An Overview of TvT in ArmA

It is probably about time for me to explain what TG Domination is and why I think it is so special to Tactical Gamer and the ArmA community. The fundamental flaw with almost every TvT mission I have every played in the OFP or ArmA environment is that they suffer a burden presented by one of ArmA's greatest strength's, the shear size of the Island. Thus far, we have seen from mission designers two approaches that are successfully, but not IMHO not optimal at leveraging the island: Unstructured Persistent Battles & Structured Non-Persistent Battles

Unstructured Persistent Battles:
A traditional persistent mission such as "Capture the Island" (CTI) does nothing to address the size of the island and it is not uncommon for players to spend hours "fighting" hostile AI forces and never actually encountering enemy players as the battle rages over the entire island. It is not uncommon to see nothing, but whack-a-mole happening for hours on end (see this OFP description). Most of these mission types also utilize a resource allocation model that grants additional benefits to the team in-control of strategic portions of the island. While this is "strategically" interesting, it creates a huge practical burden on the combatants, especially those joining in an unfavorable position. There is nothing inherently wrong with a blended COOP and TvT approach (in fact Domination includes enemy AI as well), but the lack of structure presented by this open ended mission style does not best serve the interests of a tactically oriented community like Tactical Gamer.

Structured Non-Persistent Battles:
On the flip side, a non persistent mission such as any "Berzerk" mission limits the players to contested area roughly equivalent to that of a battlefield 2 map, ensuring player on player battles in a balanced environment, but removing the scope of battling over the whole island and the benefits of "persistence". While ArmA is a fantastic military simulation platform, it doesn't lend itself well to the BF2 play style and as such doesn't deliver (nor should it) the experience presented by that flagship franchise. There is also significant overhead in playing a mission to conclusion and then having to exit out, select a new mission, get organized again and learn all the different features incorporated from the next mission designer.

I'll go on a tangent here, but my belief as to why Evolution has been so successful? It presents a structured persistent world that is able to be played night after night and once learned rarely requires the players to think about "how" to operate and interact with the mission. While TG Domination will also require a GREAT deal of learning, I'm hopeful that how to operate the mission will become second nature to the majority of players and they can then focus on execution inside the game without the fear you currently have that the next random mission loaded up on the server will utilize a totally different set of interfaces and scripts.

That leads me to the style of play that TG Domination presents, a structured persistent battle. This hybrid approach combines the benefits of a persistent world with the "tightness" and balance of a structured TvT battle. TG Domination does this by segmenting the map into zones and limiting the objectives to that zone. While players will certainly be operating anywhere on the island they deem necessary, only the active zone will present objectives that will grant them victory. At the conclusions of a battle, the zone will be awarded based on the victory criteria and the entire island will be reset with the only difference that that zone is now controlled by one team.