Hopefully these answers explain what you wish. While I'm not anymore making missions for ArmA-franchise (I'm studying how to make standalone games in Unity) it's still delight to know people are still playing stuff I created. I suggest disabling ACE mod(s) and if enemy weaponnery/ squad spotting gets too frustrating lower difficulty (even temporarily) should help.

"Your mission director seems to give the player's actual location to the AI."

Yes, if I recall correctly when player is spotted the information of player location is spread to close-by enemy team-mates with command _soldierOne reveal [_soldierTwo, 3]; (more info here: https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/reveal ). If I recall correctly when I was making this mission there were many cases where Ai team-mates felt too idiotic even if team-mate was shot right next to them and tried to make Ai more 'smart/ decent opponent' feeling with this command.

"The heavy starting armament of the enemies is a bold decision that requires caution when setting their behavior. Be careful when assigning groups, because vanilla AI is telepathic. My first encounter was in the bombed out town, and I ended up having to run away. It appeared to be one shotgun/rifle, two pistols, and a six-shot grenade launcher. You can imagine how that went."

As listed in Steam Workshop page Feature section '- Semi randomized enemy-weaponry which aim to replicate same weapons as used in Far Cry 2 game. With this feature two playthroughs will never be exactly same', nerfing/ buffing enemy Ai to fitting state with semi-randomized weaponnery is a tricky task. Though if I would remake the mission now, I would set first encounters of player with less dangerous poll of guns they get armed with and maybe decrease size of enemy squad from 5 to 4 or 3.

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"It would be nice to have a way to press onward in cutscenes so that they can flow at the speed of player reading comprehension, ideally with a few dead frames after a cut so that we don't accidentally skip dialogue."

When I made this mission I didn't have knowledge how to make skippable cutscenes (and to be honest I don't know even this day).

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"I made it to the point where the enemy leader declared that I was out of the minefield, and then hit a mine when I shifted to sprinting away from the shooting."

That is unfortunate, if I remember correctly I set enemy AI firing squad accuracy lower in that scene to prevent player getting killed if player figures out how to get through minefield to prevent what you just describe happening. But thankfully you seemed to get it through by trying again.

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"Gotta love those character limits. Comments meant to be read from bottom comment to top comment. I probably should have swapped them around when Steam made me split them up. Sorry about that!"

Don't worry, I've got too much experience with that myself :' )

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Hi Faestre, thanks for plenty of feedback! Been a long time (2 - 3 years) since I worked on this so my memory might be a little haze.

Missions/ campaigns I've made are NOT made with idea of having ACE mod(s) active, only mods that are listed in Steam Workshop "REQUIRED ITEMS" list. Within Deadly Warlands missions there's 'fps-healing', meaning you are automatically healed after X many seconds depending on your wound level (so that player can stack more ammunition/ weaponry on their inventory).

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Still looking forward to continuing the playthrough. Hopefully disabling Medical gets the injury system you implemented working again, and I imagine that will mitigate a lot of the issues I'm having.

Gotta love those character limits. Comments meant to be read from bottom comment to top comment. I probably should have swapped them around when Steam made me split them up. Sorry about that!

I could complain about the AI spotting people through solid objects all day, but it's really got nothing to do with your map. It's just a handicap we all have to work around. In this case, building rubble seems to be transparent, because my model was entirely submerged in it the last time I was spotted.

I eventually had to skip past them, but that proved difficult due to at least one of them tracking me, so it was mostly a matter of outrunning them towards the objective.

Your mission director seems to give the player's actual location to the AI. They consistently advanced up the road just as far as I was, whether I stayed in one place or moved up farther. That may have been a freak coincidence, but such is the feel. The pistols essentially hung out on top of my hiding place until the AI decided to declare me spotted. Interrupting their hivemind can help make the results feel more authentic. In this case grenade-guy counted as a squad-mate, receiving telepathic targeting instructions to erase me from existence within a few seconds of being spotted regardless if I ran, hid, killed his team, or tried to weave through cover.

Be careful with the autosave feature in general. Arma takes a while to do it, isn't that stable when saving/loading, and just generally makes things hard for mission makers. I had the misfortune to be picking up a magazine from the starting cache right as it triggered, and the game seems to have deleted it. Going into the first engagements with only one spare mag for the uzi exaggerated the main issue I have with balance, which is the generic Arma issue of AI being simultaneously overpowered and over-exploitable.

The heavy starting armament of the enemies is a bold decision that requires caution when setting their behavior. Be careful when assigning groups, because vanilla AI is telepathic. My first encounter was in the bombed out town, and I ended up having to run away. It appeared to be one shotgun/rifle, two pistols, and a six-shot grenade launcher. You can imagine how that went.

Then we got into the cold-start running through a minefield. The tip that you don't put a loading screen before a quicktime event holds true here. I made it to the point where the enemy leader declared that I was out of the minefield, and then hit a mine when I shifted to sprinting away from the shooting. Cue a long wait to see if ACE would revive me, followed by a reload when it didn't, followed by a long long Arma loading screen, followed by respawning and immediately being shot for 'being afraid of the mines'. I did eventually get through, was mildly disappointed not to get to drive the getaway boat, and then forgot everything because the briefing screen, the detailed story, and the basecamp all had me absolutely thrilled.

It's an interesting scenario and I can tell a lot of work went into it. I love the idea of open world sandbox and all that jazz.

Seems to interact negatively with ACE Medical, which is predictable. I saw ACE3 on the list and thought it wouldn't hurt to leave it on, but the wounds don't heal and I gather the player is not supposed to be as easy to down as the mod makes it. That probably plays into the trouble I've had.

A few issues I ran into right off the bat had to do with game flow and saves. It would be nice to have a way to press onward in cutscenes so that they can flow at the speed of player reading comprehension, ideally with a few dead frames after a cut so that we don't accidentally skip dialogue. Overall, the cutscenes moved at a reasonable speed, but I found myself wishing I could move them along faster.

Just stopped by to see is there any thumbs up (5 at the moment) nor down ( 0 ) since release but also happy to see two folks whom given Michelangelo steam award, sad that Steam won't notify me of it but happy to see you've liked it :)