I find the limit of 5 per squad a bit limiting :p 8 people per squad sound a lot especially now that there are not enough players. I was thinking that in big games at least two squads work on the front yet the do not earn points from one another. I thought that allowing bigger squads would give an advantage to infantry and as for tank well I have nothing to say. Squads would have a greater meaning as they would be more efficient. I find necessary at least one squad to have a limit of 8 instead of 5. Perhaps the Commander could be able to choose which squad should have this slot increase. It could also become a Commander Power. Here is my post about Commander Powers. https://forums.empiresmod.com/index.php?threads/commander-powers.19995/ Squad Limit Increase could either increase slot limit for all squads or increase the limit for the squad of choice of the Commander.
I think it would be interesting if it scaled with server pop or if it could be increased via research. In fact there are a lot of variables that could be increased too with research like vehicle cap.
Making this a researchable upgrade sounds like it could make the research tree a little more interesting because right now it only contains tank upgrades. I'm not in favor of allowing vehicle limits to be increased through research. Right now the tank limit on my server is 24 for each team, anyone more than that and the server starts to strain. All servers have issues when lots of tanks are spawned so increasing this limit is a bad idea. Same goes for turret, wall, and building limits. It's best to allow these limits to be increased through research.
Fucking edit is not working for me. I mean it's best not to allow these limits to be increased through research.
Even then though, 24 tanks per team amounts to one tank for every player on the team if server is full. Tank limit is there for server performance as you said, but we never ever get that many tanks out anyway, I get confused when people bring tank limits up. I'm indifferent about increasing squad limits though, that's about 3 full squads on a full server, feel like I'd prefer 4 and a half squads if I was commanding, moving small cluster of units is easier then large ones.
Lazybum perhaps having three eight-slot squads is pointless even in a full server, but an eight-slot squad with 3-4 smaller squads has strategic importance and helps fighting in different fronts more efficiently as you have greater flexibility.
This is a pretty good idea considering that most "hot" in-game goals stack up to maybe 3 at a time with that many people operating in those areas. It would require reworking squad auras radii and squad skill costs but expanding the size of a squad into factors of common team sizes 8v8, 16v16 rather than multiples of 5 sounds good. Like the min qty for a squad should accomodate all players on a decently sized "small game" mod/8 into larger scales, like 16v16 to 24v24