Interface: Planning

Planning Phase

Before every single player mission, you're given an intelligence briefing on the situation and a detailed map of the area that you're going to assault. If you don't want to bother with planning out an elaborate assault (which can be tedious if you're interested in quick action), then you can pick the default "headquarters plan" and skip right to action phase. Otherwise, if you're a hands-on kind of guy, you'll be allowed to plan out the mission yourself.

Ding has been in a few Clancy novels

Create smaller teams from your 8 guys

Men, weapons, armor, and more

The planning involves everything from choosing your personnel (up to eight), outfitting them with whatever armor, items, and weapons, and then sketching out the assault plan. I found planning to be a rather fascinating exercise. The interface given for the mission planning is a bit overwhelming at first, but becomes intuitive if you do the tutorial in the manual. You then split up to 8 soldiers into up to 4 groups, and then sketch out a plan of action for each group. The personnel you choose is key - there are several groups divided by specialty, including assault, recon, electronics, demolitions, and sniper. Within each of these groups there are several named characters who have good stats but as they die you'll need to replenish your roster with lesser skilled operatives.

Deck out your men

That's an exotic gun

The commands

A variety of robust commands can be issued to specific groups in planning mode. For example you can instruct a group to wait by a door until given a specific "go code." Upon giving the "go code" that group can for instance, flashbang the room (toss a FB grenade in), run in, take out any hostiles, and then escort any hostages out of the room! Other commands like breaching a door (blowing it down with explosives), cover arcs, sniping, and defending are accessible. You can even change the movement speed and rules of engagement between waypoints for your AI buddies. Just remember that in action mode, you can always switch between groups to take control of stickier (or more interesting) situations. If you don't want to deal with action mode at all you can set things to "watch mode" and have the AI carry out the whole mission for you. This way you can see if your plan was a good one or not.

Plan your attack

Weave around in that airliner

Not til I say so, dammit!

Using so many different groups of soldiers in delicate situations is tricky - you'll often need to have certain actions happen simultaneously - that's where go codes come in. Go codes, according to the manual, are like stop lights. The group will come to a specific waypoint of your choosing and not advance to the next task until you give the right go code. This tool is invaluable for getting your team to do simultaneous tasks like attacking from two sides all at once.