I certainly hope certs stay practically the same as in PS. Changing to a class system would be unforgivable. Though assuming certs for the sequel, they could still be changed slightly...either in their value or what the choices consist of.
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The command system works fine as is... for the first 6 months at which point the experienced commanders retire and just pad their kill count with OS strikes and bicker in global chat.
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So we have two problems. Encouraging people to keep commanding and discouraging people from gaining CEP for the wrong reasons.
The second one's easy...change orbital strikes.
- You could remove all personal gain. Give credit to an "Orbital station" and stop them adding to kill count, merit requirements and BEP.
- You could have a CR5 start a vote on using it on a certain base, and if 50% of the CR5s online agree it kills all friendly and enemy troops at a selected base and turns the base neutral (I'm thinking 12-24 hour cooldown for the entire empire).
- Or you could remove them entirely.
The main problem is encouraging people to lead after they reach CR5. I'm thinking there needs to be some kind of CEP decay, so the only way to stay CR5 is to keep commanding. How quickly it would decay, whether it decayed when you were offline, how fast it decayed while you were offline and whether certain actions could accelerate or decelerate the decay would all need to be figured out, of course.
If you consider planetary and galactic commanders to be "macro commanders" and squad/platoon/company leaders to be "micro commanders", this raises a new problem...How does a macro commander continue gaining CEP without resorting to micro command? A macro commander doesn't necessarily want to be leading squads, platoons and companies when they're busy leading the entire empire.
Something similar to your missions system would probably solve this, though there are countless ideas that could be dreamt up I think. I always found the best commanders could tell what would happen before it happened, though I'm not sure how you could implement a system to reward that. You could also reward micro commanders CEP for providing recon to the macro commanders, and reward macro commanders CEP for contributing recon via camera drones and scout video feeds (though I have no idea how CEP-worthy recon would be decided - votes would be too abusable). Presumably the drivers of said scout vehicles would receive BEP/merits for their service.
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Having said ALL That, I never felt that micro commanding and macro commanding had much in common. Perhaps it would be an idea to provide separate ranks and rewards for micro commanding and macro commanding, as well as a way to become a macro commander without micro commanding (a way to get CR5 without leading squads/platoons/companies). Though obviously going down this route of thought throws up a fresh new batch of problems and possibilities.