We played Mike Force all day - feedback - S.O.G.Prairie Fire

We played Mike Force all day - feedback

Dave

Today I put Mike Force (v0.65.03) on our dedicated server for my group. It's been running for about 12 hours in total with 2-12 players at various points.

Server spec: i7-4771; 32gb DDR3 @ 2400mhz; everything on an SSD; Windows 10 professional; one headless client running on the same machine
Mods: CBA; TFAR Beta; Clientside mods (mostly enhanced movement, enhanced soundscape, Shacktac/DUI) in some cases

I will keep this part concise because listing all the ways in which this mission is brilliant is only so much help: Playing Mike Force today was some of the most fun I've had gaming, and I've been playing this franchise since Operation Flashpoint came out. The mission, the map, and the atmosphere all combined really are something special.

That said, we did find a few snags along the way, and I shall mention those rather than listing off the very many positives in the hope that it's more useful...

Probably/definitely a bug:
1. At around 7-8 hours in, we noticed that a few AI (definitely not all) seemed to be invincible as they weren't going down despite being shot repeatedly. I then used admin cheats to run allowDamage false on myself and got up super close to a couple and verified that yes, some of them were invincible. As a result of the above we decided to restart the server, which did fix the invincible AI.

After restarting, everyone who had advanced in rank was reset back to Private, and all medals were lost.
Additionally after restarting, a target zone in which we had destroyed ₈₀% of AA and artillery seemed to be reset back to starting strength with new AA and artillery positions.
5.56 mags for the M16/XM177 didn't appear in the arsenal, at least not as Pvt/Cpl/Sgt ranks. We had to remove the weapon, add the weapon, take the mag out, and put the mag into clothes/vest/bag in order to then add more mags into our inventories.
Some vehicles spawned partially sunk into the ground, particularly the tanks at the ACAV base. Some but not all fixed themselves when unlocked.
One player did not receive any promotions or medals. Even when his debug tab confirmed 20+ kills, he did not receive the CIB medal that only requires one kill.
When you respawn, any role assignment (medic/engineer/explosives/RTO) is lost.
Sometimes, but not every time, team assignment (Airborne / ACAV / Green Hornets) was also reset to null on respawning.

Might be a bug, or maybe we just didn't understand it:

We attacked and cleared an enemy zone that was not marked as an active objective. A couple of times along the way we did however get "defend the zone" missions on it, however no matter what we did, we were unable to turn it green on the map. Cheaty admin spectate mode confirmed that no enemies were in the zone or attacking the zone or anywhere remotely near the zone.
Counter-attacks in general seemed to be somewhere between very weak or not existing at all. So far this has been overwhelmingly an offensive mission with little or no defensive component.
We didn't see a single Viet Cong vehicle. Not even a car or bike.
Some of us got diarrhoea/poisoning without any apparent warning, and with no way to fix it that we could find.
Our TFAR default channels did not work; additionally dying reset our long range channel to the randomly selected mission default, though our short range channels were unchanged.

Other thoughts for improvement:
14. It's really unclear what the benefits are for various buildings, or even how they get built. We only found out that a checkpoint is also a spawn point because one of the guys had seen it on Youtube; there was nothing else to tell us that.

Also there was nothing to tell us how to properly construct buildings (sandbags/supplies and shovel usage). We eventually figured it out, mostly, through trial and error.
The Medal of Honor is awarded for "entered an active zone". Seems like quite a low bar for it.
Without side objectives or a bit more variety, the general premise of destroy AA/artillery/HQ positions then hold could get a little repetitive for longer term play. Though my perspective is skewed because we didn't really see the defensive side of the mission.
The amount of food and water that you need relative to the amount that can be carried means that food/water resupply isn't really a consideration, especially as your hunger/thirst levels reset on death.
It seemed odd that the only default faction-appropriate backpack was the RTO version, and that the only vests were the vehicle crew variants.
It took us several hours before we figured out why each of the medic/engineer/explosives/RTO roles were useful. Engineer we found quickly enough, but RTO and explosives took much longer before we discovered the benefits.

Happy to elaborate or try to reproduce if any of those aren't clear or useful enough.

Cheers,
Dave

spoffy

Hi Dave! Thanks for taking the time to post all this great feedback!

Dave wrote:
1. At around 7-8 hours in, we noticed that a few AI (definitely not all) seemed to be invincible as they weren't going down despite being shot repeatedly. I then used admin cheats to run allowDamage false on myself and got up super close to a couple and verified that yes, some of them were invincible. As a result of the above we decided to restart the server, which did fix the invincible AI.

I've heard a few reports of this - I'm not sure if it's Mike Force specific, or something inherent to Arma. I'd love to see this happen so I can replicate it though! Could you tell me if they were just stood still, or if they were acting normally?

Dave wrote:
After restarting, everyone who had advanced in rank was reset back to Private, and all medals were lost.

Additionally after restarting, a target zone in which we had destroyed ₈₀% of AA and artillery seemed to be reset back to starting strength with new AA and artillery positions.

The ranks are interesting - I've heard of a few issues with missions persistence. I'm not sure why they wouldn't save when the zones have, but I'll try and look into it.
In terms of zone - progress in the current zone isn't persisted at the moment. It's something I'm hoping to put in the future, but for now unfortunately it's something to tolerate unfortunately!

Dave wrote:
5.56 mags for the M16/XM177 didn't appear in the arsenal, at least not as Pvt/Cpl/Sgt ranks. We had to remove the weapon, add the weapon, take the mag out, and put the mag into clothes/vest/bag in order to then add more mags into our inventories.

This should be an easy fix - thanks for reporting!

Dave wrote:
Some vehicles spawned partially sunk into the ground, particularly the tanks at the ACAV base. Some but not all fixed themselves when unlocked.

Interesting - at least this is just a visual glitch! I'll open a bug report for it, but it'll be a while until I can get around to cosmetic issues!

Dave wrote:
One player did not receive any promotions or medals. Even when his debug tab confirmed 20+ kills, he did not receive the CIB medal that only requires one kill.

Hrm. Another odd one to investigate! Thanks for reporting!

Dave wrote:
When you respawn, any role assignment (medic/engineer/explosives/RTO) is lost.

Yeah - this is a thing. Not ideal, definitely needs a fix!

Dave wrote:
Sometimes, but not every time, team assignment (Airborne / ACAV / Green Hornets) was also reset to null on respawning.

An unfortunate quirk of how the teams are implemented. Rewriting this is a huge job unfortunately, so it's something I'm afraid you'll have to tolerate for now!

Dave wrote:
We attacked and cleared an enemy zone that was not marked as an active objective. A couple of times along the way we did however get "defend the zone" missions on it, however no matter what we did, we were unable to turn it green on the map. Cheaty admin spectate mode confirmed that no enemies were in the zone or attacking the zone or anywhere remotely near the zone.

Currently this is by design - though I suspect we'll change how zones are captured in the not so distant future!

Dave wrote:
Counter-attacks in general seemed to be somewhere between very weak or not existing at all. So far this has been overwhelmingly an offensive mission with little or no defensive component.

Probably too many players / not a high enough AI. The mission has a fixed limit on how many AI it can use - it was probably using them all for defense! Something to improved upon, but in the meantime you might try increasing the unit cap to see if that helps (or keeping players closer together to avoid so many defenses spawning in!).

Dave wrote:
We didn't see a single Viet Cong vehicle. Not even a car or bike.

Vehicles are really really really hard to implement well, especially on such a dense jungle map. We definitely want them in, but there's a really large amount of development work involvd

Dave wrote:
Some of us got diarrhoea/poisoning without any apparent warning, and with no way to fix it that we could find.

Yup - this is some leftover code that needs stripping out. To be honest - I forgot this was a thing, thanks for the reminder!

Dave wrote:
Our TFAR default channels did not work; additionally dying reset our long range channel to the randomly selected mission default, though our short range channels were unchanged.

This mission has a hardcoded set of default channels done via CBA. I'm surprised they reset on death though. Are you running any custom settings for TFAR in CBA?

Dave wrote:
14. It's really unclear what the benefits are for various buildings, or even how they get built. We only found out that a checkpoint is also a spawn point because one of the guys had seen it on Youtube; there was nothing else to tell us that.

15. Also there was nothing to tell us how to properly construct buildings (sandbags/supplies and shovel usage). We eventually figured it out, mostly, through trial and error.

Did you have a look in the field manual? There's advice on various special buildings in there. Yes, it's unclear, and the tutorial I suspect will help when it's in!

Dave wrote:
The Medal of Honor is awarded for "entered an active zone". Seems like quite a low bar for it.

There's a medal rework on the cards 🙂

Dave wrote:
Without side objectives or a bit more variety, the general premise of destroy AA/artillery/HQ positions then hold could get a little repetitive for longer term play. Though my perspective is skewed because we didn't really see the defensive side of the mission.

Agreed - mission gets dull with repetitive play, at least - samey. Source: hundreds of hours of playtesting.
We've got plans to sort this, but they're being played close to the chest at the moment!

Dave wrote:
The amount of food and water that you need relative to the amount that can be carried means that food/water resupply isn't really a consideration, especially as your hunger/thirst levels reset on death.

Food/water needs a balancing pass applying - totally agree it's unbalanced, though interesting you say it's too high!

Dave wrote:
It seemed odd that the only default faction-appropriate backpack was the RTO version, and that the only vests were the vehicle crew variants.

Could probably use some tidying, but this is one for the bottom of the pile I think!

Dave wrote:
It took us several hours before we figured out why each of the medic/engineer/explosives/RTO roles were useful. Engineer we found quickly enough, but RTO and explosives took much longer before we discovered the benefits.

Feels like we could improve the field manual entries for roles! 🙂

Thanks for reporting all this - there's a few questions in that pile that I'd really appreciate you answering. But overall, thanks for the feedback! 🙂

Dave

I've heard a few reports of this - I'm not sure if it's Mike Force specific, or something inherent to Arma. I'd love to see this happen so I can replicate it though! Could you tell me if they were just stood still, or if they were acting normally?

Everything about them was completely normal apart from being invincible. They were still very much active and a threat.

Probably too many players / not a high enough AI. The mission has a fixed limit on how many AI it can use - it was probably using them all for defense! Something to improved upon, but in the meantime you might try increasing the unit cap to see if that helps (or keeping players closer together to avoid so many defenses spawning in!).

We had the unit cap at 120 and scanning around the map in spectate mode, there were nowhere near that amount of AI. More like 12 spawned. For the most part we've been playing with 3-8 people. Been playing today with 3 of us and again counter attacks seemed to barely exist, with definitely nowhere near 120 AI spawned in. I assume it scales based on player count but even so the defence part was still pretty easy with low numbers.

This mission has a hardcoded set of default channels done via CBA. I'm surprised they reset on death though. Are you running any custom settings for TFAR in CBA?

We have our own default channels applied server side but it looks like the mission overwrites them. The only other setting we've changed that I can recall is that we use AI hearing.

Did you have a look in the field manual? There's advice on various special buildings in there. Yes, it's unclear, and the tutorial I suspect will help when it's in!

There's a field manual? 😛 We did see the descriptions but still couldn't figure out a few things like what the situation room is for.

Food/water needs a balancing pass applying - totally agree it's unbalanced, though interesting you say it's too high!

It's kind of convenient not to need to eat and drink constantly, but it means the whole mechanic of resupplying food and drink pretty much never comes into play.

Really great mission though, brilliant work on it 🙂

Celtic

If it's okay to jump in - I've also been playing quite a bit of Mike force - and I'm loving it, now that I've got that out of the way.

Food
Currently feels under utilized - the balance of actual food needed to feel the bar seems fine. But the need isn't decaying quite fast enough, particularly when your needs reset upon death. IIRC a full ration pack should be about 1 days worth of calories, which is what around 2 hours in game?

Deaths:
It currently feels that "death" is too easy, making it to the point that a player is just going to respawn at the nearest place, and not call in for CASEVAC or extraction. To the point the Dustoff isn't really worth having spawn in lieu of another slick. Largely too many people can do what amounts to full service medical treatment, to some extent the medic role feels both under utilized but simultaneously overpowered?

Edit As a thought here - in the game "Foxhole" they made respawns at forward bases cost resources, I don't know if it can be modeled here in Mike Force, but if respawns at the buildable thing could be made to cost medical resources and/or food it would encourage discretion in their use and stop some of the "oh - well crap I'm shot, lets just respawn" that seems to happen currently.

Support Requests:
Some of the limitations have resulted in players not requesting supplies through the Menu. The ACAV guy running the logistics at the fob needs the supplies that I can bring him...HOWEVER he can't ask for them with the built in menu.

*Edit* Also, all Units should be able to request a specific "CASEVAC" call from Green Hornets, separate from the Standard Pickup Squad, otherwise these get sort of lost in the shuffle.

FOBS:
Not really sure how to approach this issue - But after a couple of days in a campaign the landscape seems like its nothing but FOBs scattered across the landscape. Perhaps a configurable limit on the amount of constructibles? It ties to the same issue as respawns to me, where it results in Hornets ending up only doing logistical runs or CAS and not actually moving troops. not sure what to think about it other than that something seems off there.

But seriously...most fun I've had in Arma in a long time