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Personally I only really need a purpose, I don't like just blowing up a town for no reason or doing recon for nothing. So that might tie into the addition of more story. I'll watch a rock for an hour if you can't convince me it's important enough. Also don't be afraid to go out of the box when it comes to storyboarding strict realism can be cool and all but it's also nice to get a breathe of fresh air. I was honestly praying the Chinese would attack us at some point in that last deployment just to shake things up. I personally would love to fight a conventional force, of course not as grunts, but just to even the playing field a bit and give us more of a challenge rather that getting shot at by a random villager who found an AK.

It isn't as cut and dry as "not enough to shoot at, not enough action, failing is not fun" - all of those statements are not black and white, there is tons of grey area. Finding the line in those is what we have to do. Failing a mission due to 100 AI swarming you at once can be very not fun, but failing due to being worn down through multiple engagements can be fun. Failing due to incorrect intel, the target escaping, enemy reinforcements push us off of an objective, etc - these are all fun ways to fail. I think this might be more of the issue with people not wanting to fail - failure always seemed to be previous a lot of enemies just overwhelmed or shot us enough to make us get frustrated. While i won't discount that being a viable way to fail, when that's all you see, either mission complete or total wipe, it gets... old and stale. And that makes it not fun. As for the "not enough to shoot at, not enough action" - I do agree with that at some level. We are here to do Milsim, but in the end we need to all realize that the actual part of milsim we want is the operations, stepping outside the wire, doing things. Something at some level has to happen otherwise its a waste of time, hence why we don't have FTXs or trainings where we all get together and clean our guns, do PT, etc. With that in mind, action doesn't have to be "firing guns until we run out of ammo or targets." I'd say a mission where we sit at the airfield for 1-2 hours literally doing nothing is a failed mission, and is not respectful of the time the members put in to showing up. The good news is there is a middle ground, in my mind. Instead of sitting around doing nothing, send us out. Give us a mission where we have to recon and avoid enemy patrols, infill as stealthily as possible, slip in under the radar, go covert. If done correctly, we don't even need to engage many contacts at all, but its still what I would call "action." Basically, things still need to occur during our missions. Events still need to happen. But that doesn't mean every mission needs multiple waves of endless enemies to shoot. Take out a small patrol with silence, slip past a defensive perimeter, do our shit and get out, with them none the wiser until daybreak and they realize their patrol is overdue. That would be fun for me, even if not full of "action" (unless we fuck up and get caught). Quick note on intel gathering not being fun - Sitting on a hill for 2 hours looking through binoculars and doing nothing else sounds boring. However, gathering intel for a while and then using that intel to do something would be fine, and could work nicely.

From the perspective of someone that was in charge of things here, just wanted to add something. Lots of the wishes and suggestions I see now are a stark contrast to what people wanted in the past, so not sure what changed. Reports and things I heard in the past were: not enough to shoot at, not enough action, failing was not fun, intel gathering is not fun Am glad that seems to be changing now and people want to take the unit in a new direction. Just wanted to add that little tidbit; I did want to move the unit in this direction, but I was afraid of a backlash. Glad to see Hito doing this thread, too. Gonna keep an eye on it and see what happens, I still consider 3d the child I willingly gave away full custody of. Rock on, friends

The only way to mark a target at night for @Capt Jennings

I would edit my post but permissions have been incredibly restricted for people who've dedicated at least 1.5 years to the unit for no reason. Hito/Osbourne - take criticism but remember to have a vision for the story and missions you'd like to create and abide by that vision. I found that readjusting that vision every week to suit task forces or grapeshot critiques/suggestions just made things seem chaotic to the regular guys.

A lot of this behavior in Vanilla AI can be negated by increasing spotting distance and AI accuracy, but I got complaints about how hard the AI were when tested. @GySgt Hito @1st LT Osbourne and any battlecaptains that weren't around when I was: you're never going to make everyone happy, especially if you try to put more focus on driving a story (making a story that an 15 people can interact with is hard, 30 even harder). Everyone else: understand that S-2 is never going to be able to make everyone happy. Find the fun in each mission (talk to your battlebuddies, check houses that probably have zero consequence to the mission), and please be respectful and upbeat when addressing S-2 with criticism. Nothing burns out a zeus more and gets you ignored faster than being whiney about something in game that probably could be chalked up to ground incompetence (which happens all the time), not S-2 personally trying to dick you over (which doesn't happen).

Much more fun to fight against. Borderline useless to when you want them to guard something.

when you get a non-speaking immersion specialist role

Didn't realize @SSgt Reeves was looking for a new unit.

Thanks for elaborating and clarifying the change it up statement. Repetitive and recycled missions would've sufficed originally as "change it up" is as broad as the subject itself. The snide comments however are not appreciated. We appreciate all the input so far and will definitely discuss and look at implementing some of your suggestions in the next deployment.

Ground Operations cover such a broad spectrum of activities, and to just say "change it up" is comparable to saying "just change it" while trying to amend a whole Constitution or political manifesto, without specifying which part or what should be changed. Surely there is something good, and most surely there are bad aspects too. Take a look at the other posts as an example, nothing constructive can be taken from a post that simply says "change it up."

I can't speak for the rest of S-2, but keep it coming guys. Some really great feedback here, and I'm watching this thread very closely.

Personally, I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that @Sgt Falconer brought up regarding gathering intel being critical to completing the mission. That would add a challenge to the game on a strategic level, and in some cases non-'mission critical' intel (meaning important, but not necessary to 'win') such as locations of enemy assets that would change the gameplan of the commander/leader during the operation, would add to the mission in terms of enjoyment and realism. And @2ndLt Jones idea of a 'story' is (in my humble opinion) one of the most important aspects of immersion in the MILSIM experience. Having a believable story that is influenced by the actions/inactions of the individuals in the story should be the framework of every deployment, with failures and successes both being possible outcomes and both altering the course of the deployment. Having a 'go to A, clear B, extract at C' operation operation may be fun at times but is liable to becoming repetitive and boring. To be honest, LT stole the words out my mouth and said it better than I ever could. My two cents is a amalgamation of most of the opinions here. To put it bluntly: I want failure to be part of our operations. I want to get bad intel regarding enemy forces/etc and get bogged down in a nasty firefight. I want the possibility of failure to hang over my head every time we step off. In my opinion, it seems that every time we go out (with exceptions) we are 'destined' to win, no matter the cost. If consequences for failure were more dire, they encourage the team to work harder to win, and 'winning' tastes all the more sweet. I can expand on this as well, as to not take too much space. I hope the idea is clear, though.

I'd like to see more recon. Part of our job description is deep recon and we rarely do it. So a few missions where a team slips in to scout AA positions, fuel and ammo dumps, HQ locations etc to mark as targets for artillery, air, or incoming friendly conventional forces would be nice. And I am fucking sick of cartels and pirates. We've done that like 3 times and it has sucked every time. EDIT: Change it up.