Calling in artillery requires an alive radio operator soldier - this is 100% fact.
- The Radio Operator squad itself can also call in bombing runs and smoke artillery.
- Any RO Soldier that is in different squads can only call in normal artillery.
Since you introduced HMGs into the game and gave Machine Gunners some interesting options with their Engineer, how about we come back to making the game more dynamic for RO squads.
- RO squads’ engineers would obtain a new buildable called “Long Range Antenna” or something similar to this name. This would be a small box-esq building that would be protected with sandbags slightly above chest level with a connection device in the middle for the Radio Operator to interact with.
- This would bring the player to the big map and also give them access to call in full artillery strikes. In essence, this would be the same time as of now but for squads that are not the Radio Operator themselves, the duration would be cut in half of how many strikes appear.
- This would balance non RO squads to soldiers being in normal squads and give a more incentive to wanting to play such squads for the full benefits.
Since RO squads would have the most functions given to a RO Soldier, it is only fitting to give them more time approximate options. Since I know this one could take some time, I am only offering this part as an idea - this does NOT have to be considered fully by you developers.
Gif is a representation of what “Isonzo”, a WWI based game, does with their Arty system.
And one final thought I want to close this off with is please give points to players killed in a called smoke artillery. That mechanic is hardly used since it does not generate similar EXP as to the other two available call ins for radio operators.