I say keep it 5 and extend the range of squad aura.. Or implement something that changes the size of the squad aura on map size.
devide into smaller fireteams, if you want to move around as a larger squad. That seems to be all you want, so there's a simple solution. the only effect on game play is that bigger squads mean that the squad skills are more powerful. But that's not what you want, so why change it.
I'd like to see 6-to-8 man squads. It helps a commander build focuses for squads with a flexible number. Big squads for big jobs, smaller ones for smaller jobs. However, it might be a bitch to micromanage a single huge squad, so you sometimes might as well have two joint squads.
Squad aura was almost doubled in one of the last versions. I think it currently is almost double of what it used to be. That was why the points for squad powers went up...although I guess since they went down again, mebbe the aura has shrunk.
Gren-gives you a 10%chance of running over a mine without exploding it. Riflemen-5% damage is taken out of your stameena Engineer-1hp every 8 seconds Scout-it takes 2 seconds for a turret to target you.
No. Randomness is bad. And magically protecting people against mines is also bad, but mostly, randomness is bad. Players definitely shouldn't be able to do something that would kill them, and survive due to a totally random roll of the dice, outside of anyone's control.
I think the reasoning is that something that isn't reliable confuses people, and in a mod like Empires...it's the last thing we need to do.
Woot that was excactly what I was thinking ... increase it to 6 AND Decrease the radius in which you can gain squadpoints a bit to even it out ... I thought that a lot of times, its just that 1 squadleader should can handle 5 squadmembers (64 man server => max 32 per team makes 5 full squads max. sounds good to me) 7 or 8 ppl in one squad would be overpowered, you could gain squadpoints way easier and by raising the squadability costs you would weak smaller squads even more (The sl can only gain passiv squadpoints and is the crucial part of smaller squads f.e. in 2 men squads there`s only 1 person gaining points e.g. 1 is doing no squadpoints=>50% efficency in 8 men squads 7 ppl gain points at once=>87,5% efficency ... that`s clearly overpowered if you got my thoughts ...) And there`s also a higher chance to meet squadmembers by accident even when your squad spread out over the whole map ...