Squad Leader

[spolokh]

It is mentioned that there is a squad leader and soldiers start panicing when he killed (or injured). So I have following questions:
1. How soldier is being selected to be such leader?
2. In case leader could be selected manually, what are the criterias to be considered:
2.1 Sniper - to keep it safe
2.2 Assault - to keep it forward and inpire squad morale
2.3 Heavy - to make him less vulnurable
2.4 Just a soldier with the highest will or other stat
3. In case leader is wounded - does it affects squad morale?

[Aries]

There are no squad leaders. When anyone takes damage, gets intimidated or scared (standing next to a blown up car for example) it reduces their willpower. When that gets to a certain point the solders panic.

Things that increase(restore) will power are things like killing or hitting a enemy, or using abilities.

Of course seeing you highest ranking unit get totally killed is never fun to watch, for you or the rookies

[Rygat]

yea i had a rookie die infront of a captain, and the cpt started freaking out,..... yea

[Aries]

Its all about the willpower. They higher that is the better.

[Nerevar]

I wonder if you were looking at information for the original x-com. In UFO Defense, the highest ranking soldier would give a morale bonus to all your other soldiers, but would cause a massive loss in morale if he died.

That does not appear to be the cause in this x-com, since all your soldiers can be promoted to the highest rank, and you often have missions where they are all close to the same rank.

[Kyutaru]

There actually are squad leaders... If you notice, one guy always has a STAR next to his rank in game. How you select a squad leader is whoever is the frontmost guy on the squad page (third position becomes squad leader).

[EnglishPhil]

It would be nice if we could assign squads. Squad 1, Squad 2, ect... Having to pick every member one by one is kinda annoying. Seems like an easy thing to do.

[Cloaked Figure]

There is a squad leader and you can pick who it is, When you go to select the layout for next mission notice how one guy is standing forward and is larger then the rest. That is your squad leader, Not sure if this is always the case as I have not upgraded to 5 or 6 slots yet but it's the 2nd slot from the left is the Squad leader spot.

[Demonbreather]

So, a year after this was originally posted, it is still useful as hell. :) (Now playing Enemy Within.) Couldn't find the info anywhere until I hit on this. Thank you Future Corpse and Cloaked Figure. Lifesavers. I assumed it was the more forward of the troops in the combat prep screen but I wasn't sure if I should trust my hunch.

After a while playing Unknown, long before Within was even twinkle in Firaxis' eye, I started using the soldiers' first and last name editing to add squad placement and quick stat info and now I have an amazingly, heartattack-inducingly fun reason to do it again with EW!

In the first name slot I use an extra 4/5 character spaces to insert "[#^] " in front of the name (^ indicates squad leader, just for rp's sake, but also for Big Sky roll call) and an extra 3 at the end of the last name that use two of these four marks ( _-+* ) to remind me of a soldier's Willpower and Offense. I use the - as the baseline and raise the punctuation for each 10 points above what I think is Rookie-decent. I use 40-49 for WIL, 70-79 for OFF. The underscore is for <40 WIL or <70 OFF, the asterisk for 60+/90+ WIL/OFF. Some names are too long, and need to be shortened to make room for the notations. So an example would look like this in the soldier list:

| Sgt. [^2] Roland Martine +- | <(u_u)> ASSAULT |
| "BLADERUNNER" |

At a glance I know he's earned leadership of squad 2 through his in-combat antics (I also coordinate each squad's armor color), the callsign reminds me that he uses HEAT rounds, is Assault class, and has 50-59 WIL, 70-79 OFF: not the best stats, but not terrible.

With a large roster to deal with before each mission, these marks help me recall specific upgrades and save me a ton of time by lessening the OCD list madness that happens in this game. At least for me. With the new random rank upgrades I can sometimes forget a soldier's unique skillset and get them killed because I neglected to activate some obscure ability. And yeah, all of this is really anal, but I can't help it. I love this damn game enough to micomanage this much. It can really be upsetting to lose a heavily decorated soldier, but I accept it instead of loading the game because the psychological effect this game has on you in Ironman is really interesting. And Unique. And fun as fu*k.