The Fighting TTLGers present: Arma 3 (a TTLG Coop Saturdays spin-off) - by Thirith
Thirith on 6/4/2024 at 16:28
Cheers to henke and demagogue for an almost entirely successful session. We started with an assassination mission where our target got into a car and raced away just as we passed, even though we were in undercover mode - but then henke took us past our target and I nailed him from the back of a pickup truck. Yeehaw! On the way back to base, an enemy truck equipped with an AT launcher spotted us and shot at us, but they were no match for henke's driving... and then we went back and took out the roadblock and stole the AT truck, to be used for another session.
This is where we got cocky and decided to take on one of the enemy bases at a radio tower. We'd upgraded our AI troops twice and headed for the tower. Dema took the back route to flank the enemy, and we approached from the front. The AI upgrades made a big difference: last time we took a dozen AI to assault a resources depot, and our AI was killed almost immediately, but this time they stayed alive for longer and picked off more of the enemy units, so slowly but surely we made our way to the top of the hill. It wasn't easy, and most of the AI still died - but we captured the radio tower, added to which there were lots of goodies up there to loot, including a Wildcat helicopter. I flew that one back to our base, while henke and dema loaded up a truck with everything we'd looted from the enemy.
... and that's when the enemy decided to take back the radio tower. They'd already sent some gunships after us, but those were more of a nuisance than anything else. But as henke and dema were looting bodies, an enemy MRAP blasted them into bits. To add insult to injury, we weren't able to add the chopper to our garage, because apparently you need an airport to do this... so henke proposed that we'd get into the helicopter and scare the guys who'd taken back the radio tower. We did, but they shot down the chopper, so we went down in flames... but dema didn't die in the crash, and he got us up again. Luckly, there were only one or two enemies at the newly retaken radio tower, and they didn't see us, so we were able to get back to the loot truck, hop in and drive it back to base, which meant a nice bit of additional gear for our next outing. Who knows? We might just take back that radio tower!
Thirith on 12/4/2024 at 12:57
It looks like we'll be returning to Altis tomorrow in a week.
Quote:
Antistasi sessionDate: Sat, 20 April
Starting time: 3pm UK time
What's Antistasi?It's a persistent whole-map mission for
Arma 3 in which we play a local resistance on a map where the local military is fighting an invading army, and we take on both of them. Doing small sorties and missions, we slowly gather resources to take on bigger and bigger targets and converting the island to our cause, town by town. Or we get shot to bits trying to race past a checkpoint in a battered old pickup truck. We'll see.
What will you need to join?* An updated installation of
Arma 3 (possibly including the
APEX DLC, depending on which map we want to play on)
* An up-to-date TeamSpeak 3 client
* The mods in (
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3148668505) this collection, all fully updated
* Here's (
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2154094306) a list of
optional mods tweaking your
Arma 3 visuals and sound
On the days of the Antistasi sessions, I'll get the server for
Arma 3 and TS3 started beforehand and will send everyone who'd like to join the IP and password at the beginning of the session. Looking forward to seeing a bunch of you ready and willing to liberate Altis!
Thirith on 20/4/2024 at 21:54
Another fun Antistasi session, even though it was just henke, demagogue and myself. We decided early on that we'd try to hijack an ammo truck, and the game put that truck on the same hill as the one we liberated, and then lost, last session. Dema was a bit late in arriving, so henke and I took a bunch of friendly AI to the hill, henke climbed it from the west and started engaging the enemy from that flank, after which I attacked from the south together with the AI. During the battle, henke fell just before I managed to get to him, but when he respawned at base he met up with dema. In the meantime, I was trying not to die, and I managed to hold out till they got there. We lost all the AI units, but we got out of there with the ammo truck and a troop truck, which we took back to base - and then we headed back to the hill in order to take it for real. The enemy threw several MRAPs at us, but we took two of them out and outsmarted the third, finally taking the hill and the radio tower. Before finishing off, we garrisoned a bunch of units to keep the hill.
Now that we have got the hang of it, at least somewhat, I'm enjoying Antistasi a lot. We used to play separate missions of Arma 3, and that was (often) good fun - but here it is starting to feel like a longer fight, with individual battles that influence what comes next. There's an enjoyment in scavenging for new gear and unlocking better weapons (when you put enough of a certain thing in the arsenal at your main base, say 15 rifles or launchers or scopes of this or that type, you then have an unlimited amount of that thing, and any AI units you buy will get the better equipment too). Once we've unlocked a bunch of things, we'll get started on taking more enemy posts and turning more cities - and before you know it, we'll have retaken Altis. In two or three years. :joke:
Thirith on 21/4/2024 at 12:58
Since the second half of May is pretty busy, we'll be doing two sessions on two consecutive Saturdays.
Quote:
Upcoming Antistasi sessionsDate: Sat, 4 May
Starting time: 3pm UK time
Date: Sat, 11 May
Starting time: 3pm UK time
What's Antistasi?It's a persistent whole-map mission for
Arma 3 in which we play a local resistance on a map where the local military is fighting an invading army, and we take on both of them. Doing small sorties and missions, we slowly gather resources to take on bigger and bigger targets and converting the island to our cause, town by town. Or we get shot to bits trying to race past a checkpoint in a battered old pickup truck. We'll see.
What will you need to join?* An updated installation of
Arma 3 (possibly including the
APEX DLC, depending on which map we want to play on)
* An up-to-date TeamSpeak 3 client
* The mods in (
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3148668505) this collection, all fully updated
* Here's (
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2154094306) a list of
optional mods tweaking your
Arma 3 visuals and sound
On the days of the Antistasi sessions, I'll get the server for
Arma 3 and TS3 started beforehand and will send everyone who'd like to join the IP and password at the beginning of the session. Looking forward to seeing a bunch of you ready and willing to liberate Altis!
Thirith on 4/5/2024 at 16:52
Tonight's session was successful in some ways and a fiasco in others. We started off by taking a factory not too far from the radio tower we'd liberated in the previous session - and apart from Arma's physics killing me when I tried to assemble a static AT launcher, it worked fantastically, with Jesh looking down on the factory and taking out bad guys with his sniper rifle. We then took another factory, though that one was more difficult - also because of some badly judged fast-travelling that left us without our AI for a while. Still, we did eventually take that rifle... and I think that this is where we may have got too cocky for our own good. We decided to do an attack on a nearby radio tower/enemy base, but there was desperately little cover, so we got shot to bits. And while we'd got some nice loot in the first half of the session, we ended up losing some of the gear we'd brought along to the second session. Note for next Saturday: let's be a bit more humble, liberate some more hardware from the enemy, and build up our strength, so that next time we have enough of the good gear to do some real damage.
Thirith on 11/5/2024 at 16:29
... phew. Today was gruelling but finally successful - though we did sacrifice two entire AI squads in the process. We asked the game to give us a mission to retrieve (or destroy) an ammo truck, and it placed it right in front of a difficult-to-take base. We started successfully enough, with henke sniping the enemy units manning the MGs in the tower, and by then the AI squads were attacking the base - but there were so. Many. Enemy. Soldiers in that base, and they all went for us. We took out a lot of them, but there were just too many, and henke, Jesh and Dema died. I went down repeatedly, but I'd taken along about nine first aid packs and was able to get myself up again until reinforcements arrived. Still, we went through several rounds of attacking, killing a bunch, then getting killed ourselves, but we were whittling them down.
In the middle of all this, Al_B joined for his first taste of Arma in years... and it must not have tasted very nice. He spawned alone at base, unable to fast travel because we were engaged in a firefight. I think he managed to join henke and Jesh at some point, but I'm not sure he got much of the battle before he died. Antistasi definitely has a bit of a learning curve... Here's hoping that next time Al_B joins, we'll be able to give him a proper introduction. ;)
Anyway: in the end, we did kill them all - well, Dema, henke and Jesh did, attacking from two sides, while I went to salvage the loot from all the killed enemies... and almost getting killed myself by a bunch of cops (not even actual soldiers!) that had circled around me and were trying to take me out. But we managed, we got the base, and while the actual 'get the ammo truck' mission timed out on us, the truck was still standing there when we got the base - so we didn't officially succeed with the mission, but we got all the goodies we wanted, plus a snazzy new base, AND a town that changed sides because of how cool we are. We rule.
Next game will only be in June, because I can't make the next three Saturdays, but we've already got plans to relocate our HQ to the new base. Towers with static MGs are just a bit more cosy than the old, run-down factory where we're currently shacked up.