Truth be told, I tried really, really hard to get into being a CO when the UAV was first rolled out. It wasn't fun, and I gained nothing from watching the little colored dots move around, talk to me about a battle I wasn't getting to participate in and 8 or 7 minute glimpses into that same battle. I tried again with the CO rally, and it just wasn't ever practical to use without such incredible preparations that I may as well have brought out a truck and set up an FOB.Rudd wrote:I'd agree with that, with the UAVs he's got plenty to do in the box, so perhaps he should stay there.
Though more couldn't hurt
I don't want to seem too greedy, but there are much better uses of my time than to sit in a little box and wait for a timer to tick down and press SLs for SITREPs that they usually resent giving. More 'toys' are needed for my end. If I wanted to play an RTS where I have no idea if the units are going to follow my orders, I'd play starcraft. Pathing is hard work :<
SLs plan their missions when the next map starts loading, more accurately, they think about what mission plan they want to use. There's very little room for new tactics on maps that are, in some cases, years old. It's easy to know where the enemy is going to be, because they're always in the same place, because the best places are all worked out.KiloJules wrote:Which is why there should be a commander right from the start...BEFORE every SL has his own mission planed.
If we need more stuff for the CO to do? And what? idk tbh...
Stuff for them to do without gutting the current systems?
1) Multiple UAVs or other "realtime" intel. Satellite passes that are five or ten minutes old are not a bad place to start.
2) Multiple area attack types with different recharge rates and different purposes. 105mm Smokes? Total Area Saturation from MRLS or Grad? CBUs? There are a lot of possibilities. (Why not restrict them based on ROEs? No way they'd just level city blocks in insurgency, but there's nothing stopping them from demolishing a shack half a km away from anything else)
3) Want to really force/entice COs to step up by shoehorning in some mandatory mechanic on insurgency (It worked so well last time, didn't it)? Give him concentric circles of intel that begin to overlap as more occur, eventually overlapping one keypad or less, the actual location of the cache.
3 A) Similarly, putting the CO in charge of asset management and battleplan choices during AAS would make him mandatory and more involved. Point buy systems, picking from a battleplan every 20 minutes for reinforcements (shamelessly stolen from CoH's commander trees), requiring squadleaders to have a little powwow and vote for an option, whatever.
4) Losing a battle? Been assigned a random, horrible, backasswards point? Don't want to spend 300 tickets assaulting a hill? Exchange 150 tickets for a Critical Point Change, get a 6/9 SL majority, and relocate one of the flags to a more.. suitable location.
5) What was wrong with supply drops?
6) Basically anything that makes an RTS fun can apply, at the risk of alienating the guys on the ground, but..
It's always going to be a balance. A commander who has too much power is going to attract all of the wrong people, and make the game very unpleasant for the players fighting it. A commander who has too little power isn't worth using. The commander's job from vanilla is no longer applicable, he has no function as a communications aid, and his support abilities are totally gutted, and not likely to return. People played him for the support abilities primarily, and until those return, or he is somehow shoehorned back into the game with arbitrary requirements for his presence, he won't make any widespread appearances in public servers.
