I just experimented a bit with the "Start New Game" -settings, and an idea occurred to me. You can currently set a global, overall "Max Soldiers" and "AI Accuracy" -value. That's all well and good, but I think it'd be a good idea to be able to customize things a bit further.

How about making it possible to make separate settings for each faction? For example, you could have a match where one team has Max Soldiers set to "100", but accuracy set to "-4". Whereas the other faction only gets "50" Max Soldiers, but with accuracy of "+2". The classic "small, elite force vs. masses of untrained cannon fodder" -scenario. Sounds potentially quite fun, at least on paper.

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Also, as I was faffing about with the game, I came to a realization. Having the AI Accuracy set to "-4" was actually really fun, in a very videogame-y way. All of a sudden, I could go up against two or more enemies at once and not only survive, but win. In a regular match, I'd usually end the match at about Rank 4, having earned perhaps two Mortar Strikes, altogether. Here, I ended the match at Rank 8, having gained enough Mortar Strikes over the course of the game to obliterate a small country. The difference in game-experience was profound. Sure, I fully accept and appreciate the fact that this is in no way how the game is meant to be played, but I'm also not too proud to admit that feeling like the biggest badass on the battlefield in this manner gave me a bit of a kick - I'm sure you understand. With this experience in mind, I propose giving the player the option to choose between a series of positive or negative handicaps for himself in the "Start New Game"-screen.

These can go from a minor increase in Health/Defense - just enough to give the player a bit more of a margin of error, with just enough room to fuck up a couple of times without being immediately and severely punished - all the way up to a massive increase where the player becomes a small god, shrugging off bullets left and right as he leads by example in the ultimate immature, adolescent male power fantasy. You know, just for fun.

I like to imagine the co-op possibilities of that, perhaps coupled with my above suggestion about faction-specific settings. A group of seven or eight players on the same team, with a massive Health/Defense bonus. No AI teammates, and the 100-man enemy army set to "-4" Accuracy. A glorious, glorious massacre.

Of course, particularly skilled players can also be free to go the exact other way - giving themselves negative handicaps for an overall tougher and more hardcore game.

Since this goes into all of this, sometimes I like to just watch the battle between the AI themselves rather than actually fight. World in conflict had this great mode where you can set up all the AI options and go into spectator mode.

So a spectator mode where I could just watch the battles would be great fun for me.

Ohh, related to world in conflict, it also had a feature where you could select how the AI would fight (this was moddable and allowed for greater variation), from defensive (more focused on defending objectives, naturally, but also on creating ambushes, setting up choke points, and similar), offensive (focus more on trying to destroy unis directly, take positions, flanking, and so on), support (would build units that would help other players, generally the ai would just build tons of AA or heavy artillery, although some AI mods made it so they would transport infantry and repair vehicles), and balanced (simple adjusted its build to meet whatever the battlefield required).

Of course world in conflict could have a lot of players on a team for a TTS, either 9 or 10, so you could have AI that was more focused, but I think the concept itself is really neat to have on top of a more widely used (easy, medium, hard) system.

I support every single part of this post.

I just don't know how to represent these different 'strategies' in RWR, perhaps different commanders that are given x amount of units to control and then use them according to this idea?

I would also like to endorse the idea of a spectator mode. Even with the current AI, I think it would be very fun to be able to set up an AI battlefield and just watch the game unfold. I admit that I often already do this, at least to a limited extent, when my character dies and I pan around the area of the battlefield I can to watch the skirmish unfold before respawning, so the functionality seems like it's at least partially there already. If there were a suggestion-tracker for RWR, this would get as many votes as I could spend on it.