Al Rayak is another great map for insurgencies and conventional that is Middle Eastern style.

I'll be honest....I'm more focused on CFP faction centered campaigns now. I don't really use RHS/Project Opfor. Yes, the units are pretty...but there are just too many quirky issues with RHS units in game. CUP/CFP units behave much better. And we are greatly enhancing the "pretty part" of CUP too with CFP.

For an insurgency I blacklist a 500-1000 meter radious around the player base from IEDs, objectives etc. so the players have a "clean" area to gear up. That's pretty much it. I'll typically have the Blufor friendlies set to only patrol major areas..with players responsible for taming the smaller, more remote villages and towns. Finding the balance on friendlies between overpowering insurgents and getting annihilated by an overwhelming tide of insurgents is the challenge.

I have Zeus enabled but I rarely (more like never) use it to spawn in Opfors, etc during an actual ALiVE campaign. It's more of an insurance policy if a vehicle needs replacing, things get "fubared" in game and need a god like fix, etc. I find that the combination of VCOM plus ALiVE more than provides enough dynamic situations for my group on our server. That being said, I've thought about doing a purely Zeus mission but it just doesn't appeal to me as much as it does to some folks. I've played a Zeus mission with some folks and did have fun..I just prefer not knowing where and what is gonna happen.

But I always have a Zeus enabled on my campaigns for the reasons i posted above...insurance against shenanigans and hijinks derailing a campaign. Too many helos hovering overhead that won't go away? Zeus removes them, etc.

Get Github for Desktop..then add the VCOM github to your repository. Choose the branch that has the fixes and select to clone that repository.

@Yeti
I am guessing none of you have been in any large milsim units, because this is honestly a VERY humble mod-list.

I haven't been in a large milsim group...but I have run my own server for 3 years and built about 293874832 missions using 294874578239 mods.

I only want 30 groups of AI on the map at any given time, to limit the amount of time the AI FSM's take up the scheduler, what undesirable behavior would I see? 144 active groups of AI is a INSANE number, and I feel it's just a terrible benchmark.

The chances of actually getting 144 groups virtualized at once are slim to none unless you have a player in 30 different locations on the map at once. I've used the default with 1 HC on my server and my server FPS rarely dips below 35.

If you drop the group levels down, what COULD happen is that you'll have enemy AI spawning in behind you or on top of you which is not good.

Content mods (spec4vest, TAC VEST, TRYK, and the various Weapon Mods) also should not impact the performance of ALiVE. If these do, will someone please explain why?

They don't. But running VCOM on top of VCOM AI Driving on top of ASR AI on top of ACE absolutely will affect your server FPS. And Running ASR AI in conjunction with VCOM AI is a very very bad idea. On top of that...I can verify that as of right now, Dominic (Genesis) has some code cleanup needed to be done on VCOM because after running for 6-8 hours on your server, it will cause your server FPS to plummet and will negate your ability to save your server as well. It's still the best AI mod out there IMO, but needs an update and Genesis is trying to get his Dissension mod pushed before he updates. So I'd recommend dropping VCOM for the time being.

That doesn't sound like proper behavior. We just finished a conventional campaign on Altis last week and I can assure you that the Enemy sent a ton of Helos up for attacks and patrols.

The AI definitely uses helos. As long as you are profiling them correctly, the enemy AI commander will fly them on patrols across the battlefield.

So heads up folks....VCOM in its current state will ultimately wreck an ALIVE server after the server being up for 8-12 hours. By wreck I mean.... extremely long save times (or no save at all can be done) on server save and exit, extremely long spawn times for ALiVE units causing units to spawn in on top of players after several minutes, etc. I'm assuming this is due to some bad code that causes never ending loops and spam on the server.

A VCOM user named MrLED has uploaded several fixes to VCOM's github but they have not been pushed yet to the main VCOM code. You can grab them off of github and replace the current version.

I'm going to test to see if these new updates fix the VCOM issues. But I figured I'd let folks know who are running servers.

Yes...for Player Combat Support Helos. Not for Jet takeoffs.

Haven't used it in over a year. Makhno has stated he's currently upgrading to Tanoa assets..which would be freaking amazing as A) It's one of the rare African maps out there and B) it's huge which allows for large, long term campaigns.

Song Bin Tanh is a nice stand in for it right now though.