Full disclaimer: I had a bit of time testing out the Commander. It quickly became my favorite class. This is not some kind of "Commanders are awful" suggestion.
Commanders in Pathfinder are specifically designed with the idea that you are meant to support your allies and make them more awesome due to your coordination. In Society, I noticed after a few playthroughs that this creates one slight problem for the Commander that isn't there in home games: Commanders in Society have to generally deal with an ever-changing party makeup. This can be a slight problem because while the Commander has plenty of generally useful tactics they can prepare, a couple tactics (Shields Up, Reload) rely on having a specific party makeup to make the tactic useful.
Commander players in Society are thus currently left with two choices. Do they take the specific tactics that are really neat if you have a specific party makeup, but risk that tactic being shunted away to the side for a whole session if not enough players match the archetype to make that tactic useful? Or do they just go for a more generic build? Honestly, the generic build is perfectly fine, but the fact that Society commanders sort of get punished by taking more specific tactics that may not come into play is kind of problematic.
And yes, I'm aware that if a tactic in your repertoire isn't useful, you can just not prepare it for the day. But part of the Commander scheme is that they can change up their tactics, either with 10 minutes or as part of rolling initiative with certain feats, to make use of those tactics that weren't prepared when they come up. Thus, having a tactic that just won't be useful for a session is a bit of a debuff, particularly when that tactic's usefulness is entirely dependent on the makeup of the rest of the party.
This brings me to my proposed fix: If a Society-specific rule was established that allowed Commanders to replace one tactic in their repertoire at the start of each adventure with a previously unknown tactic, that would give Commanders the flexibility to adapt their tactics to the party makeup without punishing Commanders for playing with diverse party compositions. That way, a level 1 commander could have 4 more generically useful tactics at the start of the day, then once they meet their party and find out the party includes 2 guardians, the commander can swap out their 5th tactic for Shields Up at the start of the day without having a dead tactic slot. Then the next session, if it turns out the party has no shield-wielding tanks but 3 gunslingers, they can grab Reload at the start of the day, get rid of Shields Up, and be able to help out the party.
Any thoughts on this? Has anyone else had this problem when playing Society commanders?
