above the point. My thinking is that should push BLUFOR to deploy a bit away from them, either out the back of a helicopter near the water, dive off a boat, or go in via submersible and stay beneath the boats. As far as development, I'm at the point where I'm able to select the random wreck, display the intel notification, and put the marker on the map at the correct position. Currently, it just sleeps for 20 seconds, then completes the mission, cleans up the map, and adds one to the secondary objective tally. Over the next couple days, I'll figure out how to spawn the enemies and such. I'm having a great time learning the mess that is SQF. My intention is to make this a pull request and if you'd like to incorporate it in the mission, I think that'd be awesome. Looking forward to your thoughts! Update (1/22): Got a bit further with it tonight. Now I'm able to spawn an "Intel Crate" at the dive point. The crate has a "Retrieve Intel" action that correctly completes the mission. I'm also spawning two, crewed attack boats and one of the smaller transports. On top of that, there's a diver team spawned there to guard the intel. Still need to figure out how to do waypoints to get them to patrol a bit and maybe add a second dive team as well. With a couple images, a bit of code cleanup, and some testing with the guys I play with this weekend, it's just about done! Anyone have thoughts on what you'd expect this side mission to cost in Intel? What it should do to the Alertness level? And zbug, what font did you use for your secondary mission images? I'd like to replicate it as best as possible. Thanks!

I'll throw a +1 on this. Noticed it last night when we played. Enemy units popped in out of nowhere, within 100m of our squads and mowed a lot of us down. It would seem CSAT has moved on from earthquake machines and straight into teleportation technologies. :P :D Happened while taking a Radio Tower objective.

Ah, so that's what the new behavior is? We didn't see it on our last game. I was actually considering adding ACE to our game, specifically for the cable ties. zbug, any idea if the cable ties would keep them restrained still? We were thinking about building a small prison in our FOB to bring the prisoners to, instead of them just sitting around the vicinity. Even if they despawned by the next time we all logged on to play, it'd be a bit of fun.

Your new update hit just in time for our group to try it out this week. Awesome! We had two new experiences that were a ton of fun. For the first time, the enemy assaulted one of our FOBs. We weren't expecting it at all. Had just finished clearing a town when the alert popped. Everyone just got on their mics at once with "Uh...what?" Followed by "Shit. MOVE MOVE MOVE!" and a run back to the chopper. Got back and was able to clear the FOB. Then we spent some time better fortifying it and mining a key intersection between us and the enemy. Nice change of pace to the gameplay. Secondly, we tried the Convoy Hijack. It was another frantic moment as we tried our best to guess which road the convoy would take. It was a path that was certain to be full in enemy territory, and we had no FOB anywhere close. Loaded up into the heli, figure it out on the fly, landed and deployed. The first vehicle we destroyed was the one carrying the ammo. It seems like that was all it took to "finish the objective" even with troops and other vehicles around. Not sure if that's intended, but we still had to clear the area anyways. Anyways, thanks for the big updates zbug. We love the side objectives to spice things up between capping towns and bases, really looking forward to whichever ones you cook up next.

For our group, I don't like the idea of personally owned resources. If it were a mission parameter, then by all means! It seems like it makes sense on a public server with a lot of people on it. For us though, we play with about 5 people and the discussions we have over "should we buy this, or buy that" is a big part of the game for us right now. I worry that a personally owned resource system would start to make it feel more PMC rather than standard military as well.

You gave us this advice about a month ago and I just wanted to say it's spot on! We've had much better experiences since. Anytime we go out, we now take a Heavy AT Squad with us, post them up high via the Commander, and let them rain hell down on enemy armor. We've also had some luck with mining intersections once we're in the town, in the event the armor gets passed the squad and rolls in. Switching the FOB hunt to something we get to trigger via the menu, rather than just getting a POW back to the FOB is also a huge improvement. Now we have a way to manage that awareness percentage when we want to, which helps fit our schedule. Really, really looking forward to the additional objectives. Thanks for all your hard work on this zbug. You've created the mission type that best fits what me and my friends have been looking for. It's resulted in some incredibly memorable gaming. Best of luck with Liberation through the New Year!

zbug, your Liberation mission is incredible. It's exactly the kind of game I was looking for that would bring my non-ARMA-loving friends into the fold. At this point, we've played on Sundays weekly for the last month and a half, with just the 4 or 5 of us. What we're running into now is how to deal with the vehicles that roll into a town we're clearing. We'll generally be able to take down the one or two vehicles that spawned in at the start, but just as we're about to take the town, the cavalry will roll in. By that point we'll be out of AT, and then promptly mowed down. Got any tips or pointers? It's starting to become a frustration with my less enthused ARMA friends and they could use some victories. Don't wan't to lose them! =) Looking forward to the Intel and sub-objective stuff! Best of luck with your development, Teck