Planning: Training Ops for 3.0

Shadow Reaper

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Jun 3, 2016
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Before making any other decisions I suggest you decide whether you intend to allow others from outside your group into your instance. Chasing away outsiders and those who are unauthorized could have real benefits, and would require fighters on patrol over your planet. If you require this sort of coverage and radar/stealth has been enabled, I highly suggest sending stealth in addition to other fighters to patrol. Fighters no one knows are coming should be fabulously effective, but warnings to leave the area should not come from hidden fighters, so you need both.


1) What specific objectives should be focused on for our first training op involving landfall?

I suggest a simple search pattern, utilizing tools like googledocs, where participants search a pattern and mark their grid section on a shared document where officers can see it. Searches serve lots of great functions but the chief advantage of doing them early is hopefully no one dies because someone else didn't do their job.

IMHO, your first goal needs to be learning to organize in such a way that people all know what to do, and then get them to cooperate and do it. You need to find out who can take direction and who cannot, so you do not have to worry about those who abandon their posts when you are in combat. These are the simple character issues that drive effective fighting teams--communications, discipline and accountability. You need to strike the proper balance between military discipline and full-on fun, and that will take some time.


2) How will these objectives be achieved? (State the basic strategy and tactics available in said strategy. Detailed stuff comes much later.)

Build a search pattern in a googledocs spreadsheet and select carefully who has access. In a group larger than 6-8, divide the group into subgroups and appoint leaders to each and allow only them to edit the doc. Everything of interest should go into the doc, including entries that require short text to explain them, so make that availble to your officers. It should be treated as confidential intel. Using several smaller groups has many benefits for organization, but one worth noting is you can include people who otherwise might not be able to participate from language issues. If there are 8 Norwegians only one of which speaks English well, that person is your squad leader and he can do voice comm with his friends in Norwegian, and communicate with command on the strategic level. This is a way to get around the biggest barriers in communication and involve the largest group possible.


3) What assets, at a minimum, should be utilized in a landfall training op? Take into account what CIG will be releasing to us in 3.0 - the Ursa Rover, Dragonfly, and the Nox, as well as other ships.

Depends upon your participants. If you are not planning a conflict you do not need to practice with turrets, which are going to be boring until there is a firefight. I would save the firefights until you know what you are doing as a group. Can you imagine someone sitting in a turret for 2 hours while absolutely NOTHING happens? Part of leadership is doing your best to provide satisfying gameplay to all your folks. That doesn't mean searching will be exciting, but it means you did not take their playtime for granted. Create ways to make it interesting. You might for example, plan to create the appearance of an outside incursion, just to give the flyboys some excitement.


4) What methods of communications should be utilized?

Voice for tactical, meaning inside each small group. Text for strategic, meaning between the tactical leaders and command. This method is probably best for group conflicts because it maximizes communications at the level where they are needed most urgently--voice leaves hands free to shoot, and reduces the chatter at the command level.


5) What procedures should be generally followed for achieving the following sub-objectives of a landfall operation?

None planned, unknown expected. You can't prepare for interesting finds on the surface of a planet until they are known, but no matter what you find you should have something in reserve and able to deploy stat. You should be able to reassign tasks in response to the findings; and you should try to finish the original search pattern regardless.

If you find a derelict ship, ancient ruins or weapons cash, make an announcement to all participants. They'll enjoy being in the know, and this is your test to see who can be trusted to stay on task and who is going to abandon their post whenever they feel like it. Make no mistake--this will happen--and the sooner you find and remove such people, the better off you will all be as a martial organization. If you find a giant spice worm needing extinction, wait until everyone has accomplished their assigned tasks and kill it together, so everyone enjoys what you find and doesn't feel they were unduly left out. If someone disobeys instructions and runs to kill it himself, you know who to leave off your next op.


These above are ambitious objectives, especially if the entire terrain cannot be searched in 2 hours or less. In the Ailon Nova Guard and again in The Wraiths, I was a member of joint ops like this that went on for days at a time usually with 20-30 players, and you will find out who takes directions and who does not--stuff you need to know before you trust your back to the guy next to you. Also note you can build some friendly competition into such a task--make an award to the team that successfully searches their grid pattern first, and otherwise reward good cooperation. Note though, that every rock outcropping is opportunity to find a cave, which if large enough can become an extremely valuable asset. It makes no sense to do a comprehensive search and not find/note everything there is to find. Players need time to investigate every lead to see if there is something worth putting on your map.
 
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Cynicism_FTW

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May 29, 2016
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1. Fireteam tactics and cas.

2. Fireteam tactics are for 4-6 players and for now copy military battle drills until sc specific tactics are developed. For cas have one player spawn ship or vehicle for the target and have another flying as cas.

3. Hoplite for troop transport and connie or freelancer if vehicles are used.

4. Voice chat with text as a backup. Speech to text and text to speech are tools that need to be developed.

5. Server cap is to low to worry about large scale ops for now. (Your list is a great start.)

Very little training wise can be accomplished until the server cap goes up, but i am willing to help as much as will be possible. And if you want to start theory crafting I will more than happily partake.
 

Mich Angel

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Shouldn't this thread be in
Operations/Events

Just thinking out load here.... CHEERS! :beer::beer::beer:
 
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James Gunn

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Jun 22, 2017
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Eyesturnedupwards
1. Fireteam tactics and cas.

2. Fireteam tactics are for 4-6 players and for now copy military battle drills until sc specific tactics are developed. For cas have one player spawn ship or vehicle for the target and have another flying as cas.

3. Hoplite for troop transport and connie or freelancer if vehicles are used.

4. Voice chat with text as a backup. Speech to text and text to speech are tools that need to be developed.

5. Server cap is to low to worry about large scale ops for now. (Your list is a great start.)

Very little training wise can be accomplished until the server cap goes up, but i am willing to help as much as will be possible. And if you want to start theory crafting I will more than happily partake.
This right here. I am assuming that we will have some sort of recon before deployment to adequately prep the teams as far as loadouts, vics, ect that will be needed. The tactics already exist for ground/air ops, why not use them? Marine Raiders, Seal, Ranger ect... I am sure we have a player base who has done Milsim (ARMA ect...) and we can pull from their experience. Voice coms are essential, I am hoping we will have the ability to manage coms channels, something like ARMA III's TFAR would be awesome as keeping our com's separate from opposing players will be essential. As said many times before, we won't know actual capabilities until launch, but it's good to be prepared. Cheers!
 
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Pander

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So do we have any movement on some training ideas?

As i understand it server cap wont be that big so getting a few of us into games may be difficult

does anyone want to get together for an easier game to get into like arma or planetside? at this point with the game changing so frequently the best thing we can develop is comms and preferred teams/relationships as discord may be a little too difficult for large groups

By teams relationships i mean some people want to be very tactical and use military terms, Others want to have a fun firefight that still want to work together.

I think we need to set a date and get into a discord chat?
 

Pander

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Taking this further we could do arma games of zeus vs test

Zeus can spawn and control AI units to fight all test members
 
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NKato

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Apr 25, 2014
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So do we have any movement on some training ideas?

As i understand it server cap wont be that big so getting a few of us into games may be difficult

does anyone want to get together for an easier game to get into like arma or planetside? at this point with the game changing so frequently the best thing we can develop is comms and preferred teams/relationships as discord may be a little too difficult for large groups

By teams relationships i mean some people want to be very tactical and use military terms, Others want to have a fun firefight that still want to work together.

I think we need to set a date and get into a discord chat?

I have some basic ideas going in my head and on paper, accounting for the limitations of the player cap in 3.0 - which is still pegged at 24 at first.

Once we hit 3.0, I'll probably schedule something.
 
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