PMC Livonia Ninjas Campaign or a Mission?

[Snake Man]

PMC Livonia Ninjas is the working project title for this... whatever this thing is. Technically it is a campaign PBO so under campaign/description.ext, but in reality it is only a single mission, so not a campaign, kinda. You follow?

I wanted to explore enoch / livonia a bit using proper CUP addons, specifically at night in full moon environmental conditions.

Created mission with US Army Delta Force four man team, random starting location, random weather, random soviet commie scum enemies (infantry only) on all the terrain class names{} main location types (nameCity, nameVillage, nameLocal) which comes to 51 objectives. Enemy force is strong, depending on the random generation the russian dogs enemy count is somewhere between 600-800 soldiers.

Players team has plenty of support, mortars, artillery and MQ-9 Reaper drone overhead.

At first day of testing this mission and doing that long desired livonia exploration, I had no support other then the UAV drone which ran out of fuel real quick and crashed. I spent most of the day (hmm day before yesterday) sneaking around and had a great time.

Then I added the arty/mortar support, more debug messages and improved random weather, plus few other fixes.

Yesterday I played... dunno how long but the mission started at in-game 0300hrs (you know, full moon), and last time I remembered checking in-game clock it was coming to noon, so heh yeah quite few hours sneaking around

Had a good time too, but honestly it go a bit boring now as the support assets made it so "easy", you just used the reaper overhead to call arty while your team was hiding in the bushes still often times over 1km away, actually I very rarely called 155mm arty on any target as the 82mm mortars did the job just fine. Also probably because this was the second almost full day of playing the same mission.

Not sure I can call myself a "Oh! look shiny! *runs off*" person if SECOND day of playing gets me bored or well lets say "not so excited anymore", but yeah I have no desire to continue playing it today, I have done enough exploring and the initial in-game time is pretty much noon so all the delta force spec ops night vision goggles advantage is gone etc.

The mission itself is pretty nice, the balance might be off now with unlimited indirect fire arty, you can just blast every objective without even having eyes on. But overall if you want random livonia sneaking around ninja style, this is your mission

Day before yesterday when I was super excited while playing I had grand plans of developing this into a campaign, well a real campaign heh, but today when waking up and thinking about things... nah probably not going to spent time on that now/anymore.

I do have a desire and plan of what to do, but that is for another topic if it comes to that.

Just wanted to write about this two day mission making and testing experience, in the case that this develops into something bigger, good to have the origins of the story written down

Below is a text I wrote for my own notes so with few tweaks its good to go for forum post, this is from day before yesterday's arma3 session; livonia ninjas game-play:

2022-06-19T17:48:59Z

Because scripting bug bulk of the bad guys were hunkered by the airfield, yeah I know its bizarre, there was probably like 100-200 dudes if not more heh.

Once we reached close to the airfield after first going through half of the terrains objectives with very few firefights, we ended up in a big firefight. I took our team to ridge line overlooking hundreds of meters of open field terrain, just awesome sniper position. However I quickly realized that "MK18 Mod1" 5.56mm silenced assault rifles are useless in the 600m+ range. My number 2 and 3 did not even shoot, it was just 4 who shot a lot with "MK17 SV" (?) 7.62mm marksman rifle.

MK18 is nice spec op silenced toy on close encounters, but its fucking useless in long range engagements.

Anyways we won the firefight, so many dead russians, was pretty cool.

At this point I had 7 rounds left in my last mag. Dumped all mk17 marksman rifle magazines to 4, then took one 5.56mm magazine from 2 and 3 so I get something to shoot with.

It is clear that this mission is too large for one single squad to take, its mickey mouse fantasy scenario if you would fight and win that many objectives enemies in a one real life mission. This mission at start had about 794 bad guys.

However this is ofp/arma so you get a bit freedom on such realism, who wouldn't want to be a rambo

So this mission absolutely needs ammo resupply. Virtual support module for ammo resupply would be the best, ammo box just drops from the sky using parachute so it doesn't bother enemies. I assume it would work like that, if not then I have to script it.

Overall I don't even like to try to accomplish all objectives, it feels way too rambo. This would be awesome campaign hub patrol mission so it would be focused on more smaller scale objective wise, to add more enemies to objectives so players cannot just waltz in and shoot everyone, if they try they will get killed. Maybe balance it off with armored vehicles, dunno.

I love this sneaking around at night time in livonia, weather is changing and then morning daylight comes, assuming you want to play 0300hrs - 0800hrs in-game time haha. But yeah this needs to be a campaign hub patrol mission with few side missions and more detailed hand placed enemy locations, armored vehicles and just overall more life, more danger.

But beginning would be the ammo drop, so those rambo wannabes can do those truly long range patrols

Or maybe add some FOB type locations which player could visit or "tour" to rearm. Hell he could even go back to campaign hub location to rearm without activating the end mission, hmm.

Shit this should be written down to specific PMC.TODO tasks

Overall, I love this mission, its half a day of playing fun really for the old school ofp 6-8hrs gaming session type of thing

Your team doesn't have a medic, so better not get injured

[Snake Man]

Was so burnt out bored today that didn't get any editing work started, so decided that instead of staring an empty computer screen, to fire up Gaming computer and continue exploring enoch / livonia. Well played another several hours and toured all the remaining objectives, actually finishing all 51 locations / objectives.

Did most of the killing with artillery and mortars, yeah those are a bit overkill with MQ-9 Reaper drone targeting from overhead, need to find some game-play balance to it.

But even so, its a dangerous place to be among over 700 russian bad guys, so you cant just run it through without being careful. Had a lot of fun playing it as is with the overkill arty support.

Mission started in-game 0300hrs night time and when it ended it was around 1630hrs late afternoon and again already dark, quite nice mission duration

[Snake Man]

Today wanted to see PMC Poland terrains in action, so quickly made three missions for all of them; hulskie, krynki, and suwalki. Then went to Gaming computer to try them out.

First had some issues with objective generation, arma3 froze on loading the mission and had to ALT-TAB to kill from task manager, another attempt worked OK.

On hulskie terrain which is "only" 40km this mission generated 1400 enemies heh. Objective count was 94, not sure if all class names{} locations got one, my script might have bugged out.

Hulskie also has border with slovakia (I think) where openstreetmap has a lot of place names, this generates silly number of objective tasks for this mission, I might actually have to fix that on terrain side.

Started to play, unfortunately random weather was quite bad, it was raining and thunderstorm, visibility was zero, no moonlight penetrated cloud cover, so it was night vision goggles on while hunting russians.

Walked probably 10-15km total going through three objectives, called mortar fire on the commies, weather did not improve and there was scripting error in my PMC_Debug.sqf as well so decided to end it there to make some fixes.

So far in that testing session I was amazed how nice hulskie was even without any buildings, heightmap was great and enoch vegetation for forests was looking good.

With 40km terrain you really got that large scale feeling, ideas started to flow about creating campaign hub and bunch of FOB's where friendly forces are hanging out and patrolling the area

You can really do large scale of operations in land locked 40km terrain, you get that deep behind enemy lines feeling (well its poland so friendly country invaded by soviet commie scum).

Anyways.

Reason I'm replying here is that now this "PMC Livonia Ninjas" campaign is not enoch/livonia anymore, we need a universal name which is not associated with a single terrain.

US Army Delta Force ninjas sneaking around deep behind enemy lines with silenced weapons and boat load of support, what should we call such campaign?

2022-06-23T22:55:00Z edit:

Just finished another long gaming session, was hunting russians in PMC Poland Hulski terrain, didn't count how many objectives I completed but it was hours and hours of walking around the forests and admiring the sights

Started to feel a bit exhausting too, first I played a long time in livonia these past few days and now switched to even bigger terrain, 40km monster compared to puny livonia... so yeah where does this all end heh.

Tomorrow most likely I'll test just for the sake of it, PMC Poland Krynki and PMC Poland Suwalki, especially suwalki might be interesting with its many farm fields and smaller forests.

I don't want to end up playing all day, its kind of wasted time as I rather edit than play for such days on end sessions.

Had a great fun today walking around in hulskie, I love every moment of those huge terrains

[Snake Man]

Finished today's gaming session, left a lot of russian bad guys dead, had a good fun.

Played on PMC Poland Krynki, man that is one huge terrain, arma3 cant even generate enough bad guys for all objectives, my script aborts with 90 objectives as there are 3 groups per objective we get very close to 288 groups per side limit

Was debugging PMC_Weather.sqf script which still is not working properly, did some progress but its still not fully working, I hate that arma3 weather system as it got mind of its own.

Then moved to PMC Poland Suwalki and uh oh now we are in the serious big boy country with 81.9km x 81.9km terrain size

Did three objectives in suwalki, traveled 11km from mission starting location.

Got really exhausted of all this european woodland walking around, don't get me wrong I love it, that's why I'm doing it so much... but that of course eventually led to exhaustion, just had to stop playing for today. Now just want to relax and chill rest of the day, I'm hoping tomorrow would be another day without hunting russians, need to do something else for a while, maybe edit other missions, dunno.

PMC Livonia Ninjas campaign still need a proper name and the mission now is excellent starting point for a campaign hub patrol mission, quite happy how it turned out so far.

[Snake Man]

Dev Diary PMC Livonia Ninjas Campaign E01 2022-06-23 ArmA 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YgPApbXevE

This is footage of game-play in PMC Poland terrains, no actual editing. Its labeled dev diary because the campaign is very much work in progress where I monitor all kinds of debug stats during playing.

[Snake Man]

Dev Diary PMC Livonia Ninjas Campaign E02 2022-06-23 ArmA 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQWe_9AdEEg

[Snake Man]

Made a decision with the campaign name; PMC Red Zero, however when I googled that "red zero" name a lot of stuff came up, apparently its some energy drink and some star wars related thing... wanted to change it back, but decision was already made, actually edited some new dev diary videos with that in the title heh.

Oh well, when choosing the next campaign name need to google it first before deciding