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Losing Soldiers

Norfleet

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Exactly, there is a good balance to be found on the death of a soldier being meaningful without being too dramatic.
Personally, I think the balance point is that the game needs to be of sufficient difficulty that some WILL die, that this is pretty much an unavoidable occurrence, simply because the odds are so massively stacked in favor of deaths. Perhaps the game covers a sufficient duration of time such that every unit is mortal and eventually dies, period, like a Total War game: All of your generals WILL eventually die of terminal oldness, if nothing else. Faced with the prospect that they're going to die anyway, glorious death in battle isn't unacceptable anymore. The fact that it's a question of when, not if, makes losing a man acceptable if the victory you buy with his life is worth it.

Another point is that it should be a decision. In a Total War game, for instance, when a general dies in battle, it's most likely because you made a choice to risk and sacrifice him. While the danger of random death always exists, in Total War, it's sufficiently low that the death rarely comes across as a product of spiteful RNG. It was invariably YOUR choice to charge the general's unit into melee. You probably didn't have to do it, but you did. And if you won the battle doing it, maybe at the end, you'll decide it was worth it. Or at least acceptable, otherwise you have to fight the battle again because the chain of the events that led to this began long ago.

In contrast, X-Com deaths are often total RNG. There isn't any realistic way to keep a unit largely out of harms way and yet still effectively utilize them, and whether they live or die tends to come down to a single roll of the dice entirely outside of your control. Even this may fall within the bounds of acceptability if the soldier in question is sufficiently replaceable and the price is right. Their survival isn't integral to the game experience.

At extreme end of the spectrum are those Tactical RPGs with named, handcrafted characters that contain storylines that you will never see to the end. If you lose one of these characters, your game experience has basically been amputated. Usually these characters don't die because the combat mechanics are sufficiently "soft" to avoid sudden death, but often losing such a character is considered a game over condition worthy of a reload, sometimes even a hard one enforced by the game itself (X MUST SURVIVE).
 

SymbolicFrank

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If you hit an enemy with your weapon and he doesn't go down, your weapon sucks and you need a better one. He might survive if he gets medical help in minutes, but he will be out of commission for a while. To remedy that, most games have magical armor and force fields for protection, and magical instant healing. Because, if one of your heroes dies, the player has to reload.

In X-COM, you have to save humanity from imminent annihilation. It's all-out war! A small group of heroes won't cut it. Throw as much soldiers and material at them as needed. Our survival is on the line!

So, in your first mission, you unload some soldiers, and they... melt. GLP! What just happened? Where did that come from? Because the aliens don't just have soldiers, they breed them, cut them up and stuff them full of armor, weaponry and targeting computers. They hit your soldiers from across the map, with enough power to vaporize them. And some of them can fly, or mentally control your soldiers.

It's simply brutal. Very one-sided. How the fuck are you going to win against them? Your guns only dent the aliens. You need cannons, grenades and rockets to have a chance against them! And lots and lots of soldiers! Help!

And when you finally manage to capture, research and produce armor that can sometimes take a single hit, and weapons that do some damage to the aliens, it turns out that those things are much more expensive than a rookie with a stun rod and a grenade. You would go bankrupt fast, if you fitted out all your soldiers with the best stuff. Because they will still die. Just not as fast.

And officers are far too valuable to send out into the line of fire. Give them all that good stuff, and keep them safe. Have a lieutenant hover in the air with a big gun as spotter. Send out the sergeants with the cheap armor and a medkit, and give them a bunch of expendable rookies. And make sure that you can continue the offensive for survival, even if a whole battle group or base gets destroyed. Because the future of the whole Earth is on the line!


TL;DR: if you don't want a happy game with small group of friendly superheroes and magic heal juice, but a brutal and realistic game where weapons kill, soldiers have to be expendable. And the enemy has to look invincible.
 
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Endemic

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Actually, near as I can tell, the CTH didn't depend on anything but baseline stats and range conditions.

..

BUT shots that missed still had to go somewhere, so could still hit the target, especially if there was no other possible option. So I could routinely fire shots at point blank, and it would still say I had a shitty 65% or something, but I practically never missed under those conditions, because stray bullets couldn't deviate far enough to NOT hit the target.

The "CTH" is quoted for 20 tiles (and doesn't actually change regardless of where you point), but the angle deviation will naturally cause shots at range to be less accurate. It's misleading anyway because:

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Accuracy_formula#Use_of_Accuracy

Then you have to factor in splash damage from AoE weapons\ammo. Also, throwing accuracy seems to work differently as well, it's pretty rare for grenades to land more than a few tiles away from the target (helped by high default throwing accuracy stat on rookies).

TL;DR: if you don't want a happy game with small group of friendly superheroes and magic heal juice, but a brutal and realistic game where weapons kill, soldiers have to be expendable. And the enemy has to look invincible.

Jagged Alliance 2 and Silent Storm are closer to the "team of superheroes" side of the scale, despite being "realistic".
 

SymbolicFrank

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TL;DR: if you don't want a happy game with small group of friendly superheroes and magic heal juice, but a brutal and realistic game where weapons kill, soldiers have to be expendable. And the enemy has to look invincible.

Jagged Alliance 2 and Silent Storm are closer to the "team of superheroes" side of the scale, despite being "realistic".

They require "load save" magic.

Well, you could lose a few, and you might want to hire some more/better ones, but there's a strict limit. And they would probably have the wrong skills.
 

Endemic

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They require "load save" magic.

Well, you could lose a few, and you might want to hire some more/better ones, but there's a strict limit. And they would probably have the wrong skills.

You can in theory continue after a squad wipe in JA2, but reputable mercenaries are much less likely to work for you, and IIRC there are general morale and loyalty penalties.

A lot of battles also tend to be ~6-10 of your mercs vs a large number of redshirts. You have your own "redshirts" in the form of militia for defending, of course.

All of these factors contribute to the "superhero" feeling. Not necessarily a bad design choice; fighting heavily outnumbered with the game's mechanics would be almost impossible if enemy soldiers were equal in quality to your mercs.
 

SymbolicFrank

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Your main limit in UFO isn't money or soldiers, but Elerium and prisoners. And the best way to get those is not blowing stuff up with superior weapons, but sending in waves of rookies with stun rods. Brutal, but effective.
 
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Endemic

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Your main limit in UFO isn't money or soldiers, but Elerium and prisoners.

Yeah, the research aspect of X-COM: UFO Defense is arguably more important than just your tactical skill alone. It determines your ability to intercept UFOs in the long run, which isn't required in the strategy layer of a game like JA2.
 

Gregz

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I was wondering what is your opinion on the death of your soldiers. There is a major difference between the old XCOM and Nu-XCOM. In the old XCOM your soldiers die very often and are easily replaceable, however in Nu-XCOM it goes in more the super-soldier route, where they very rarely die and if you lose too many of them the game really punishes you.

It seems to me that there is a strong difference in the type of game and how attached you can get to your men. In old XCOM you could get attached as well, but it was usually only once a guy would stand out after a few missions.

I'm wondering if you guys prefer to play a game where taking casualties is normal or you prefer the Nu-XCOM type where the goal is to make a perfect battle with no death and if possible no wounded.

Honestly, I never play a game that forces me to lose units.

X-Com, Battle Brothers, NetHack, whatever...I will savescum and cheat the shit out of it to ensure that I never lose a unit. If I can't do that then I will find another game to play. Why? Because the fun is in building up my units, and I get attached to them. I'm not going to flush them for the sake of immersion, or because the devs think I should play their shitty game their way. Fuck the developer's "vision", I'll play how I want thanks.
 

Nutmeg

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I think we can all (well mostly all, there are hopeless cases like Gregz above) agree that games like X-COM are a million times more meaningful and exciting experiences if you play them iron man. But yeah it takes quite a bit of maturity and discipline to play them that way.

Definitely the first instinct when you lose your investments is to reload. The reason is hard to pin down. It can't be game length, cause e.g. other lengthy games like Civilization don't really cause the same pangs. Likewise for ease of saving and reloading. I guess it's fungibility and randomness. Like the urge to reload is much higher if it's going to take you another 2 hours to get another unit like the one you just lost to a 1 in 100 roll than if you just lost a fat stack you can pump out in 2 turns.
 

Van-d-all

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The reason is hard to pin down. It can't be game length, cause e.g. other lengthy games like Civilization don't really cause the same pangs. Likewise for ease of saving and reloading. I guess it's fungibility and randomness. Like the urge to reload is much higher if it's going to take you another 2 hours to get another unit like the one you just lost to a 1 in 100 roll than if you just lost a fat stack you can pump out in 2 turns.
I'd say it's the availability of reload (free save anytime) and feasibility of doing so (RNG based difficulty like Norfleet said). A game needs to strike a balance between the two, which is not always easy. For instance lengthy missions of XCom are ill suited for save restrictions. Still, I think games should simply be difficult enough so that losses are unavoidable to some degree, so the player accepts them as price of victory.
 

Galdred

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The reason is hard to pin down. It can't be game length, cause e.g. other lengthy games like Civilization don't really cause the same pangs. Likewise for ease of saving and reloading. I guess it's fungibility and randomness. Like the urge to reload is much higher if it's going to take you another 2 hours to get another unit like the one you just lost to a 1 in 100 roll than if you just lost a fat stack you can pump out in 2 turns.
I'd say it's the availability of reload (free save anytime) and feasibility of doing so (RNG based difficulty like Norfleet said). A game needs to strike a balance between the two, which is not always easy. For instance lengthy missions of XCom are ill suited for save restrictions. Still, I think games should simply be difficult enough so that losses are unavoidable to some degree, so the player accepts them as price of victory.
You can very well have a single "mission save file" that is replaced whenever you save in mission, or whenever something happens.
I think several games do that. It creates a problem though, as it can get corrupted.
 

Saduj

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I don’t think developers should worry about people saving and reloading especially if the result is that I lose the convenience of saving when I want to. If you want to make people “accept” losses, create scenarios where losses are expected rather than the result of a mistake or bad luck. If you’re breaching a room with multiple high level enemies and one of them can mind control your troops, chances are someone is going to die no matter how much reloading occurs. Most games do a horrible job of setting up enemy bases. If you’re assaulting a location where the enemy had time to prepare, there should be choke points, overlapping fields of fire, fortified positions, etc that make getting anything done without losing soldiers unlikely. Don’t always give the player a secret tunnel. Make him go through the front door sometimes.
 

Norfleet

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You can very well have a single "mission save file" that is replaced whenever you save in mission, or whenever something happens.
I think several games do that. It creates a problem though, as it can get corrupted.
Hamfisted attempts to try to FORCE players to conform generally don't work very well and just waste development time and annoy players. The idea is that you have to make the player WANT to keep going.
 

Galdred

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You can very well have a single "mission save file" that is replaced whenever you save in mission, or whenever something happens.
I think several games do that. It creates a problem though, as it can get corrupted.
Hamfisted attempts to try to FORCE players to conform generally don't work very well and just waste development time and annoy players. The idea is that you have to make the player WANT to keep going.
But ironman/bronzeman is a (optional) feature that many players actually want in this kind of game. It is the difference between a difficulty setting and self enforced rules.
 
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SymbolicFrank

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It also depends on the randomness, as said. From the to-hit chance (UFO has a max to-hit chance of over 100%) to the placement and nastiness of the enemies. Do make sure the player always has a fighting chance if you make everything random.
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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One aspect that I think is important is that while player could lose soldiers, then game should offer ways for saving endangered or downed squadmates.
Patching wounds, dragging or carrying fallen to safe spots or evacuation zones; stuff like that to give some dynamism for tactical challenges that game could offer.
 

Norfleet

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One aspect that I think is important is that while player could lose soldiers, then game should offer ways for saving endangered or downed squadmates.
Personally, I'm thinking that, in the context of an X-Comlike clone, rather than frequent outright deaths, most small-arms "kills" would simply result in the character sustaining injury that takes them out of action temporarily and possibly has semi-permanent crippling efffects like losing limbs in more severe cases, as long as the characters are rescued in time. This helps increase the size of the active cast in the game, so that any actual permanent losses are less of a game-over condition because it will be common for characters to be injured and out of action and thus for a squad to be mixed between replacement goldfish and veterans.

Non-frontline roles for soldiers will also help give a purpose to soldiers taken out of action by crippling injuries, so that even if your best man loses a leg and thus is no longer suitable for front-line service, he can still continue to function as a member of your team, and later techs like cybernetic limbs may be able to bring him back into action.

With fewer outright deaths and greater roster plasticity as a standard expectation, the player will be more inclined to continue even if a man goes down.
 

Mustawd

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Btw, I really like having some kind of memorial/obituary/cemetery for fallen characters, preferable with a summary of their actions.

Open X-com has this and it’s very cool.

I’ll echo what a lot of people have said in that it just depends on the game. Personally, I don’t mind the new XCOMs style. It reminds me a lot of skirmish wargames like Necromunda or Gorkamorka or Mordheim where your squad was quite small and each one was very important to the squad as a whole.

That being said, if accepting casualties is your goal then I agree it’s not the best setup to have super soldiers like in the new XCOM games.

I’ve actually been playing X-com lately and my last fight was a terror mission in Brazil. One of my Squaddies turned the corner and there was a Chrysallid a few tiles away. Knowing what the outcome would be next turn (especially since my soldier blocked all LOS to the enemy) I aimed a rocket launcher at both of them, killing the Squaddie outright and scaring away the Chrysallid. Brutal, but I will name a base after the poor soldier.
 

the_shadow

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In nu-XCOM Long War I don't mind losing PFCs, Specs, and even corporals in later missions, and sometimes I'll bring one to scout, purposefully draw fire and grab meld. If they die it's no biggy (panic chains don't occur if you have an officer), if they survive that's an additional bonus. It's cheaper and quicker to buy a new PFC than to repair an Alloy SHIV or Mech, and PFCs are better at drawing fire if they hunker behind full cover due to defense bonuses, unless they are flanked. I might reload a battle if I suffer bad losses due to tactical errors, or reload and abort if I've bitten off more than I can chew, but I don't continually reload until my 50% shot hits, for the same reason I don't continually reload until a 50% alien shot misses.

In Xenonauts this is even more effective, since rookies can shoot almost as accurately as leveled up soldiers and there are no abilities gained at level up, so the power difference isn't that great. Yeah, veterans gain more TUs and strength, which affects mobility, but something like the double tap ability that veterans get in nu-Xcom makes them at least twice as effective as rookies.

Unironically correct. I roll with the punches. There was a period when I got annoyed seeing people playing with permadeath only to reload whenever something went wrong and they lost a character. Why are you playing with permadeath on in that case to begin with? I think it was Fire Emblem games or something. New ones at least where you don't have to play with "classic" difficulty. If your characters can die and can be replaced, then the game is built with that in mind.

Provided it's well put together.

Fv7-Gy-Tw-MEK3k-Cu7nh0-QFa3-Pz-ETPAOj-8-IYn-A6-Rrq3-E.jpg


DO IT, FAGGOT.

I'll be the devil's advocate here and observe that just because you've got a gun pointed at an alien point blank, doesn't mean they can't dodge before you pull the trigger. Superhuman reflexes can be taken into account via dodge/defense values, which would be subtracted from 100% shots. It's also worth noting that it represents a snapshot in time, in a dynamic battle everyone would be moving around and not holding their gun steady. Overall I'm willing to suspend disbelief for video games, although it is frustrating when you miss that 95% point blank shot, while an alien will one shot kill you on a 2% overwatch chance to hit against someone with lightning reflexes.
 

SymbolicFrank

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Non-frontline roles for soldiers will also help give a purpose to soldiers taken out of action by crippling injuries, so that even if your best man loses a leg and thus is no longer suitable for front-line service, he can still continue to function as a member of your team, and later techs like cybernetic limbs may be able to bring him back into action.

Should I buy that cybernetic limb, or hire those three rookies for the same amount of money?

In Xenonauts this is even more effective, since rookies can shoot almost as accurately as leveled up soldiers and there are no abilities gained at level up, so the power difference isn't that great. Yeah, veterans gain more TUs and strength, which affects mobility, but something like the double tap ability that veterans get in nu-Xcom makes them at least twice as effective as rookies.

The more distinct your soldiers are, the more interesting it is to manage them, and the sadder you are when they finally die. Which I think is a good thing. Strong guys get a rocket launcher, good shooters the best gun and a flying suit, officers the best armor, etc. And this will change during the game and depend on the mission. With nu-XCOM this is all fixed and you don't have much of a say in it.
 

Van-d-all

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One aspect that I think is important is that while player could lose soldiers, then game should offer ways for saving endangered or downed squadmates.
Patching wounds, dragging or carrying fallen to safe spots or evacuation zones; stuff like that to give some dynamism for tactical challenges that game could offer.
This is a tragically neglected feature. It all stems form simplistic HP damage models, where wounds and healing apply to abstract value. I think it's just more reasonable to actually have various degrees of injury up to incapacitation that requires out of mission healing, after all out of combat does not mean dead, but incapable to fight on. Again, Battle Brothers do it quite nicely, but it could be even better.
 

Norfleet

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I'll be the devil's advocate here and observe that just because you've got a gun pointed at an alien point blank, doesn't mean they can't dodge before you pull the trigger.
A bullet travels at maybe a kilometer a second. Your target is maybe half a meter away from the bullet. If he chooses to dodge right as you fire, he has to move his face maybe ~0.1 meters from standstill and then stop in ~0.0005sec (otherwise his head goes flying off into the distance at ~200m/s), which gives us an a an acceleration and then deceleration of about 1.6 million Gs. This guy's brains will undergo the force of being accelerated with over 25 times the power of a railgun and then brought to an equally sudden halt in the span of the aforementioned 0.0005 seconds.

If he's that superhuman that his brains can withstand being scrambled in his skull with 25x the force of a railgun, he doesn't NEED to dodge bullets.
 

Chaosdwarft

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I don't know if its because one of the first tactical games I played was Xcom: UFO Defense, but I don't mind losing soldiers, hell I expect to. For me it was part of the experience of being a commander. I will admit as a younger kid I liked to use my horrible stats rookies as recon loaded with explosives just because I could! Maybe it was because I had spent long hours in Lemmings making the little dudes explode in frustration for not being able to finish the level.

Now I can't remember when I started to stop save-scumming in Xcom and later in other tactical games. Since I adopted the ironman philosophy in Tactical and Grand Strategy games I found it has enhanced my gaming experience. Sure at first it SUPER FRUSTRATING, but like in Dwarf Fortress, you learn to have FUN.

I agree that losing veterans in new-xcom is super shitty. I'll even admit I have yet to beat Xcom2 WOTC on classic difficulty ironman. I always seem to reach a point mid game where I lose my best soldiers (FUCK U VIPER KING AND CHOSEN).
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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I'll be the devil's advocate here and observe that just because you've got a gun pointed at an alien point blank, doesn't mean they can't dodge before you pull the trigger.
A bullet travels at maybe a kilometer a second. Your target is maybe half a meter away from the bullet. If he chooses to dodge right as you fire, he has to move his face maybe ~0.1 meters from standstill and then stop in ~0.0005sec (otherwise his head goes flying off into the distance at ~200m/s), which gives us an a an acceleration and then deceleration of about 1.6 million Gs. This guy's brains will undergo the force of being accelerated with over 25 times the power of a railgun and then brought to an equally sudden halt in the span of the aforementioned 0.0005 seconds.

If he's that superhuman that his brains can withstand being scrambled in his skull with 25x the force of a railgun, he doesn't NEED to dodge bullets.
I think that this "problem" comes from modern graphics and animations.
Point blank miss seems to cause much more butthurt when it happens in modern game than in case where units are represented as stick figures or simpler sprites.
 
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Van-d-all

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I'll be the devil's advocate here and observe that just because you've got a gun pointed at an alien point blank, doesn't mean they can't dodge before you pull the trigger.
A bullet travels at maybe a kilometer a second. Your target is maybe half a meter away from the bullet. If he chooses to dodge right as you fire, he has to move his face maybe ~0.1 meters from standstill and then stop in ~0.0005sec (otherwise his head goes flying off into the distance at ~200m/s), which gives us an a an acceleration and then deceleration of about 1.6 million Gs. This guy's brains will undergo the force of being accelerated with over 25 times the power of a railgun and then brought to an equally sudden halt in the span of the aforementioned 0.0005 seconds.

If he's that superhuman that his brains can withstand being scrambled in his skull with 25x the force of a railgun, he doesn't NEED to dodge bullets.
Maybe it depends on how you interpret the turn based system itself? It seems rather obvious to me, that the idea of alternating turns (yes I know about reaction, but still) imposes a rather heavy degree of abstraction here, so the fact something is in a given place during player turn, where the whole world stands still, is somewhat time-approximate so to speak.
 

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