Would be nice to see in SBs

[TheBigRedOne]

I had a rather long-winded post about potential gamey issues that could arise from this break-down concept, and you hit on many of them.

From a 'playing the AI' standpoint, breaking down squads would really lend itself to doing stuff like the above quite easily. Against a smart human, they'd probably hold fire long enough to get the idea of where the rest of the troops are.

From a time standpoint, there's really not *that* much extra time in most scenarios to spend completely reorganizing units in this manner, especially in the older games. I would assume that doing this would have to cost movement points in order for it to be realistic, and as Mike said, you'd have to then adjust a variety of numbers to reflect the mixed unit, probably going down to the lowest valued parameters. I'm not really sure if there would be enough benefit to doing this on a large scale.

I could see the utility coming in for units that have heavy weapons that need an extra guy to man them if someone gets clipped, not necessarily re-arranging full blown squads. The designers in the most recent games have done a nice job of trying to give these types of units an extra guy so that when you lose someone, the weapon isn't 'undercrewed'.

The fire-team concept is also a good one, but it didn't really come into play in the US military until 1944 or so, and then it was predominantly the Marine Corps, if I'm not mistaken. Giving every force in the entire series the opportunity to re-organize their structure like this gives would-be commanders way too much flexibility in terms of historical accuracy, I feel.

There are benefits, clearly, but does it change things *too* much? Hard to say.