Squad Recomposition Experiment

Development Ideaguys
1

You saw it in Discord, now you get to see it here!

Objectives:
-Break down the larger four squads with hardset roles and cultures into smaller groups of 8 people. The fixed capacity of a squad will make it much easier for a leader to manage and delegate, giving squad leaders more ease of leadership and control with smaller fireteam sized squads.

-Break down the large, disgusting looking giant squad prep areas into a larger, more generalized prep zone (movielike).

-Enhance the chain of command downstream from the CIC, as the effective leadership link between CIC and the infantry will be greatly improved.

Squad Composition:
-Squad Leader
-Smartgunner/Specialist
-Corpsman
-Combat Technician
-Rifleman
-Rifleman
-Rifleman
-Rifleman

Functionality:
Squad Leaders will have a preference as to the name of their squad from phonetic alphabet, preps will become large and generalized for al squads. Number of squads will scale with pop, probably up to 10 squads at a time.

Individual players will not be able to have a preference as to which squad they are assigned to to eliminate clique behavior (FOR NOW), because I know it’ll be a concern.

IMPORTANT
This is all, of course, extremely subject to change and likely will change a lot through testing. Don’t pick a hill to die on just yet for every design choice, because it’s likely not final.

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TO DO LIST:
-Remove A/B/C/D Prep and colorings through ship, barracks, cryo, briefing.
+Rebuild briefing to accomodate 8-10 8 man squads.
+Make comms system more dynamic to be manipulated on the fly. Maybe something with frequencies?
-Remove squad preference for regular marines.
+Give an SL preference for what their squad is named ABC’s wise.
-Remove RTO/FTL or whatever the fuck it is now.
+Cap squad composition. Pop scale it.
+Rebuild prep as one big generalized thing, very open, add pull-up bars.
+Streamline OW system to make flipping through squads easier.
+Add color code thing for overlays.
-Vendor economy rebalance.

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Looks like a huge pain to code.

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Interesting idea, worth a shot IMO.

Don’t know how to streamline OW tho, even switching between comms sounds like a huge pain

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A very interesting idea. I agree it is worth a shot. I would hate the end of squad preferences.

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Very well thought out, I like it. Obviously would take lots of effort to implement but it could be a great change. I do still think the old cliques would exist, obviously.

I also think it’d be cool if OW had the ability to click on other marines in the camera view and then watch them, alternatively they could use arrows at the bottom to navigate without having to back out every time.

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Like I said on the discord thread, but just gonna post it here too;
Overall I like the idea of having smaller squads, but I have a few concerns over all. This could kill CIC gameplay, you have not adjusted for the added squads in CIC for things like overwatch. power creep, correct me if I am wrong if want like one SG,and or one Spec as well then that can become very OP, think of game balance zeno would be fucked over by this so much more. If you also remove things like squad pref you will have more marines going ranbo to do what they want, like if they wanna be fobbits but are not fob squad they will fuck of from their assigned squad, or the to marines from different squads ranbo off together casue in the same squad. also ya squad comms, looks like coding might be hell. And current ship squad cryos will have to be redone as well.
This all is just surface stuff, I bet there would a lot more things pop up that need to be addressed before this can even be tested

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I should say that the main focus isn’t to waste to much time on overhauling overwatch stuff, because that would literally take ages and is way beyond the scope of this project. The idea is to give more control to the SLs, and also increase the number of SLs, so the chain of command is smoother between the ship and the ground. SOs will have to waste less time herding cats because there will be more groundside leadership to rely on, and therefore the job is mostly the same. The overall amount of players isn’t changing here, just the leadership ratio.

As far as radio and stuff goes, Moonshanks and I have pretty much sorted out what we think the bulk of the problems are as far as implementation goes. It’ll definitely take some work, but it’s not impossible.

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Briefing concept.

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this is awesome, less squad size - more cohesion and probably more roleplay

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While smaller squads may be easier to lead, we already have fireteams for that reason. I also think that this would somewhat remove squad organization: if someone rolls for comtech and set preference to Bravo, you can be pretty sure that they are either totally bald and decided, Bravo sounds nice or want to build the FOB. Now the comtech would end in Golf or somewhere but still build FOB, together with the comtechs from Kilo and November, but without the ability to communicate over radio. Also, multiple squads would have to be assigned to FOB, as an eight-people squad with only one comtech is not enough for FOB, especially if half the squads runs off and frontlines. Now there wouldn’t be a single “FOB channel” but three squads nobody knows if they are actually at FOB. Where to ask “How is the south looking?”, then? It would additionally a pain to manage ten more radio channels.

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Why would I stick with a smaller squad if I’m not sticking with the big ones already - how is this reducing herding cats? Who would play all these SLs? How do you want to balance around so many SGs and specs? Just have weaker squads without them? And how would this even function any different than current implementation, you would still murderball several squads together to be effective. Would also cause an absolute shit storm comms wise and a hassle to remember which squad is where doing what for CIC.
Its a cool idea but for a different game. Will not work unless you redesign CM in its entirety to accommodate it and I can’t really see any positives in implementing this. It’s just pointless chaos.

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This seems like a neat idea but could easily go wrong. I think that this would, obviously, need tested quite a bit. The question is, how do we work this into a minimal change to reduce development time.

For example, if we ignored all the mapping changes and just gave Marines access to all prep rooms, that cuts out a chunk of work.

If we can reduce the scope to test the essence of the idea, I think this could be tested quicker and built upon

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Short time remove all access restrictions on the vendors. Long term create a common prep area that all Marines access. It should not be hard to map out a large common prep area assuming the concept is found to be good and we move forward with it.

@Johannes2262 the server would eventually create a culture of which squads would usually be assigned to FOB duty. I’d guess Bravo and Foxtrot only because the Foxtrot symbol colour is similar to the Bravo symbol.

However I understand the issue that if we have 8 squads with 8 comtechs and only 2 of the squads are put on FOB duty it might create a lot of pressure on those 2 comtechs. But nothing has ever stopped non-Bravo Engis from helping with FOB, and we always have MTs/SLs/the CE/Synth to help.

These are all things we can speculate but we’ll only get a perfect picture if this is tested.

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Worth noting that with the upcoming Support Officer role, CE and MTs especially will already be highly encouraged to deploy to build the FOB as is. It essentially becomes their job.

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Ok I already REEEEd enough about this on discord, but I still have some acid left to spew and I guess I’ll sum it up now and then completely disengage from this topic.

This is Echo-fication of CM squads. But what worked for Echo would not work for CM in general for a variety of reasons.

The first is troop quality. Echo could allow itself to strip most of the good players from other squads for 1 good squad. Current squads being that large also usually have a few good people on the account of their extreme size. But if we spread the same amount of people among 8(or whatever) squads we’re just risking none of the squads being effective.

The second is resilience. You need to account for attrition. With just 4 riflemen, losing 1 or 2 already puts the squad at an extreme disadvantage(assuming they would even follow the leaders). This never mattered for Echo, because it usually quickly died together flanking the hive alone.

The third is responsibility. Squads are actually expected to follow orders to do something boring. Which is usually accomplished by SLs scrapping a fireteam of good\new players to actually do whatever job is assigned.

More squads means more squad leaders have to do the boring stuff. Assuming 1 squad per task, lets say on a LV round we’re gonna have 2 FOB squads, 1 comms squad, 1 hydro squad. So instead of 1 Bravo SL roll that everyone dreads, there’s going to be 4 hated SL rolls out of 8.
And because command has to assign those boring jobs, it’s gonna be SLs with good reputation being given those tasks round after round. Oh, SL, I remember you rolling Bravo? Well, enjoy your permanent FOB duty every round.

For Echo that never mattered because Echo never had any sense of responsibility even in that basic Delta sense of always being the guys in the heat of action. So, to me it really seems that all this talk of “enhancing the chain of command downstream” and “giving more control to the SLs” is all about empowering the shitty SLs to go “shut up command we’re not doing that”, then getting their squad killed in whichever cave flank they decided to do on their own and then going “shit command, why did they not reinforce us” in dchat.

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hop off my nuts lmao

like I said before, it’s way too early to be picking hills to die on. this is just experimental, so that we can stop with the wild speculation and actually get a definitive answer and what’s good and what isn’t. obv this hasn’t been done before, and there’s plenty of things to iron out. it’s not going to be perfect in the slightest, but coming into it with a mindset of failure isn’t helping.

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This looks to be a very interesting change, I would definitely want to try it out. However, I see three main issues that would have to be addressed in the later stages of this experiment:

  1. Lack of a well-defined second-in-command in each squad. Currently, we have two team leaders in each squad for a total of eight. If no squad leader joins the game for a squad, or if he is out of action, a staff officer assigns one of two other NCOs as acting SLs. The removal of TLs entirely would end up with the decapitation of a squad the second they lose their SL, and with 8-10 squads, it would be likely to have squads with no SLs to begin with.
  2. Lack of a proper platoon structure to command all squads. It would get very difficult for CIC staff to control 8-10 squads, especially if CIC is not fully manned. I suspect that two platoon lieutenants and platoon sergeants may be necessary, but I would need to see how the marine players adapt to this change.
  3. Radio communication overload. With 8-10 SLs and all CIC staff on one command radio, information might very quickly overwhelm leadership. Sure, having one, central radio net for disseminating information would be great, but this is a two-way street. Again, this is just speculation, much like my second point. If this turns out to be the case, platoon command nets might be needed.
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Yes good idea, decentralisation of the squad system to make it more compact makes it more logical for the direction CM is taking - the original squad system with four squads was made for a server with a much lower population than what is regularly achieved now. Basically, more squads = good.

Giving orders might be a bit of a faff, but that will be apart of the experience and make command gameplay more complex and add new challenges.

Would also allow for more individual, squad focused gameplay that favours mobility and dynamic orders placing more of an importance on the squad leader and the marines under them.

I support this change wholeheartedly, good luck thwomp…

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There’s nothing wild about my speculation. I’ve been leading small squads for years now(dark age of Charlie hurt) and you can easily try it yourself anytime by hopping onto lowpop. As for the “mindset of failure”, that’s exactly how you should approach any experiment. Because otherwise it’s easy to ignore all the negatives and declare a complete success because it’s your idea and you had fun.

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Cant we just use the extra squads as intel spawns, Instead of having foxtrot with 3 SLs.

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In a situation where a Squad Leader gives an order that 5 people obey, if the squad has 30 people, they are likely to ignore or dismiss the order. Conversely if the squad is restricted to 8 people, the remaining 3 people are far more likely to obey the order or at least follow the SL.

I postulate that smaller squads will result in better and more engaging roleplay and making it more likely for a SL to direct their squad (or at least follow them).

Ultimantly speculation can only get us so far but I do genuinely believe the idea is worth testing out. The bugs or kinks can be ironed out once we know what the actual bugs and kinks are going to be.

1 Like