PermaSquads Idea

[DNK]

I had a brainfart piece of inspired genius come to me right now. I mentioned in another thread about the issues with the crew assignments UI, and I was just thinking "what if we could set up permanent squads and switch those in and out of dropships?" Seemed genius enough for its own thread, sorry if that's too modest.

The idea is that we can create squads and assign soldiers to those squads, then assign squads (not soldier by soldier individually) to dropships or bases. Maybe you have an alpha squad of your best vets, and then that old delta squad with a couple Lt.s in command and then cannon fodder all the way down the roster. Then as the fodder progress into pros, they can fill in the "sudden vacancies" in your alpha squad... and so on, you get the idea.

Just seems to make sense to me. Also, you can get combat bonuses for squads that have fought together for a long time, like morale bonuses, maybe some extra time points since they're so much more efficient in communicating/moving together. But these bonuses are dependent on some maths...

For each individual it would be (one approach):

sum { [XP gained while fighting with squad member X in the past while in this squad] } for each other soldier .... divided by some reasonable coefficient

IF the other member is the current squad leader, it's like 3x multiplier on top (the actual squad leader doesn't get this bonus when doing the calc)

Example:

Joey Bloke is in a squad with 4 people

He's gained 3XP when on missions with person 1 while they were in this squad

He's gained 10XP with person 2

He's gained 0XP with person 3

He's gained 5XP with person 4 (the current leader)

His total bonus will be something like 28XP / 20 = 1.4x bonus to his morale (different division coefs to other skills perhaps?) (note the division coefficient will be like "5 per squad member" or something, rather than a set amount, scales with size)

This will decrease during the mission when anyone dies btw, or improve as XP is gained in real time (I think there's something similar already in place for morale, so maybe this can replace that)

So, one of the things I felt X1 could have improved on was storytelling. Basically, I had 0 connection to any of my soldiers as they blasted through the invasion. Losing one was little more than an inconvenience in terms of built up XP and skills. This way you can add a little in, as now everyone has a technical connection to everyone else, and squads have a persistent presence (and you can name them for extra flavor!).

Perhaps we can add in personalities and relationships that alter how well the squad works together too (storytelling DLC hype starts now). I'm sure there's plenty of open source code that's simple enough to be adapted and thrown in without too much fuss, since it's all happening sort of on top of the rest of the mechanics, maybe updated after each mission, easy simple coding stuff, as much as it can be.

[Decius]

There's some value to having a squad that can be moved around as a single unit, such as putting equipment assignment on the squad position. But working out the edge cases and the UI for it is time better spent on other features.

Giving a mechanical bonus for using an accounting feature is cancer; if you want a rapport mechanic, have it work pairwise independently of squad.

[Twigg]

Long war 1 and 2 (the overall mods for both Firaxis games) had a squad mechanic that was somewhat similar to this. Essentially each squad was built around 1 or more officers. These officers provided bonuses to each squad member that scaled (somewhat) with each successful mission. This was balanced by the fact that an officer had to conduct training (aka be out of action) every time they went up an officer rank. This really helped differentiate and humanize squads added to the tactical complexity of the missions (as you had to balance not just which missions required which squads but which missions were worth risking your high level officers on). This system also helped make certain builds more effective. Niche's like the spotter and the medic could use their officer skills during the times where their main skills weren't needed.

I really think such a system would flourish in X2 and would wholly support some form of it in the game.

[Coffee Potato]

It depends on how the game plays down the line. If there's tons of teams like Long War or XDiv, it would be amazing. If it's like what we've seen so far, Xeno 1, etc, rotating teams wouldn't be necessary, so you could know your individual agents.