Create a Soldier lets you aesthetically customise a soldier. This gives you the opportunity to create up to 10 soldiers all with individual looks without having to worry about changing them each time you fancy something different. Gender, head, helmet and uniform can all be customised with over 20,000 possible combinations.
Each soldier has their own unlocks and rank. This rank is up to 60 and once that is achieved that soldier is prestige. This means that to fully prestige in Ghosts, you need to level all 10 soldiers to level 60. A soldier remains at level 60 and keeps all currently unlocked items when prestige. New soldiers are unlocked using Squad Points (more on these below).
Each soldier has 5 (I think?) class slots. These can be customised to have different load-outs.
All weapons, attachments, equipment and score-streaks are unlocked via Squad Points. These points are the currency of Ghosts and can be achieved in a number of ways. To name a few:
- Ranking up.
- Completing challenges.
- Completing field orders.
Perks are unlocked at a certain rank, but also can be unlocked via Squad Points if you want them earlier. Squad Points are global and are shared among all soldiers. If you have enough Squad Points you can create pretty much any load-out you want.
The "Pick 10" system is gone, but a variation of it is used for perks. Each perk has a set point value of between 1 and 5. You normally have 8 perk points, which can be increased to 12 by not taking a primary weapon, secondary weapon, lethal equipment and tactical equipment (might be 11, I'm not sure if you can unequip all four slots at the same time). This allows a huge combination of perk setups.
And whilst on the topic of Create a Soldier, a new mode exists called Squads. It has a variety of single and multi-player game modes designed to use your squad as a whole. Progress in Squads counts towards multi-player, so your soldiers can gain ranks there as well.
Hope this helps.
Best Answer
You don't lose any progress on your operations when they swap out.
There are five groups of operations and you can tag one in each group, which will lock it, preventing it from changing.