Monday, May 23, 2016

Arma 3 - The SAMO Squad Action Menu Orders Offers an Interface to Command Suppressive Fire on the Enemy

I think that Arma 3's own menu to lay suppressive fire is somewhere (dev. branch?) but it is not showing up in my plain vanilla regular branch game.

That bright sun is where my hombres will shoot their suppressive rounds.
So, I tried the SAMO (Squad Action Menu Orders) mod and it works like a charm. Please note that this entry displays screenshots from an already modded game.




In this scenario, my US Infantry Squad is challenged by a Russian T-90 tank blocking a route of advance. In this screenshot, my AT specialists has just taken care of the threat with a Javelin missile.

The explosion of the T-90 tank has convinced other Russian infantry to move forward (?). Despite their odd, coverless choice of a position, they started shooting at us.


I order my men to suppress them. The SAMO mod is brought up by the [Del] key. Note the "suppress" order and how the orange sphere (movable with the mouse) points to where my men will shoot.

After taking care of the Russian infantry in the open, I moved my men towards a village. There we stumbled onto a double machine gun position. In this screenshot, I am trying to find out the exact location in order to suppress it.


Suppress that position!


The suppressive fire itself ended up killing the remainder machine gunner and its support men.

They say that the job of the squad leader is to make sure that the fires of the squad are distributed properly. I find it a very difficult task to do so and to keep my head in one piece at the same time.

So, a big thank you to the A.I.M. Team for this mod.

Available at:

http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=27359



Cheers,




















3 comments:

Johan said...

Thanks for the tip, JC, this mod looks very useful. I hope the vanilla game will get an updated and expanded suppression system. The existing one is very basic.

Speaking of suppression, I was very surprised at learning what is actually required for successful suppression from this article:
Dropbox link to the PDF

It turns out that accuracy is much more important than rate of fire. 3-5 rounds within as many seconds is enough to suppress, provided that it is accurate fire, within 1 meter of the target. After that, one round every 3 seconds is enough to maintain the suppression. More information about this study can be found in the article, for those that are interrested.

Unfortunately, I have no link to it online, so I put up the PDF in the Dropbox link above.

JC said...

Hi Johan,

Guess what? Patch 1.6 brings suppression to plain vanilla Arma 3. :) Just released a couple of days back.

That article is excellent. Would you be so kind to send me a copy to realandsimulatedwars at gmail dot com ? So I can archive it.

Thanks,

Julio

Johan said...

That sounds great, I have not yet had time to check out the latest update. I have sent you the article.