matty1053 wrote:Haha! I was on there too.
But. The thing was. We took only one LB out. We don't get AA or nothing.
But yeah, the US team was sitting in the same spot the entire round. Well, they were before I disconnected.
Yes, they should have raced against the clock. But we get too many tix imo.
I completely disagree on the too many tickets, and I think the example of the game above is a great one to demonstrate it. The US team didn't use conservative tactics for most of the round, in fact, they were on Blackhawk 61 before we were at the start of the round with a series of aggressive drops. Throughout the round, the US team consistently had people in and around the point even after they set up the (two, we discovered much later) FOB in the NW.
We actually also killed a number of LB and BH throughout the round, starting fairly early, in the first 15-20 minutes, the attack LB was more of a problem though, since it consistently killed the techies before they could kill it.
But here's the issue, the ARF don't have any way of defending a point other than throwing bodies at it. The ARF can't establish mortars and emplacement fortresses and then create a spawnlock to drain tickets. They don't have armoured vehicles or CAS to dominate an area of the map and force ticket bleed that way. They can't force the US team to fight anywhere by attacking points or threatening key terrain.
From the start of the round to the end, the ARF are forced to defend, which is great and there's a fantastic mood to the round. The problem is that it gives the US team all the initiative as well as all the tools. It's a problem we've seen before in some INS maps, where the Blufor team has all the toys and gets to decide how the game will be played. The main difference is that the ARF have a ticket counter as well.
I'd almost argue 1100 is too few. The round we played is pretty close to best case scenario for an ARF team against an organised US team. We held our first flag and turned the blocks around it into a meatgrinder. None of the unconventional factions can ever hope to trade on even terms with the Bluefor factions - Blufor have overmatch in terms of range, firepower, ISR, OS, and even in close, their weapons recoil patterns and access to better medics and flexible specialist kits (AR, Breacher, Grenadier) are better than the unconventional kits. We forced them to trade against us in the most advantageous way we possibly good; the only way a round could go better for an ARF team would be an indecisive Blufor team with no teamwork or plan just meandering around the map and getting picked off willy nilly.
Herein lies the problem. We did as well as we could, and yet still didn't win by a big margin. The US didn't achieve a single objective until about 15 minutes from the round ending. That's unacceptable, and I've seen it on other unconventional maps like Kozelsk where the conventional team isn't able to even take the first objective due to a really tenacious defence for most of a round, but wins anyway because they're not really punished for not being able to take the objective as long as they're maintaining a solid KDR and keeping assets alive. The problem is that the unconventional factions have to play a meatgrinder style because it's the only scenario they're even close to parity with the conventional factions. Playing the standoff game isn't even a possibility against scopes and superior AFVs with thermals and the spread out and hide the fob game doesn't work against UAVs. That makes the only viable choice to force the conventional faction to fight you in close quarters, and yet even that isn't enough in these maps. Going back to Kozelsk again, consider what happens after the tunnel flag - you hold the Russian team off for an hour, and as soon as you're pushed off the tunnel flag, it doesn't matter what you've prepared in the more open flags, the superior AFVs and scopes roll you on subsequent flags and, more often than not, you lose from ticket loss on your second or third flags even though in terms of objectives you succeeded far more than the other team did (ie. you defended better than they attacked, but were forced to expend tickets to do it because of the "meatgrinder" effect"), and they still have a really healthy ticket amount.
The objectives in these pure attack/defend maps with an unconventional faction don't feel prominent enough. Holding a conventional faction capless is no mean feat, and it's not sufficiently rewarded right now. The round we had on Ramiel is a really good example of that - we burned 850 tickets defending the first flag - without knowing the US' starting tickets, I assume we actually used
more tickets in our successful defense than they did in their failed attacks - but what other options do we really have? Give the flag up, give all the flags up?
The price for attacking slowly or not attacking well enough is too low for Blufor in these unconventional AAS defence maps at the moment. Both sides should be forced to play an objective based game - the unconventional factions have no tools to trade tickets evenly with Blufor at all, so Blufor should be punished heavily if their advance is held up. The fact that successful first flag defences very often punish the defending side more than the attacking side demonstrates this - they're too often pyrrhic victories, which just shouldn't be the case.
