Played the opening day at UCAP Vanquish, located at the Citadel in Dover. Like a lot (most?) of the other UCAP sites except GreenOps, it's in a disused prison. I believe this was also used for an AI event, but today's was 120 or so players rather than jamming everyone in the world in. Quality over quantity (or something).
Rolled up to a busy carpark at 08:30. I would have thought some people were camping for a week given the number of rolling trunks, bags and cases, but apparently it was just for the day. There's an on-site cafe that does breakfast if you've missed yours and from what I saw it looked pretty good. Was also open for lunch (more on that later). Across the bridge and a relatively brief queue to get checked in, albeit in a cutting cold wind, before getting into the safe zone. Tables everywhere to put your kit on, more upstairs, a tea urn, proper toilets with actual working hand dryers. May have reached peak safe zone tbh.
Caught up with some familiar faces, which was good, before heading out for the usual Chronoing and safety brief. Standard stuff really, and everyone there seemed to be experienced, so no issues.
Rules for the day were , no 2 tones, semi auto only, no DMRs, bolt guns are allowed (outdoors only) but I wouldn't recommend it. There are no open windows, so it's not like Longmoor/Catterick/Sennybridge where you can snipe out of buildings. Additionally you can't shoot into/out of windows because mostly they all still have glass in and all that'll happen is it ends up getting damaged. Attackers could lob pyro in to buildings, but defenders couldn't lob it out. Nobody used smokes. I think they would have been useless outdoors and obviously a no-go indoors. All these worked pretty well and were well observed. Where there was occasional confusion (can you shoot whilst going up the stairs, can you shoot through mesh/cracks, etc), it got resolved amicably.
There then followed a number of attack/defend games, starting with a warm up block war assault, which involved both teams being split in half and half of their team defending their block, while the other half attacked the enemy block. The opposing team were doing the same, but the attacking teams couldn't engage each other, just assault onto the buildings. There was also a british bulldog element where when a defender got hit, they'd go and join their team on the attack. Leading to basically a few people defending as the entire enemy team assaulted. A good warm up game where nobody was sitting around for long.
Next up, I think various rolling defence games attacking buildings in sequence. One life and fall back to the next for defenders, unlimited for attackers. It was identified that there were some choke points on the stairs, which the marshals let run for 5 or 10 mins and then moved the defenders back. Part of the day was identifying things like this that you can't really tell just by walking through it, and all the players seemed to be on board with that approach. The marshals were open to suggestions throughout, and I think there are some easy fixes without having to radically alter anything.
At some point there was lunch. Meal deal for me, but there were plenty of people having things from the cafe's excellent selection (sandwiches, burgers, full English, hot drinks, cans, cake, biscuits...). The only issue was the wait time, with 120 airsofters suddenly deciding they wanted cheesy chips, etc. It was possible to preorder for lunch in the morning and I suspect going forward this will be a necessity. Again, it was day one.
After lunch, some reversals of the previous games. It was our turn to camp at the top of the murder stairs and it became apparent what a turkey shoot it was from that perspective. Fair play to the marshals, they said we could have 5 mins of that and then they'd move us back, just like the morning. This duly happened, and the attacking team then pushed forward to be met with, frankly, ALL the pyro. The bombs just kept coming and those at the top of the stairs were falling about giggling at the disbelief from the bottom as to much was being lobbed down. Eventually the place was full of smoke and none of our ears worked any more. 11/10, would recommend.
The initial games were very much focussed on fighting through each building to see how they played, but the final game of the day gave us free reign of the site with 3 bomb objectives. Quite fancy LED bombs in pelican cases that you had to hold down the button to change to your team colour. A lot of back and forth in that one as people flanked round, made use of newly discovered routes through buildings and so on. I have no idea what the scores were, but it doesn't really matter. Didn't feel like one side or the other dominated.
In conclusion, a solid day out. I had a good time, despite CQB not being my usual play style. The NGRS MP5 did the business as ever, although I am now considering tracer options. And possibly some earpro. Well run day, good hit taking and good attitude from all involved. Recommended. Shout outs to the rest of "Team Green".
