I feel that squad mechanic is heavily underutilised by the game.
The most meta use of your squad, is to hide it somewhere and use AI soldiers as spare lives. How is that different from (for example) BF where you can spawn on temmates?
And what are other usages of squad? Spare grenades. Spare medkits. Spare ammo. Different weapon / tool.
Squad mechanic is basically “give me X and get of my way”. It’s a walking inventory, not a combat unit.
Yeah sure, you can RP as a squad commander and actually give orders to your squad. But I wish you good luck beeing 1st on your team.
Maybe I don’t understand something. But so far it seems that removing AI from players’ squads and spawning them as independent squads, wouldn’t change a lot in current meta.
Yes, it would change the gameplay but not nearly as much as it should. We are taling about a removal of the main feature of the game after all! It should change the game drastically, not just a bit.
Sugestion:
Tbh, I have no idea I wanted to sugest adding more control over squads but it’s already here and it changed nothing in meta.
I guess it’s because of fast gameplay. You can either spend time commanding your squad, or you can rush in with SMG and grenades. If you want xp, the choise is obvious.
I don’t know. Share your thoughts.
TL;DR:
Squad mechanic is next to pointless in practice. Imo it’s a shame but I have no idea how to change it.
Ps.
I finaly managed to make an actual short post instead of 2 pages of text. Hurray I guess.
Gameplay speed and an abundance of aoe weapons definitely don’t do great things for the squad being very interactive. You could try to have them take up positions while the enemies are approaching, but then someone throws in one grenade and all that effort is gone. Just placing mines everywhere or setting up some barbed wire tends to be a better use of that sort of downtime.
Something I think that could help make the squads more relevant would be switching the way you command your squad to be more goal oriented, than the current “Stand here” system. Something like “Attack that tank” and a couple of your bots will try to grenade it or take shots at it with AT weapons, or “Secure this room” and they’ll spread out to the different windows and entryways on their own from there. Basically try to have a short list of tasks the bots can do, and then let you get them moving in a straightforward but somewhat coordinated fashion with a quick point and a button press or two. That way you don’t end up investing more time trying to command one soldier than they are likely to actually survive once an enemy is visible.
They could also stand to be somewhat more aggresive in actually firing their weapons. Bot aim isn’t brilliant, but I don’t think that’s really what makes them so harmless. Its the fact that they often just won’t actually shoot at all. Frankly even if their aim got worse, but they took more shots, I think they would be more impactful.
All that said, I think you are underestimating how important bots are as well, cannon fodder. They may not kill much, but they make it harder for enemies to sneak up on you, they keep up at least some pressure while you are reloading, and they draw fire away from you. They can also be really handy for drawing attention away from yourself as you do something sneaky, since no one can resist shooting at the huge blob of bots running in a straight line. And frankly, I really appreciate all the extra noise and action they add to the game, even if they don’t really mean a whole lot.
In all recent games, the AI has been neglected to the point it becomes the norm (Assassin creed, Far cry, Just cause, Total War series, Fallout etc…)
I can not think of one game where the AI manage to make me say “Wow, that’s crazy how good the behaviour looks.”
AI is the selling point of the game, the argument that make you choose Enlisted over other war games. Most of the current FPS manage to attract player because of the historic fan base (CoD, Battlefield…) but the gameplay hasn’t evolve for years, and the overall quality has droped. However War Thunder has became a reference in its gendra because of new mechanics et precise gameplay.
This is Gaijin for me; Precise gameplay and inovative mechanics. While Enlisted is selled as a MMO Squad FPS, the AI is very desapointing.
What a squad leader do? He gives orders. Orders like: “Suprresive fire”, “Build fortification”, “Focus on this area”, “Build sandbag and MG nest”, “run to the trench”, “Build a trench”.
All thoses thing can make the game so much appealing, because to be honnest I play Enlisted because I have been desapointed by Battlefield games since the excellent Battlefield Bad company 2, 12 years ago.
I want to say to the devs: make me play the unique component of this game, the AI.
Give me some tools to use my chickens on the battlefield and not as stupid mobil spawn points!
And make this game a reference for AI and shame all the other lazy games who neglected the AI just like some lazy game just use “Health Point” on a 50t tank.
Another use of your AI squad is to, when under heavy fire is to command them to attack the objective as a distraction so that you can rush somewhat unnoticed to the objective
The AI will walk by themselves if you’re using that command, so you have the option of, your squad dying while following you (note that, a full squad behind you is jeopardizing your stealth) or use them as a sacrifice/distraction/meat shield.
100 percent agree with you and frankly the only solution is a better system for giving orders. This game needs company of heroes ai. It really doesn’t work with the current brain dead lemmings.
I wanted to sugest adding more control over squads but it’s already here and it changed nothing in meta.
