Saturday, October 6, 2018

Arma 3 - US Marines Company Attack

A quick scenario featuring a US Marines company, devoid of support weapons and indirect fire support.



I tried a live stream last week on this very scenario and it was a disaster, it showed the wrong title, the quality was ugly ... Sorry about that.

So in the following video you will see the action. Don't expect anything cinematic. Like in any real life operation, the pace is slow and the enemy is barely visible.


I am currently reading The Marine Corps Way of War: The Evolution of the U.S. Marine Corps from Attrition to Maneuver Warfare in the Post-Vietnam Era, by Anthony Piscitelli and right off the bat the book mentions the importance of fires and maneuver in in pursuing the ultimate goal, the decisive assault.

Well, that's something I will have to practice because I pretty much shoveled aside the ENY with attacks by fire. The C2 mod helped me a lot to position my troops and maximize the fire volume. But pretty much everything was dealt from the distance without assaulting. Except for the final objective. That's where I had to split my fire teams.

Other thing I wanted to try out is the M27, the replacement for the SAW. Maybe in Arma 3 I just can't see the benefits of this weapon, but I was left underwhelmed.

Cheers,















3 comments:

NW said...

In A3, I find the AI to be equally useful suppressing with aimed rifle fire or MG fire: the effects are the same, they seem to take as much time to line up shots with a GPMG as they do with a SMG, and they'll generally hit near the target and then walk it into the target. I haven't found them to be very good at generating suppression, is what I'm saying; they are good at destroying.

So the M27 I find to be "another rifle" and then my fireteams don't lose cohesion in the same way they do when an overburdened M249 gunner is trying to keep up with fleet-of-foot riflemen.

Where it lacks, in-game, is that when presented with more than three targets the gunner will have to reload since it seems to take them ~10rnds to reliably kill someone downrange. Here the belt feds are better, but not necessarily better than two riflemen. But that's what the rest of the team is for - and if they're so spread, and return fire starts coming in, the gunner's probably going to be neutralised anyway.

I like having belt-feds with me and the AI have been getting consistently better (been coded better) at reacting to suppression and moving under fire throughout the series' development, but they haven't markedly improved in handling weapons meant to generate that kind of effect.

Interestingly, the Russians are trying to move towards GPMGs replacing the RPKs while we are moving away; but I note that they are using GPMGs, not intermediate calibre SAWs, and that we were only launching patrols in "multiple" strength with attached GPMGs for many years in the 'ghan, so it's much the same really. One of the rationalisations for the M27 was that the larger belt wasn't actually helpful enough to offset its weight penalty or lack of ergonomics compared to a rifle/carbine, particularly in FIBUA. The British experience (with MINIMI Para, mind you) was that the SAW made a superlative "room broom" in FIBUA. I do wonder what these two forces were doing differently when policing (alright, COIN'ing) the same areas.

badanov said...

Pushing around Chernarus/Soviet kit, using motorized rifle units, I find support weapons such as the BTR to be integral to any attack or defense.

As far as I know the Russians regard armor/heavy vehicles as just another big gun to bring to the fight. With the 30,000 armor vehicles of various forms used in the most recent test maneuvers in central Russia, they don't appear to be changing from that.

Anonymous said...

C2 is such a great little mod. I remember the earlier versions of it and man it has come a long way. Wish it integrated a bit better with commanding vehicles though.