Had an amazing extended ops session today.
Logged in early and was messing about in a pubby platoon during an Amerish alert. Once other came online I found out our outfit was merging again. Switched to Indar for the new and improved ops only for it to be the usual mess, except with two squads bearing our new tag instead of just one. We were dedicated air so I burned a few hundred certs trying to get a reasonable Air Hammer Reaver. Turns out I'm still a worthless pilot though, and TR are packing obscene levels of AA these days, so mostly ended up rear seat gunning in a Liberator then switching to ground support. Did get a Prowler and Sunderer kill with the AH though, despite being utterly useless at avoiding returning fire.
Had an awkward period of straight up rolling over easily attacked bases then getting overextended on the next push and having to fall back again. A couple solid defences and mostly avoided getting completely overrun. Had a really ugly framerate and even crashed a couple of times, but focused on vehicle support and a little AA/sniping so didn't feel completely worthless. Even got to make a fun Lightning suicide run when we were ordered back to the warpgate.
Then we got ordered to switch to Esamir for reasons. After rolling out in Vanguards and securing roughly 50% of the map an alert started on Esamir and the real fight started. We were getting hit by the main TR zerg for nearly two straight hours. Within ten minutes of the alert starting we were outnumbered locally by 3 to 1, although this did drop as low as 2:1 at times.
We managed a literal last second defence of the Traverse, rolling in with a couple of squads just before it could be capped and then holding it till we were needed elsewhere, then doing the same thing with Glacier Station where we made a longer stand.
At one point we made a combined Liberator and Galaxy gunship run on them where no plane survived more than thirty seconds past first contact, but every single one of us got at least five kills, including the guy who just ploughed his Galaxy into the enemy forces. I was gunning for a Zephir Lib and got 10 kills plus a Sunderer assist from the two magazines I could unload before we blew up.
At another point I managed to unload a complete 100 round Gauss magazine on full auto, without pausing and scoring a shocking number of hits simply because most of my cone of fire was filled with TR charging at us. That kind of situation came up a couple of times, where I was having more trouble taking down targets as they appeared than I was avoiding getting killed. I felt like playing a TF2 Heavy instead of a PS2 one.
Then there was the extended valley fight where each side had their Sunderers behind opposite hills. Both sides had excellent anti-armour and air, so we were using infantry rushes and solo suicide runs to try to take down the Sunderers. It was hugely entertaining, especially as most of the TR were pubby zergers and couldn't coordinate rushes. We kept marking their Sunderers, getting C4/mines on target then calling in Phoenix hits to detonate. After we won that we pushed all the way to the next base, cleaning up wave after wave of infantry and surviving AA MAXes along the way. I swear I got about twenty kills in that push. It was the most satisfying counter attack I've seen in a while. Although it did stall once we were under their AT/AI base defences and they got some Prowlers back up.
But my highlight was from shortly after the alert ended (we finished with 42%, Vanu on ~40 and TR were contained to <20%, which was our job). Me and another guy were riding on Kobalt equipped Flashes and came across an enemy squad on foot, nicely lined up on the side of a hill. We just sprayed them with the Kobalt bullet hoses and accounted for the full squad in about ten seconds. Utterly brutal.