I liked Sigma Quadrant 4 a lot. Difficulty was well balanced, and Lord Penney did a good job at leading us.
Clearly my recon-skills @2:10 leave something to be desired tho.
No worries - it's not like anyone else noticed that Ifrit just a few steps away until it was almost too late.
The next Arma 3 coop session:
Date: Sat, 24 March 2018
Time: 3-5pm UK time
As always, I'll be online a bit before 3pm to set up the server and check who's on Steam. I'll try to launch the server with a lobby mission 10 minutes before the session starts, and I'll post the IP and password on the Steam group, under the Events tab.
After the last session two weeks ago was a great success - two missions played, two missions won - this one was the opposite. Henke knew what he was doing when he said he couldn't join... which, come to think of it, is a tad suspicious. Hmm.
Downpour
A defend mission set on Tanoa, created by Lord Penney, our main Arma expert (and, sadly, not a TTLG member). We found ourselves stuck in a small town during a rainstorm as the enemy came at us from various directions. When our leader Sulphur phased through a roof and died, perhaps we should've known that we weren't getting out of this alive, but things then went surprisingly well - until the tank arrived. It took out me, the one guy with an AT launcher, and after that it was just a matter of time till we were all dead.
Escape Tanoa
The highly randomised Escape missions can be great fun - or they can be horrific meatgrinders. Today they were the latter, though we still had some fun... in particular during the run where the backpack which should've given us our starter weapons vanished the moment one of us touched it. Which meant we were tasked with escaping a POW camp without any chance of getting our hands on weapons. "Run, Forrest!" went through our heads, followed closely by a bunch of bullets. On a later run, most of us ended up dying in the jungle while Jesh and Malf got to the nearby coast. Perhaps Malf kinda, sorta (though not really, not entirely) spoiling the ending of Lost doomed the two of them, because just as they found a getaway boat they were ambushed by enemy troops that ended up killing them. Ah well. It was a good run.
We then tried to play a mission set in Takistan, but it booted three of the five players every time we launched it, so we ended on...
Operation Bolero
... which had me and Jesh as a team of snipers overlooking a town and CSAT outpost, which the others were tasked to infiltrate so they could take out the AA equipment. We didn't win this one either, but at least we had a fighting chance - though unfortunately we'd decided to take along an explosives guy but not anyone with AT weaponry, which turned out to be the wrong decision, as CSAT threw a couple of armoured vehicles our way. We all ended face down in the mud, thinking that war is hell - especially if you're caught with your pants down and no anti-tank weaponry to speak of.
Yesterday Jesh helped me test a 1-2 player helicopter training mission for Arma. It seems to work, so thanks to the magic of Steam Workshop I'm sharing it with anyone here who'd like to practice flying around with the Hummingbird transport helicopter. In the mission, you have to go and pick up six units (the sequence is randomised) and drop them off at the base. When you get close to them, they'll drop smoke and flares and start approaching the helicopter; be careful not to squish 'em!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfile...?id=1341443196 (you may have to be logged in to access it)
Talking of which, some of you have said you find flying helicopters in Arma difficult; for me, it helped a lot to tweak the controls. I use the following:
W - Cyclic forward
S - Cyclic backward
A/Mouse left - Cyclic left
D/Mouse right - Cyclic right
Q - Collective raise
Z - Collective lower (well, it's really Y in my case, due to a QWERTZ keyboard)
X - Left pedal
C - Right pedal
I use the mouse (sensitivity turned up almost to the top) for most of my steering, so WASD don't get much use other than when I need to do drastic manoeuvres.
Last edited by Thirith; 25th Mar 2018 at 06:00.
The next Arma 3 coop session:
As always, I'll be online a bit before 3pm to set up the server and check who's on Steam. I'll try to launch the server with a lobby mission 10 minutes before the session starts, and I'll post the IP and password on the Steam group, under the Events tab.Date: Sat, 7 April 2018
Time: 3-5pm UK time
In the meantime, have a happy Easter!
I'll probably have to duck out early or miss it entirely, not sure how it'll go yet, sorry
No worries. If you can join for a while, that's great, but if not, there'll always be next time. The AI will be waiting for us, guns at the ready. And that's just the friendlies.
Longer mission than expected: Guerrillas in the Mist, set on Altis. Today it was just a small group - henke, Malf, Jeshibu, Lord Penney and myself - and on our first attempt we were cut to shreds by a small, inconveniently placed squad... but we won in the end. Not that Arma would acknowledge it, but we cleared several outposts, took out the convoy, liberated the trucks and made it very clear to any and every enemy Ifrit that they're not the boss of us.
Thanks to everyone for a fun session and see you again in three weeks' time, on Saturday 28 April!
Two things:
1) The next Arma 3 coop session:
As always, I'll be online a bit before 3pm to set up the server and check who's on Steam. I'll try to launch the server with a lobby mission 10 minutes before the session starts, and I'll post the IP and password on the Steam group, under the Events tab.Date: Sat, 28 April 2018
Time: 3-5pm UK time
2) There's been a big update since last time we played, so make sure to update your Arma before the session!
Last edited by Thirith; 24th Apr 2018 at 08:12. Reason: What do you mean, "editing"?
Have you invented a time machine?
I have no idea whatsoever what you mean.Originally Posted by PigLick
*blink*
*blink*
Thanks to henke, Jeshibu, Malf, Sulphur and Lord Penney for a great session that covered the whole gamut of Arma drama: success, failure, piracy, nudity.
Dynamic Drug Raid
Not the mission with the most original title, but a great start to the session and a brilliant bit of planning (by LP) and execution, as we searched a Tanoan town for a container of drugs, destroyed it, rebuffed the attacks by the Syndikat and hotfooted it out of there. Tanoa's a fantastically atmospheric map and this mission, while generated randomly, offered some good pacing, with a tense beginning as we tried to sneak up to the town, us getting surprised by a technical, and then attacks ramping up as we entered the town proper, and finally us running across the bridge... to freedom. And stuff.
A Bit Dusty
We'd played this one before, but not to completion. Not that we managed this time, mind you: just as we'd finished the first objective, 2/3 of the team got cut down, and me and henke tried to make it to the next village and find the incriminating evidence. I guess a few dozen heavily armed Takistani insurgent count as incriminating evidence. Once they started firing, we didn't have much of a chance, but at least we went out in a blaze of death. And blood. And getting killed horribly.
Defend Alikampos
I'd tweaked this mission a bit since the last time, but the results were mixed, shall we say. It was pretty much like the Battle of Rorke's Drift, just with more automatic weapons. In the end, it was Malf on his own in a little stone hut, surrounded by swarming enemies - yet he held them off for what felt like a very long time... until he, too, went down. Malf, you were our hero tonight. Sniff.
Sweep and Clear
Finally, we thought we'd finish on a nice and simple mission clearing an island shrouded in fog of enemies. Once we'd done that (yarr!), we thought we'd turn on each other - but then it turned out that the mission had other plans for us, sending a chopper to pick us up and drop us off elsewhere to clear another camp. Sulphur had enough, bailing out of the chopper without a parachute, and Jesh and me followed... though for some reason Sulphur survived his fall, which we couldn't exactly claim for ourselves. Lord Penney mowed down Malf and henke and then set out to finish off Sulphur, shedding more and more of his clothes as he went on. After putting poor Sulphur out of his misery, Lord Penney walked into the sea, putting an end to himself. It was... beautiful.
And that was it for today. We'll be back with another Arma 3 session in three weeks:
Date: Sat, 19 May 2018
Time: 3-5pm UK time
Fun if weird session with Jeshibu, Malf and Sulphur - thanks for playing, guys!
First up, there was Strike Back, in which we we fed up with being mortared by the bad guys so we decided that attack was the best defense. Of course, due to being shelled I thought it was better to drive off with six of eight units - leaving the AT guy back at base. Which turned out to be something of a tactical error when we got to the enemy base (Jesh and me from one side, Sulphur and Malf from the other) and promptly came under fire from an APC. We held out surprisingly long, taking out a large part of the base's personnel, but in the end we all got shot to bits. The end.
Then, we played a Chernarus-based mission called Coming of Shadows that started, somewhat sillily (?!) with a quote from Babylon 5 - and we promptly got killed, mainly because we were a bunch of disgruntled farmers and hunters without nightvision who chose to attack a town occupied by Chedaki in the middle of the night. Oh, we also didn't have any radios and couldn't even reach Jesh, the sniper, first supporting us and then dying, alone, on a hill, like a slightly glitchy Hemingway character. The second time around, though, Malf suggested that we'd start by blowing up the APC in town as a distraction - and that distraction (and the fact that Malf hit the church two times with his rockets) ended up killing most of the enemy. In the end we finished the mission with a glorious job back to the extraction point. Well done, lads!
Next up: Ambush, where we (wait for it...) ambushed a convoy in Takistan. It's amazing how much punishment Arma units can take while in a minibus under heavy fire, because after we thought we'd killed everyone in the minibus and tried to blow it up for good with a rocket, a sole survivor popped out and tried to take us out. Still, all in all we got shot as much by ourselves as by the enemy but still finished up beating the mission, so I'd say that counts as success.
Finally: Operation Tick Bite, a mission set on Tanoa in the middle of the night - and in thick fog, so it felt a bit like Silent Hill with more automatic weapons. Even with nightvision goggles we barely saw more than ten metres in front of our faces, and yet again an APC proved to be our doom. It's almost as if they've got it in for us... Several RPG shots at that damned APC didn't help, mostly because the weird AT weapons we had meant that practically every single shot went high. Still, pretty atmospheric mission and one we might try again!
The next Arma session will probably take place on Saturday, 9 June. Confirmation to follow. Over and out!
Some footage of the middle two missions.
Ladies and gentlemen, now that’s some world class sniping.
Also, my sympathies for Sulphur having to be put down because he was stuck in a wall are somewhat limited, since he’d shot me in the back ten minutes earlier. As I was running up a hill to grenade the units shooting at us. I’m sure he had his reasons.
Well, I thought I'd heard Malf say someone had shot Thirith. Turns out he was saying 'not Thirith'. Whoops.
Everyone should already have seen my message on Steam, but if you haven't - or if you got the recent Humble ARMA Bundle and want to find out what all the fuss is about - here are the details for our upcoming game:
The next Arma 3 coop session:
Date: Sat, 9 June 2018
Time: 3-5pm UK time
As always, I'll be online a bit before 3pm to set up the server and check who's on Steam.
Fun session - with a surprising number of people joining! Henke, Jeshibu, demagogue, Malf, PigLick (a surprise late addition) and Al_B joined for an epic mission: Sigma Quadrant 5. I was a bit worried that the mission wouldn't work properly, since it didn't show us any mission objectives, but we had a couple of targets on the map - so we drove there and took 'em out, looking stylish as ever. Also, for the first time since playing Arma 3, I felt like I knew what I was doing with the Titan launcher, taking care of MRAPs along the way. This game does really nice explosions...
The next Arma session'll probably be in two weeks. I'll post an update here once it's confirmed. Till then, thanks to everyone who played today!
Last edited by Thirith; 9th Jun 2018 at 14:22.
Bit late arriving, but here's a bit from the end of play:
Lovin my shorts and sandals combo there.
So I've been pre-occupeid with certification exam prep...BUT..
Yeah. My laptop doesn't handle ARMA 3 at a framerate where I find it anywhere near present to play. I'm gonna have to wait on this one to get an upgrade.
As promised, here's the confirmation of the next session:
The next Arma 3 coop session:
Date: Sat, 23 June 2018
Time: 3-5pm UK time
As always, I'll be online a bit before 3pm to set up the server and check who's on Steam.
In spite of technical problems, which meant that we lost almost as many people to power outages and network troubles as we did to the enemy, we continued with the ongoing saga of Sigma Quadrant, in this case the sixth mission. Again, for some odd reason the mission tasks didn't show up, but that didn't stop us from shooting and exploding our way through the Altis hinterland to Molos. Many an MRAP was blown up and many a rabbit lost their lives to our driving. Thanks to Malf, Jeshibu, henke, Demagogue and Lord Penney for a fun session & see you again in two weeks!
And here it is in bolded writing:
I've adjusted the time, since we usually play for longer than two hours - but people can leave whenever they like. Depending on the mission and the number of available slots, it's often also possible to join late.The next Arma 3 coop session:
Date: Sat, 7 July 2018
Time: 3-6pm UK time
As always, I'll be online a bit before 3pm to set up the server and check who's on Steam.
So, today was a mostly *weird* session of Arma, complete with some of the worst driving ever.
We started with a randomly generated mission on Sahrani, which went reasonably well, although our glorious leader Malf got shot to bits and bled out as we were trying to destroy enemy artillery. We also lost Sulphur on the way, to a power outage (although some rumours say it may have been that he went crazy, killed some civilians, and then ran off into the woods screaming, "We're all going to die!").
We then moved on to a mission by our very own Lord Penney, A Bit Dusty, which first saw us find and destroy a weapons cache in a small Takistani town. A revived Malf expertly took out most of the opposition from his gunner position in the Jackal. After blowing up the cache, Jesh made the tactical mistake of not telling me that someone else would drive the Jackal to the next waypoint - because I managed to back it up into a wall, which took out the engine and wheels... and then the Jackal blew up, killing everyone on board.
At this point two more people bowed out, so we played one final mission, which had us steal a helicopter in Takistan. Jesh killed the units guarding the chopper and Malf flew it back to base... where he was blown up by one of our own guys. It is just about possible that the helo guards were on our side and that we were supposed to steal it without killing anyone... This was followed by Dema running his jeep into a tree, which flipped it (the jeep, not the tree) over on its roof. As a result, Dema's installation of Arma went batshit and wouldn't allow him to exit the car until he tried the eject button. O_o With Malf having fallen to friendly fire, the remaining three accompanied a friendly patrol down the road - we managed that at least, which was made easier by there not being any enemy units - and then we decommissioned some abandoned mortars. Not that the game let us have that last triumph, though; it simply didn't recognise that we'd done what Arma had asked us to do - so we went out in a blaze of fire, fragging ourselves (just as Dema said, "No, let's go and shoot some people fi-").
All in all, glorious times. Thanks to henke, Malf, Jeshibu, Demagoggles, Sulphur and Lord Penney for joining us, and my apologies for the downright lethal driving!
Next Arma session: probably 28 July (to be confirmed).
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