Thought I’d do a little write-up of this event that myself and my team attended last Sunday.
I’ve played Longmoor a couple of times in the past and it’s a great site, with lots of potential for long-distance engagements as well as close quarters fighting inside and between the buildings. With this in mind we decided to book on and make a team outing out of it, 3 of us attending.
It took me about an hour and a half to get down to Longmoor, and once there queued up with the other punters to be escorted to the car park area. Once there and parked up by the DS, it was a pretty standard get your kit ready and wait for the safety brief. I believe there was an indoor area that could be used for this but most people were working from their vehicles. There were good, clean toilets available as well and a shop although I didn’t visit it.
Interestingly there was No mandatory chrono, although I know this has been covered in previous threads so won’t go into it. The safety brief was succint, covering the salient points and general rules. Maps, rules and briefs had been emailed out the week leading up to the event so we felt well prepared.
This was one of Legions’ ‘Battlesim’ events, so once the game began there would be no breaks and it would be down to players to manage themselves as required. We had some initial objectives that would span the first couple of hours and once these were complete we would receive further objectives. Fairly simple and I’d say everyone pretty much knew what they were doing.
We carried our kit (including ammo, food and water) out to our initial regen point and the game kicked off at probably about 1030-1100. We were split down into 7 callsigns, and as I had a radio programmed to the command net I took the role of RO as well as TL for my callsign.
I won’t go into detail of every objective and engagement but it was a fairly normal ‘Hold building X until X time to score 100 points’ or ‘go and take the ammo crates to the helicopter’. This meant that things didn’t get complicated, and there weren’t many/any occasions where people didn’t know what was happening.
From the safety brief we’d seen that we (Barbarian/Green team) seemed fairly well outnumbered by the Legion/Tan team which meant that we got plenty of trigger time with the enemy, but at the same time we were still able to move about some areas relatively sneakily/unhindered.
As we entered the early afternoon it did feel as though some of the enemy had disappeared (gone for lunch/left) which made our objectives quite easy to take and hold. This isn’t a complaint, I’ve played long enough to know the game is what you make it so I made sure to keep in contact with our commander to keep the taskings coming so we didn’t get bored.
In the last couple of hours there were a fair few big pushes from both sides with the patrol base changing hands a number of times, accompanied by lovely colourful smoke grenade clouds and plenty of pyro!! We actually held the enemy HQ until end-ex was called at 1700, despite numerous counter attacks and at one point taking fire from all sides.
Did we enjoy it? Yes! Would I recommend it? Definitely!
The standard of gameplay from our point of view was very high, and the coordination and teamwork from the rest of our team was also great. We’ll definitely be back in the future, and for anyone who wants a kind of milsim-lite experience I couldn’t recommend it enough!