Intelligence Assets

[snow]

"Intelligence provides commanders and decision makers with the requisite information facilitating their situational understanding so that they may successfully accomplish their missions in full spectrum operations." -- US Army FM 2-0 (Intelligence)


A lot of people have suggested stuff involving increasing the deployable assets a commander has, but I think that's missing the mark. It's good that arty, spotting, & the God's-Eye view were removed--and the deployables are great--but a commander should have intelligence assets at his disposal that guys in the field don't have. It's the basis of pretty much every major and minor military operation that happens today.

Personally, I think this could be perfectly accomplished by simply bringing back both the original scan and UAV, but in a fashion that restricts their usage to the commander who then verbally communicates the intel and implications of the intel to SL's. These assets should be limited: only the commander can see the scans/UAVs (and no auto-spotting of course) and have much slower reload/refresh rates than vanilla (like 6-8 minutes each). And slower repair times.

This would allow commanders to make informed decisions as to why squads should be doing something (e.g., "squad 3 divert to Temple, US elements en route"), instead of just pushing his team around based on where they happen to be on the map. But with slower reload times, it would also mean he would have to use these assets tactically, instead of them getting spammed every 30 seconds.

Overall this would have a positive effect on commander usefulness & fun (he needs more to do), and increase overall teamwork, as well as better reflecting the reality of a commander's access to intel...without involving lots of new modeling & skinning & coding, etc etc.

It also, of course, would make Spec Ops much more useful and important. And reinvigorate the metagame of destroying and protecting commander assets, which is basically a waste of time now.

The CO role needs a little love. This would be an easy and solid fix.


ps: I dunno how this would effect insurgent maps.

[Zimmer]

I have played commander some time and I feel I never have the inteligence to order the squads here and there. And most of the times tehre where on to three squad who ocasinaly reported I didnt know anything. So teh UAV could have been nice with some tweaking no showing people inside houses etc, or only showing vehicles.

As info as a commander I nearly fell asleep teh only fun was teh blue guys running around in the main base.

Maybe add inn some more firepower as in lets say kashan instead of using jdam to get a smoke screen why not make the commander be able to make smokescreens himself and on maps with conventinal armies and maybe insurgency to as that is a very used tactic to send in fastair and drop one or two bombs.

[Rudd]

I was on FH2 for the first time yesterday with the DM lads and thoroughly enjoyed using the scout plane since you can right click to look down and see the ground. With coordination such scouting is very cool, so I appreciate that the above suggestion of being able to gain information pertaining to the location of the enemy would be a great asset to the game.

UAVs like the one you suggest have been talking about often around here, and I think we generally thought that a deployable UAV where one guy watches from the UAV camera would be cool, but i think the devs thought it couldn't be realistically portrayed or that they were busy with other stuff at the time.

[gazzthompson]

disagree the UAV and scan sucked in vbf2 people on the ground need to get the intel and give it to the CO

[Zimmer]

But again most people dont and I belive thats why you never see any commanders at all.

Seriously I know the scan and uav didnt work well but right now the commander is that guy who knows nothing of what happens. And as we alll know teh commander shall be the one who knows the most of enemy movements. As a good commander you also shall request information, but even if I want to (as an sl) I can only give breaf intel on whats happening. And teh commander only knows that there is a tank coming a place but he isnt sure.

[snotmaster0]

I agree that someting needs to be done. What, I don't know, but your suggestion sounds good.

[snow]

disagree the UAV and scan sucked in vbf2 people on the ground need to get the intel and give it to the CO

I agree. It was spammable and overpowered. Between the two it was effectively a series of wall hacks all over the battlefield. But this, like the previous (and good) commander changes, is meant to address that. If no one can see the precise location of enemies but the CO, it's much more generalized & teamwork focused.

I've played commander a lot (cuz it's often open :roll , and yeah some SLs will report back on enemies but it's not that common and often not that useful. The CO really needs to have a better sense of big picture to do his job right (in terms of both general realism and team-based gameplay).

And yeah Doc, I've seen the threads about field deployable UAVs (like the Raven or Dragon Eye or the like), and those seem cool but would take a great deal of dev resources to implement (if they could be gotten to work at all). I'm just suggesting something fairly easy to put back in with the least amount of time sink as possible.