OK, via our discussion I have some more ideas. So someone at the corps level has directed a unit to attack a given position. That bastard is probably asleep right now. At this point say it’s 1905. The top level Army commander has allotted weapons to your unit. Maybe some caried level action 44’s with limited range, but great up close damage, a few 1897 remington shotguns, and some 8mm bolt action rifles. What ever number of weapons thats how you equip your troops.
So playing the FPS, you of maybe 3 people are playing within a platoon of 40. As lead layer you can distribute your real players and the rest of the AI along your skirmish line.
The human players, once they are killed can take over an AI player (until there are no more left or until victory).
But the outfitting thing still isn’t going to make the game very appealing. Again, who’s going to play a random match when there’s a chance they’ll be defending a city with 20 people and 1897 shotguns against the massive 100 person steamrolling 2055 futuretech stack of doom?
One player plays as a strategic command type while individual players are flying fighters/bombers, etc. Standard fighters could be grabbed by anyone, but if you wanted a fancier fighter, ship, whatever, it had to be approved by the command player and he would be spending some of his in game resources to allow you to launch in one. There was a tech tree and resource harvesting managed by the commander. Commanders could issue orders but the only way to force compliance was ejection from the game.
There are very well coordinated player groups out there who will fly well executed group tactics, dedicated wingmen, bomber formations arranged to maximize interlocking feilds of fire from bomber gunners (a full bomber is 3 players, a pilot and 2 gunners).