Today, the armed forces of Atropia (me) went to a rather warm Airsoft Plantation in the much maligned county of Essex. As usual, the place was busy, with possibly about 200 players in attendance.
The first game of the day was simple; in its first iteration the attackers (Red Team) had to transport five crates from Swaziland to the Hill Fort ("If you don't know what it is, it's a fort. On a hill") and get them inside it. They had unlimited regens on eight medics while we, as the defenders, had two lives each. We started at the back of the Mortar Pits and had a 30 second head start to get into position, which we did rather well. Most of the fighting was in the scrubland, where the maze of paths between dense bushes added to the complexity of the combat, with small opposing groups bumping into each other. I took up a position in a bush and potted three attackers before their colleagues worked out where I was and potted me. As I fell back the required 30m to regen, I noticed that the Reds were working around our right flank via the Village; I slithered into a small and heavily overgrown bunker that covers one of the exits from the Village and was surprised to find a teammate already in there. We put up a good fight, taking out a number of attackers before the defence behind us collapsed and we were shot in the back at close range.
With mags reloaded, the game was turned around; I volunteered to be a medic and moved forward with one of the attacking groups, keeping about 4-5m behind them so that any casualties could quickly return to the fray. However, as a rather heavily armed medic (rifle, pistol, pyro and poison gas), I couldn't resist taking out a few targets of opportunity that presented themselves. Unfortunately, we took two minutes longer to complete the mission than the Reds.
After once again reloading mags, we set off for a fallback game. As the defenders, we had one life at each of the Kill House (deploy within 30m of it), the Border and the Village. The attackers had infinite marshal regens and had to set off a siren at each location. As usual, I positioned myself on the left (known as "doing a Corbyn") along with a few other colleagues, with the aim of holding off any flanking attack from that side. The Red's main attack came through the centre and our right, but we did our bit for what felt like ages, sending lots of the enemy back to find a marshal while the sounds of conflict grew massively to our right . My highlight of this part of the game was taking out two snipers with the trusty MPiKM. When I was eventually hit, I fell back to the pill box at the Border, which is actually just three low wooden walls with large rectangular holes in them. Once the siren in the Kill House had been set off, our surviving players were given an opportunity to fall back and dig in before the Reds were unleashed. This turned out to be something akin to what U-Boat crews called the "Happy Time"; I had a superb field of fire and took out every enemy player who entered it, which they kept doing. When I was eventually taken out, I turned around to find the site owner behind me, who congratulated me on what I had been doing. I fell back to the Village, taking up a position on the left (again!) but only seeing limited action before enemy players on the other side of the Village reached the well and set off the siren.
We then retired to the safe zone and took luncheon which, for me, consisted of a bottle of water.
After refreshing ourselves the fallback game was reversed, albeit with a twist. We would have to set off the siren in the Village first, before moving on to the Border and finally into the woods to set off the one in the Kill House. This was a daunting prospect as taking the Village from our start point is rather tricky and assaulting the Border from the Village is a huge challenge as the large bushes and the barricades channel the attacks down two paths which are easily covered by the defenders. We slowly fought our way into the Village, with some of us flanking around to the left while the main force pinned the enemy frontally. After a very hard fight, the siren was sounded and we regrouped to attack the Border. As the site owner commented, this was one of the hardest fought actions he had seen as we gradually whittled down the enemy and pushed forward down what were perfect killing zones. However, working in small teams, we eventually cleared most of the enemy out and one of our players made it into the hut to set off the siren. After the defenders had regrouped, we moved into the woods and seemed to eliminate the defenders rather rapidly; however, it turned out that most of them had deployed very close to the Kill House, where they put up a ferocious defence until they were eventually overrun and the siren was sounded.
Having reloaded again, we went out to the Mortar Pits to play an infected game; to nobody's surprise, this ended with everyone being infected.
It was a great day of airsoft; the games were well designed and the site easily absorbed the large number of players present. From my perspective, the gameplay was really good, although there were the usual accusations around hit taking, which always seem more numerous after lunch at every site I have been to. I saw one possible incident of non-hit taking; the marshals reacted to it quickly and appropriately.
Weapons used:
CYMA MPiKM (with genuine rubbish East German furniture)
Golden Eagle (JG) AMD65
ASG XP18 Commander (CO2)
UKAPU; that was what the discussion was about.
