With the current system of squad grinding, some high-level squads suffer from an insanely long grind time where you’re forced to play them at below 50% power for several games. Even as a good player, you will expect to play at least 5-10 games to earn ONE squad level, where each level is upwards of 15-20k exp.
Nothing’s worse than being forced to grief your team because you need to unlock a weapon upgrade. Now imagine spawning it in to grind it only for you to get nuked and being unable to grind it for another 2-3 spawns.
I’m not asking for a free full power squad right after buying it, but certain squads need to have their grind reduced to be in line with the rate other squads can be grinded.
The squads that suffer the most from this are mainly smaller-sized squads with very niche uses:
- Radio Operator II
- Sniper II & III
- AT Gunner II
- Fighter & Attacker Pilot (mainly level II-III)
Proposed Solutions:
- Instead of setting a constant exp requirement for all squads of a level, it should be balanced or multiplied around the number of STARTING soldiers in the squad at level 1. It could work a little something like this:
A basic formula could be like this:
(base cost) - [base cost x (1 / (squad starting size)]
Only exception is if the starting size is 1. In that case, the denominator would be 2.
Sniper III level 1-2 exp requirement:
~12,000 - (12,000 x 1/3) = 8000 exp
- Squads under a certain level (maybe level 4-5) can bypass the restriction for having a cooldown time of 2-3 spawns. Only exception would be vehicle squads, but those tend to earn more exp per spawn anyways. So now instead of having to wait 2-3 spawns, you’d be able to spawn in it again if you got nuked. This would by no means be overpowered or easily abused since you’re playing a squad at less than 50% of its power level when fully upgraded.
By using this system, it helps newer players greatly by kickstarting their squad grind and make it so they at least get the +25% squad exp upgrades before feeling the full force of the grind.
A potential issue with this system would also be “bleeders”-- people who are awful at the game and only serve to drain your team’s ticket supply and actually have negative contribution. Most of the time, the culprits of this are bad players levelling small squads. What could be done is to reduce the number of tickets a squad from level 0-5 drains out of the team pool.
As a whole, the squad grind needs to be drastically rebalanced, particularly from levels 1-10 when a squad is at its weakest.