Can Platoons be Outdone? OR: Are Platoons "So 2003"?

[kaffis]

Okay, I made this post elsewhere, and I was asked to break it out for discussion on its own merits, rather than allow it to hijack the other thread. So, done, PhoenixDog.

Originally Posted by PhoenixDog

Example? I don't seem to understand how platoons would be redundant or unnecessary save for a mission to take Random Outpost #42

Design the mission system so that higher level commanders (we'll cover how we could stratify command usefully a little later) can create high level, "big picture" missions. "Capture facility X a couple hex layers behind enemy lines." This mission is created because facility X has strategic value, be it resources, continent benefits, denying the enemy one of the above, etc.

This is obviously a big mission, that will require massive amounts of forces. MORE than a platoon, even! So how does it get organized?

Well, squad leaders accept the mission, and create submissions for their own squad to support it. Again, depending on the level of the commander, said squad leaders might still be creating some high-level missions. "Capture facility Y" where Y is a facility along the front line that has influence over X, perhaps. He'd immediately support that mission with one for his squad to complete, "Destroy turret emplacement Z." He'd also survey enemy force disposition, and perhaps add, as a task to be requested to complete for his Capture Facility Y mission, "Suppress enemy tank activity on the northern approach to the facility." He orders his squad to set to work destroying turrets, or capturing control point Alpha, or whatever his mission was.

Another, low-level, squad leader, looking for some action for his squd, pulls up a window, and sees that there are missions to capture X and Y, and that the commander who's taken charge of the Capture Y mission has put in a request for tank suppression. Knowing his squad is full of crack pilots, he calls for them to load air to ground weaponry, and they go to work, earning bonus xp for tank kills in the designated region.

Etc. I'm not going to go and invent an elaborate tree of thirty such missions, but the idea is that the mission system can support a hierarchical structure by which commanders of different levels can create missions that support other commanders' missions, and can create their missions to call for certain support tasks they anticipate needing. The UI would need to be designed so that you can see what other groups around you have selected as missions, to help commanders know whether an appropriate force has been dispatched for a given task or whether additional support is needed.

In this way, you can involve an arbitrary number of squads in an operation of arbitrary size and scope, creating a chain of command on the fly (based on whose missions support whose), and allowing each commander to address manageable situations according to their command level.

You can then modify a follower-like system (such as Higby suggested at one time) so that upon conclusion or abandonment of a mission, the people involved in that mission can rate, as it were, the commander who issued the mission. If you feel ambitious, you can (and probably should) try to implement a system that weights missions by difficulty, impact, and level of success, and apply those as modifiers to the ratings the commander recieves. In this way, the theory is that good, active commanders will rise to the top, and be granted the authority to issue the missions with the larger scope. Generally, commanders would get partial credit for the actions and successes of the missions supporting them, the idea being that talented middling commanders will be motivated to seek out good higher-ups to support, too.

Now, I realize that all this is completely theoretical, and pretty ambitious.

But, hopefully, it's enough to illustrate that when you give commanders the ability to delegate responsibilities and mission tasks to other commanders, you can completely eliminate the need for platoons. Such a system enables relative strangers or multiple smaller groups of occasional allies to work together and organize as effectively as large outfits. And that builds good community, and a strong game.



Now that this is standing on its own, I'll just add a few more lines.

I really think that, while ambitious, this sort of thing can be done. And I think that it would really set Planetside 2 apart from the pack. If you put the love into it, and particularly the UI for it, it could have the makings of an intuitive, easy (and fast!) to use, and informative system for coordinating forces continent-wide. A framework like this has got the potential to allow for granular management of mission objectives at all levels of play, smoothly integrated calls for help or support, and to integrate smoothly into both Outfit play and the command certification system.

How would it integrate into Outfit play? Quite naturally! Offer UI sorting filters so that Outfits can quickly and easily find each others' missions, and prefer to support their own missions. If Outfits want to get really protective of their command structure, I suppose you could offer the mission commander privacy options, so that only Outfit members could see/support their missions, but I think that, overall, that probably ends up being a net negative to the system's integrity from an Empire standpoint, and it would be better to simply allow the Outfit's members to naturally prefer their own, and if they don't trust somebody else to support their mission when they create a supporting mission, simply duplicate the effort with their own support mission.

Really, though, the TL;DR to take away from this comes in keywords: hierarchical, granular, support, scaleable, informative, integration. If you design a mission system around those goals, you can completely obviate the need for platoons. Go ahead and keep them in, some people will still like them. But they can be made dinosaurs that artificially limit the number of squads working towards a given task (as evidenced by even the hyper-organized outfits complaining that 3 squads isn't enough!!!), while at the same time breaking down the artificial barrier of "You need X number of players directly reporting to you to get Y done." Put the tools in place, and talent will rise to the top, no matter how many people they tend to associate with permanently.

I just want to see people, especially as we approach beta, with high aspirations for the mission system, rather than going into this new game looking for an exciting new possibility to fail so they can protect their precious platoons.