An Android and his Nexus: Battlefield 4 Commander and Battlelog App

One of the mains reasons I wanted a tablet was so I could play some tablet-only apps such as the Battlefield 4 Commander App, and once I got my Nexus 7 it was one of the first things I got. I did a review of Battlefield 4 back in April and spent a part of it complaining about the Commander mode requiring you to sacrifice your player slot to be a commander whereas in Battlefield 2 the Commander was an actual player in the game. The Commander app is a bit finicky to start with as you have to download the Battlelog app as well, so basically you can go into either one first for example if you start up the Commander app and click server browser it takes you into the Battlelog app then when you join a server it goes back to the Commander App. The Battlelog app is pretty much identical to what you see on the browser version and it also syncs your profile and settings data so you have the same favourite servers and history etc which is a great help, it’s relatively simple to navigate but can be slow and laggy at times.

Looks familiar... that's good

So basically once you find a server you can join as the Commander and be amazed at how fast the damn map loads lol in stark contrast to when you’re playing the game and have to wait there for almost a minute. The battle screen is a simple and mostly colourless view of the battlefield you have your commander tools on the left and your squad info the right, with your usual other information such as chat log, menu and scoreboard buttons, time and score. There are three types of assets that you can use as a commander, these are Default Assets, Main Assets and Squad Assets.

Main screen on the Golmud Railway map, you can see the default assets up the top left, then main assets then squad assets in green.

Default Assets

Defaults assets are things like UAV scans and marking high value targets, these are always available to you but all have their own cooldown.

Scan UAV                  
Deploy an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), which spots enemies in the area.

EMP UAV                 
Deploy an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) UAV, which hides activity in the area from enemy Commander. This causes damage to the enemy cruise missiles and gunship.

High Value Target
If an enemy soldier reaches a killstreak of 6, Commanders can highlight them as a High Value
Target (HVT) for their team. The player that kills this target within a short time frame will receive a
bonus along with the commander, and each kill this HVT makes while targeted will earn him a bonus.

Evac Order                         
Warn allied soldiers in the area of incoming danger.
Order                                   

Give an order to a Squad Leader to either attack or defend an objective.

You can see here by the dark patch that the enemy has used an EMP UAV and I have placed a High value target which in this case is a bomber jet.

Main Assets

Access to the main assets usually depends on which flags your team currently has captured as each one is tied to a particular flag, sometimes when playing the game as a soldier it’s good to know which points give the commander what resources as you’d want the one with the Gunship at all costs as it’s one majorly powerful asset when it’s in the air allowing up to 3 people to man 3 different types of guns.

Infantry Scan                    
 Spot all enemy soldiers on the mini-map.

Vehicle Scan                     
Spot all enemy vehicles on the mini-map.

Proxy Attack                     
Disable the Enemy Commander for 10 seconds

Cruise Missile                   
 Launch a cruise missile at an area, destroying all enemies in the area.

Gunship                              
Deploy the AC-130 GUNSHIP. When the gunship is deployed it will circle the base that it is tied to. Your team can deploy in the gunship and parachute from it.

In this particulat instance my side has capture points B and C which allows me to use the Infantry Scan and Gunship assets

Squad Assets

As the commander you can select a squad by touching them and assign them to either attack a neutral or enemy flag or defend a captured one, after a while I worked out that when you issue an order it appears as a dotted line and if the squad leader complies and tells his squad to attacked that flag it becomes a full line. I vaguely remember this in the actually game now being loosely represented by a sort of triangle around a flag that your Commander wants you to capture. Anyway when your squad orders and obeyed and the squad works well together it adds to the Squad Asset bar which is on the bottom left in green and depending on how high your squad asset bar is you can do one or more of the below. Each of these assets cost a different amount of “chunks” of the bar going from promote squad to vehicle drop.

Asset

Promote Squad                
Promote your squad.

Supply Drop                      
Deploy crate via parachute, which automatically heals and gives ammo to nearby soldiers. Allied soldiers can also switch kits by interacting with the crate.

Rapid Deploy                     
Reduces affected squads’ deploy time.

Vehicle Drop                    
Context-sensitive parachute vehicle drop – Personal Water Craft (PWC) or a quad bike.

My squad asset bar is full here so I can use whichever one I like

There’s also a voice option so you can talk to the squad leaders, I haven’t really used this but I have heard someone speaking at some times, too hard to hear what they were saying though. I found that people aren’t that obedient most of the time, it’s only when I was in Japan that the quality of play, chat and obedience really went up, figures huh? There are 4 types of ribbons/medals you can get for playing commanders including:

Leadership - Receive 10 order followed

Surveillance – Obtain 10 scan bonuses

Resupply – Obtain 10 supply crate uses

Gunship  - Deploy 2 Gunships

The Commander app main screen with my commander medal and ribbon information and my beautiful portrait.

Though for the most part the points you get are nothing compared to the points you get when actually playing as a soldier, but I suppose there’s got to be a compromise there somewhere. One thing I found recently was that there was a fair few servers which didn’t allow for Commanders. I suppose that would be because a lot of people don’t like the extra level of difficulty with the Commander around especially when your side doesn’t have one and the enemy commander is pummelling you with cruise missiles and gunships and giving their team the extra advantage, there’s a setting in the server search which allows you to check that the server allows Commanders anyway.

Yay a server that allows Commanders!

Overall I found the app to work pretty well, there was some unexplained server disconnects but nothing that doesn’t happen in the main game, it’s fun to use if you have the opportunity to play and help out your friends, not to mention get some extra points for you soldier. It will never be as good as Battlefield 2 with its assets and commander physically on the battlefield but it’s still a bit of fun for when you’re not at home and need that Battlefield fix.

JD


A short video of the Commander app in action on a Nexus 7

An Android and his Nexus: New Post Title Introduction

Well here I go again, another post type, I have finally delved into the untouched (for me at least) realm of mobile gaming. The title comes from when I was preparing for a trip to Japan with my martial arts group (I do Iaido) and I decided I should get a multimedia tablet for internet, email and gaming cause I didn’t want to use my phone all the time. Funnily enough I decided on an Asus Google Nexus 7 (2013 Model) for a few reasons which I’ll detail below.

• It runs on Android

• It has a powerful CPU and graphics erm chip or card I don’t know what they have.

• It was cheap! (only $305)

• It has lots of storage space, I got the 32g model which has 26gb free 

My main screen in landscape mode, I managed to pretty much copy all of the apps from my phone,  the time/date and weather widget isn't a built-in feature

There are some drawbacks such as  7” screen which is only slightly bigger than those giant Samsung galaxy note phones and also I got the wifi-only version so I’d need to be connected via wifi to be able to use internet. However these are a minor issues, the way I see it if I got an actual gaming handheld such as the PSP it’s only 4.3 inches which is the size of a regular smartphone anyway. The other thing was I didn’t want to pay for a whole other phone plan for my tablet either, so I got got this nifty little thing called the TP-Link TL-WR702N 150Mbps Wireless N Mini Router Atheros which basically allows you to create a Wifi hotspot from a normal Ethernet port supplying internet.I also got a case to go with it which was one of those thin shell black ones which fit nicely and had that feature where you close the front it automatically switches off the screen and it came with a  free stylus that I love to use as it’s a bit more accurate than your finger for pressing those little links.

Me holding it in portrait mode, the orange bit the the case

 The main reason I got this was for my trip to Japan, (which was awesome by the way) and the Nexus 7 delivered, the screen is great, it’s really fast, I wasted no time setting it up with all my options and most of the apps I had from my phone, it works fine from my wireless internet at home after a bit of mucking around. I was going to try and use Juicedefender and Adblock Plus but unfortunately the Juicedefender kept cutting out the wifi and Adblock plus didn’t really work. After I fixed those two issues the tablet was running much better and pretty soon I had loaded up on various different apps I wanted inc MX Player which plays all types of downloaded movie files where android will not. On the trip itself the time on the plane flew by with me with me mining it up with Minecraft Pocket Edition or going old school with GTA3, and yes that is on the Google play store for Android  even San Andreas is on there, I could scarcely believe it though I spose it was pretty old and these things were pretty damn powerful, so why not.

My games and bookmarks screen, up the top right is the general controls tabs such as wifi and birghtness.

I ended up getting a collection of games as there was an android equivalent of most of the games I play, I’ve detailed whole list below. It truly is a good gaming device, there’s even a Steam App

Pegland and Pegland Deluxe – This is just basically an Android version of Peggle though not as good but that’s usually the case with free games.

Boing! Pow! Zing! Isn't the same as Peggle though

Battlefield 4 Commander and Battlelog App  - These are one of the main reasons I got the tablet, I like being the Commander though it’s nowhere near as good as it was in BF2, I just like the idea of commanding a match while your friends play. When I was playing this in Japan they were damn obedient I can tell you that.

Oh the responsibility!

Grand Theft Auto  III – The old favourite, I chose to play this one as I’d played San Andreas recently and wanted to go right back to the (almost) beginning, plays pretty wellbut would really love a controller for it.

I don't know about you but I kinda liked good old Claude from GTA3, especially at the start of the game.

  
Minecraft Pocket Edition – You could probably see this one coming, though there is a few features that are missing or different to the PC, the main one being finite worlds.

Edge of the world, that just ain't right man.

Ravensword 2 Shadowlands – This is basically Skyrim just lower res and slightly different, less Dragons maybe.

This will be much easier with the MOGA pro

Real Racing 3 – There were a ton of realistic racers though this one was pretty good, couldn’t exactly find a test drive unlimited equivalent

Hey who recognizes this place? the developers do, as they are based in Melbourne.

Order and Chaos Online – They basically could have called this World of Warcraft for Android, top notch MMO for a mobile device.

Looks familiar doesn't it?

Clumsy Bird -  Of all the Flappy bird clones this one is awesome, it looks great and can even play online with others seeing how far you can get within a set time period.

Multiplayer fun!

Repulze – This is basically Wipeout except with less focus on tricky tracks and ship flying and more on shooting. Have to try this one yet.

Off road sections? reminds me of Wipeout Fusion, ugh oh well I'm sure it's still better

These three were put on by my friend along with a whole bunch of others, these were the only 3 I kept.

Angry Birds and Angry Birds Space – Yep you know what these are, tbh I may delete them as I really don’t see the hype.

2048 – An interesting numbers game that I can’t quite work out, it’s pretty damn popular though.

Plants Vs Zombies 2 – Another well known one, is pretty cool but I got kinda bored of it after a while.

The TP-Link router was really good as the wifi in the hotel was average at best, I really noticed the different when I beefed it up with the internet for the port, I actually had to go get another adaptor plug for the adapter plug that I had as it was an older Japanese plug. So apart from a few issues I had some good nights of gaming while in Japan. Screw arcades hey?

Ahh gaming home away from home.

So basically after explaining all that this post title will be about the games I play on my Nexus 7 using Android, hence the title, haven’t exactly decided what the first post will be but we’ll see. As a final note I’ve bought a MOGA Pro controller for my Nexus 7 so I may leave any games that I want to try with the controller for later and focusing on the ones that I only use the styles and some touching for, that sounds kinda weird actually.

JD

I’m through touching I need hands-on