Advanced Squad Controlling - Suggestions

Suggestions
1

Squad controlling is a bit too basic in the game right now, and the AIs just feel like another life when you died and won’t actually do many things, so I have come up with some suggestions and would like to share with you guys

Roles in battle
Introduce a ‘role’ system, where you can appoint jobs to soldiers in the squad in the game’s main menu like how you would edit their equipment layout.

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Roles that I came up with included:
1. Default - what AIs do now, follow you and shoot the enemy that they encountered
All classes can be appointed into this role

2. Medic - will stay at the back as much as possible, and will heal downed soldiers
Only Rifleman can be appointed into this role (or make it into a class just like assaulters or riflemen?)

3. Recon - will go attempt to go ahead with the squad and tells the player the vague location of tanks, machine gun nests etc. (Enemy tank! 10 o’clock! sth like this)
Only Rifleman and Sniper can be appointed into this role

I can only think of these, any more ideas?

Behavior settings

Set the behaviours of each soldier in the menu:
1. Passive - Aggressive (Will they cover your back, or charge with you in front?)

2. Will they attempt to throw grenades back? (At all cost? Consider the risk? Never?)

3. Will they resupply through the squad’s ammo crate? (Always? Not when the box is low? Never?)

4. Prefer moving by Running? Crouching? Or Crawling? (this will become weird tho)

(Medic only) Will they heal only squadmates? Or all teammates? Or only you and your friends?

Ability to recon (how far and how good can they see) and the chance of throwing back a grenade is based on the soldier’s rank, for example, a rank V soldier can throw back a grenade 30-40% faster than a rank I one etc

Lastly, more control in the battle

1. Battle Formation: Spear, Circle or sth like those

2. Being able to control Engineer without switching, you can call up the radial menu and appoint a building to the engineer without switching

3. Telling the squad to secure windows: by pressing a button, you can control either the whole squad or individual into windows that you pointed at (when it’s the whole squad, they will find a window on their own, with the Passive soldier still staying in the back)

4. Ask to provide suppressive fire from Assaulters and Gunners, points at a location and click the button, then AIs will go pew pew pew and shoot more than usual

Some of the suggestions might be weird, but I also want to hear some opinions from you guys, and maybe someone can come up with a better solution to gameplay and balance.

Suggestions and criticism are welcomed.

5 Likes
2

The idea to put a selection inside the menu is great, we don’t want our radio operator to behave like our assault gunner or our lmg dude.

But I would also add someting ingame:

  • the bot take cover when order to go on a house.
  • Correct the bug: that brake the pathfinding when they are inside a building.
  • Correct the bug: you sometimes can’t give them order to go to the firdt floor
  • double click an order to RUN without stoping until they arrive at position (they always get shot on the way because they stop to fire back)
  • hold the order button, an arrow apear, put it in the direction you want the bot to aim at, release. So they don’t just crouch looking at the oppisite place the ennemy is
4 Likes
3

Great idea, in some JRPGs you can set the behavior for you AI mates like this, too.

1 Like
4

The only thing that I am worried about is that making the AI system ever more complicated will cause more bugs to emerge…
But then this is a squad-based game, better AIs are needed and more control of the squad

And I agree so much with your points, those are some of the most annoying bugs, and AIs still get trapped inside houses and towers.

As for the hold button, I think we can integrate it with the role system as well, maybe via a pie menu or via quick buttons, so that we can let the AI take cover from that direction, provide suppressive fire to that direction, or even flee from that direction lol

1 Like
5

I think its so important to let us set the roles and control our AIs more
Its to feel the power of being a leader, and tell the AIs to act better on the field rather than being a moving target lol.

6

I dont know how well it works in online games but in practice the ai will aim at red marks and take their direction into account when taking cover.
Go to practice build a sandbag and mark a random location and just see how the ai react.

1 Like
7

Yeah, full agre.
It’s a sad joke that the game about being a squad commander doesn’t have much orders to command your squad.

(Not that there is much time in game to use already existing orders.)

1 Like
8

so true lol

1 Like