ArmA 3 TMS Capture The Island

The short of it:

We are looking for some players interested in playing on our new Conquer The Island server with tactical gameplay and lot of vehicle mods from the community.

Server IP: 37.200.98.245:2302 (Warning: We may need to move the server at some point. The IP address will change in that case.)

Server location: Germany, Europe

First test match: 21st of December 2014, 2:00 PM Central European Time (that's 1:00 PM UTC)

Accepted languages: English, German (Please try not to exclude any players from the conversation.)

Mission: BeCTI / Zerty version 1.3.0.1

Teamspeak: ts3.thisisatest.de

Play WithSIX: pws://?c=i4JXruj8n0u6MEMfaCd91w or http://play.withsix.com/arma-3/collections/i4JXruj8n0u6MEMfaCd91w/TMS-CTI-ArmA3-Modpackage

Steamgroup: TMS CTI ArmA3 (http://steamproxy.com/groups/TMSCTI)

Required mods:

modlist: http://steamproxy.com/groups/TMSCTI/discussions/0/626329820879581163/


mods listed:

CBA A3 1.0.9

RHSAFRF and RHSUSF by Red Hammer Studios 0.3.0 with hotfix (important!)

LAV 25 by Chairborne

F/A-18 Super Hornet 1.8.3 by John_Spartan & Saul

Su-35S Flanker E 1.2 by John_Spartan & Saul

US Helicopters (HAFM Overhaul) Mod 2.0 by geraldbolso1899

Task For Arrowhead Radio 0.9.7 by [TF]Nkey (required! Game internal Voice-Over-Net will be disabled!)

Authentic Gameplay Modification 0.94.1 by BWMod Team

NATO SF and RUSSIAN SPETZNAS VEHICLES by massi

NATO SF and Russian Spetznas Weapons by massi

ASDG Joint Muzzles by Robalo

ASDG Joint Rails by robalo


Optional Mods:

Blastcore A3 Phoenix by Opticalsnare

LAxemann's Enhanced Soundscape (L_ES) by Laxemann


The long of it:

Hi,

We are a small clan of 5 players (3 active), and for about the last year, we have been regularly playing on the ofps.net server (Shoutout to SpanishSurfer, btw.). However, since that server is based in America, and we are in Europe, there is no hope that we can ever get good ping times to that server. So for some time, we have been thinking about starting our own server in Europe, and now we have done just that. At the moment, the server is running on a cheap virtual linux server from jiffybox. The performance has not been a problem so far, but if it does get problematic, we may have to move to a dedicated server at some point.

While working on getting the server up, we quickly realized that we could do a lot of fun things with it now. One of the first things we did was to increase the visibility to the maximum (4 km). The landscapes look gorgeous now when you are standing on a vantage point somewhere, and flying is a lot more fun, too. (Will this kill server performance when a lot of players join? We don't know, but we plan to find out...)

Next thing we looked at were mods. There's an abundance of really great and fun mods to be found in the ArmA community, but unfortunately, most of those really only make sense if you make them mandatory for everybody, especially the vehicle mods, because one player is missing a vehicle mod, he will end up seeing other players float through the air in sitting position...
We are taking a bit of a gamble with that here, of course. Making some of the community mods mandatory means that users can no longer easily just join from randomly finding us in the arma server list. Let's hope announcements like this one will help with that...

We are trying to go for a level of realism that is somewhere between the ofps.net server and what Gruppe W does. One thing in particular we don't want is an actual military-like command hierarchy...

You probably have noticed TFAR in the list of required mods, even though ArmA 3 already has integrated voice chat. We decided to forego the included voice chat and go for TFAR instead for a few reasons:
- The included voice-chat just isn't very good. The sound quality is low and, more importantly, it keeps suffering from intermittent "stuttering" problems, which usually means that you cannot understand what the affected player is saying.
- Playing on the OFPS.net server, we have come to the conclusion that the in-game voice chat is just not a good fit for becti/zerty. You cannot really form squads in BeCTI (that is reserved for AI control, and what squad management scripts exist out there seem to break Becti/Zerty when actually used), so everybody ends up just talking on the "side" channel. Even when people are not chit-chatting about randomly, there's still too much going on for small task force to be able to really coordinate and concentrate on one attack, especially if some other task force is doing their own thing somewhere else at the same time...
- TFAR is just more immersive and more fun.

About teamstacking:
We are not at all fans of telling players which team they can or cannot join. You can generally join any team that still has slots open, except if you have already been on the other team during the running match. (This is to stop players telling their team where the other team's base is through unfair means).
The bigger team gets a penalty on town-capture rewards, and the smaller team gets a bonus, both depending on just how big the team difference is.

There were a few things going on on the opfs.net server that we would like to avoid on our server:

Tank over-presence:
On the OFPS.net server, tanks are just better than everything that is not a tank. Once tanks are available and players can afford them, they will ride around in tanks and MRAPS, IFVs and APCs might as well not exist. This is a bit silly and unrealistic, no real force has more tanks than infantry. What we did about this is:
- Tanks are just more expensive. You cannot just buy one after the other anymore. If you lose one, you are probably not going to get another for quite some time.
- The early tanks just aren't very good. You are starting with the T72 on OPFOR side or the M1A1 on BLUFOR.
- Third person view is disabled. Realistically, tanks have a major situational awareness penalty compared to infantry, but when third person view is available, the penalty just magically disappears. Now, tanks will have to advance together with infantry (and maybe IFVs/APCs) into a town and stay in radio contact the whole time.
We are also considering penalizing destroying civilian buildings, so that when an enemy hides in a building somewhere, you will think twice about just destroying that building to get at him. (We have not yet figured out how to do that, though.)

Using IFVs/APCs as "minor tanks":
This is connected to the one above. There is just rarely any real need for transporting infantry into a combat zone, so APCs are not used for that. With our changes, we hope people will do that again.

Cheap death:
Okay, we do not want to make so that when you die, that was it for this mission for you. That what just make this game too hard and not much fun anymore. But still, players committing in-game suicide just so they can respawn back in their base and can save on some walking is ridiculous. If your guys are stranded somewhere where they cannot get away from, you are supposed to extract them, not tell them to shoot themselves and hope to get reincarnated in a convenient location.
The only thing we did about that for now is to disable persistent gear. (This also means you cannot just keep respawning with a launcher in a contested town, you need to get a new one from the base or a repair truck everytime or have a logistics bring you a new one.) We are considering adding some more penalties for dieing. You are supposed to play like you really don't want to die.

written by waigl (serveradmin) posted by MDTorch (missioneditor)