|
 Why we don't need many ranks - 03/12/03 | By: Quizzical
Imagine that you're a mission commander and want to send two people to a particular area of the map. The plan is to have one defend the area, while the other flanks it. One of the players is a great flanker, but gets rather ancy and can't hold still to defend well. The other is a solid defensive player, but really doesn't know what he's doing in trying to flank. Which one do you send to flank and which one do you send to defend?
Sounds like a no-brainer, right? There's just one problem: the second player outranks the first. If you send the good flanker to flank, he can't have the other player as a sub, so he can't see what's going on. At this point, you probably have to scrap the plan and come up with something else, even though the personnel you have in the game would be great for it.
That didn't happen so much in Chain of Command, as nearly everyone was an officer, a newbie, a multi, or didn't play in reg games much. There weren't that many higher officer promotions available, and there would typically be a lot of sets of players in a game of the same rank. That gave the mission commander needed flexibility in assigning subordinates.
What if Call of Combat has perhaps 20 ranks, and no more than 1/10 of the players on at a given time is a given rank? That would often lead to a mission commander being forced to put the subs in a particular order, and that would severely constrain what plans were viable. A lot of the creativity in making plans would be lost needlessly.
The other way to avoid this problem is do drop, or at least substantially lessen, the rank requirement in setting subs. Letting a higher ranked player be a sub of a lower ranked one, or perhaps allowing this only if the difference is only one rank, would create a lot more possible sub orders, and a lot more viable plans. | |  |
|
|
