I think we all know that the Empires squad system is not very functional. Sometimes the comm uses squads to give groups of people orders in the very beginning of the game... but after that, it rapidly falls apart. The thing is, Empires is a game that very much rewards people for frantically rushing to where they're needed. "Killspawn to XYZ!" is so commonly said that it could probably have its own autochat button. Vehicles rarely work together in exactly the way squads do, and when a team only has a few vehicles they're going to usually end up moving and positioning themselves in ways that have nothing to do with their squads, because that's just what's necessary. None of this can be changed without massively overhauling the game. The fact is, the idea of "choose a squad at the start, stick with it while you go after the objectives" simply doesn't work in Empires at all -- the objectives change too fast. Sometimes you need five people to rush the north; sometimes you need to grab one engineer to build something while everyone else rushes elsewhere; sometimes you need one vehicle, or one or two grenadiers, or whatever. I had another suggestion for how to change squads elsewhere, but here's a different one, one that could work "on top" of the existing squad system, while still letting people who like to choose a squad and stick with it do their thing: Players who have not manually 'committed' themselves to a squad through the menu are instead automatically treated as being in the squad of the nearest squad leader, as long as they're in that squad's aura. They share squad powers, earn squad points, see the same squad orders as everyone else, and so on. They appear at the bottom of the squad member list, in a different color or with a special symbol or something to indicate that they're temporary. Oh, also, while it might be obvious: This would require eliminating the way the free skill works at the moment. Either give it to everyone automatically or have no free skill at all (I prefer the former, but that's a different subject), but the free skill doesn't actually encourage teamwork -- it just encourages people to join a squad and forget about it, making squads even more useless because half the people in them don't really give a damn about the squad and just want their free skill. My suggestion, though, might have a chance of actually encouraging teamwork, because while people often don't give a damn about their squad, they usually will care about whoever happens to be near them (because those people provide covering fire, ammoz, repairs/healing, anti-tank/anti-infantry support, etc.) So if someone doesn't manually choose a squad, instead of using the free skill to "force" them to sign on to a squad they'll probably ignore anyway... why not just say that they're part of whatever squad they happen to be near? Chances are, even if they didn't officially join, they're working with that squad anyway. Possibly, for continuity purposes, once you've been 'auto-placed' in a squad via proximity, you remain in that squad as long as you're in their aura, even if another squad leader gets closer (this prevents someone constantly ping-ponging back and forth as squad leaders move.) But if you leave the aura (say, if you spawn elsewhere, or drive off with a different group of people), you can get auto-reassigned to their squad instead. This would result in squads that have a "hard core" of people who are interested in sticking together and working as a team, plus other people they happen to "pick up." It would support both methods of gameplay. And this is important: The people who happen to get "picked up" by a squad are not doing it wrong. They're not bad team players. Often, they're doing it right, since they're dashing to the location where the team needs them for support. This would have the side-effect of breaking the squad size limit. I think that that's not such a bad thing. The squad size limit is a hack; people didn't find the Empires squad system useful, and when they were forced to use it they just all joined one squad, so they were forced to break up. But the squads they were being forced to break up into still, often, don't reflect the way they're actually playing the game. Doing it this way would reflect the way they're playing the game. I don't know how difficult it would be to implement, but it seems more straightforward than many of the other suggestions I've seen, too.
