I was watching the History channel once ages ago and they were talking about how Vietcong/NVA (can’t remember which) would set up ‘flak traps’ to ambush US helicopters. They would have english-speaking radio operators call in a medivac, and when the helos would arrive, they would open up at them from concealed positions.
Some time later, I was playing Planetside (a Massively multiplayer online FPS) and a light bulb went off in my head. Enemy dropships fly into continent through a warpgate sending reinforcements. They drop their troops into bases, functioning kind of like paratroopers. They also send supplies to bases with the dropships. Now, I’ve defended bases, and the dropships are a HUGE target, but they are so strong it is impossible to shoot them down before they unload 12 guys right smack in the base courtyard. So I decided to find a way to stop them before they got anywhere NEAR our base.
I was really fond of the anti-aircract MAX (armored exo suit) and used to hang around warpgates shooting down aircraft that passed by. But I couldn’t shoot down a dropship all by myself, so I formed a special squad of anti aircraft guys. We’d go out in the mountains which were directly in the path the dropships flew (the pilots were really lazy and often just flew in a straight line to their destination, so it was easy to predict where they’d be). When a dropship approached, we’d attack it, and more often than not we would shoot it down. We started getting TONS of kills this way- it was a very productive strategy on continents that had a lot of fighting going on. Enemy reinforcements would pour in from their warpgate, and anything that flew never got past us.
The opponents were slow to adapt. Eventually they started escorting the dropships with ground-attack aircraft, but they had terrible organization- When missiles started flying, the escorts would turn yeller and bug out rather than help their stricken dropship :wally: When it was slow, we would have a player send an enemy player a /tell, requesting reinforcements. Now, a little bit of checking will reveal the faction of a player, but a lot of people didn’t even bother and they would just assume the message they got was from a friendly. So we would say, “Need 3 squads in dropships to rendezvous at (coordinates)” and ten minutes later, they would show up! :eek: it was absolutely hilarious how easy it was to sucker them.
The best part about the whole thing was the exo armor we used (Sparrow MAX). This was a pretty benign Anti-aircraft weapon- nobody really thought anything of it because at the time the way to get kills was to get a ground attack aircraft and spam rockets at infantry. But once we started disrupting supply drops and insertion runs, there was a HUGE uproar about how ‘overpowered’ it was :rolleyes:
I think my biggest gripe about that community was how much they wanted the devs to change a weapon rather than actually developing tactics to COUNTER it (like we did)