Preferred Squad Size?
Just curious what others think would work better than 4-man squads, which aren't near large enough in my opinion. I'm leaning towards 8-man squads myself due to the 128 player size. Of course with ...
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@Ironhead841 wrote:Just curious what others think would work better than 4-man squads, which aren't near large enough in my opinion.
I'm leaning towards 8-man squads myself due to the 128 player size.
Of course with all the "legacy" squad features like locking squads and kicking squad members and such.
Oh yes and the ability to go solo if you wish.
Anyway what are ya'll's thoughts?
Personally, I think 8-man is too large without changes to spawn mechanics - we can already spawn on any active squad member and an 8-man squad could easily equip 2 spawn beacons without losing anti-vehicle effectiveness - 2 beacons, 1 SOFLAM, 5 M5s and 1 Angel (supply drop and quick revive!) That's 30 M5s with lock-on capabilities before the crate cooldown. Moreover, it would be almost - if not outright - impossible to wipe a squad and send it back to base. It would turn every match into a Grind weekend.
As it stands, I think that before we can really assess the effectiveness of 4-man squads, we need VOIP. I suspect that a small increase to squad size (say to 5- or 6-man) with VOIP would address many of the frustrations.
A 6-man squad with only-squad-leader-spawn would be my preferred option.
Honestly...does the game have to be 128 though? What about reducing sizes to 100, freeing up some CPU overhead for more map complexity and other things, and slightly larger squads of say, 5? That allows for 10 squads per-team, closer to the 8 squads per-team in 64 players than the 16 squads per-team in 128.
Fewer squads overall, a 25% increase in squad size to allow for more teamplay and slightly larger groups of friends, and slightly less players overall in the game while still staying closer to 128 vs. 64. Obviously would require revisiting the 64 player cap on smaller maps as well. But like, it seems BF2042 is critically looking at a lot of the "core" concepts in BF including classes and the 64 player size to begin with, so why not keep the questions going?
They'd still need to allow for multi-squad support so you could play with more than just a single squad worth of friends though.
It would be hard to speculate on that without knowing what they are going to be doing with that.
If they were going to reduce the player count than yes I suppose a 5-man squad would work.
- @Ironhead841 Yeah, it all depends on just how deeply they're looking into potential changes to the core of the game. Changing match sizes is a huge change that would require a lot of additional work elsewhere.
I'm no tech wizard, but honestly it seems pretty apparent that the concessions they had to make in design to allow for 128 players, down to the relative lack of any complex geometry in maps and the resulting lack of cover. How much CPU overhead could they save going down to 100 players? I have no clue, but surely it would help them in regards to improving map design and potentially give them more room to address other issues (like netcode/hitreg, but I'm just spitballing here since I have no clue).