I just rotated all of my infantry units into my 4-squad lineup so I could revisit the mandatory 4 soldiers in each unit. I pulled out probably 15 1-star riflemen and other classes and replaced them with 2-star soldiers that mostly hadn’t been played yet. I was able to send all of these 1-star soldiers to the rear and free up tons of slots in my reserves.
It was really awkward to have to move a unit into the 4-squad main lineup, then go back and look at who was in the unit, then rotate people from the reserves into the unit and move the 1-stars back to the reserves. Then, as has been noted elsewhere, it took several mouse clicks to send each 1-star to the rear to free up the reserve slots.
This is all a very awkward user interface.
Here are my suggestions:
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Don’t require any minimum number of soldiers in a squad if that squad isn’t in the main lineup. I can think of no very compelling reason why I should have to keep 4 soldiers in a squad that isn’t being used.
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Let me see what soldiers are in a unit without having to rotate it into the main lineup first. Having to manually move each infantry unit into the main lineup just to review who was in that unit and move people around to get rid of all the 1-star guys was just too much clutter. Too many mouseclicks for something that should be easier to manage.
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Simplify the UI for sending soldiers to the rear. Someone else already suggested something like a right-mouse menu option where you can right-click on a soldier in the squad listing and just send him straight to the rear from there, without having to first click on him and wait for his soldier view to show up, then click on that button to send to the rear, then confirm it, then wait a second for the server to think about it. It’s too clunky.
On the bright side, while doing this I found two or three grenades, a couple of explosion packs, and a couple of med packs that I hadn’t realized were just sitting on used on some 1-star soldier in a unit that was no longer in active use. I policed up all of that gear and was able to redistribute it out to the soldiers I was actively using.
As a rule I rotate soldiers out as soon as I have maxed out their stars. I put new soldiers in with 2 or 3 or 4 stars but that haven’t filled out those stars yet. This enables me to collect enough dudes of max rank and send them to the academy to rank up. I do this a lot, constantly rotating guys through my active units in order to keep things moving up. This means I have to go through this process each time I want to rotate a soldier out where I go in, strip off all of his gear and valuable weapons, then move him out, move the new guy in, then add all the valuable weapons and grenades and such back onto the new guy. It would be great if this process could be simplified.
One suggestion would be to make it so if you drag a dude from the reserves that is the same class as the guy you are replacing, they simply swap gear. I really shouldn’t have to first take the pre-war K98k away and replace it with a Gewehr 33/40, then move him, then replace the new guy’s Gewehr 33/40 with the pre-war K98k I took from the first guy, etc. It makes for a tedious process that could be greatly simplified.
I don’t know why some classes must have a primary weapon in the slot, but others don’t. I can put tankers, bombers, etc. in the reserves with no weapon, but for riflemen I must give them a Gewehr 33/40 in place of whatever better weapon they had before they went into the reserves. I can see no good reason for this. It would make the entire process easier and less clunky to manage if I could just stick guys in the reserves with no equipment at all, and all of their gear goes back into the pool of equipment I can use to outfit the guys in active units.
Anyhow, hope these suggestions are useful. I think the UI of this game can be improved a lot to make things easier, less tedious, and more consistent overall.