Let's Play: Armed Assault II

Boba and Rooster have got themselves a server so I'd like to do both them and all of you uncivilised heathens a favour by making a thread about this amazing milsim :allears:

Mil... what?

Milsim. It's a military simulator rather than a game; however, it's not as inaccessible as you might be led to believe. Obviously twitch shooting will get you into a very deep hole very fast, but with a little practice it's not too hard to come out on the winning side of a firefight. Bohemia Interactive actually designed ArmA II (and its predecessor, ArmA) around the VBS 2 and VBS engines respectively, which are used by the US and Australian armies as training aids. The ArmA series is actually more of a sequel to OFP than Dragon Rising is, since the latter is most definitely a game.

I don't trust you. It sounds hard and boring.

I won't lie; if you can't go for five minutes without getting your action fix, you should definitely stay the fuck away from ArmA II. Both yourself and the community will be better for it. That said, it does get pretty intense - we're talking scores of players on a massive open-world map, with shit blowing up everywhere - and sometimes you'll even find yourself relieved not to have been contacted for the last half hour.

In terms of difficulty, it has a fairly steep learning curve, but it doesn't take too long to master. The hardest thing to get the hang of is probably the clunky controls; there are more key bindings than I wish to even think about, but for the most part you'll only be using the same main ones you'd expect in your average FPS. There is a small tutorial built into the single-player campaign, but if that fails to help you, there are also community-made training missions and online servers designed to help new players.

Alright, but what about multiplayer? Campaigns are for faggots. Pros like me need to hit the online scene.

Co-op campaigns, co-op missions, team-based deathmatch, team-based objective... the list goes on. There's an endless variety thanks to both the built-in scenario editor and the massive modding community, who constantly churn out addons and tweaks. On top of that, BIS releases patches fairly regularly; the last added a wealth of new units and features, a whole new campaign, and fixed a lot of niggling bugs.

How far you go really depends on your own preferences. You may want to just hit up a Domination mode and go blow shit up, or maybe go on a long (sometimes upwards of five hours) co-op with your mates.

Show me.

Ok.

Here's a pretty sloppy video I threw up on Youtube to show a large-scale armoured skirmish at night - lots of pretty lights and explosions:



Fan-made promo for ACE 2's PLA addon



More videos from the same guy, mostly cinematic - yeah, there's potential there too





A lot of currently serving/ex-service brosefs play this religiously, and are only too happy to share their wealth of knowledge:



I could post videos, screens and after-action reports all day, but in the end, I doubt it'd help much. There's just so much to experience that it would be impossible to include it all in one thread, although certainly at a later date I'll try and do just that. In the meantime, give it some thought; ArmA 2 caters to any serious gamer, from the creepy snipers like me to demoman lovers to aspiring pilots. Land, sea, and air; infantry, artillery, armour, transport, and support; fighters, bombers, attack helicopters and transports, and drones; light armour, heavy armour, air defence, transport... the list goes on. There are even zombie mods, WWII mods, and God knows what else in the works.

For those interested, I'll look into running some short missions which will give you guys a chance to get up to speed on things. I'll be glad to help you out with some of the basics of infantry life, too.

Need to upgrade my CPU to play this shit.

Due to tiredness I'll improve OP with reqs and useful links and shit later

Looks fun. Are you gonna be gifting it to a bunch of us? :) :)

Right now B and I are making a super powers (a stock game type) variant with some extra shit in it. We're trying to get all the ACE 2 weapons in it along with adding some structures in the mission editor to certain areas, making them easier to defend and making it seem more like an established outpost/base. We'll probably make more as time goes on.

Also, we got a vent server along with it.


---Server Info:---
NAME: ETS Modacity Server - Chicago
PASSWORD: smug

Once we get some stuff setup we'll probably just make it public. Since it's going to be a coop server, and we cant afford anything higher, its 10 slots (which is enough when you have that much AI running around).

---Ventrilo Info:---
Server: v3.defconservers.com
Port: 4095

Vent has 25 slots, low as the slots went, but was cheap as fuck anyway. Extra slots for other stuff I guess.

e: Oh yeah. To play in the server, you need the mod A.C.E. 2. I'll post some links about that later if I remember.

I was already aware of this game, but I can't play it... I only have a nvidia 5200.

does it involve planes? :ross:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Aerowyn

does it involve planes? :ross:

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Don't be silly, of course it does, or else Ross wouldn't promote it so much. Well, I'm only half kidding. There are planes and other aircraft, but this type of sim is actually fun to play and takes less time to become proficient at than something like IL-2.

I find flying the helicopters the most fun. I borrowed the game for a while from my friend before he upgraded his computer to something better, but he wanted to play online once his computer was up and running. So now I can't play the game anymore. I'm not ready to drop $49.99 on this game yet. I'd buy L4D2 before that time came.

Hey don't you be dissing Il-2 mister <:mad:>

ArmA 2's flying is obviously a lot less realistic as it's primarily an infantry sim; however it is quite fun and the only thing better than dropping shit-tons of hurt on the enemy is being on the ground and seeing the spectacle from there. I really can't put into words the feeling you get as your fast air comes tearing down a valley at treetop height before dumping a series of guided bombs onto hostile positions - and remember that being a sim, someone on the ground (or in the air) needs to be calling those strikes in with a laser designator.

There's pretty much a role for everyone, it owns.

I'd totally upgrade my PC to play this (if I had the money). Looks really awesome.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/33920/

ArmA II Demo for those who want to see if the game is fun.

Bought this game on release day retail, like 100 fucking bucks, and I don't play it. At all :iamafag:

And I've got all the settings cranked up and it doesn't look as good as those videos do. Is it dx11 or something?

Game was really hardcore awesome when I played it, but it was crashing left right and center. But hey, I love the shit out of stalker(get CoP, is fucking amazing tbqfh), so I can deal with crashes. They've probably patched the shit out of this by now.

I'll have to play some more methinks. Those smoke effects enough just look fucking rad.

For those of you that play the game regularly, please tell me what factions you'd like to see aiding you on the map; in our version of superpowers, some towns may belong to different factions other than the ones you are directly fighting. As of right now we have the German Bundeswehr patrolling and occupyng a city, and we would love it if some people would suggest (and provide links to) more coalition or eastern countries.

The ADF, naturally. Check out the AAW weapons pack, it's amazing. I'm working (very slowly) on a basic 9-player co-op mission, I might post updates in here.

As for not looking as good? Mods, bro.

Mods galore for this game.

Also, the Demo for this game includes a buttload of content. 4 scenario missions, the entire boot camp tutorial, a limited version of the editor, and a good amount of units to play with. The ground combat is good, but the most fun comes out of flying the helicopters.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Boba

For those of you that play the game regularly, please tell me what factions you'd like to see aiding you on the map; in our version of superpowers, some towns may belong to different factions other than the ones you are directly fighting. As of right now we have the German Bundeswehr patrolling and occupyng a city, and we would love it if some people would suggest (and provide links to) more coalition or eastern countries.

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the austrian navy

hahahah i get it

Tried out the demo and for some reason the graphics were horrible, looked like none of the textures were loading and everything seemed to be in ultra low LOD... I played with the graphics settings and couldn't get anything to work... Ideas? I looked on Google briefly but I've been busy playing BFBC2 Beta with some IRL friends...

Are there any Canadian Forces skins in the game? Would be epic.

Operation Northstar. Quality is a bit iffy for some things, but it's better than nothing by a long way.

The game looks good on the highest setting, but like absolute trash on the lower settings. The LODs do seem to be really low for this game.

Yeah, BIS don't know how to optimise shit properly. They either don't do it at all, or they overdo it.