Bootcamp--Equipment and Maneuvers

Team Equipment and Roles

The center of any successful operation are your men, and in Full Spectrum Warrior, you’ll be taking control of two separate fire teams, each containing four men. These teams are identical in terms of equipment and skill, so you can use them interchangeably as you play. Should you need to select an individual member of your team, you can do so by pressing on the D-Pad, but this is rarely necessary.

Team Leaders (TL)

Your team leaders are the most highly-trained members of your fire teams, and are responsible for issuing your orders to the teams and then seeing that they’re carried out properly. When you select a team, your viewpoint will be centered behind the team leader by default. TL’s will generally be at the front of their fire team, and will be responsible for checking around corners when you move up to one.

Team leaders don’t get any special equipment; they’re outfitted with a standard M-Class Rifle. This semi-automatic weapon fires in bursts for greater accuracy.

Automatic Riflemen (AR)

Each team has a single automatic rifleman, who will take up position behind your team leader. The ARs on your team will follow the team leader out when you decide to lay down point fire from behind a corner.

The weapon of choice for automatic riflemen is the Squad Automatic Weapon, or SAW, which is a light machine gun capable of spitting out bullets at a terrifying rate. Although it isn’t terrifically accurate, you’ll still be killing more enemies with this weapon than with your three M-Class Rifles combined. Although the SAW is used in the same manner as your other weapons, it’s worth noting that you can engage an enemy with just the SAW, which means that you can individually select your automatic rifleman to have him engage an enemy while the rest of your team engages a different target. We’ll explain the concept of engagement in the Maneuvers section.

Grenadier (G)

In most combat situations, grenadiers are just normal riflemen; they have the same M-Class Rifle, with the same capabilities. When you need to blow stuff up real good, however, your grenadiers are the ones that you’re going to call up, as their underslung M203 grenade launcher is capable of accurately propelling shaped charges over fairly long distances. The shaped charge isn’t a pure antipersonnel device; rather, it’s primarily used to destroy objects that enemies are hiding behind. A shaped charge that impacts a car, for instance, will reduce the car to rubble, rendering it ineffectual as cover and killing anyone hiding behind it.

Even though this gentleman has cover, that won’t save him from a shaped charge exploding on the other side of this corridor.

The fact that a shaped charge travels in a straight line and has a smaller radius of effect than a frag grenade makes it difficult to kill off enemies with it unless they’re hiding behind fragile cover, but it can be done. While actually aiming at a soldier directly is ill-advised, as you’ll likely just waste ammo, you can occasionally get a kill by aiming at a nearby wall or other hard surface. For example, if a soldier is using a corner of a small alleyway for cover and is pinning you down, you can aim your M203 at the other corner of the alleyway and hope that your target is caught in the blast zone. The shaped charge is lethal only to around five meters from the point of impact, though, so you’ll need to aim directly across from whatever you hope to kill. In general, though, it’s best to use normal combat maneuvers to close in on your target and kill him conventionally.

Rifleman (R)

The final member of your group is the rifleman. A rifleman packs only an M-Class Rifle, making him the least specialized individual on your team. The one role that your rifleman will fill by default is the team field medic; if a member of your team goes down, it’s the rifleman that will apply first aid and carry him back to the CASEVAC. If the rifleman himself goes down, however, any remaining member of the team can perform this action.

Grenades

In addition to their normal weapons, any member of your team can throw grenades or paint a target for mortars or airstrikes, when available. Note that grenades and shaped charges for your M203 do not get resupplied at CASEVAC stations with your normal ammo; you only get a set amount per mission, and if you run out, then you’re out for good.

To throw or select a grenade, you have to press and hold the X button; your team member selection icon will then shift to a grenade selection menu. Press up for indirect fire, left for frag grenades, right for smoke grenades, and down for an M203 round.

Frag Grenades

Frag grenades send out shrapnel over a large distance when they detonate, and are effective killers up to around 10 meters. Shrapnel doesn’t pass through cover, however, so you’ll need to check your throwing arc to make sure that the grenade will land somewhere where it’ll have a clear line-of-sight to whatever you want to kill. You can’t throw frags very far, however, and they don’t roll after they hit the ground, so you won’t have to worry overmuch about running out, even though you only have six per team in a mission.

Smoke Grenades

Both of your teams will carry along six smoke grenades in each mission. These can be thrown quite a bit further than frag grenades, and are tremendously useful for protecting your teams from fire while they move. In most cases, it’s best to try and lay down smoke grenades a few feet in front of the enemy you’re trying to prevent from shooting you; this will give you a much better chance of avoiding fire than laying down smoke in the middle of a wide road, for instance. In some cases, however, such as when an enemy is inside a building or is in an elevated position, you won’t have any choice but to lay down smoke near yourself and near your destination, and hope that the enemy can’t tag you while you move.

Don’t hesitate to use plenty of smoke to cover your teams as you rush towards an enemy.

In general, if you’re unsure of how much smoke you’ll need to move undetected, apply them liberally. You’ll rarely run out of smoke grenades during a mission, and it’s better to be sure than to have to cart one of your team members back to a CASEVAC because you underestimated the amount of smoke you needed.

Indirect Fire

Indirect fire covers both mortars and airstrikes, and is available only during certain scripted points in a few different missions--you can’t just call down an airstrike whenever you feel like it, in other words. You’ll need to get fairly close to a target in order to paint it with your targeting cursor, but in most cases, you’ll be guided up to your destination through objective markers.

M203 Grenades

Each team only possesses three rounds for their M203 grenade launcher. This weapon is explained in the Grenadier section above.