Protection Core

The goal of the Protection mods is to make Arma Reforger even more immersive and dramatic by implementing various dimensions of a major component of modern warfare: the interaction with the civilian populations and the constraints implied by the civilized behavior of armed forces.


Their solo author is mostly active as an independent software engineer, but is also a trained political scientist, an activist and an author specialized on intercommunal conflict in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and the Levant. This project is primarily a dialogue between these two perspectives, rather than explicit advocacy for International Humanitarian Law. And while it certainly has some educational value, its purpose is first and foremost to make the game more enjoyable. Protecting and saving civilians from despicable war criminals is actually quite cool and rewarding!


This mod, Protection Core, is the basis of all other Protection mods and modifies significantly some low-level components and entities related to the gameplay. In order to minimize potential side-effects when using it as a dependency for third-party mods, all features (see below) are disabled by default. Modders using it are therefore able to pick and choose which particular feature they want to enable (typically: only automated population, but not all war crimes, etc.) So, by default it should do strictly nothing, and server administrators or casual users should rather use the Protection Vanilla mod (recommended) or the other Protection mods.


The main features at this stage:


- Automated population of the maps with civilians, based on the vanilla building structures and configurable through the vanilla concepts of home territories and urban locations. An overall density of population can be defined, in order to manage the load of all these AIs on a server. When multiple civilian factions are available, territories can mix communities with configurable proportions.


- Additional war crimes or refinement of existing ones, by distinguishing between harming non-combatant vs allies, and being disguised as an enemy vs as a protected person (perfidy). Notably, executing an unarmed enemy can be punished. These new war crimes can impact the statistics used for kicking/banning players, XP progression and the base scoring system.


- Additional AI commanding orders allowing to "protect" non-combatants or to capture unarmed enemies, effectively recruiting them into the vanilla commanded AI group. In addition to obeying orders, which typically allows to extract them from the fighting zones, these AIs acquire a special status and don't get targeted by any other AIs.


- Two additional civilian factions (Rural and Urban), which can effectively replace the vanilla Civilian faction, and allow to model that only some civilian communities are targeted by certain military factions. This introduces the inherent complexities of civil war, combined or not with conflicts between great powers. These factions are optional and all other features work with the vanilla Civilian faction.


- A basic system for triggering and managing the flows of internally displaced persons. Dependending on the intensity of the fighting and the brutality/criminality of some military factions, civilians will progressively leave populated areas and try to reach "civic centers", which are either the vanilla municipal offices or "emergency response centers" which can be built by the playable factions. Civilians and prisoners can be discharged near these locations, with XP rewards for the players.


Modelling and depicting the impact of war on civilian populations is a sensitive and delicate matter. By default, playable factions are forced to be friendly to non-combatant factions. In other words, one cannot play as war criminals and only AI factions can be configured to systematically commit war crimes. Disabling this safeguard for any other purpose than testing is explicitely discouraged by the author.


Overall, the population system is quite robust, but has not been extensively tested on big maps with many human players; reducing the population density should work around most problems. The commanding system for protecting non-combatants works fairly well, but is mostly useful for missions focussing on interacting with civilians. The capturing system is less mature and currently does not cover real players; moreover, allied AIs will still try to kill unarmed enemies (except if they are explicitely prisoners of war).


These versions of "Protection Core" and "Protection Vanilla" (but no other Protection mod) are candidates to the "Make Arma Not War" mod competition.


Note: Along with the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, the Red Crystal is one of the three protective emblems recognized by IHL. Its use here indicates simply that ICRC resources are used as the functional specifications for this software.