ARMA anyone?

ArmA: the only game where die-hard simulated soldiers will hold up an entire convoy for a lone rabbit on the road, but happily plow through a platoon of friendly soldiers at 90MPH.

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RIGHT?!

Oh no, letā€™s wait here for that one guy 500m away.

Assault the town? PEDAL TO THE METAL BOYS!

I feel like I am nannying the AI at times.

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@Franze I see what you mean now:

ā€œSo youā€™ve never done stealth in the campaign no? Okay cool, hereā€™s a enemy force stronger then before that you now have to evade. Also go straight through them. Good luck! Oh wait, canā€™t have you have any of your fun weapons. have this hand gun, I am sure youā€™ll do fineā€ - ARMA 3 speaking to me me in the Signal Lost mission(First Altis mission).

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Youā€™ve never ripped a squad to pieces with a handgun for the giggles?

Dare I say good man, you havenā€™t been properly utilizing the editor.

I donā€™t expect a handgun to be incredibly effective (real world experience talking there) but I do expect a 5.56 rifle at point-blank range to do more than give somebody giggle fits, especially when shot in the head.

Though ArmA3 does do a pretty good job of simulating handgun dynamics, Iā€™ll give it that.

I mean less flippantly. Arma 3 was in a weird spot there for a bit in 2014/2015. Armaā€™s damage model has four zones: legs, arms, torso, head. Your player has an overall health pool, and damage is applied to that depending upon where you are hit, arms and legs contribute less to the overall damage pool, but negatively effect speed, stamina and ability to aim. Torso and head shots contribute more damage to the overall damage pool.

Traditionally, the total amount of damage a player could take was directly linked to the type of unit they were playing. Rifleman were the default , ā€œheavily armoredā€ units like grenadiers or machine gunners could take more, less armored units like the non-combat fobbits and rebels could take less. Arma 3 started with this, but took steps to move away from it with the new inventory/uniform system. Iā€™ve been using ACE for so long I donā€™t remember the particulars of the interplay between the unit system, weapon caliber and how the armor worked, but it was very WIP there for a while. It has sense been ironed out.

Additionally, player biases also come into play. Back when I was knee deep in medical scripts for the SimHQ Arma group before ACE became a thing, I did a bunch of testing on this (namely capping AI in their face). Many times when people were complaining that the AI werenā€™t dying right they were either

  1. Not actually hitting the AI, or not landing as many hits as they hypothesized.
  2. Hitting the AI in non lethal areas (legs, arms)
  3. Hitting the AIā€™s weapons (Rifle, AT launcher), which are invincible and confer 0 damage to the unit.
  4. Hitting heavily armored units at such a range that they were not conveying much damage.

@TheAlmightySnark

Movement speed, stance, and distance (as well as ambient light) effect the AIā€™s ability to see you. If you go prone, sit still, and kemp boosh, you should be able to at least observe their patrol patterns.

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Yes, Iā€™m intimately familiar with ArmAā€™s hitpoint system, given that I put a custom set on the Apache to encompass a more diverse set of systems for script interaction. I also remember the dark ages of FP, which I started messing with mods back in '03. Up til recent changes in ArmA3, everything had a health pool and it was possible to, for example, blow up an M113 with an M60, given enough time/bullets (which wasnā€™t a whole lot in FP, as I recall. I think it was about 6 or 700 rounds). I donā€™t recall if it was ArmA1 or ArmA2, but they introduced mechanics in hitpoints/damage to ignore certain levels of damage depending on where it hit.

What had happened in the case of this soldier wasnā€™t hitting a weapon, but his helmet; this was a couple years ago, but it was a problem with just about all of ArmA3ā€™s ā€œlegacyā€ type weapons. Iā€™m sure theyā€™ve rebalanced since then, but it left a bad taste in my mouth to have a Tavor or a F2000 shooting what amounted to spitwads and then AI having no reaction to the hits at all. The modern/fictional weapons like the MX didnā€™t have these issues and generally performed as expected.

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I meanā€¦ They caught me so I was like okay, kill me and get it over with.

The AI player expended 3 magazines on me without hitting me. I was not moving, standing up straight and less then 50m from himā€¦

What the hell ARMA.

In FP you could at least say he hit the vodka hard that morning. I donā€™t know if that excuse works for ArmA3. Also, tactical rolling dodge FTW.

BIā€™s handling of small arms has always been flaky. For a game it can be a real balancing act, because how do you explain to people that an AKMS fired by a typical person with rudimentary training can hit anywhere within a 8-12" radius at 100m? An M4 with a red dot is only slightly better with typical ammo, and none of this gets into things like physical condition, a part that they did get fairly accurate ā€“ itā€™s real hard to shoot well after running your butt off and being shot at.

Problem is that the AI doesnā€™t seem to take this into account and you either get a case of ā€œIvan hit the bottle last nightā€ or ā€œDmitri passed the Spetsnaz sniper exam 5 minutes ago.ā€

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There has been a great deal of progress in this area in the last few years.

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Me and a friend tried the Apex coop campaign last year; AI X-ray vision still remains.

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What was their equipment level? what was the environment? time of day? were they grouped?

They donā€™t have X-ray vision. However once you are detected and they know enough about you to know your affiliation, they will be far harder to ditch. If you do break LOS, they will try and guestimate your position based off your last observed position an movement. You can observe all of how this works by turning on the AI GUI crutches. That said, in combat mode, if they can spot any part of you, even if itā€™s a pixel through a bush or a gap in a box, thatā€™s enough to refresh their last known position, and that information is communicated throughout the group.

If youā€™re careful and donā€™t set them off, you can get within 3m of them with a little luck. You can further murder their awareness via specific skill settings and selectively turning off parts of their FSM logic.

Is it a perfect system? no. A perfect system doesnā€™t exist, and certainly not on a system that fits under your desk.

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Itā€™s not an immersive system and more importantly, not fun. Thatā€™s my problem with it. This was a night/early morning mission, one of the stock missions of the campaign. No mods. We kept low and snuck up on a technical, coming at it from behind; suddenly, even though we were in the grass and not visible, the gunner turned around and lit both of us up despite being about 50m apart.

I might have understood if we were actively engaging and making a lot of noise, but we were being careful and not making a sound in poor visual conditions (including fog, which this mission had pretty bad). Iā€™d expect the AI to have some sort of penalty at the very least.

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:man_shrugging:

All I can say is these are problems I havenā€™t had in Arma for years. If Iā€™m spotted when I donā€™t want to be, the problem was generally PEBCAK. Either I wasnā€™t as stealthy as I thought I was, or someone I didnā€™t see spotted me from a direction I didnā€™t anticipate.

Thatā€™s why I keep saying that, without mods, the game is very schizophrenic. Some people get great experiences, others get really lousy ones. Mods at least allow us to tailor to individual tastes and expectations, even if doing so is one extra step to go through to enjoy the game. That was a huge reason why the Apache was self-contained ā€“ we didnā€™t want anyone to have to download a bunch of other mods to enjoy it, even if doing so meant we had to duplicate certain features included in other mods like CBA.

I never really liked arma 3. I tried playing the campaign, but there was no exposition, no direction (they did not seem to put much effort into making a decent story) and it was just the player character and one other AI against a swarm of enemy AI. The enemies did have ā€œx-ray visionā€ in my experience and it did not matter how much cover or concealment you had or how little noise you made.

The only BI games I truly enjoyed on its own (without mods) was Operation Flashpoint and Resistance. Arma 2 is okay, at least at the beginning of the campaign.

Hay, bouncy tanks are still a thing!

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All I can say is Iā€™ve seen what Iā€™ve seen. In two years of making missions for a multiplayer community, and another seven of making them for my own jollies. Across multiple hosts, single player and remote, as long as the host has decent performance the AI works as advertised.

Iā€™m undoubtedly biased, because present company not included, most of the times Iā€™ve heard these complaints, the person complaining about the AIā€™s supernatural abilities had just gotten repeatedly shot, usually immediately after making some variety of glaring mistake.

Squad is a pretty slick alternative if youā€™re looking to avoid the AI.

Just a reminder that this thread is originally about checking to see if anyone is interested in playing Arma and not intended to be a critique of the game. I understand that we all have opinions (and valid ones at that) but we donā€™t need to turn something positive (a call for those interested in getting together) into something negative.

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iagree

(Iā€™m still an ArmA fan too!)

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