Basics of how to play Mike Force No-Fun Edition
The purpose is to capture zones in the larger Vietnam map, or the map of Khe Sanh province. These zones are on the map, and consist of PAVN and VC sites with AA and mortars, and one static HQ that is randomly placed. Destroying the sites and capturing the HQ is necessary and will invoke a counter-attack by the enemy which must be defeated to capture the zone fully. To help in this, a friendly FOB should be built to serve as a respawn area and storage for supplies, and it can also be defended for the counter-attack.
Players can choose to play in Alpha Platoon for basic infantry gameplay, in Bravo Engineers for base building and tree cutting, and Charlie Platoon for scout gameplay. In addition, Delta Troops has the transport helicopters for ferrying supplies.
To survive at the built FOB inside an objective area, player forces consume all types of supply.
Types of player units
Alpha Platoon
Grunt-work infantry. Your priority is to take out objectives in the current AO. Read task descriptions. Find the AA, arty, or supplies and destroy them. Then get back to your FOB for defending against the enemy garrison. Not too complicated. Go shoot stuff, don’t die.
Bravo Engineers
Most people's personal favorite. Easily the most versatile squad and arguably most crucial. A good engineer team will make an AO run smoothly. Priority number one is to get checkpoints set up in a properly defendable FOB. That means knowing how to scout terrain, knowing what to build, how, and where. Knowing how to build proper fire positions and how to build with pilots, armor, and infantry all in consideration.
Charlie Scouts
Kinda like Alpha but gets a mortar section and a sniper section, and has demo charges as well. Works well for finding the enemy HQ.
Delta Troop
Useful in a pinch for a few specific jobs, namely CAS, Supply, and Transport. A good CAS pilot can help keep an AO alive. For the first 20 minutes of a new FOB in an AO every time a pilot leaves base they should be heavy lifting large building supplies to that FOB. Checkpoints require supplies to work as a respawn. No build supplies? No respawning. So either transport supplies now or impatient infantry later.
Good CAS is way too situation specific to give tips on. The best thing people can think of is to check the map carefully and frequently. Predict where infantry are trying to move to and plan your CAS strikes and attack approaches accordingly.
Infantry Specialties
These are generally chosen by going to a duty officer and pressing 6 and selecting correct role. They should be auto-assigned, so only please select if needed for debugging.
Medic
You get to make use of the Medikit item. Infantry healing themselves with just a FAK will bring their health to 75%, it will consume a FAK in the process, and to get back to 100% they need to find an Aid Tent or Iroquois Dust-Off to heal fully. A medic with a medikit avoids all that, heals for free and puts someone back up to 100%
The Medikit also speeds up the process of Stabilizing and Resuscitating downed infantry in Mike Force. By a lot!
Bottom line, bring a medikit with you when in a medic specialty.
Engineer
Always bring a toolkit. You can repair vehicles to orange-level damage so they can minimally function again after taking damage. Pilots will thank you.
Want to build? Bring a shovel, maybe some sandbags from the misc-ammo tab in arsenals. Sandbags are the on-foot version of supply crates. They’re lightweight and come in handy. Make sure it is an E-Tool specifically.
With an axe you can cut down trees! Equip axe and hit trees! Useful for clearing terrain.
Hit N and get intimately familiar with your options to build. Anyone with Engie specialty can build, Acav Engies just get the best stuff. There’s a whole tab in the build menu labelled Non-Acav for the standard stuff. Proper building tips will be in another section.
Radio Operator
Pretty awesome class. With this specialty just equip an RTO backpack and you get a scroll wheel option to call in CAS/Arty support. These requests are special because they’re carried out by AI, not potentially unreliable Delta pilots. Call in a Daisy Cutter and a friendly AI jet will fly in from the direction you asked and drop it in the spot you asked.
If the menu is too small like it was for me, go into Settings > Video > Display and crank up the Interface Size so that typewriter font doesn’t require a magnifying glass to read.
Another small thing people miss, inside the Radio Support menu there’s a fancy display with a lot of knobs and buttons that seem like they’re just decoration. They all are, except for one with “Pre Set” written above it in the center. Click on that and you’ll swap between calling in support from CAS and Artillery.
Please don't just randomly order fire support. Coordinate with leaders.
Explosive Specialist
You know all those Satchels and Breaching Charges people accidentally place down by the arsenals at base? Switch to this specialty and you can clean those up.
That’s about it. We haven’t figured out anything else useful with this specialty, everyone is able to place explosives but only this one can deactivate them. Enemies don’t place down IED traps so this is mostly just for base cleanup.
New AO Order of Operations
A good transport pilot will get a full chopper plus 1 large build supply crate as close as they can to the AO. Once on the ground, Engineers use the supplies to get the beginnings of a FOB set up, specifically a checkpoint so people can respawn in the AO rather than get transported again. Note that the Checkpoint (spawn) only holds 500 units of supply and that equals out to about 10 respawns. A situation room (HQ) adds the ability to hold 10000 supply units and as a bonus feeds all nearby buildings with supply.
While the FOB is being built Infantry guys should go clear the nearest Arty objective before it kills everyone in the FOB over and over.
If the FOB is outside of the red hexagon of an AO then at most you should only have to deal with random patrols + arty strikes. If you’re inside of the red zone then prepare for “defend fob” objectives to spawn on the regular.
If there's AA threatening the pilots’ approach to FOB then that’s the next priority for anyone not building FOB. Take them out from nearest to furthest from FOB so CAS can eventually start doing their thing without leaving a mess of wrecks.
Some objectives require explosives to complete, namely destroying anti-air and the “destroy supplies” task at the enemy HQ. Don’t bring satchel charges. They are stupid and heavy and intended to demolish entire buildings or heavy armor. Breaching charges weigh a fraction compared to satchels and do the same job for these tasks. You can destroy the enemy arty with small arms so just shoot the mortar a few times.
Once all main objectives are down the only task remaining should be “Weaken enemy garrison”. The garrison is not a real structure in the AO, it’s just referring to the amount of troops. So kill stuff. The easiest way to speed this along is to build the FOB inside the red zone. Those “Defend Fob” tasks seem like a chore at first but at this point it helps speed up the enemy kills and turn the AO from red to green so you can move on and start the process again.
Building FOB Defenses
Bottom line is that Engineers are little gods of creation running around with shovels if they know what they’re doing. A good Engineer will make a FOB that works like a well oiled machine and a bad Engineer will make a jumbled mess of structures that look like M.C. Escher and Fortnite players got together and had a deformed child of architectural hell.
Priority number one is to build with the other players in mind. You need to know what makes a good firing position, defendable terrain, how to build effective lighting for combat situations, and what pilots need to safely land.