Poach

The squad was in action at Area 66, playing the defending side in a game of "hold the downed pilot hostage". Using a sniper positioned in a church tower to the rear of the front line, we were able to stay in constant communication about enemy movements. This allowed for the team to rapidly deploy against enemy build-ups and resulted in all the enemy attacks, including a major flanking attack, being turned back. Good communication was the key to victory in this game!

We're in action at Area 66, getting to play a D-Day style assault on their landing craft map layout! Good communication allows for fire and manouevre to successfully push us forward, pressuring the enemy team and keeping some of their key assets, like an LMG-armed player, suppressed at important moments. Back to our home site at Section 8 where 3 of us seize a critical objective, only to find the rest of our team hasn't got the memo and has left us facing almost the entire enemy team, determined to take it for themselves! Good communication and teamwork sees just the three of us holding out against overwhelming odds for far longer than we had any right to.

We're back in action at Section 8, playing a VIP extraction game. A 2-man element succeeds in delaying the enemy team for almost 40 minutes, by really listening to the game brief and devising a plan that blocks a vital part of the enemy team's progress for as long as possible, and it shows what creative thinking around the game mode can do: we didn't just follow the order of the objectives set for our team, we intentionally set out to instead disrupt the enemy fulfilling their objectives instead, in order to buy our team a decisive lead. Ultimately, this handed us the game, with our side securing both win conditions before the enemy could secure either of them!

That's a wrap on 2024 for us! It's been a huge year for the team coming together, learning and employing a new, more cohesive and more tactical, way of playing the game. Here's some highlights, and some bloopers, for the year. We're looking forward to 2025, with plans to attend some more milsims and to keep working on our teamwork and coordination. We've also written a blog post about our journey this year!

We get into the Christmas spirit by playing Christmas-themed games! First up, we successfully escort Santa's presents from their staging area up to his workshop for onward delivery, keeping the Grinch team at bay for long enough to successfully shuttle all Santa's presents in. Then, we swap over, and lead a vengeful Grinch attack that interdicts the Elf team's efforts to move their presents up, before then launching an attack on Santa's workshop itself, overrunning it and claiming all the presents the Elves had managed to get in place.

The Team play a domination game mode to control the map via domination points. Structured as 2 4-man fireteams, we play a very coordinated and tactical game with great success, winning both rounds by securing 2/3 and 3/3 points each time. There's a lot of tactical gameplay on show, including fire & manoeuvre with the whole squad and within the 4-man teams, peeling along a battle line to better engage the enemy, and at 18:46 in the video a rapid assault into an enemy force that tried to sneak up behind us! Quickly pinning them with 2 shooters, the other 2 fireteam members peeled around to the right, bounding around the back of each other constantly, to close with and destroy the pinned enemy players.

The Team are used as this game's special objective. We form a tiny Orange team, tasked with surviving for as long as possible against the far larger Blue and Yellow teams, who are tasked with capturing us. Once captured, we join our captors in the field, fighting as conscripts, and need to try to recapture our former Orange comrades to get all of us conscripted onto the same team. Whichever of Blue or Yellow succeeded in conscripting the most Orange players were declared the winners! Though massively outnumbered and outgunned, we hold our position well for much of the game, making use of arcs of fire, coordinated movement, and good communication to best engage the superior enemy forces trying to take us prisoner. We made our last stand offensively, trying to assault our way out of becoming surrounded, and ultimately ended up fairly evenly split between Blue and Yellow, with neither team succeeding in getting all of us.

The team play in a multi-phase game, starting with needing to capture 3 domination points and, once all three have been held for 5 minutes, getting the team's flag onto the "king of the hill" base to win. We've been working hard learning Section-level tactics and successfully implemented them on the day, managing to hold off attacks on the midfield domination point, successfully withdraw from a failed push to the lower domination point, and then launch a flank attack by fire & manoeuvre to overrun the enemy flank and seize the final domination point. The team then punched through the enemy lines as they tried to keep us away from the victory hill, getting our flag through their lines and into the base to take the win.

We're back at The Fort in Fife, Scotland. The Team work on overpowering the defenders of a bridge in order to capture the base's flag to win the game. Some good pairs movement in the video!

& CHIPS - Causing Havoc In People's Streets

The team play as VIPs besieged in a village, needing to hold out until the relief force arrives! Using the best positioning available to us we were able to deny the enemy access to some key terrain, allowing our relief force to rescue us before we were overwhelmed. This is a good example of playing the objective: we prioritised holding down our relief force's access route towards the village, rather than hunkering down deeper inside the more defensible buildings. Even though we ceded most of the village itself to the enemy, our team ultimately won because we kept their access to the village open for them.

Short video this time, mainly of two of us struggling with a very steep hill! 🤣 Importantly though, we used dead ground well to creep up the enemy team's flank and managed to locate, then eliminate, a ghillie sniper that had been taking out every attempt by the rest of our team to push up on our left. With the centre and right avenues of approach being completely open ground, getting that ghillie going to ground and, eventually, getting him taken out allowed our team to advance more rapidly. In the end, after team swaps had happened, our side ended up winning the game overall by holding the base 9 minutes longer than the enemy did.

There's a growing feeling amongst Airsoft Facebook groups that the site is ramping up hostility to Airsoft, because the number of groups getting banned for various "promoting firearms"-type reasons is growing. The trend is also evident on Instagram, also owned by Meta. Several groups that I'm in on Facebook have started setting up Discord servers, but Discord have also recently changed their T&Cs and so all those servers have now banned buying and selling out of fear that Discord would consider it weapons trading.

The team played in Dirty Dog's "Operation Sireeen", their 2024 milsim event. We returned for their 2024 game, having played their 2023 Operation Overkill last year as well! Since then we've worked hard on playing a more tactical and more coordinated game, and we feel the results really show! Playing as two fireteams, our squad played an important offensive role, securing the high ground for our team early in the game and helping push the line forward through the central objective and beyond. Later in the game, after a Red Team offensive had dislodged the defenders around the high ground, we were back at the forefront, advancing our side up the road and clearing out an important enemy road position. At the end, as Red Team closed in on our HQ, we pushed forwards and held a perimeter line to buy the rest of our team time to reposition and dig in. The event was great, a successful follow-on to 2023's Overkill. Bring on 2025's event! We have also now written an After Action Report on the event, detailing how we made decisions on where to go and how to fight, and how those decisions gave us success on the battlefield.

Made the trip down to Dirty Dog at the weekend for their second all-day game event, Operation Sireeen (with 3 e's!), a re-run of last year's Operation Overkill. (Edit: We've now got a video of the day's action!) Mostly the same format, unfortunately started at the same spawn as last year because we were on Black last year and Camo this year, and they'd swapped the Camo spawn from last year, so us swapping teams resulted in the same spawn! We had a good idea of what the start was like as a result, though, and this time the opposition were the Red team. The day started well, with our squad (Royal Huntsman, callsigned to Golf for the event) able to quickly rush up the side road from Camo spawn and claim a toehold on the high ground: Red technically beat us there but were unprepared for our attack and so were pushed back off the edge of the hill, allowing us to hold a favourable position and allow follow-on Camo groups to beef up the numbers and spread out over the high ground. A fierce battle for the central fort of the high ground ("French Fort") ensued with us eventually squeezing Red out by cutting their ability to funnel reinforcements into the structure, which is where the lines largely sat until close to lunch time, where a ferocious Red counter-attack rolled Camo off the high ground entirely. We'd retired off the line to replenish ammunition and couldn't arrive back on time to help preserve our access to the hilltop, and so withdrew to our spawn fort as a major Red push downhill was closing in on it, but lunch was called there and then so the setback wasn't fatal. Red were within shooting distance of our spawn fort at the point of lunch though, an impressive advance! After lunch everyone reset to their spawns and, this time, Red made a much more serious effort to rush the high ground. The access road we'd successfully gained last time was the site of some intense fighting but, with Red beating us there again and this time being prepared for an early fight, they couldn't be dislodged. What followed was a couple of hours of Red dominating the field: with the high ground secure they handily repulsed every Camo attempt to gain ground for those hours. Multiple times we were able to fight up to the lip of the hill but couldn't then flesh out a foothold, inevitably being pushed back downhill again. Eventually a tactical error was made somewhere on their part and a Camo team force rushed French Fort and hunkered down, interdicting Red lines of communication and allowing multiple other ongoing Camo assault attempts to start to consolidate footholds throughout the hilltops. This resulted in a complete flip of circumstances, with Red facing an uphill battle against entrenched Camo forces using the high ground to their advantage. At our furthest advance we were menacing the outskirts of Red's spawn town, yet another flip from the morning when it was Red's BBs peppering the walls of our HQ. The day ended with Red making a final push to retake the high ground, succeeding in establishing a fairly solid position at the base of the hill but being repulsed in their effort to push up the road to French Fort. Camo took the day with the most points. Improvements-wise from last year they handed out the HQ comms frequency to individual squad leads rather than having Marshals just trying to shout out updates, which made it far easier (at least for us, a fairly cohesive team with our own team comms as well) to understand what the current active objective was and to get updates on major movements. For improvements to make for next year I think Camo spawn (which was Black spawn last year) is clearly the inferior one, with Red spawn (which was Camo spawn last year) being closer to the central high ground area and having a proper road running from their spawn right to the central French Fort. As much as Camo won this year we won because in the morning they didn't expect us at the back road as quickly as we got there and in the afternoon they left a gap in their lines and lost the central high ground fort to a mad rush. As this event matures (if they keep running it every year) the regulars are going to learn from these things and soon the team that gets the Village spawn (Red's this year) will dominate with ease. A possible solution is that they stop the game for lunch and reset at that point anyway, maybe swap sides? Overall though a great game day, glad we went back for Sireeen, and I expect we'll be back for whatever 2025's game gets called!