Platoon Leader, or Company Commander

[Renomaki]

I myself would love a dedicated field officer to manage the FoB and organize marines, easing up the stress on command staff and providing a morale boost to the troops on the ground. Nothing breaks morale worse than a lack of leadership, I say.

Although, if we are going to have field officers, I'd like them to have strict RP guidelines, requiring players to behave like a proper officer on the ground, not another grunt with a pulse rifle who just charges into combat willy nilly. Otherwise he is just another marine to throw at the aliens.

[RuiXon]

BOs are essentially Platoon Commanders and the CO is the Company Commander. What you're looking for is a Company Sarge which can be billed as a Gunny since we already have a bunch of Staff Sgts running around and Gunnys usually are the ones who talk between the individual platoons and command anyways

The only problem with this is that Command is supposed to be inherently blind to the battlefield, a sort of fog of war. If you have a Gunny down planetside you remove that fog of war which makes commanding so challenging. Sure there's BOs or COs/XOs that go down, but thats a tradeoff between OWing and going down to coordinate without the need for SL helms/constant communication with the squads.

[Doc]

That fog of war is still very, very possible- a large amount of negatives initially suggested were that they would just run off and get themselves killed. In my opinion, this could have negatives and positives either way- and isn't the same true of any position, just like the risk/reward of sending the CO down to begin with? This just opens up more opportunities, and especially helps coordinate marines during high-pop rounds or rounds with troublesome SLs or marines. I would definitely play this role if it were created.

[Jroinc1]

+1.
Change XO to company commander position, laterally transfer CE to "XO" position.
Company commander is responsible for and commands the platoon, CE is responsible for and runs the starship (Supply, medical, ect...), and the CO has overall operational command.

[Renomaki]

+1.
Change XO to company commander position, laterally transfer CE to "XO" position.
Company commander is responsible for and commands the platoon, CE is responsible for and runs the starship (Supply, medical, ect...), and the CO has overall operational command.

The CE is one of the more underwhelming positions on the ship, giving it some more importance and access would be a great idea and make things all the easier on command staff.

[OatzAndHoes]

I'm leaning to +1 but my issue is that this will completely cut the Bridge command out of the loop. You already see a lot of situations where SLs ignore BO's orders and do their own thing in mid-to-late game. I feel like this will only increase the divide between Sulaco-side command and the troops on the ground. Why listen to command when you have someone on the ground who not only can see the situation, but can hear the common groundside channel as well. Personally I'd prefer to see the Bridge given more tools to coordinate troops with:
-A map that has moving trackers of marines so the BOs can better visualize the battlefield (several vanilla ss13 servers such as /vg/ already have this feature already with their crew monitoring computers and central atmospheric monitors) or,
-More cameras on marines, such as giving the specialist a camera in his helmet as well

If this idea is implemented though I think it is necessary to have the ground commander as a lower rank than the BOs to maintain the chain of command. Make the Platoon Leader (PL) a 2nd Lieutenant.

[Killaninja12]

Heyo, just returned to the game after QUITE the away time due to school. Glad to see this post is still ongoing and hopefully it will end up getting accepted! I want to thank those whom have kept this topic fairly active however since I have not been able to. ^^

[Simo94]

BUMP and +1

[forwardslashN]

According to apop, XO is the ground commander. He just has to stay on the ship in the absence of a CO. I'm just going to mark this as resolved for now, but if roles get switched around in the future, this might become a thing.