Bahger

Thanks, guys. Onwards!

Gents, I've just started to learn the Editor and have a good idea for a mission but am hung up on the simplest frickin' thing: I cannot move my squad after placing them initially. I left-click and drag the green box around them, they all turn dark green but when I attempt to select a squad member, left-click and drag him and his buddies to the desired location, all that happens is to detatch the individual from his chain of command. This is embarrassing. I have a lot of scenario design experience in other military sims so I'm sorry to be asking such a basic question but I'm scratching my head here, can you help?

Hey guys, I'm determined to learn the Editor and want to read something definitive, I'm a quick study. The OFPEC mission editing tutorial is good but it's HTML only and not configured for printing. Can anyone help? The bigger the article(s) the better as far as I'm concerned, I wonder if there is a "bible" out there...

Appreciate the assist, thank you!

Excellent, very replayable scenario, rated it "Very Good" on Armaholic. I've only played it in SP so far and cannot figure out why my M136 will not work against either T-72s or the BMP. Do I need to take something else for AT?

Bardosy, yes, Patch 1.05 is literally a "game changer". The AI seems much more capable of survival, you don't have to babysit them as much. They get wounded with various degrees of severity -- as does the player - rather than constantly killed outright, and this is much more realistic in a Marines vs militia confrontation with the US forces in full body armor. The medic healing system is now not hopelessly broken, which means that you can restore your squad to full strength after a vicious firefight if necessary...and if your medic has survived. All this amounts to much more fluent, satisfying gameplay, especially in missions or campaigns like yours that do not permit (nor should they, IMO) constant saving. @jasonnoguchi, I have done a search for GL4 and found the download. Is it modular, i.e. can it be installed in such a way that it can be "switched off" returning the sim to its "vanilla" state?

Hey Bardosy, I'm very glad you checked in here. I have to tell you, your campaign is just fantastic, by far the best experience I have had of any ArmA game I've played. I like the fact that a well-populated, tactically authentic mission forces me not to play ArmA 2 like a shooter but to maintain situational awareness and synchronise my squad's movements with those of the supporting units. As in real life, mission success and low casualties in the unit you command are much more important, and satisfying to accomplish, than personal kills, yet very few ArmA2 SP missions are sophisticated enough in their design and execution to promote this kind of simulation (vs shooter) gameplay. IED discussion: One of the many things that I just love about this campaign of yours is the women at the beginning of Force Recon who seem to be flirting with the Marine and who wave at the motorcyclist who rides by. Details like this, and the integration of civilians, wildlife, aircraft, vehicles and MEU assets is ArmA 2 mission design at its very best, kudos! I am also a huge fan of a mission designer disabling player-saves in favor of well-placed autosaves in a soundly-designed mission. The experience of playing this campaign would be much inferior with a player-save option because you can trial-and-error your way through a mission that way rather than be forced to approach the missions as if your life, and those of your Marines, is at stake. If ever you design another campaign, I will get you all the American voices you need and will script the dialogue for you in accurate U.S. military language. I did a lot of this when designing scenarios for "Steel Beasts". You are pretty active in CMSF too, huh? I have posted a link to "Chesty Puller" over at the SimHQ ArmA forum, where some rather serious grogs have played it and are digging it, including Magnum, the admin who runs all the ArmA 2 coop activity there. I told him that CP was not playable in coop; maybe he can find someone to convert it, if that's possible. Thanks again for making ArmA 2 SP interesting for me again. I cannot stand the stock SP missions, I loathe the dopey official campaign and don't play "4 SpecOps against the world" scenarios. Tactical, authentically military missions requiring fire and maneuver, with a well-populated battlefield and realistic support are "it" for me in this sim but such scenarios are not easy to find. I might learn the Editor and do some myself but it will be a year or two before I get to your level.

Hey gents, I'd be interested to know if any of you have played this user-made (SP only) campaign for ArmA 2, "Chesty Puller" . I'm a couple of missions in and am very impressed indeed with the mission design, the mastery of ArmA scenario editing and the military authenticity. The dialogue is written in subtitles rather than spoken and suffers greatly from the fact that the designer, Bardosy, does not speak English as a first language, but for me the well-populated battlefield and high-fidelity simulation of Marine MEU ops is worth the price of admission alone. I was wondering if anyone could recommend other user-made missions or campaigns for either SP or coop, that, like "Chesty Puller" meet the following criteria: - tactics rather than cinematics - not "four SpecOps against the world" scenarios - emphasis on infantry, not air or armor except as support - authentic small-unit OOBs, i.e. Marine MEUs or Army platoon-scale - good implementation of force multipliers and indirect support, either arty or air - military, territorial rather than over-scripted mission objectives, no need for extraneous "character" or "narrative" issues. Any ideas? Thanks!

Keep us posted, Jason. "Chesty Puller", in my opinion, sets the standard that all SP scenario designers in ArmA should follow, it shows such deep understanding of the A2 Editor and it's authentically military. The mangled English subtitled briefings are its only weakness.

Jason: I have a lot of admiration for this mini-campaign, it's real graduate-level ArmA mission design and so much better than any official mission or campaign that I've ever played.

Many thanks, I may well try the Seal Team series but I must confess I am very leery of all the add-ons. Not because they are not great but because they can really complicate your life.

Thanks! I'll go looking for links, unless you have some handy. Edit: NP, I found all the info.

I'm loving this campaign. I go for military authenticity over cinematics and tactical gameplay over Rambo. One thing that struck me as odd in the Force Recon mission:

This is not a whine or a troll as the game justifies itself for me with the Editor and MP but, really, how do you put up with the Campaign? Excessive scripting, constant dodgy triggers, bad voice acting, lots of travelling and no real tactics?

So last night I tried the "Welcome to the War" mission. It's BI scenario design at its silliest. It's just so fussy, so jury-rigged. You get an array of objectives but you are not in command and the squad does not follow you anywhere and somehow melts away, no matter which objective you have chosen from the "Tasks" menu. Thus you find yourself Rambo-ing your way through the objectives, which the player chooses but, in the process, cannot command a squad to help him assault. The triggers are broken. A looping reminder that you can buy arms -- where does this belong in a proper military sim?? -- never stops playing throughout the mission. Ditto idiotic reminders of money earned by salvaging things, seemingly disconnected from any action taken by the player. Everywhere, the AI is either failing or succeeeding in taking objectives, independent of the player. Radio messages are out of synch with triggers. Finally, all objectives are taken yet the player gets multiple failure messages. It's quite insane. It's as though BI hired PhDs to design the Editor and kindergardeners to make make missions with it (with 5th-graders marketing the product). Can they not see the massive disconnect between the capabilities of their own Editor and the shoddy, non-military, non-tactical output that issues from it in their own name? All they have to do is understand that, in any sim with this kind of scenario design capability, not only are excessive contrivances and cinematics unneccessary, they also undermine the product's credibility with the most devoted military gamers? It would be like if I used the "Steel Beasts" scenario editor to recreate "Die Hard". With a voice track badly translated from a Russian script into pseudo-American English. What a mess!

It's a schizophrenic game. On the one hand there is an Editor which, with the improvements in friendly AI, can now reproduce modern battlefield conditions at squad/platoon level with appropriate fire/air support. On the other, BI seems terrified of being in the "sim" as opposed to "game" category so they use their powerful Editor to produce a Campaign that is all cinematics and no tactics, with excessive, inept voice-acting, bad cut-scenes and unreliable triggers designed not to present the player with tactical challenges but to initiate cinematics. I'm going to learn the Editor, well enough, I hope, to be able to produce high-fidelity, platoon-level scenarios designed to reproduce infantry-level combat (with support). If I do Special Forces recon-style missions I will try very hard for realism and not do cinematic hijinks. Basically, what I learned doing a lot of mission design in "Steel Beasts" is that the best and most replayable missions in any good tac-sim are those which put the player in the position of a Lieutenant/Captain with a mission to accomplish and a balance to maintain betwen that mission and the preservation of the force that he commands. Cadmium, did I see Editor Tutorials mentioned in your sig? If this is for ArmA, I'd love to take a look but I don't see a link.

The problem is not that the game is incapable of good single player; ArmA 1 was, because of brain-dead buddy AI but in ArmA 2 the AI has a much improved capacity for tactical use of cover and self defense. The problem is BI's concept of SP and its misplaced belief that it has to be cinematic rather than tactical. The execution is awkward, clunky and dull and, oddest of all, does not reflect the genuine capability of the Editor. The few standalone SP missions that shipped with the game provide some insight into what the SP campaign might have been if BI were not so determined to dumb it down. Good SP in ArmA 2 is possible but only with user-made missions. In this respect, BI is its own worst enemy.

I played the village sweep mission today, my first in ArmA 2. Good tactics/fighting but having cleared the village (including calling in an airstrike on a BMP) there was no conclusion to the mission, no indication of whether I had won or what to do next, I was just marching about with my squad looking for a victory trigger. This is a pain. It's something that always bugged me in OFP and ArmA 1. I cleared the village and preserved my squad; how/why did I fail to trigger the victory? it was so inconclusive and in the mission menu the square beside the mission title is unfilled, which indicates an incomplete mission. This took me an hour (including save/restarts); grrr. Help, please?

Very useful info, many thanks. I will now replay the mission in an attempt to get to grips with High Command.

This happened to me the last time I ordered a boxed game that Steam was distributing electronically; it never shipped on its promised release date. As Steam gets better and becomes the standard for digital distribution of games, simultaneous physical publishing deals appear to be becoming more and more marginal. I bet they just cut their losses and refuse to press the DVDs unless demand reaches a certain level.

Sorry for the very basic question but I can't find the MOUT training scenario that I believe is included in the full game's training module. I see where the MOUT training area is in the Boot Camp map but MOUT is not an option when the soldier asks me which training option I would like to select. There is probably a very simple answer to this; help appreciated.

Thanks!

I think you're right. It's frustrating and a bug they should have caught. Last night I swept the village successfully but by 8:30 (the end of the briefed "Take and Hold" time) no sign of a victory notification. I had asked for reinforcements after losing one man but why would I want to break cover and run back across the open to rendezvous with the reinforcements when I'd probably get shot?? Shouldn't they come to me? So I stayed put and the reinforcements appeard to disperse and do their thing. The mission only ended after the village sweep when I went to where the reinforcements had landed and triggered the victory that way. Goofy but typical ArmA sp.

If I want to task an AI squadmate to take out an armored vehicle, how can I tell which one has a Javelin, or other suitable weapon?

It's not the same mission as the demo, or even a different version of it. It's a four-man village sweep (with NPC support). I will try it again today. I think that saving games often erases necessary triggers in ArmA, a problem that reared its ugly head for me in ArmA 1 and OFP. I'm hoping this is an aberration, as it would be a shame if the the much-improved gameplay were to be sabotaged by broken event triggers.