Ye olde ArmA recommendations thread

[The Vanished One]

I've been meaning to try one of the BIS shooters for some time. I tried OFP first, but the sum of dated visuals, poor performance and miscellaneous annoyances turned me away. Too bad, I had excellent mod suggestions for it in an old topic. ArmA II and OA are too much for my laptop, so in the end I bought ArmA gold. Since I know we have a lot of experts of the series in Codexia I thought I could ask a couple of questions here instead of registering at the BIS forums or Armaholic. Specifically, I'd like to know about:

*Ideal AI settings for "realistic" allies/enemies that can shoot "like real trained soldiers", no better and no worse. This page in the wiki tells me I can customize the AI quite a bit, should I bother or choosing "expert" is enough?

*Missions, though I'll only need them in a long time. I had a look at the list at Armaholic but there are few ratings and comments. I wonder if there are some well known fan-made missions that I should try before randomly downloading stuff based only on the description.

Aside from all of this, the performance is barely acceptable even on rather low settings. I'll try lowplants as suggested here, but I'm not keeping my hopes up. I also had this strange bug where the game would slow down every 1-2 second but without the FPS dropping. I know that the answer is "buy a new PC", but if there is some essential tweaking that I should do, please let me know.

Thanks for any suggestions.

As for my experience with the game up to now, it's different from anything I've seen before and I like it. Not that I'm very good, I die a lot and I don't think I'll ever leave the comfort of infinite saves per mission (though I set most of the other difficulty options under "cadet" to match those in "veteran"). I can sort of understand that if you're used to this kind of game and won't accept a compromise anything else must seem dumbed down.

I also installed the Cold War Rearmed mod. It comes with two entire campaigns and it looks pretty good, if a bit buggy. I think I'll play that even more than the original game in the next days.

 

[Suchy]

Get ArmA version of Zeus AI, imo best AI mod. No need to mess with default AI settings, or you can end up with enemies being inhumanly accurate, taking you with a headshot from 300m, through a smoke screen, at night. Or complete dumbasses wasting ammo on everything but their target.
As for campaigns - the OC is shit, but there are some neat user made. I totally recommend FDF mod. The campaign is good, also comes with awesome sound mod and a bunch of fixes. I always used this mod, even with completely unrelated missions.
CWR is nice, haven't finished it, but I spent quite some time on it and it seemed perfectly playable.
Don't install ACE for single player gaming, it's a total hog and makes some missions unplayable. Great stuff for online coops though.
In vanilla hiding behind bushes is fucked up, enemies can spot you right through them. There's a mod to fix it, I forgot its name though. Look in Misc section on Armaholic.

 

[baronjohn]

I highly suggest you play the 3 OFP campaigns and just skip ArmA 1/2.

ArmA 1/2 have nicer graphics, but absolutely no quality control and really bad campaigns.

 

[The Vanished One]

@ Suchy: I couldn't find a Zeus AI version for the first ArmA. However I dug out the old OFP thread where you suggested this:

http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/6thSense.euack3

I'll try that. I'm also downloading FDF (looks really cool), and will get the ai blocking vegetation mod.

Everyone seems to agree that the ArmA OC is horrible so I'll just stick with CWR for the moment. If I can learn how to play it that is, I barely made it to the third mission (the one where you find a russian patrol in a forest) and the russians killed me a dozen times out of nowhere while I have no idea where I should go and my armored support can't enter the forest (the M113 just smashes into trees). I wonder if I should just abandon my idling commander and retreat to base, but that would be unprofessional.

 

[Trash]

I highly suggest you play the 3 OFP campaigns and just skip ArmA 1/2.

ArmA 1/2 have nicer graphics, but absolutely no quality control and really bad campaigns.

This. Unless you decide to go multiplayer.




Then just install BF2.

 

[Suchy]

@ Suchy: I couldn't find a Zeus AI version for the first ArmA. However I dug out the old OFP thread where you suggested this:

http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/6thSense.euack3

I'll try that. I'm also downloading FDF (looks really cool), and will get the ai blocking vegetation mod..

Oh yea, that's what I meant. For some reason that ZeusAI name got stuck on me. The OC is still better than pretty much any other military game out there, except it's shit compared to OFP and even Arma2 campaign.

 

[The Vanished One]

Well, I'm starting to get the hang of it, although I still die a lot and the performance is barely good enough to shoot targets. Hard game, but rewarding.
The CWR campaign is nice, I like how things keep getting worse and worse in the first few missions, makes for many intense moments.
I also like how the same mission - or even a segment of it - can be very different between reloads because of the changing fortunes of the AI. In the latest occasion, at first my whole squad was destroyed by a Shilka, forcing me to go and find a rocket launcher to take it down. In the second run my comrades managed to hit it immediately, and the rest of the mission required me to do nothing at all.
There are a few annoyances, such as having to go through a set of checkpoints without much reason to do so in a couple of missions and not very clear objectives here and there. Still much better than all military shooters I've played up to now.

 

[baronjohn]

You should know that the Arma 1 engine is by far the shittiest. It's possible to copy ArmA 1 maps to ArmA 2 and they run about a hundred times smoother.

 

[The Vanished One]

Are you sure? I tried the OA demo and it was barely playable at the lowest settings in open desert with four people in total on the map.