Hey

What about giving commanding officers Area of Effect powers? Nothing fancy, maybe just +health/+movement/+accuracy/,depending on type of commanding officer.
Commanding officer could get +10% and the soldiers affected by AoE could get +5%. Radius of AoE could be dependent of officer rank. Aura is seen as a highlighted circle around the commanding officer.
Only commanding officers have aura. When commanding officers die there would be x% chance of retreat for the soldiers affected by leader aura. The higher the rank of commanding officer, the higher the chance of retreat.

Got this idea (Aura) from Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction. I have no experience in either giving advice for games or making games my self. Just thought it could be a nice touch for this game. Let me know what you guys think


Cheers
CODY

One of my favourite ideas for officer moral boosts is only activating it if the officer gets a kill streak or something. I prefer it to the area of effect as it feels too unrealistic and breaks immersion. Getting boosts for actually doing something great would be awesome though.

I defiantly like moral implementation as a whole but i am not sure how well it would fit the style of the game.

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Believe it or not, Killstreaks are not realistic at ALL.
IRL you can't shoot 3 people and ask the military to send a super expensive drone to your position for a couple minutes because you got 3 kills. lol

and if you see a veteran badass Officer next to you, I'd have an instant morale boost as long as he was near me. Once he was gone I'd be like "Awh fuck, I'm so dead."

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Goodies vs Baddies.

Precisely! When I was with an experienced player on Mount and Blade: Warband, I was sooo hyped and excited. When he got killed, I stood in a corner with my shield up.
How sad..

So, yep. I agree with Chunks.

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Click.

I didn't mean UAVs, i meant like giving the squad a moral boost if they see their leader kicking ass. From experience playing games such as warband you see all the time that a persons faith in their officer can shift rapidly and if he's constantly hiding and not fighting it's not really there at all even if he has been great in the past. It's much better to have a dynamic effect that only gives a moral boost if the officer or really if anyone in the area does something encouraging.

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Hey guys

Thanks for all of your comments. I like McChunks and ChloChlo's description about officer morale boost, it was kinda what I was thinking too. Guess I should have written down that in the first post.
Foamy: I guess you could be right about the morale part.

Maybe instead of chance of retreat, one could impart negative AoE on soldiers when leading officers get killed. That would be more like what ChloChlo mentioned in Mount & Blade. The reason why I am suggesting this aura/AoE effect is that I feel the game could benefit from a little more strategic combat. Go for the leader instead of just shooting wildly at anything that moves. The leading officer could get a more defensive AI, so that he would be harder to get.

Let me know what you guys think


Cheers mates
CODY

Well why not make it more interesting if that is the reason? having an artificial boost is a little weird and wouldn't feel goon in the example that you are part of a squad but go all rambo and take down tons of enemy but then your officer catches a stray bullet and suddenly you lose a load of benefits.

The ideal situation would have officers make better leadership decisions and so taking them out leaves the squad with no direction. This would be hard as hell to implement.

I think everything has to fit the style of the game and at the moment it is a very loose, simple quick and fun game. It has a cartoony look but at the same time the gameplay is quite realistic with the damage and stuff. Mechanics need to fit into this minimalistic simple realism. Having a load of moral icons or bars and crap cluttering up the screen would break that. A more subtle effect would be cool though as in you could have people say stuff depending on what they are feeling. You could then have an abstract moral which depends not only on officers but other people. So when in combat there could be a hidden stress counter for each person and each person has a slightly different one (maybe based on rank). Then when this reaches max they could run. If others are running around them then it is lowered and if they have an officer around it increases. The only way of knowing what people around you or enemies are thinking would be to see what they're saying to each other.

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Consider that one of the best ways to get promoted is by killing the enemy. Thusly, pretty much any officer would be quite a badass. There's lots of proof that soldiers do suffer negative effects after seeing badass officers die. For example, I read David Bellavia's House to House, a nonfiction book about his experiences in Iraq. At one point he actually suffers a bit of a breakdown and flips out on another soldier upon hearing(yeah, he'd didn't even have to see it himself) that one of his role models in his company leadership was killed by a sniper.

Maybe taking something from the Commissar unit from Dawn of War:Winter Assault! (God I loved that game)
like, if high ranking, Ability to execute one of your squad members (without penalty to you, except losing 1 member of your squad lol) and it provides certain boosts to nearby infantry around you and possibly your squad. (has possibly so long of a cooldown or something for balance?)

That's just my suggestion on the matter.

-LOGMA

Is "thread necromancy" allowed?