FLO: Frontline Operations

FLO is a persistent Arma 3 frontline campaign mission built around dynamic objectives, AI command, virtualization, logistics, civilians, and long-running saves. It is designed for long sessions where one human-controlled side fights a campaign while the rest of the theater keeps moving in the background.

What FLO Does

• Runs a persistent campaign with save/load support.
• Builds a living frontline instead of one static mission start.
• Uses AI commanders for EAST and WEST to manage attacks, defense, support, and reserves.
• Virtualizes most of the battlefield so large campaigns can keep running without simulating every unit live all the time.
• Uses logistics and supply networks so destroyed forces are replaced through actual resources and supply chains instead of free respawns.
• Supports custom friendly, enemy, and civilian factions through mission-root faction files.

Main Features

Persistent Campaign

• The campaign can be started fresh or loaded from a previous save.
• Objective ownership, virtual groups, logistics state, and mission configuration persist across saves.
• The battlefield keeps evolving instead of resetting every session.

Dynamic Frontline

• Objectives are linked into a real frontline and rear area network.
• Towns, villages, military sites, and clusters change ownership over time.
• Frontline pressure, contested sectors, and reinforcement needs update during the session.
• Newly captured sectors do not immediately become perfect launchpads. Capture growth is delayed, repeated breakthroughs fatigue the attacking commander, and overextended lanes stage more slowly.

Dual AI Commanders

• FLO runs one GTN commander for each military side.
• Commanders build a maintained world state, allocate forces, protect threatened sectors, request support, and launch attacks.
• New ATTACK, DEFEND, and GARRISON route orders are budgeted per commander cycle so large reallocations spread out instead of generating one large burst. Defaults are 4 total new strategic route orders per commander cycle, with attack, defense, and garrison each capped at 2.
• The enemy side is not just a pile of spawned patrols. It is managed as a campaign opponent.

Virtualized Battlefield

• Ground, air, artillery, and transport groups exist in a persistent virtual registry.
• Groups become real near players and return to virtual state when they safely leave the activation range.
• Orders, routes, transport attachments, mission locks, and runtime state are preserved across activation cycles.
• This lets the mission run large theaters without having to keep every unit fully simulated.

Logistics and Reinforcements

• Each side has its own logistics network and supply chain.
• The network selects an HQ, promotes forward supply nodes, and dispatches replacements from rear areas.
• Replacements spend side resources instead of appearing for free.
• Capturing territory only expands long-term force growth after the new owner actually holds and consolidates the sector.
• Rear-area support assets such as artillery and aircraft are only considered available when they are actually secure.
• Transport reserve pools are maintained separately from frontline combat forces.

Custom Transport System

• Infantry can be assigned ground or air transport for longer operational moves.
• Live dismounts are staged more safely for trucks, APCs, and helicopters.
• Carriers can revirtualize after transport work instead of being held active forever.

Civilian Population and Behavior

• Civilians are no longer just random walkers.
• Civilian groups are seeded with roles such as residents, vendors, workers, watchers, wanderers, and drivers.
• Settlements can have moving civilians, anchored building civilians, market activity, and parked civilian vehicles.
• Civilian behavior changes with local control, threat, recent combat, and reputation.
• Civilians can flee, shelter, protest, or return to normal routines depending on local conditions.

Civilian Intel and Interaction

• Players can ask civilians about local activity.
• Civilian reports can cover patrol sightings, vehicle movement, checkpoint rumors, safe routes, and hostile reports.
• Civilian intel is local and uncertain rather than omniscient.
• Civilians can also offer missions, react to detention, and support interrogation gameplay.

Player-Requested Commander Support

• Players can request commander-managed artillery, CAS, and CAP.
• Requests go through the side commander instead of directly spawning support effects.
• Support requests use map clicks, cooldowns, queueing, and HQ radio messages.
• Approved support reuses the real GTN artillery and air systems.

Commander Player Tasks

• The GTN commander publishes one primary and one secondary side-wide task for the active human faction.
• Player tasking is intentionally sticky so the current order is held for a minimum window instead of being replaced on every scoring wobble.
• Defend tasks only close after the sector stays calm for a sustained window, instead of succeeding on a single quiet sample.
• Task scoring follows the main player concentration more than a single distant outlier, so one scout or pilot does not yank the whole side's orders as easily.

Battlefield Intel Pickups

• Enemy units can carry intel items such as phones, secret files, and flash drives.
• Picking these up can reveal enemy commander targets, supply nodes, or HQ information on the map for a limited time.
• These reveals are temporary and side-only rather than permanent full-map knowledge.

Commander Intel and Supply Visibility

• The commander COP publishes friendly support and supply information.
• Friendly supply nodes and HQ markers can be shown on the map.
• Players can locally toggle supply-node visibility so the map does not have to stay cluttered.

What Players Can Expect

• One side is the active human faction for the session.
• The first connected EAST or WEST player locks the active player side.
• Players on the opposite military side are moved to spectator.
• The campaign is built for multiplayer, hosted MP, dedicated servers, and long-running co-op sessions.
• Support, logistics, and AI pressure continue to matter even when players move away from one area.

Mission Setup

On a fresh start, the commander configures the campaign through the mission setup flow.

Current setup options include:

• friendly faction
• enemy faction
• civilian faction
• multiple compatible auto military or civilian factions can be selected for the same side; FLO merges their detected pools into one side catalog
• force composition setup values are capability-gated before virtualization, so unavailable optional categories such as armor, mobile AA, static AA, artillery, jets, or helicopters are skipped with a warning instead of hard-failing Phase 4
• player start position
• difficulty and reputation handles
• separate BLUFOR/WEST and OPFOR/EAST commander posture settings for aggression, tempo, attack coverage, defense coverage, force growth, and baseline garrison
• enemy presence
• objective size threshold
• virtualization distance
• virtualization unit cap
• starting territory ratio from 10/90 up to 90/10

On a loaded save, the saved configuration is restored automatically and the setup dialog is skipped.

Requirements

• Arma 3
• CBA
• any faction-specific mods required by the faction files you select

FLO can run in singleplayer, hosted multiplayer, or on a dedicated server, but it is primarily built around multiplayer campaign sessions.

Quick Start

1. Put the mission source in your Arma 3 profile missions folder, or pack it as a PBO for a server.
2. Open the mission in Eden Editor if you want to inspect or customize it.
3. Launch it in multiplayer preview, hosted MP, or on a dedicated server.
4. On a fresh start, complete the mission setup flow as the commander.
5. On a loaded save, let the mission restore the campaign state and continue from there.

Session Model

Topic	Behavior
Active human side	One military side per session
Opposing military side	Spectator-only for human players
Fresh start	Resets campaign state and opens mission setup
Loaded save	Restores saved campaign state and skips setup
Campaign authority	Server-owned startup and persistent systems

Initialization Pipeline

All authoritative startup work runs on the server through Functions/Init/fn_initPhaseManager.sqf.

Phase	Name	Purpose
0	Save Detection	Detects existing save data and restores saved mission config when present
1	Mission Config	Waits for commander setup on fresh start, or restores saved mission config
2	Factions	Loads faction scripts and builds the runtime faction catalog
3	Objectives	Indexes map objectives or restores saved objective state
4	Virtualization	Seeds or restores virtual groups, reserves, and registry state
5	Mission Systems	Starts GTN, logistics, routing, civilians, support systems, and client-facing systems

Clients wait for FLO_MissionReady and then finalize local UI, map intel, and player-side actions.

Faction Customization

The main customization entry points are:

• CUSTOM_PLAYER_FACTION.sqf
• CUSTOM_ENEMY_FACTION.sqf
• CUSTOM_CIVILIAN_FACTION.sqf
• Scripts/factions/README.md for built-in preset dependencies and required mods

Phase 2 builds FLO_FactionCatalog from those files, and that catalog feeds:

• commander force pools
• objective seeding
• virtualization spawn pools
• logistics replacements
• transport reserves
• civilian population templates

Auto-Generated Compatible Factions

The mission setup UI also appends [AUTO] faction entries generated from the currently loaded CfgFactionClasses and CfgVehicles config data. These entries do not create new .sqf preset files. They build a runtime FLO catalog directly from compatible config classes.

Military auto factions are included when they have spawnable Man units. FLO uses any matching all-infantry CfgGroups entries when present, then classifies same-faction vehicles into motorized, mechanized, armor, transport, artillery, air, AA, drone, boat, and radar pools. Civilian auto factions use spawnable civilian Man units and civilian vehicles.

Auto-faction keep/drop and selected-catalog diagnostics are emitted through FLO_fnc_log as FACTIONS warning-level logs (FLO_Debug_Level >= 2).

Mission setup includes a Per Numeric Force Composition card. Each row is prefilled with default faction values and accepts a non-negative whole number per side. The Composition tab controls ground and air transport reserve counts, objective group type caps, and group counts for infantry, motorized, mechanized, armor, helicopter, jet, air, artillery, mobile_aa, and static_aa. The Objective Groups tab controls per-objective subtype templates for capital, city, village, local, marine, and cluster objectives.

Composition values apply by key. For example, setting OPFOR Armor Count to 1 changes only that side's armor count; it does not replace the rest of the group count list.

Curated presets remain the preferred path for tuned balance, prices, and exact doctrine. [AUTO] entries are a compatibility path for loaded mods that have usable faction config but no FLO preset yet.

Objective Templates

Objective templates control what kind of groups a subtype can seed. Curated, custom, and auto-generated factions use the same standard numeric defaults from FLO_fnc_factionGetCompositionDefaults, then mission setup always sends the typed Objective Groups values with the rest of the numeric force composition tuning. Faction .sqf files do not define BLUFOR_Objective_Groups or OPFOR_Objective_Groups.

Numeric Force Composition

Group counts, objective caps, and transport reserve counts are configured through the mission setup Per Numeric Force Composition card. Faction .sqf files define available units and vehicles; they do not need to define BLUFOR_Group_Counts, OPFOR_Group_Counts, side-wide objective cap globals, or transport reserve count globals.

Save/Load Note

Changing centralized objective templates or faction vehicle pools does not automatically reseed an old save with newly-added groups. Loaded saves restore saved virtual groups first. If you add new template group types after a save already exists, you usually need either:

• a mission reset with the FreshStart lobby parameter, or
• a targeted backfill call such as:

[west, ["city"], ["artillery", "jet", "helicopter"]] call FLO_fnc_backfillObjectiveTemplateGroups;

Runtime Configuration

Lobby Parameters

Parameter	Meaning
AutoSaveSwitch	Enables or disables mission auto-save
AutoSaveInterval	Auto-save cadence
FreshStart	Load saved progress or reset mission progress
RestrictedArsenal	Enables the restricted arsenal flow
RagequitBlocker	Prevents abort while unconscious
DisableSystemChat	Hides system chat

Commander Campaign Config

On a fresh start, the commander setup flow publishes:

• faction handles
• difficulty and reputation handles
• GTN attack, defense, tempo, growth, and garrison settings
• enemy presence
• objective size threshold
• virtualization distance
• virtualization unit cap
• player start position
• starting territory ratio

Default GTN Order Budgets

The commander authors strategic order caps against the 10s tempo baseline, then scales them upward with the tempo curve:

• shared strategic order budget: 6 at 10s, 14 at 14s, 24 at 20s, 32 at 28s
• ATTACK cap: 3 at 10s, 7 at 14s, 12 at 20s, 16 at 28s
• DEFEND cap: 3 at 10s, 7 at 14s, 12 at 20s, 16 at 28s
• GARRISON cap: 2 at 10s, 5 at 14s, 8 at 20s, 11 at 28s

Repository Layout

Path	Purpose
Functions/Init	Server phase manager and client finalization
Functions/AI/GTN	Commanders, world state, combat, support, alerts, and player support
Functions/Factions	Runtime auto-generated faction compatibility and catalog builders
Functions/Virtualization	Group registry, activation lifecycle, routing, transport, and seeding
Functions/Logistics	Resources, supply networks, replacement dispatch, and reserve replenishment
Functions/Objective	Objective indexing, ownership, graph links, and markers
CONTRIBUTING.md	GitHub commit message rules and contribution expectations

License

FLO is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE.