Eight soldiers, not one box

On 14 October I played the latest build. Same mission as before: one section out on patrol, a contact, a casualty. This time the section was eight soldiers, not one box. The video is above; this is what it showed us.

What is new since playtest 2

• The room has textures and lighting. I got sick of staring at grey boxes. It is not the final look, and Ryan would want me to say so, but it makes the room feel like a room.
• The sky follows the time of day. Play into the evening and it gets darker.
• Shift to run.
• A big screen beside the two feed monitors. It repeats whichever monitor you pick, so you can read it from across the room. Still two feeds, still five sources.
• The drone camera zooms.
• The section is eight soldiers. They walk in single file, each treading where the soldier in front trod. That is how you moved when the threat was buried IEDs: one long line in the footprints of the soldier ahead, until contact. Then the job is weapons facing the enemy, not following the soldier in front.
• Select the drone on the sand table, press F and pick a unit, and the drone follows it.
• An ORBAT board on the wall: platoon commander, platoon sergeant and every section by role. Names come later. They will be invented, and checked so that none belongs to someone who fell.
• The radios moved against the wall, which gives more room and makes them easier to read.
• When the power goes, an emergency light shows you the way out. You follow the cable to the generator.

What worked

• The patrol stayed in file along its route.
• The section was hit from the rear. Six of them went prone and returned fire.
• One was hit, another gave first aid, and when I placed the casualty collection point and sent the stretcher party, the casualty was on the way back to it.
• The generator went down mid-mission and I got it running again.

What did not

1. The feeds are too pixelated. I want a degraded feed, not blocks. The soldiers need to look like soldiers through it.
2. The drone follows its unit in jerks. It needs to stay on them smoothly.
3. The drone's token on the sand table stayed where it was while the drone followed the section. Someone in the room should move it as the reports come in.
4. The map on the board picked up a cloud's shadow. It is a picture of the ground taken from above, and it was taken in weather. It needs to look the same whatever the sky is doing.
5. At the contact the two soldiers at the back ran off before rejoining. I do not know why yet.
6. The casualty started moving before the soldier sent to carry them got there. Walking wounded, so you could argue they crawled. We will fix it anyway.

What happens next

Fixing that list. Then the drills: how a section reacts to contact is mine to write down properly, and the soldiers will follow it. After that, the rest of the first slice: an enemy that notices your habits, and the review at the end of each mission.

Still placeholder

The art, the captions and the words on the net. They say what is happening rather than how it would be said. The soldiers are blocks with weapons.

Come and tell us what we are getting wrong on the Discord.