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The DA’s have played some unusual games over the years, but this was a first for us: this was the first time that we were asked to be a scripted opposition.

The idea has a lot of merit if you think about it. Firstly, games often ebb and flow randomly. One side may gain the upper hand in an attack, but they loose too many men to reinforce the position and soon are driven back and it is the other team who are then on the offensive. Similar to a game of football. However, sometimes a team simply hammers all opposition to such an extent that the suffering team cannot fulfil their objectives at all. Sometimes they cannot get out of their safe zone. The game suddenly becomes unbalanced, tempers raise, cries of cheating go up and no fun is had at all.

Well, at least none by the team getting a kicking.

Contrast this with a scripted game. In a scripted game one team has knowledge of the layout, defences and shooting power of the other, but instead of using this knowledge to annihilate the opposition and ruin the game for all, they design a set of tactics that challenge but fall short of victory by a very small amount.

At least for a while.

Frankly, given the reputation of team Delta Alpha for “pushing shite back in” I was surprised that the organisers came to us to fulfil this role. Surprised but pleased. You see, the DA’s have wanted to show their ability to restrain themselves, to play the game with knowledge of the inside and yet willingly walk into night ambushes, heavily defended strategic points and overlapping arcs of fire without getting angry or upset. We wanted the challenge to see if we could do that, and so we did.

Milsim is not CQB, indeed the reality of this hit me the moment I arrived at Zulu. We were billeted in a lofty building full of dust, only one small light and we were sleeping on the hard concrete floor. We had it easy, the OPFOR were camped out in the forest areas with only what they could carry and rain had been forecast! Our roll mats came out and sleeping bags were deployed, one smart ass even put up a tent (wish I had thought of that!). This was our safe zone and the one place in the whole camp we could relax in true DA style.

Our brief was to operate out of this building under central command of a member of staff who would feed us attack and withdrawal orders as well as supply vehicles for us to “airdrop” with. On assault, we were to push the enemy, but not break them. We used our normal team structure of commander “Sockdog” (so called because he is tenacious like trying to get a dog to let go of a sock) to direct two fireteams that can split into 5 man sub-units under a 2IC.  This then gives us Sergeant, lieutenant and commander roles. Every tropper was under command and no-one went lone wolf, not even me. This worked really well in keeping our options flexible and enabling us to withdraw pressure from the field in bite size chunks, or turn it up by attacking a flank.

The idea was that we would be ordered to withdraw after a certain time, even if that meant we had to abandon that assault’s objectives. We had to regroup and launch multiple pronged attacks all over the Opfor controlled area and try and take hostages of a few “CIA” agents hidden amongst their number.

As the night drew in, we were to act out the role of Insurgents buying arms from gunrunners (Team Gray Fox) by performing “drops” at various sites around the base. These drops were to be defended, but in a haphazard manner to allow the Opfor to observe them and generate the next set of their objectives.  We also had to attack their base during the night and walk right into a three line ambush, getting cut to pieces in the process. When we died, we were to act wounded and cry out in pain, shout “man down!”, panic, etc. Anything we could do to increase the realism for the other team was to be attempted.

I hope that you all can see how much more fun this was for both sides! I loved it, being that I come from a role player MMO background. Anyway, at this juncture I will say no more; this was the first time we have done this for an organisation, but hopefully it will not be the last!

The film.

This was also the first time that I have made a film with my new Bashocam. This new model is a VIO POV 1 and is much higher quality than the previous camera. Video is saved as high definition files and then converted to be used in my editing program: Sony’s Vegas. My old camera is now tied on the front of my Magpul PTS and will be generating guncam footage for those Multikill moments. In this film I have outlined the basic storyline of the game, and then put down the best footage I took. It was a bit of learning process and I will be using a zoom camera as well next time to capture the many Opfor I shot.

I hope that you all enjoy it!

High Quality Version on Vimeo:

Operation Zulu from Basho Matsuo on Vimeo.

YouTube version:

Outside Context has been through a major overhaul and now all the airsoft articles are collected into a series for easy reach by the readership. I have migrated to a new, much more powerful, server that can handle the sort of traffic I get these days. I invite you all to come have a look!

Regards,

Basho

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