[SAS_Random]

Great discussion so far. Your tactical wheel diagram is excellent. It shows how important communication is to any situation into which officers inject themselves. It also accurately shows that passive resistance is met with soft to average physical control. I guess that's why I would say, as far as the game restrictions, that to me, using melee is a less violent option to gaining compliance with a civilian than use of the tazer electrodes, only in the fact that electrode removal can be a bit uncomfortable. It seems the game skipped over the necessary option of physically forced compliance of a grab and shove to the wall or ground. I would say that force increases on this path...presence, compliance, melee, stun, taze, fire to disarm/injure, fire to incapacitate, fire to neautralize.

I have evolved my game play from first playing Single Player with the AI, to playing MP online because the officers do not even stack up properly. In order to keep them alive, often the lead has to enter rooms first, etc and so on. The game provides 4 stack points at each entry and the moron that selected them is a dolt. It really only gets worse from there. I moved to online and it was complete chaos on one server, completely unreasonable less lethal usage on another, and shoot on sight in another. There has never been a happy middle ground philosophy.

This is why I wanted to start a separate team from SAS several years ago based as close as we could to use of force guidelines. I lost interest where I could not dedicate as much admin time to gaming as I had in the past, and that concept died on the vine, so to speak.

When SAS first adopted S4, although they shot all suspects, they were highly organized and had stayed close to true SAS tactics as they could. We started playing SWAT3 and Rainbow Six and used the same tactics for each--more or less. The only suspects that survived were the ones that immediately surrendered (as I would do if SAS troopers were bearing down on me).

I wanted more, but the games available just could not accommodate. I began to adapt my tactics to the police side and even got the SWAT branch of SAS to limit the killing to non-compliant suspects. We never used less lethal, so how the game reacted to less lethal did not detract from my experience. The more exposure I had with teams like ETS (not to say this style is not enjoyable to some) it really began to get under my skin how much use of force doctrine for police is being violated by these high and mighty "tactical" players that don't seem to know squat about application of force.

My play style, if you pay attention to what you are really seeing and not the scoreboard results, is as close as the game allows to realism. Do I take liberties from time to time, yes of course because ultimately, I'd rather stay alive in the game and continue to play instead of watching others from view mode. My character gets incapacitated every session because I'm living on the border of the no action / lethal action bubble. As soon as lethal is authorized, it's a showdown between me and the suspect. I'm not looking to change SOG at all. I'm just asking that perhaps SOG players may be interested in the added challenge of evolving less lethal tactics to be closer to reality. Experiment with it. I guarantee you will have some fun and excitement that may have left the game experience.

Some realistic movement through buildings might not hurt either ;-) but that's a topic for another day.