This post contains light spoilers about the original campaign.

I don't own the ArmA re-issue (might still get it one day), but I own the original boxed Operation Flashpoint and both the add-ons. I'm probably going to go back and replay them soon, but there's something peculiar I remember about its patches and difficulty.

I finished the original campaign when the game came out. Later, I played the add-ons, made my own missions, engaged in multiplayer, and so on. But when, after that, I once decided to play the original campaign again, it suddenly felt like it's become considerably harder than it was the first time around. Some missions were near impossible to win.

The one I remember in particular is where you are cut off from your team, lying in a forest on Everon, and you have to get back to the base before all of the island is evacuated. It's a very stealthy mission that, at least in the first part in the forest, you only have a chance of surviving if no enemy soldier spots you. It always was a hard mission, but on the second play-through it was incredible!

Then I figured out why: it was because between my 2 play-throughs I had patched the game. The first time I played it on probably on v1.00. By the second attempt I had it on GOTY version 1.96. I figured out that the enemies had been made much stronger with some of the patches. Not actually a better A.I., but simply higher viewing distance, better spotting skills, higher shooting accuracy. When the patches were released, probably not many people were still playing the original campaign. So it seems that the enemies have been made massively more difficult, throwing some campaign missions totally out of balance because they were designed for the original, easier enemies. This has been confirmed to me by other players on the official BI forums. It's possible that I wanted to play on harder settings the second time around, so that the game was at least still somehow beatable on regular or lower difficulty. But back then I downgraded to my original, unpatched boxed copy of the game, and then I was able to beat it on hard difficulty much better than with the patched version. I remember all this because I made a mental note back then, that if I ever wanted to replay the game, I should leave it unpatched for the original campaign, because that felt like the way it was meant to be played.

Now here's the ArmA-labelled re-released, version 1.99. And I wonder, since this seems again to be aimed at new players as well, who will start by playing the original campaign, has anything been changed about that? Has the enemy difficulty been toned down, or the missions re-balanced?


Edit: These are from the official patch notes, and I believe them to be the culprits :)

That's gotta be a tough thing to balance, the point at which the AI senses something, figures out roughly where the person is, and then pin-points the player location. Especially tough when you're factoring in things like concealment (trees, bushes, etc.) and cover, of which this game has a lot. And then adjusting it on a decade-old game engine.

I remember the same thing being done with EF2000, a flight sim from the 90s I think. The original release made for a fairly easy game. An update made it crazy-hard for a ham-fisted fighter-<what's the opposite of "jock"> like me.

It's still really hard, yes, if you don't think of tricks. But all the levels have ways to make the impossible easy. In 'After Montignac', try heading into Provins. You're being hunted from the west, and if you run, you can stay ahead of the search party. There's a hill and treeline that can hide you from the commies in Provins, and you can steal a car and drive away before anyone even gets a shot off at you. Then all you have to worry about are the tanks.

That's what I used to do in the first playthrough :) although I sneaked through the forest for quite a bit so that the final bit into the village was not too far anymore. I tried the "run for it" approach several times with the patched version, but never managed to survive it because the improved AI soldiers shot me with such incredible accuracy even at bigger distances.

I'm playing it through on 1.00 again, but after that I might get the ArmA reissue and try a direct comparison.

I had to repeat Search And Destroy because the damn Spetnaz buggers had laser-alike acurracy. If you were spotted, you were dead within 5 seconds, no less.

The trick to After Montignac is to run to the southeastern corner of the forest, then across the road, behind the hill and treeline, then up to the town. Do NOT go directly into the town or you'll be spotted, probably by both the search party and the garrison, and will be swiss-cheesed in seconds. If you do it right, nobody in the forest will spot you, and you'll enter the town such that the garrison doesn't see you either. Steal a car and floor it down the road for a bit, then leave the road and drive until either you get to the forest with the extraction point, or run into soldiers (in which case, use the car for cover and kill them, then proceed to the forest on foot), or get shot at by a T72 (in which case, exit the car before you get blasted, assuming it doesn't nail you with its first shot, and run like hell for the forest).

The 'correct' way to beat Search and Destroy is to go around to the opposite side of the mountain, climb it, descend towards the Scud, and spot and nail the Scud from the mountainside. There are a few spetznaz on the mountain, but fewer than on the ground. But why go to all that trouble? Quit thinking Arma and start thinking Ferris Bueller's Day Off. You know those two Cobras you can call in? Take a few men to the Cobra base, jack one of them (or both, if you like, though AI helo crews tend to die quickly) and slaughter everything with TOWs. (This tactic works well in a few other missions, too. If there are vehicles, see if they're unlocked. If they are...well...'it is his love, it is his passion - it is his fault he didn't lock the garage!' Sadly, in S&D, you can't commandeer the tanks. The Cobras start uncrewed, but the tanks don't.)

Yeah, I did the Mountain descent tactic in the first try. I reckon'd that I would have higher chances of spotting the SCUD from there.

It took me 3 tries to find out where the scud was. First, because I wasted the hole 5 min thing in finding it, Second because after seeing it launch I thought the emplacement was random and Third because I realised it wasn't random :P

I didn't thought about stealing off the Cobras. That's a nice one.

Is there a guide or text showing those kind of things for the missions (IE. Stealing Cobras, the MI24 at Red Dawn,the Car in After Montignac, etc)?

EDIT: I never played the After Montignac mission. In my campaign, it was replaced by one in which you are travelling in a Truck with all your partners. Then you stop at a crossroad and go to check some radio help messages. You are ambushed, then you proceed to Morton, then you find out everything is FUBAR and then you are sent to the secret extraction point.

Jesus, it took me 2 hours to complete the mission, including all the "try and fail". Had to go on foot from Morton, to the ambush site, to another forest, to the S.E.Point.

This game is unique.

Hmph. I've never gotten 'Strange Meeting'; somehow, no matter how good or rotten my gunnery, I get 'After Montignac'.

The best short walkthrough is [url=http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Walkthrough:Cold_War_Crisis]here[/url]. It mentions many of the vehicle exploits and cheap tricks, but not all.

Useful ones I've found (that I recall - I'm afraid I've been playing Arma 2 for the past few months):
After Montignac: if you can get to the car in Morton, you can bypass most of the foot patrols, and only really have to worry about a tank

Saboteur: If you're good with a tank gun, just go to the base, get into one of the T80s, massacre everything on the ground with machine guns, waste the two Mi-24s with the main gun, drive to the little town with the supply depot, fry it, drive back to the base, blow it up, then drive to the extraction point. If you're not so good with a tank gun, get into the Shilka, hose down everything on the ground, hose down the Mi-24s, then switch to a T80 and repeat. If you want to get a really high score, lots of the surrounding towns have T72s and soldiers, and if you're careful to attack from hull-down positions, you can destroy them all without much trouble.

Return To Eden: After seizing the farmhouse and defeating the Soviet armored counterattack, take your men east along the coastline until you're as close as you can get to the Shilka. Tell them to stay put, run up the hill, put a LAW through the Shilka, and go back down the hill. Let the Cobras clean house for a minute or so, then run to the airbase and get into the BMP - if you still need to.

Hind Attack: Don't blow up the Hinds; steal one. It's easy to kill everyone at the Hind base if you just stay down, get close, designate targets, then have your team open fire all at once. Once it's clear, get to one of the far Hinds and go. You do need to be careful: there's probably a Hind overhead, and soon after you get into one, a BMP will come looking for trouble, and that's why you need to be in one of the far Hinds - the near ones' aren't positioned such that they can shoot either. It's safest to take the gunner's seat, waste the BMP and the Hind overhead, then switch to the pilot's seat, load up your team, and go from there. If you're going for a high score, there are lots of Shilkas and soldiers around for you to kill.

Wake Up Call: Sort of a vehicle hack. There's a Hind flying near your insertion point. Kill it with a LAW, and in Soviet Russia, the Shilkas will come find YOU - saving you the trouble of traipsing all over the island. Kill them with LAWs too. Some soldiers will come looking for you as well, but spec-ops prone at night are almost invisible - if you hold fire until the enemies are close, then let them have it all at once, they'll die before they can do any harm.

Escape: Get back into the Hind and trash everything. Fly as close to the American position as you can, then eject. Or, do as you're told, then at night, get into the BMP, trash everything, then get out of it and run before tanks show up to kill you.

Incursion: Sneak into the base, steal a Shilka, hose down everything that moves, which is, uh, a lot of people. A T72 will come looking for trouble, but if you're quick, you can kill it too. At this point, you can steal a Hind (if you didn't damage them) or drive the Shilka to the mansion. Either way, kill everything moving around the mansion, then walk in, grab the docs, and leave. If you do steal a Hind, there's a Shilka and a couple of tanks on the beach down the cliff behind the mansion, and you'll need to fry them before doing anything else.

Search And Destroy: Take three men with you in a jeep and drive to the Cobra base. Steal the two Cobras, then slaughter the Scud and the armor with TOWs. Mission accomplished.

Red Dawn: Follow the road until you get to a base with a Hind. Refuel it, then fly east over the ocean, then north, and then fly west towards the northern point of the island. The Scud has at least one Shilka nearby (and I think more), but you should be able to kill them and the scud without taking significant damage. You can then hunt Guba at your leisure.

My plan of playing through on 1.00 fell through, some sound issues and other little bugs led me to update to 1.46 after all. So I probably won't be doing the direct comparison between patched and unpatched, on how much better the AI soldiers get at spotting and aiming. But it's possible that back when I had so much trouble with the missions, I might have played it with the "Super AI" option enabled. I'm going to see if I find After Montignac considerably easier with that option deactivated.

But your replies show why I really love ArmA/OFP: that you're often forced to think outside the box—or in comparison to other shooters I should say, think at all—and that no matter how many times you've played a mission, it can still surprise you because everything is so dynamic. I call it the GTA-style of mission design: set up the scenario, give objectives, but let the simulation take care of the rest, and let players experiment and figure stuff out themselves. Not only is it more interesting for you to play it repeatedly, but it's also great to talk to others about the game because everyone will have played it in a different way.

comando062 says it all: This game is unique.

LOL, I remember doing the Incursion mision. I was f**** nervous when I got to the house. Right before I got into the house crawling, that goddamn soviet officer standing outside turned around and saw me. Due to my nerves, I unloaded the hole 30-round clip into him xD. Couldn't believe the AI didn't see me, as all I did was to get between somes bushes and then ran along the coastline.

I've got to try the saboteur and Hind Attack one.

Are ARMA 2 Missions alike to OFP ones? I've been thinking about buying it. Plus there's that DAYZ mod....

Arma 2 can be quite a bit different from OFP.

The original 'Harvest Red' campaign missions are much longer, and in many of the missions, you'll get a set of vague objectives, e.g. 'find this guy', 'find these camps and destroy them', 'find evidence of war crimes', and...that's it: you're expected to spend the next couple of hours searching around, piecing together information, and figuring out what to do and where to go. You'll do a lot of driving and walking, often through peaceful little villages where you can chat up the locals: a lot of the game is very slow-paced, such where it'd almost be relaxing if you didn't have to keep in mind that you are in a warzone, and someone might be setting up an ambush for you just around the next bend in the road. (And it is relaxing to fire up the editor and drive or fly around Chernarus. It's very beautiful, the sort of place I'd like to go to retire.) You'll often get new objectives during missions, and you're free to decide whether they're important or not, and you'll have to deal with the consequences of your choice. The storyline branches in a few places, and there are several different endings, some good, some pretty bad, one spectacularly bad. (In outcome, not quality.) Some people complained that Harvest Red was boring. I disagree - I'd call it one of the most revolutionary singleplayer game campaigns ever devised - but it definitely wasn't anything like OFP, or even Resistance.

The Operation Arrowhead campaign is much more linear and fast-paced - it's close to OFP, but is a bit more interactive: it's a good idea to make peace with civilians and take care not to hit them by accident, and the campaign does have a few branches. It's sadly nowhere near as long as OFP, but what is there is pure gold.

The British Armed Forces campaign is very short, but very good, very difficult, very fast-paced, and, best of all, very well written: people've bitched about BI's writing and voice acting for years, and they finally did something about it. It sets up the Private Military Company campaign, which, alas, is also short, but I think it's the closest to OFP in spirit, and has almost as satisfying an ending (if a way more violent one). (Note to BI, if you're reading this: the last mission of OFP was the single best video game level ever made. At the end of Arma 3, I want to steal a T-55, round up my old war buddies, and go drinking with them again.)

I haven't yet had time to play Army of the Czech Republic, but if they collaborated with Ceska Zbrojovka for the guns, it's got to be good.

They also released a very small free bonus campaign, Eagle Wing, which I won't spoil, except to say that several parts gave me nightmares for days.

The bad news about Arma 2, other than the sort of bugs that are inevitable in a game of this complexity: system requirements. They're steep. Really steep. i7-2700k @4.5 GHz, GTX 580, and 'Manhattan' still gets slow in places. Not game-breakingly or anything, but noticeably. Some of that is draw distance - I have mine cranked higher than most - but it still demands a lot more horsepower than OFP did.

But if your computer can handle it, it will eat up months of your time, and that's before you even begin playing fan-made missions and campaigns from armaholic.com. Or, of course, DayZ, which I haven't yet played.

I just completed After Montignac and this is the first time I've played any Arma games.

I tried about two dozen times to move west along the forest, and once, I got very close to the meeting place. After reading this thread, I tried stealing the jeep @ Provins. There's a tank very close, but if you move fast you can be over the hill before he can shoot at you. There are two more little villages south of Provins. Haul ass through the first. Just over the ridge, I practically ran into a squad of Russians supported by a tank. It took about 10 tries, but eventually I figured out, if I cut off the road heading SE putting the village between me and the tank, it gave me enough time to get half way over the field to the forest bordering the alternate extraction point. As soon as the tank gets a clear shot and you hear MG fire, jump out of the jeep and run for the forest. The tank continues to shoot up the jeep, ignoring you. By the time I vanished into the trees, the HIND had found the jeep and smoked it.

Until I read this thread, I was getting very disappointed in this game. It's basically if they see you before you see them, you're toast. I can see that AI patches might have screwed up this and other scens.

To be fair, seeing them before they see you is a pretty big part of warfare, and doubly so when you're evading capture in hostile territory. Much like reality, the game severely punishes running-and-gunning, and you should always move from concealment to concealment (or better yet, cover to cover), and whenever possible, engage only when you have the upper hand: surprise opfor from superior positions instead of charging their defenses.

The good news is that After Montignac is by far the most difficult and luck-dependent mission in the game.

Also, you don't have to steal the UAZ in Provins. There's at least one civilian car by some houses, and you can get in it totally unseen, since the garrison is on the other side of the houses. You'll still be spotted when you leave town, though, and the car's offroad performance is worse than the UAZ's - but it is an option and you can complete the mission with it.