Artillery

We now have Rik’s advanced artillery system in. I won’t bother explaining it all because there’s training for that, but it’s a really cool system. This is currently only available on siege, because I’m waiting on chaza to do stuff before I can do any work on domi or insurgency.

A quick note on this, after chaza’s next input there will be automatic rejection on any pull requests that contain a change to an SQM file. This is because I have to spend days going through each file and looking for errors, it’s just not worth the 30 minutes it saves me from doing the work myself.

Back onto the artillery, there is a light gun available on takistan siege, which has been converted into a proper firebase. The ballistic computer is on the table next to the gun and boxes of 105mm can be procured from the spawner. And yes, you can direct fire with it.

Factions

2 new factions have been introduced to siege, again I can’t do anything to domi or insurgency at the moment. The first is US Army 1990’s in woodland camo, created by Rik a couple of weeks ago but hasn’t had a place since recently. It’s now available on chernarus siege 90’s, which is also new.

The second is the Afghan National Army. Made by myself, these units represent a moderately equipped section in early 2010’s, with a full complement of ex-russian kit but pre-M16/M240 upgrade. They’ve got AKM’s, RPG’s, a PKM and a marksman with an SVD. This means that they exist in the sweet spot where they can be used for modern and 90’s, so they’re now available in all afghan siege maps and will migrate to insurgency when possible.

Both of these sections happen to be missing sights apart from the Afghan SVD, and testing showed a really neat playstyle of actually needing to assault positions rather than sitting on a hill and plinking.

Siege Mode

Vehicles have now been unlocked, and the movement restriction has been removed, you are now free to go anywhere. I didn’t get around to putting the extra objective descriptions in the ingame diary so I’ll describe it here:

Number 1 priority is to defend the base. If enemies get in the base for an extended period of time then the mission fails. In future this will be different, you’ll have the option of setting up a patrol base like in insurgency and spawn on there, so you can lose the base but you have to get it back and the AI will defend it from you instead.

As well as defending the base, you can go out and assault the enemy strongholds. These aren’t mapped like in insurgency, and they’re not the same every time you play the mission. You’ll need to work out where they’re coming from, and send out a patrol to smash it. There will be a garrison force at the location, and the amount of damage you do to the enemy there corresponds to how much the enemy can throw enemies at you from that location. This, like your own resources, will not regenerate. This is more effective than a whack a mole method, assaulting a position drains the enemies ability to bring in reinforcements (not to mention drains them of manpower) and if you somehow smashed every position in the map the enemy attack on base would be reduced to a trickle.

Future

Insurgency and domi will be getting a crew rebalance soon, with multinational vehicle crews that can choose between US and UK vehicles instead of separate crews with unnecessary faff. Siege mode has a couple of upgrades in store before I consider it feature complete, namely a limited respawn system and the patrol base/overrun system.

I forgot to mention, there's now a little laptop in siege that you can ace interact with to get an idea of how many enemies are currently moving toward your area. This is super simple and inspired by the rather snazzy system bose has created for insurgency and domi where players can interact with a folder or radio and get a visualisation of where friendly sections are from base, so people can connect in, look at this folder and then have all the sections pointed out to them on the map, as well as what direction they're heading in. I'll be putting this in a fresh changelog with a screenshot of it working when it's in the missions and on the server, but for the moment I'm still hamstrung on the mission file changes.