ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

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Fallschirmjager
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ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Fallschirmjager »

After getting good buying advice on this forum, I decided I will try again/

I am thinking about picking this up next time Steam throws it out sale. The current price is $45 with ARMA 2 being 39.99 and Arrowhead being a $5 throw in. When the summer sale begins at the end of this month it might get slashed down to $22.

I played the demo at the end of last year and kind of unimpressed. The game seemed to have potential but even in the demo I could see scripting and trigger bugs. I can handle some bugs and I have played buggy games in the past. I despise paying full price for a game and getting bugs, but if I know there is going to be bugs and I pay a discount price for the game I can lower my standards some if the rest of the game shines.
But worse than the bugs is that the game played horrible on my system. My system is about 15 months old but still IMO almost top notch.
It is a Intel i7 920 overclocked to 3.2 GHZ
6 GB of Ram
And 2x Geforce 295 GTX video cards

It should be able to handle a two year old game pretty well. I first tried the game at ultra high settings and it was a slide show. I then turned it down to medium settings and the game ran about 20-25 FPS on the ground but when driving at high speeds it was 15 FPS and when flying it was 5-10 FPS. It made flying even harder than it had to be and led to unfortunate endings when my jet or helicopter would end up in a tree or ploughed into the side of a mountain.

When the game did work correctly I really enjoyed it. I loved the long range infantry combat and the great deal of weaponry and vehicles.

Have the patches improved the performance of the game any? Does anyone have a system similar to me or weaker but still get good performance?
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jomni
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by jomni »

Sorry but I can't comment on the hardware aspect.  I just bought the game recently and fininshed two campaigns already (Operaiton Arrowhead and PMC add-on).  Missions are fun and not buggy.
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Mundy »

I play every weekend with my brothers.

They have been optomizing more with each patch.

I have a high-end AMD quad core that I built about a year and a half ago. No real issues, although my GeForce 285 tends to get real hot. Turning anti-aliasing and some of the other tweeks off will help with FPS. I tend to keep more average settings. I keep view distance at around 3,500 m.

My brothers run older dual-core machines with the cheaper GeForce cards and they've had no issues speed-wise. We do use middle of the road settings, since the play is more important than squeezing every last bit of eye-candy out of it. We were hardcore OFP players for years, so ArmA/ArmA2 have just been bonuses on their own.

Some of the speed issues will depend on the mission. I downloaded a particular Takistan mission with a Rourke's Drift type of theme. It's the only one which will grind my machine to a halt, so I'm guessing there's an overkill of objects on that one. I've created test scenarios involving set-piece defenses while increasing the amount of enemies and things have held up fine. My last test involved a weak platoon holding off over a company's worth of troops plus armor.

I spend lots of time re-making our old OFP missions for ArmA2. I'll be picking it up more when the Cold War Reloaded group finishes the rest of the original OFP maps. We're finding that things we could take for granted aren't so in ArmA2, when playing the same missions. The AI has gotten better since then and we've found ourselves unexpectedly flanked at times.

In the end, I would say having a halfway decent vid card, a dual-core processor and plenty of RAM should do the trick. Not getting greedy on the graphics settings helps too.

Ed-
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Lützow »

ARMA II is a real hardware hog and took me quite some tinkering with graphic options on my 3-years-old machine. There are three more flaws to be mentioned: vehicle pathing, team AI and lack of melee combat.

However, if you can live with these shortcomings, you get a hardcore infantry simulation, where missions can take hours for accomplishing. In addition there is a plethora of free content available on fansites.
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Fallschirmjager »

ORIGINAL: Mundy

I play every weekend with my brothers.

They have been optomizing more with each patch.

I have a high-end AMD quad core that I built about a year and a half ago. No real issues, although my GeForce 285 tends to get real hot. Turning anti-aliasing and some of the other tweeks off will help with FPS. I tend to keep more average settings. I keep view distance at around 3,500 m.

My brothers run older dual-core machines with the cheaper GeForce cards and they've had no issues speed-wise. We do use middle of the road settings, since the play is more important than squeezing every last bit of eye-candy out of it. We were hardcore OFP players for years, so ArmA/ArmA2 have just been bonuses on their own.

Some of the speed issues will depend on the mission. I downloaded a particular Takistan mission with a Rourke's Drift type of theme. It's the only one which will grind my machine to a halt, so I'm guessing there's an overkill of objects on that one. I've created test scenarios involving set-piece defenses while increasing the amount of enemies and things have held up fine. My last test involved a weak platoon holding off over a company's worth of troops plus armor.

I spend lots of time re-making our old OFP missions for ArmA2. I'll be picking it up more when the Cold War Reloaded group finishes the rest of the original OFP maps. We're finding that things we could take for granted aren't so in ArmA2, when playing the same missions. The AI has gotten better since then and we've found ourselves unexpectedly flanked at times.

In the end, I would say having a halfway decent vid card, a dual-core processor and plenty of RAM should do the trick. Not getting greedy on the graphics settings helps too.

Ed-

What I found is that the game did not look at that great at medium settings. You mentioned a view distance of 3.5 KM. Is this adequate when you are flying a jet or helicopter?

This feedback though is encouraging. I bet the demo on Steam has not been updated and is still version 1.0
And the sales during the summer sale get crazy. The game could be marked down as much as 66% or even 75%. If it is then that would be well worth taking a chance on.

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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Lützow »

Well, regarding the fun factor it's 90% title, but you should rather focus on infantry. There a better games for air combat. Like the DCS series from Eagle Dynamics.
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Fred98 »

I have “Operation Arrowhead” and the add-on game “Reinforcements”.

If you enjoy infantry level fighting this is a fantastic game!

In first person shooter mode you can play as an individual, as a squad leader or a platoon leader.

In the top down 2D mode, you get a view much like Close Combat. Here you can play as an individual, a squad leader, platoon leader, company commander, battalion commander etc etc. There is a limit but I have not reached it.

There is a massive variety of pistols, rifles, machine guns, AT launchers, AA launchers from the US, Russia and British armed forces.

And you can add armoured vehicles to support the infantry or in an Armour v Armour clash.

This a wonderful game I see keeping for 5 years or more!

I bought a new PC a year ago. The specs:

i7 930 2.80 processor

Nividia GTX 470 1.2G RAM graphics card

6 Gig of RAM

The game is set in Afghanistan. I have never been there but it looks authentic.

One of the maps could be set in Scottish heath land and that too looks good.

There are some who complain the graphics are not bright, shiny, colourful, not "model railway looking" or whatever but to me it looks very authentic.

All military enthusiasts must buy this game!
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Arctic Blast »

Apparently, the MP portion of Arma 2 is about to be released as freeware.
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by jomni »

Just to add, my favorite mode of play is Combat Mission where you drop in and do random mini-missions until your extraction helo picks you up after 30mins / 1 hr / 2hrs.
 
There's also a multiplayer coop mode that gives you random orders to capture towns around the map but the travel time from base to frontline gets quite boring because of the size of the map.
 
I also have lots of fun tinkering with the mission editor and also www.plannedassault.com.
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Fallschirmjager »

I only plan on playing this single player. Can a lot of this stuff be done in single player?
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by jomni »

Yes. A LOT.  There are many game modes aside from the campaign.
The Combat Mission, I mentioned earlier is one of them and you can just keep on playing that mode several times.
But if you get familiar with making your own missions, then there will be more single player fun.
You can also host a multiplayer game yourself and let bots control the rest.
As mentioned earlier, you can also go into tactical command perspective.
You can drive stuff.  But I avoid helos and planes as they're not modeled realistically.
Tanks are decent but is not Steel Beasts.
 
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by JudgeDredd »

Where is the Combat Mission mode?
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Fred98 »

ORIGINAL: JudgeDredd

Where is the Combat Mission mode?


It is called "My Mission"

Select this and there are only 3 or 4 variables you need to select. Save and begin the mission.

"My Missions" are a lot of fun !

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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by JudgeDredd »

lol - thanks. I had seen that, but I thought I must have attempted to create a mission or something!
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by jomni »

Yup. Under "My Missions" one of the modes is called "Combat".
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Mundy »

ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager

What I found is that the game did not look at that great at medium settings. You mentioned a view distance of 3.5 KM. Is this adequate when you are flying a jet or helicopter?

This feedback though is encouraging. I bet the demo on Steam has not been updated and is still version 1.0
And the sales during the summer sale get crazy. The game could be marked down as much as 66% or even 75%. If it is then that would be well worth taking a chance on.

Most of the in-game maps are rugged enough where 3.5 is enough. I can probably up it. Usually I'm flying low enough. Even in the jets, I'm usually well under 1000 m

While this isn't a more hardcore flight sim like LOMAC or Black Shark (if we could only combine them!) I think the helicoptor modeling isn't really bad.

On this this series shows, all the way back to OFP: if you're on foot and an enemy AFV is around, they are very, very scary. Same goes for gunships. Back in the first ArmA, I was hiding in a barn with a Hind hovering over me chewing up all my friends with its gun. (and nothing I could do about it) I could almost hear the empty cases hitting around me.

If the demo is still 1.0, the game has been seriously optomized since then. I know that if you fly at higher altitudes, it won't try to render every object anymore like it used to.

I see that ArmA3 has been announced. I wish they'd slow down a bit. I don't think we were playing ArmA1 as long as we did good 'ol OFP.

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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Fallschirmjager »

Good news! Best buy had the game for 29.99 (Combined Operations) and I had a bunch of points saved up and I had a 25% off certificate from an e-mail I got because my birthday is coming up. So I wound up getting the game for $11

I loaded up both discs and the latest patch. I went to the armory and ran the bench marks and I get very very good performance out of the game.
1920x1200 with everything very high and 4x AA gets me about 35 FPS. Flying believe it or not gets me close to 60.
The game must be CPU dependent vs GPU dependent because the more moving pieces you add to the game the more it slows down. Not necessarily how many polygons the game has to crunch on screen. But the # of processes.
I run a i7 920 over clocked to 3.2 GHZ
My CPU is probably holding back my twin video cards. I have read people over clocking my same CPU to 4.2 GHZ which would probably net me a big performance gain. But my motherboard I don't think is up for the task and I don't want to increase the voltage to the CPU nor do I want to risk stability or long term health of the chip.

Otherwise I am impressed with the game. Infantry combat is very fun. The controls are a little stiff and not very fluid but they work. Vehicle driving and combat after a few minutes feel good. Using a IFV makes you a one man killing machine. The auto cannon, machine gun, ATGM combo makes you a stand off threat.
Flying jets is pretty easy. I can stay airborne and keep myself from unfortunate demises in the sides of mountains. But I can't shoot anything for shit. Attacks runs are hard to line up and the default view inside the aircraft is useless.
I wish there was a view like in IL-2 where it completely took away the planes cockpit and just had an aiming reticle.
If you switch to third person view it makes staying in the air easier but makes it even harder to aim.
I like the auto land feature too. That is handy.

Helicopters on the other hand are a complete mess. I can get one into the air and do a reasonably good job of keeping it in the air. But I wobble and spin all over the place on my way to an objective and I can't do anything to get it to be a steady gun platform. I have no idea how I am going to be a gunship pilot.

All in all I really like the game.
I wish there were more stand alone missions. The quick mission generator looks to be fun but a little too generic.

Also, in one of the the reviews I read a reviewer said a really good training mission (it's not a training mission but a stand alone mission) is one where you are tasked with defending a hill against waves of enemies and all you are given is a G-36 and 150 rounds of ammunition and a good defensive position.
However, I cannot find this mission in the game. Has anyone encountered it?
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Fallschirmjager »

More comments. The voice acting in this game is simply awful. Among the worst I have ever heard. Maybe for Arma 3 they can spend a few dollars and get some native English speakers into the studio.

#2
How do you climb a damn ladder in this game? I have figured out every key except this one. Nothing I press will make me climb up the ladder.
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by jomni »

ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager

More comments. The voice acting in this game is simply awful. Among the worst I have ever heard. Maybe for Arma 3 they can spend a few dollars and get some native English speakers into the studio.

#2
How do you climb a damn ladder in this game? I have figured out every key except this one. Nothing I press will make me climb up the ladder.

Operation Flashpoint is worse. It has improved a bit.

For the ladder: If you position yourself correctly and an Icon will appear then you press the action button (center mouse button).
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RE: ARMA II and Operation Arrowhead

Post by Hertston »

ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager

Helicopters on the other hand are a complete mess. I can get one into the air and do a reasonably good job of keeping it in the air. But I wobble and spin all over the place on my way to an objective and I can't do anything to get it to be a steady gun platform. I have no idea how I am going to be a gunship pilot.

I gave up, it's actually harder than 'flying' helicopters on full realism in MSFS. It's just as finickity but the physics are all wrong as well.
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