Protection Vanilla

"October 1991. After the failed August coup, the disintegration of the USSR is accelerating, mostly peacefully and within the framework of international law. However, some military units subordinated to its Ministry of Internal Affairs have mysteriously disappeared, notably the feared ОМСДОН 'F. E. Dzerzhinsky' motorized division and their bloodthirsty special forces, the Vityaz. It seems more and more likely that Boris Pugo, one of the coup leaders and the former Minister of Interior, faked his own suicide and is actively looking for a sanctuary where rogue Soviet forces could gather and perpetuate the regime. Meanwhile, a small elite unit of U.S. special forces expert in peacebuilding and peacekeeping is trying to cool down tensions on the Malden Islands between the Rural and Urban populations. The Urban civilians feel threatened by the FIA militia which controls the islands and whose soldiers originate exclusively from the Rurals. Starting with Arland, the U.S. soldiers are encouraging meetings between leaders of both communities by providing protection to the Urbans as they visit Rural territory. But intelligence from the Pentagon has also identified the Malden Islands as one of the possible targets of Pugo's troops, with Arland being used as a stepping stone towards Everon. An additional mission for these U.S. special forces is therefore to monitor any suspicious movements of foreign troops. In case of an invasion, and given the brutality of both the Vitiaz and the FIA, the worst is to be feared for Arland's civilian population."


The Protection Vanilla mod enables various mechanisms of International Humanitarian Law (or "laws of war"), which are actually implemented in the Protection Core mod (see its own description for a detailed explanation). It also provides short but intense showcase missions for these features, which serve as an introduction to the lore being developed in other Protection mods (which depend on third-party mods). These showcase missions are calibrated for one or two players.


Protection Vanilla has no other dependencies than Arma Reforger and Protection Core (hence its name) and is the easiest way to deploy the Protection features on a server, with reasonable defaults. Just add it as a dependency and it will populate Arland or Everon, punish additional war crimes, and enable the AI commanding of civilians or prisoners. This mod is also useful for modders as an example on how to activate Protection features or how to use them with the Scenario Framework.


The mod logic and missions' content are entirely localized in French, the other language of international law.


Many thanks and kudos to Zuzuthereal for hours of testing and regular feedback on the scenarios.


Last but not least, these versions of Protection Core and Protection Vanilla are candidates to the "Make Arma Not War" mod competition. There are many other ideas in the work which did not make it into this first release. Stay tuned for additional mechanisms, factions and integrations with third-party mods, to be implemented in the coming months!