Squads, Leadership and Morale
These notes explain how AI groups choose leaders, maintain trust, react to pressure, and continue operating when plans or relationships begin to break down.
Squad behavior is not controlled by one permanent commander value. Leadership, confidence, morale, and social cohesion change from evidence and events while remaining bounded by the characters and systems that own the underlying state.
Team Trust
This system tracks how much trust exists between players in a team. It watches cooperation and shared damage.
Visual markers show the team's status. Trust goes down if teammates are out of sight or range for long. Killing a teammate causes a penalty that lasts for a set time.
Squad Response to Crises
This service handles how squads react when leadership is lost, friendly fire happens, or emergencies occur. It uses personality traits and morale to guide behavior.
It keeps squad actions coherent during crises. The system does not change other systems directly.
Squad Mental State Influence
This service tracks how events and conditions affect a squad's mental state. It considers losses, mission risk, and communication problems to create a morale pressure score. This score influences behavior like panic or aggression but does not decide what the squad actually does. The system keeps squad actions varied and realistic while letting other systems control final decisions. The service only uses approved inputs. It does not hardcode final tactical behavior. It preserves plugin-layer ownership and intent-only mutation.
Learning Better Tactics Slowly
ADK is designed to let NPC groups learn gradually from small, useful records of how previous fights and maneuvers unfolded. When repeated experience shows that an existing approach keeps failing, the system could propose a new tactical pattern for testing.
The proposed tactic would not control NPCs directly. It must remain understandable, limited, testable, and separately approved before use—preventing a few training rounds from turning Private Bob into Napoleon with an assault rifle.