A proposition and a thanks

In all seriousness though, Vanu is still my preferred faction but I’m conscious of where other people have put the effort in developing their characters and tbh it makes little difference to me. My Vanu and Terran characters are at a similar level, and even on NC the server’s just brilliant at times so I’m easy what we go with.

If we do this along with some newer players, I might be inclined to avoid NC as it’s a little less accessible a faction than the others from the point of view of someone coming from playing BF3 or 4. Vanu in particular is like playing BF3, while Terran’s not much more difficult.

Having said that, we can decide on the night, and it might boil down to simply where there’s an alert on at the time.

Just dropped off miller after an afternoon alert there with Steve, some good fights at a small level. Got me thinking about last night on Woodman which was just crazy. Not sure if it’s the new lattice or whether it was just last night but sometimes you get on and every fight is just huge and it makes it really difficult to help new players. That being said if there had been more of us last night when Beer was on we might have been able to protect the group a bit better.

Thanks again guys for those who turned up for this, it was great seeing green dots on my overview and knowing they represented people who could be relied on to play the objective, and I’d take that over 7 random higher ranked players any day of the week. Obviously with the relative inexperience in the squad we found it tough going at times, but this was compounded slightly by the state of play on the continent we were playing on.

My goal was to find us a smallish scale battle to involve ourselves in but unfortunately right after the Alert, the TR seemed to focus on taking Amerish, and this meant there was a large force attacking or defending each point of the line. On Indar we had a similar situation, and on Easamir we had far too easy a situation. I wanted to find a fight were we could ease people into the game, but unfortunately the only options available to us were big fuck off zerg fests, or easy mode capping of an empty continent. I had access to the command channel for the session and there were a lot of people cursing the fact we had so many people on Easamir while the main fight was on Amerish and Indar.

With the new lattice system on all continents, this is unfortunately the current state of the game during prime time, with options limited for a small squad like ours was, but this should improve over the next few months with a 4th continent coming which should spread the numbers out a bit more. Last night we’d have had to open the squad to randoms to build our own platoon to have had a realistic chance, but that’s the next level and something I didn’t want to have to do while trying to show people the game.

Anyway, that’s the explanation for how we ended up in that bitch of a fight on the NC Arsenal (the fight where we couldn’t go around a corner without being shot), and it’s also why we were pushed back off a couple of the other bases we had attacked. That being said, we forced the TR to pull forces away from the main thrust of their attack 3 or 4 times, and that at the very least relieved the pressure on the friendly platoons defending against that attack. We did have a couple of moments which were very well played, for example the defence on Moss Ravine. We spawned here at a slight numerical disadvantage, gathered up in the spawn room and pushed out. The enemy squad responded quite quickly in trying to cover the routes towards the flag, so we had to work our way there carefully, advancing from cover to cover, popping up to do some killing, rezzing, some more killing and rezzing, advancing some more, kill, rez, etc. We succeeded, capped the flag just in time and went to work on their sunderer (mobile spawn point) with the help of the randoms in the are who we were supporting, taking it out fairly quickly and securing the successful defence. This was actually very well played as the guys we fought off here were all fairly high in terms of battle rank, so they were not exactly inexperienced. Unfortunately it was after this fight that I realised I’d forgotten to press record on Afterburner, which is a shame as it was a great move worthy of an upload to youtube.

Anyway, we pushed on from here, started capping another point but were pushed back by twice our numbers (no shame in our squad being wiped here – we were outnumbered by experienced players who had good air support), and then made the mistake of joining that NC Arsenal fight. I only spawned here because we were about to lose it and you can sometimes pull off a miracle save, but it wasn’t to be and we got ourselves caught up then in the fight to retake it for a few minutes. This fight was just brutal and is the kind of fight I normally avoid in this game, so I’m sorry for dragging us into it, even if it was only for a few minutes. After this we found a few bases we could cap in the south against the Vanu, but eventually ran into a squad twice our size on Auraxis firearms corp who killed our sunderer quite early, preventing us making a fight of it, although it would’ve been difficult anyway.

There were still 5 of us in squad, so we decided to switch over to Indar and help on a push towards Tawrich tech plant over there. This was fairly straightforward until we ran into some opposition on one of the satellite bases surrounding the tech plant, and an annoying couple of engineers bombarding our sunderer from the top of the cliffs to our South. We dealt with this, and pushed on to secure the southern flank which had opened up here (and I took great pleasure in shooting the two guys who’d been bombarding us in the face during this attack).

At this point we more or less called it a night, although Steve and I stuck around for a few more hours. After prime time passed we certainly had a better time of it, possibly because the zergs were smaller, but possibly also because a bit more support from our faction helped in securing the objectives. In any case, I had a good overall session, made all the better for having some XDC team mates. There were frustrating moments for the newer players, but I hope also some good ones. It is a difficult to get into, and it can sometimes take a while to find a fight which can be influenced by a small squad. It obviously possible to assist in larger fights, but that’s a harsh environment to learn the game in. The more experience people get in the game, the more we can do as we’d become more effective, but last night we really needed more numbers as well. On Miller I’m going to start running some public platoons going forward, and maybe start recruiting some players, so if anyone wants to join in and assist me with that, just log in and let me know you’re there on TS 🙂