Two serious questions about the Assessors:
1. What techniques do they use to assess an anomaly?
Depends on the anomaly. I don't want to lock them in to specific techniques that might not be applicable. For example, I don't want to lock them into human-interaction detectiving as their primary means of study, since I imagine in many cases there will not be any humans who know enough about the anomaly to be useful.
2. How do those techniques necessitate a full 12-man squad?
Do we need 12 dudes camped out with binoculars? 12 dudes to poke an anomaly with a stick? 12 dudes to ask a farmer to show us his crop circles?
Presumably only one or two guys will be doing a task at a time, so the other ten are pulling security? Unless you really want a bunch of Star Trek redshirts, sure seems like you can scale the footprint down to single digits at least. ("This anomaly killed two Assessors, but they thought it was a good idea to try and ride it like a horse, so it's only a Yellow.")
Well, I'm imagining there being more than one way to study a given anomaly. You might have some poking it with a stick, whilst others investigate the surroundings, a few question witnesses, with a few left in reserve.
Admittedly, I didn't put a huge amount of thought into the exact number. I just wanted a number that was big enough for them to be flexible, but not so high as to render them redshirts. I could see lowering the number, if that's the consensus, though I wouldn't want to go below 7.
The way I imagined it, all of them would be searching for potential anomalies in different places around the world, so having more guys would increase the chance we find any. I think?
That's not how I intended it. They would still be sent to target a specific anomaly. And since they would be our only deployable unit next turn, I intend for them to be at least somewhat capable of retrieving anomalies themselves.