Quick Preface: Erika’s excellent customization overhaul would be preferable to the suggestion proposed in this post. In a perfect world Erika’s system could be implemented in tandem with this proposal, gold order soldiers still getting unique cosmetics while regular soldiers get access to everything described in the post below.
The general sentiment of the forum community is that gold order soldiers are generally worthless aside from a little medal you get next to their name. While that is at least something, gold order soldiers are a much less substantial reward when compared to gold order vehicles and weapons. In this post, I will talk about relatively simple additions made to the gold order soldiers to make them more worth using aside from giving them perfect stats.
New gold order soldiers added to game are based on real life people who served various countries during the war. With that in mind I think one easy way to differentiate the gold order soldiers from their silver counterparts is to give them access to uniforms with patches and helmets with decals (in some cases from the actual divisions or organizations they participated in). Obviously this is problematic for some german soldiers, so there would have to be some censorship.
The Return of Patches
Some people on this forum mourn the loss of patches on soldiers uniforms. While it would be nice to have this make a full return, I doubt that it will happen due to the substantial work required to make patches of all the new squads appear on the new cosmetic options.
However, I think it would be considerably less effort to just add a patch to the uniform of a gold order soldier instead. They would function like event squad soldiers do, with a set uniform that is unique to them.
Helmet Cosmetics
As previously mentioned, it would be very cool to get helmets with unique decals for gold order soldiers. This would work best for american soldiers as they customized their helmets quite a bit.
However it may be possible to also implement this for German, Japanese, and Soviet gold order soldiers. There are examples of lightly costumized Japanese helmets.
Note - the above helmet may have been used by the Japanese Civil Defense.
It may be possible to censor german helmets or simply replace the problematic imagery with the division or squad symbol present in the game.
I didn’t have as much luck with Soviet helmets, as I didn’t find any good examples of customized Soviet helmets. So I am unsure how to make this system work for Soviet gold order soldiers.