Specialties aren't the same thing as ranks. Ranks are an entirely other thing altogether and will be dealt with in another thread. Specialties are certifications irrespective of rank that I award to CULT members on the basis of skills they demonstrate to me and to other officers in the field. If, for example, some player demonstrates solid recon skills, I award him the Reconnaissance I specialty, and officers know to prefer assigning recon duty to him, and also giving him recon gear, like full recon armor and so on. There will be dozens of specialties, including sniping, dogfighting, bombing, driving, scouting, brawling, assassination, and plenty of non-combat ones like mining, salvaging, repairing, diplomacy, espionage, gang warfare, etc.
Obviously, since I can't be present during and witness every daring and skillful act, people should report to me and/or to their superior officers any such act they witnessed. Do that on Discord and I'll see it, since I read everything. If you can include photographic or video evidence, that would be best, but it's not necessary. And also the more people pile in to back such claims, the higher the probability that I'll make the award even if I didn't witness the act. Even if I don't make an award though, the word-of-mouth is still useful to me to push someone over the threshold when I do witness something.
I will be working with a graphic designer to create icons for all these certifications to put them in your profile on the new website. This will take a while though, so for now this thread will do.
I probably won't know the coolest names for all these specialties, so feel free to bump the thread and suggest better-fitting and cooler-sounding names for them, and I'll consider them.
Each specialty will have three levels of certification, I, II and III. I will be fairly easy to get, while III will require extraordinary skill displayed over a very long time. The object will be to find what everyone excels at, and ultimately give them those roles as often as possible to build a superior fighting force that can achieve The Cult's objectives with clinical efficiency. In other words, to have fun, since the maximum of fun is when we're operating kind of like a proper military unit.
Feel free to post suggestions for new specialties in this thread. As the devs add more and more mechanics, we'll have to devise more and more of them. Just imagine when base-building is added!
And I'll kick this off with some awards for tonight's assault on the Siege of Orison [ > ]. Adjudicator clearly stole the show with a ton of new certifications. Makes sense since he's from Singapore and they're number 1 in all the international educational rankings.
ExiledOne: Photography I
ChevRage: Flight Instruction I
Adjudicator: Troop Transport Piloting I, Reconnaissance I, Electronics Warfare I, Tech Analysis I
And here's a cert I should have awarded earlier, since ysignal has been pulling heavy photography duty since day 1.
ysignal: Photography I
I'll look for Adjudicator's recon outfit this week. So you see, specializing like this unlocks gear and vehicles for you during the roleplaying-only timed events and also for the bigger missions and operations that we'll be undertaking. The point isn't to compete on any of these things, the point is to give you yet another "gameplay loop" as they are called—yet another advancement route in the game to follow if you wish to. But you can also just play a regular trooper forever who just follows orders to the best of his ability. We'll certainly need a lot of those, so this entire system can be pretty much completely ignored if you prefer.