Operation Flashpoint: On Fieldcraft.

I looked up a walkthrough on Gamefaqs for advice on the escape mission that I was so thoroughly stuck on. It turns out that this isn't Far Cry: if you kill one soldier, the others won't forget that you're there no matter how long you wait afterward, and I was constantly opening the mission by taking out a Russian who was in range and coming fairly close to my position. I'd previously accused them of cheating (though I removed that from the post on consideration); but it turns out that their AI, rather than being too unrealistic, was not unrealistic enough.

Armed with this knowledge, I spotted a line of bushes running almost entirely from one forest to another (or rather, the Gamefaqs guide spotted it, and I followed its advice), and was able to sneak from the one to the other, and onward to the eaves of the forest and the open road and clearing between it and my evacuation point, much more straightforwardly. I discovered in the process that Russian fieldcraft is bad. The incident I mentioned earlier was not the only time I got to nearly bayonet range; in fact, there was one mission where I was undetected within about two meters of a Russian soldier -- as I put it to Pete Takeshi, close enough to tie his shoelaces together. I died shortly afterwards, though; in worrying about evading him, I'd become visible to one of his squadmates (although I don't remember the details; perhaps I tugged too hard when I went to untie his shoes).

I also managed to make the M203 work at last! There was a squad I had to fight my way past to cross the clearing; after far too many deaths and reloadings, I finally beat them -- they were marching in single file, and I planted an M203 round in the middle of their column, then shot the one survivor and ran over to the other woods. I was promptly captured by Spetsnaz who had learned about our secondary evac point and wiped out everyone who had come there earlier, and just as promptly liberated by a resistance group (after three deaths: once when they threw a grenade that caught me in my tent, once when I ran out to escape before all the Spetsnaz were preoccupied, and once when I tried to get a clear view of the fighting and got hit by a stray bullet).

I went on to fight a couple of missions with the commandos. They used the same squad formations as the US, but did a better job of it: when they attacked a village, they started by reconnoitering it, locating as many troops as possible, and then engaged from the eaves of a forest rather than trying to run up to the enemy. We won that battle conclusively -- I had several retries, but mostly because I was getting too clever for my own good and tried to engage before our second team, attacking from the south, had knocked out the Russians' tank. In the second mission, we made a ridiculously brazen plan to drive a troop truck through several checkpoints and an occupied city to link up with our main base to the south. (Speaking of which: why on Earth would a rebel group that builds its secondary camps in forests make its primary base a ruined castle? Is this hiding in plain sight, on the assumption that the Russians would assume that no one would be so stupid? I think it's likelier that it's just a mistake by the campaign designers; the right place for a resistance base is in the middle of a major city, where the steady flow of business and the frequent arrival and departure of strangers is enough to conceal a great deal of guerrilla activity. "The guerrilla moves through the people like a fish through the sea" -- why use a kiddie pool when you can swim in the ocean?)

The ridiculous plan worked about as well as it sounds -- we bribed our way through the first checkpoint, manned by standard-issue zero-morale, zero-loyalty Soviet conscripts (in Stalin's words, "in a hot fire even wet wood will burn"), but there was an officer at the second who demanded to see what was in the back of the truck. Could we really not have hidden our men under packing crates or something? This is a video game, I'm sure there would be enough of them to go around... (Operation Flashpoint actually scores pretty well on the Crate Review System, if memory serves; I wasn't really watching for them, but I think I've only seen a few barrels.)

Anyhow, we set a new world record in deploying from the truck and wiping out the Russian garrison (and did it on the first try -- I didn't die in that part of the fighting even once), and beat off several subsequent attacks before retreating into the woods with light casualties (omitting a few replays here, like the one where our LAW gunner, euphoric from knocking out two approaching troop trucks in as many minutes, decided to march off in the general direction of Moscow). For no discernible reason (except perhaps that they'd read my post that talked about where you really want to position your heavy weapons to defend an objective), there was a Russian garrison high on the slope of a cruelly steep mountain, which was much harder to get past; but we were in the clear after that. In my successful run through this mission, I had no fewer than twelve kills, and we reached the castle with only one man dead. (The rebels' AI is just plain better: their captain made a point of moving his squad to cover, and I saw the ordinary rebels moving from cover to cover or fighting pressed up against the walls of houses, as opposed to standing or lying in the open with no thought for concealment like both the US and the Soviet troops do in this game, even when cover is readily available.)

Also, did I mention that I figured out where the game is set? We're fighting for control of the islands of New Ruritania, the only Pacific archipelago entirely peopled by generic Eastern Europeans. It's embarrassingly obvious that they wanted to set this game in Poland and Germany -- although that doesn't explain the WWI-French settlement names, of course.

The last mission (preceded by a guard-duty mission in which I don't have as much to say, except that I learned that guarding an objective by watching it from cover works very poorly if the infiltrators approach from the other side of the objective) was a matter of going out with a Poolean bang. I and one other soldier laid mines on a road to intercept a squadron of four Russian tanks, who drove into our ambush quite enthusiastically, with no more reconnaissance than four Russians looking out the windows of the Soviet equivalent to a jeep. Shouldn't they have realized that the long hedge running right next to the road, where I and the other soldier were hiding, was a really good place to set up an ambush -- and that the town was so poorly defended that only a lunatic would fail to set one up? Regardless, they merrily drove on their way (the anti-vehicle mines required more ground pressure than a jeep can exert), and the tank column continued (did I mention that the "scouts" were making no attempt to match the tank column's speed, either?); the mines were just past the north end of the hedge (I, the other soldier, and a really big crate of LAWs were hiding on the south edge). Two tanks were knocked out by the mines, and I moved to the edge of the hedges and took out the other two with LAWs (although I had one mission where I aimed for the treads of one tank, hit it twice, didn't knock it out, and was shot by it; the next time I aimed for the joint of the turret and the chassis, with much better results); my kill count for the end of that mission was one T-72, one T-80, and six crewmen (two of whom escaped their tanks and engaged us; I killed them with LAW rounds fired through soft cover).

And so, it's on to learning about tanks. Perhaps to compensate for the very good (especially for 2001!) infantry AI, driving a tank is a three-way argument between the driver, the tank commander, and the tank itself, which knows it's going to get all scratched up if it tries to go through those bushes.

(Or perhaps they grow wild tank traps here in East Ruritania, as Pete Takeshi hypothesized.)

By the way: the game admits that the Russians aren't adhering to their tactical doctrine (which actually makes ours look pretty darned good by comparison); in a conversation, an officer expresses serious doubt that these are really Russians, since they look like Russians, they're driving Russian tanks, but they're fighting like nothing he's ever seen before...