There's no doubt that the best squad is one that listens to orders and sticks together. They also are a great tool for organizing your forces and sending groups to different sections of the map. However, there is a tendency for them to get separated and mixed up. Thoughts on how to keep them together? Currently there are the squad points and auras that give benefits, but what about easier ways to say spawn together? The problem of course is ninjaing an entire squad to arrive, but we do that all the time with APCs and mass revive squad leaders.
Make squads change automatically to encompass the people nearby. If someone goes too far away from the squad leader, have it replace them with someone nearby (unless the SL locks the squad).
or make it so when members of a squad split up from the SL they receive a penalty and get a decrease in accuracy and damage decrease XD
Squad leader aura would work better than randomly clumping people together in squads, but have it increase effects rather than decrease.
in the game americas army people tend to massively stick together as squad, i wonder why that is the case, anyone know perhaps it is usable in empires?
I don't think that there should be any penalty at all for not sticking together as a squad, as the consequences are evident in the running of the game since people are less organized you lose. I would rather go with rewards rather then penalties. One thing you could do is if the squad stays closer together then they get squad points faster so a distance based system. Now some will say then the squad members will just get as close as possible when moving; then that will pose a target to all enemies and they'll be easily killed. Or what if they do that in safe territory? Then they are being useless players to your team. And that basically also applies as a penalty so if your squad doesn't stick together you won't get squad points as quickly.
Having squad leaders that 1) know how to use points and 2) are not riflemans would help, for experienced players at least.
Problem is that if there is a squad full of vets, they will be able to push up and as other squads get killed, they will trickle to the vet squad and end up not holding the area that they where assigned. Give the commander more than 3 options for orders. "stay here" order: as long as the squad+ squad leader is in the area of the order, they will slowly gain points. The other problem is the number of places that need to be held don't match the number of people in the team, larger squads or a "squad cooperation" point may help with this. 2 squads working together, they all get a point.
If you want to have squads stick together, take up the position as squad leader and start leading. Talk to your squad mates and tell them to stick with you. Squad teamwork is more rough and bump in this game and harder to get because the community itself doesn't practice it on a daily basis. Every time I switch games from Project Reality to .. pretty much any other game, you notice a difference in the general player attitude in following orders and the experienced team leaders you have. I believe most dedicated team players have all moved to Project Reality. It is like their heaven. I enjoy this game though but don't really care to squad lead as much as in PR. Odd eh?
I like the drifter/lock idea from ScardyBob, but I think squad leaders just need to be me for the squad to stick around.
I don't usually have a problem getting my squad to stay together, although that's probably because I don't try to get them to all go somewhere else when there is fighting to be done where they currently are. As a squad leader I stick with my squad and use powers as I get the points for them, the more I use the powers the more inclined my squad is to stay with me, and I am inclined to stay with my squad to ensure I get power points.