How to play this game?

[Inkompetent]

Little Bird or variants of the UH-60 are best learner-helicopters imo. Although the Cobra is pretty nice to fly as well. The Mi-8/17 and Hinds are like flying bricks, and the Apache is quite clunky too. Decent agility but horrible lift.

The Little Bird is very agile and responsive and got a lot of lift compared to weight. The UH-60 variants are pretty balanced and easy-to-fly helicopters, although nowhere near as agile as a Little Bird.

And turn-keys are very important imo. They allow some degree of yaw when speeding forward (good when using unguided rockets or other fixed weapons), and most importantly they allow you to turn the entire helicopter at low speeds, without tilting. Pretty neat when landing.

[Enforcer1975]

I've managed to remap the helicopter flight keys to be like Battlefield. I don't have the left turn or right turn commands bound to any key, as I prefer to turn the aircraft manually with rudder pedals and banking. Maybe I'm just a dork about helicopter physics, but something seems strange about them in ArmA 2. When I go faster, the rudder becomes virtually useless unless I bank sharply while using it. Even then, I can't get the helicopter to turn very fast. This might have something to do with the fact that I didn't have anywhere to put my mouse and was using the trackpad. Idk. The other problem I had was that slowing down seemed impossible. I would flare up and drop engine power and nothing much seemed to happen. I can land, but I need a gigantic space to slow down and correct in. I overshot the airstrip once in the Helicopter Tutorial while trying to land.

It's at least more realistic than BC2 where you evade bullets and missiles like a primaballerina. Every pilot would have lost control over his chopper by then. It looks more like an apprentice pilot than a professional flying and is really funny to look at if your team wouldn't suck at shooting down the drunken pilot ( OP aifcraft imo ). These pilots would be frustrated how often they are shot down in ArmA 2. Some are frustrated in BC2 too where i shoot them down every time i get my hands on AAA.

Just forget everything you learned in BC2 and start from scratch. It's like in the Youtube video "How not to be a noob in BF BC2" where CoD is compared with BC2.
Bullets go where the barrel is pointed and not because some programmer put in a dispersion script to simulate inaccuracy while moving. I do things in BC2 i would never do in ArmA 2, i started playing again BC2 for some time and have to empty my brain to be able to play it.

In the end you can't really compare an action shooter with a military shooter.

[Sig [USMC]]

I usually turn all that off

Anisotropic filtering = Disabled
Antialiasing = Disabled
Posprocess effect = Disabled


I also run @ 3D Resolution to 200% , but you have to own a decent video card for that.

[160thSOAR]

Well, I'm slowly getting better at Helicopter flying. Attack Helicopters are amazingly easy to fly in this game since it's possible to do third person. I'm going to be doing a whole lot of mission editing once I get better at attack flying. For right now I'm mainly messing around in the Armory using the AH-1Z.

On to another question. Any tips for spotting enemy soldiers? Often, when I'm in the Armory doing a Survival or Point Defense mission, I get shot before I even see the guy. This happens a ton while I'm sitting in the turret of an M2 Humvee.

Finally, how do I switch characters around in the Campaign? I've reached the mission where you have to take out a sniper in 5 minutes and I'd like to switch over to Sykes and use his DMR to try to find the guy. If I suck at that, which I probably will, which grid is the sniper located in so I can go get up close?

[Inkompetent]

If the mission allows switching between characters it is the 'T'-key as default. Think it's possible in all campaign missions, but just beware that outside of the campaign it's often not the case.

As for spotting soldiers I can't really give more advice than to make sure your 3D Resolution in video options is at 100% or more (higher sort of works like antialiasing. Depending on graphics card it might actually give better results than using AA), and to watch carefully. Zooming in generally helps to (hold right mouse button, or hold NumPad+). Careful when being on foot and holding right mouse button though. It is also Hold Breath, so I recommend either remapping the zoom, or the hold breath button, so you don't get exhausted just from observing.

[160thSOAR]

I'll leave the zoom button as is and remap the Hold Breath button to a different mouse key. I didn't know that the Hold Breath and Zoom keys were different!

[160thSOAR]

I played my first two games of multiplayer last night.

I didn't do too badly the first game. I spent most of my time flying around in an Mi-8 Medevac and healing wounded soldiers. My teammates thanked me a whole lot and I got a respectable amount of points. I only killed two soldiers though, when my helicopter crash-landed in a clearing after being disabled by a Tunguska. Still, I did all right.

The second game, however, was on a different server. I absolutely sucked! For one thing, my ping had climbed over a hundred and I was lagging somewhat. The main problem was that my respawn point was out in the middle of nowhere and the helicopter approaches were covered by a pair of Tunguskas. The AH-1Z that extracted me was shot down on the way out of the LZ. I kept respawning miles away from the action, for some reason unable to change my respawn point to where my teammates were, and got so busy legging it around the map that I got shot a ton. I contributed little to my team except spotting a pair of Tunguskas and left after the game ended.

The good thing is that the people on both servers were just like the people on these forums. Quite helpful and I didn't get called a "noob" or something of that sort once, even when I asked really stupid questions and accidentally wasted an AIM-9 Sidewinder.

[Li0n]

On to another question. Any tips for spotting enemy soldiers? Often, when I'm in the Armory doing a Survival or Point Defense mission, I get shot before I even see the guy. This happens a ton while I'm sitting in the turret of an M2 Humvee.

Well, sitting in static weapons makes you a really good target, IMO. First, try it on your feet. Don`t stay - sit or lay down if you not moving. Try to move rarely, because while you are sitting, you will spot enemy easier than while moving. In multiplayer very helpful to use head-rotate action, when you looking around, only by head, you body stands still = good cover. Try to find cover and and look from behind it, using Q and E keys. Note that looking from right side of an object is better, because your caracter is right-handed and you will cover more of your silhouette.
Welcome to A2!

[Pummel]

I have TAB as lock on to enemy target, I think that is the default key. So when flying attack choppers, I am almost constantly spamming the TAB key to see what's out there.

I fly choppers with keyboard and mouse just fine. I sucked at first but I'm awesome now :P I find that to be a great chopper pilot in this game, you have to be very forceful with it. Don't try to fly it like a real life chopper. So say you are flying in one direction and fly in to a bunch of enemies and want to turn around, forget about making nice gentle turns. You should throw the chopper on to its side and then pull up, just like flying a jet, and then you do a sharp 180 degree turn and come back on yourself. The finer points are learning how to do turns like that without losing too much speed, but sometimes you will want to lose speed. As mentioned earlier, you can't turn left and right unless the chopper is going very slow, so sometimes if you want some finer control over the chopper, its nice to violently throw it sideways again and kill all your air speed, and then if you level it out quickly, you will all of a sudden be stopped and stable in the air. And you can then turn and take some shots or whatever.

As for being on foot, the key thing in my opinion, is playing it like real life. The number 1 thing I learned which turned me from a noob dying every 5 seconds, to surviving a lot, was learning to use cover. You can lean in this game, so if you find a building, you can hide behind the building and just lean out and take shots at enemies. It makes you so much harder to hit, and if they get a flurry of shots coming at you, you just lean back in and you are completely safe. You can also do this with big trees, vehicles, and anything else that is wider than you.

Another thing is the ability to crouch and lie down prone. Not only does it help your aim, but it makes you far harder to hit. And often there are quite large rocks and bounders in the ground, so if you find yourself somewhere without a building or thick trees to hide behind, you can just hit the deck, preferably behind a rock, and you are safe there.

Another thing I learned was if you ever have to fight on the move, like you have to check to see if someone is inside a building or something, don't just run and hope to shoot because the chances are you won't be able to stop and take aim in time. Instead, hold shift as you go and you'll walk, and the character will be far better able to aim as you walk. So just before you get to the door, start walking and taking aim and be prepared to take the shot.

One last thing, maybe this is just me, but I would say that 95% of firefights in this game take place at long distances. I hardly ever get in close range fights. It's almost always at long distance, when the enemy is so tiny you can almost not see them. You then zoom in and you can just about see them and start taking shots at them. Not only do you have to deal with the bullet drop over distance and making good shots, but if you aren't shooting exactly in the right place, you are never going to hit them anyway. So to help with this, I pull my monitor closer to me when I play this game. Usually my face is around 3 feet away or something, and when I play this game it's more like 2 feet. It still looks good and it's still comfortable, but it just makes it easier to do pin point shooting, and that is a huge part of this game.

Other than that, it's all about practice makes perfect!

p.s. Once you get online, check out the game mode called CTI. I am kind of new to multiplayer but that is my favourite mode so far. Enjoy

[160thSOAR]

I've never been the type to be yanking the stick around in an aircraft; it will be hard for me to adjust.

I know some of your infantry tips, but some of them were quite helpful and I'll be sure to implement them. I generally spend most games wandering around with about 4 or so AI Humvees. I try to put myself in an up-armored M240 Humvee and give the AI a Mk-19 Humvee and 2 M2 Humvees. It works pretty well and I capture a whole lot of stuff doing it. Due to the way I tend to fight, which usually results in being in city streets a ton, most of my engagements I can usually see the enemy fairly well. One thing that's gotten me killed a lot is not leaning. I tend to go prone and use rolling if I can, but in confined alleyways and the like it's more convenient to use crouching.

Because I play on a laptop, I can't use the Numpad keys. This prevents me from using a whole lot of the functions they want me to use for the ArmA 2: OA tutorial. Is there a way to circumvent this? Does anyone have any keybindings for me?