Losing Soldiers

[Galdred]

The problem I usually have with unit death is that it is usually more important than whatever goal you are supposed to accomplish:
Losing an unit to secure an objective in nuXCOM is almost never worth it (while it was usually pretty sensible to throw characters into the meat grinder in the old one).

This is made even worse in games like Mordheim our Battle Brothers where improving your warband is the goal of the game itself.

I think Blood Bowl handles it rather well for a multiplayer game, especially in (non endless) League play:
- Winning a match is a big thing (it rewards you with popularity, and it helps you win the league. You have a limited number of matches per season)
- Having a character out of the game doesn't mean he will die. I think having most of your heavily wounded characters recover makes casualties a lot more acceptable. I wish more games did that (consider most characters that are out heavily wounded, without making it impossible to die).
- It also helps with the long term balance of the game, as insanely good characters get phased out.
- Given that it is a multiplayer game, you need to accept your losses, and cannot reload.

I only wish the game made it easier to play with an incomplete roster (1st edition had 16 players at all start of match, instead of 11 now), and concessions were not so crippling (as you cannot really save your team if it makes one thrid of them leave after the match).

 

[Van-d-all]

"Only the dead have seen the end of war." So essentially cannon fodder. Another reason XCom >> nuXcom. I always played with several squads readily available, mixing rookies and veterans, and achieved veterancy through meat grinder. I think it's important part of simulation to show that soldiers die, and as such losses are in part the price of winning. Even chess acknowledged that.

But since the "fear of loss" is one of most prominent psychological factors, modern hand-holding games felt the need to address that, maximizing the positive feedback, effectively turning the games to ridiculous power fantasies of infinite power creep toward super humans. Current audience is in full denial towards human transience, so the superhero obsession is seeping into every aspect of consumer culture.

 

[Van-d-all]

Battle Brothers

BB is all about people dying, especially since you'd have to save scam the perma-save system quite heavily to keep everyone alive. That's what makes it so great.

 

[Jimmious]

Battle Brothers

BB is all about people dying, especially since you'd have to save scum the perma-save system quite heavily to keep everyone alive. That's what makes it so great.

It does however get annoying in late game because replacing a dead level 9+ brother is a slow and painful process. You should be able to hire higher level bros somehow imo

 

[Van-d-all]

Battle Brothers

BB is all about people dying, especially since you'd have to save scum the perma-save system quite heavily to keep everyone alive. That's what makes it so great.

It does however get annoying in late game because replacing a dead level 9+ brother is a slow and painful process. You should be able to hire higher level bros somehow imo

If a Veteran dies, that's that. He's dead. There's no magical training to get a rookie to level 5. All the veterans are already in service, because that's what makes them veterans in the first place. And that's the beauty of it. Accept death.

 

[Galdred]

Battle Brothers

BB is all about people dying, especially since you'd have to save scum the perma-save system quite heavily to keep everyone alive. That's what makes it so great.

It does however get annoying in late game because replacing a dead level 9+ brother is a slow and painful process. You should be able to hire higher level bros somehow imo

If a Veteran dies, that's that. He's dead. There's no magical training to get a rookie to level 5. All the veterans are already in service, because that's what makes them veterans in the first place. And that's the beauty of it. Accept death.

Actually, a way to attract skilled veterans from other companies/noble house could work well from BB, as long as it has reasonable requirements making it non trivial.

 

[Van-d-all]

Battle Brothers

BB is all about people dying, especially since you'd have to save scum the perma-save system quite heavily to keep everyone alive. That's what makes it so great.

It does however get annoying in late game because replacing a dead level 9+ brother is a slow and painful process. You should be able to hire higher level bros somehow imo

If a Veteran dies, that's that. He's dead. There's no magical training to get a rookie to level 5. All the veterans are already in service, because that's what makes them veterans in the first place. And that's the beauty of it. Accept death.

Actually, a way to attract skilled veterans from other companies/noble house could work well from BB, as long as it has reasonable requirements making it non trivial.

Bah, turncoat defeatism contrary to namesake brotherhood.

 

[Galdred]

Actually, a way to attract skilled veterans from other companies/noble house could work well from BB, as long as it has reasonable requirements making it non trivial.

Bah, turncoat defeatism contrary to namesake brotherhood.

That could be an interesting event set up actually.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Problem with BB is that company roster is so small that replacing level 7 or higher bro takes time and seriously affects company's performance in combat.
Games with larger rosters like X-Com or Xenonauts it's feasible to keep larger reserve from which to rotate units when someone dies, is wounded or just unsuitable for mission that's coming.
In these games I usually try to rotate new guys in to get some exp. , so I don't run into situations where everyone that's any good is out of action and I need to deal with crisis now.

 

[Azdul]

I think it's important part of simulation to show that soldiers die, and as such losses are in part the price of winning.

Game should simulate enough aspects of warfare so it will be able to teach real strategy and tactics.
Taking heavy loses, even if they can be replaced, is never without consequences.

For example, Waffen SS and Fallschirmjäger were notorious for Pyrrhic victories that ultimately meant little on strategic level, but put the unit out of action for months due to losses.
OKW would rather have them win less often, but keep the combat potential for longer.

Long War (Rebalance) once again is better in that aspect that old X-Com - your fresh recruits can be actively trained, either through officers school or psi labs, improved in genetic or mech labs - and it all takes time and resources.

 

[Van-d-all]

Actually, a way to attract skilled veterans from other companies/noble house could work well from BB, as long as it has reasonable requirements making it non trivial.

Bah, turncoat defeatism contrary to namesake brotherhood.

That could be an interesting event set up actually.

Mmm, alright. As an event. But not as a regular mechanic.

 

[Darth Canoli]

If my soldier stands right beside the enemy and attacks with 95% chance to hit, misses and then dies to reaction fire im going to reload.

This!
It's acceptable if there's no permanent death but completely unacceptable otherwise.
Why should hit rate be capped at 95% in short range ?
That's completely retarded, i'm ok for a long range and even mid range cap at 95%, or even with a point blank burst shoot cap at 95% (from the second bullet) but a single shoot in close hit rate shouldn't be capped, or eventually at 98-99%

I think Blood Bowl handles it rather well for a multiplayer game, especially in (non endless) League play:
- Winning a match is a big thing (it rewards you with popularity, and it helps you win the league. You have a limited number of matches per season)
- Having a character out of the game doesn't mean he will die. I think having most of your heavily wounded characters recover makes casualties a lot more acceptable. I wish more games did that (consider most characters that are out heavily wounded, without making it impossible to die).
- It also helps with the long term balance of the game, as insanely good characters get phased out.
- Given that it is a multiplayer game, you need to accept your losses, and cannot reload.

Never played blood bowl (even if i know about it) but it reminds me of my Speedball 2 days, would be great to get a new speddball/Bloodball "RPG" mix.

 

[Falksi]

Galdred's on the right track for me.

It's a fine balance to strike. For me the key is to give the player something valuable enough so that any loss is felt, whilst also not making them feel as if the game is wrecked & lost should they lose said valuable "assets".

I like both NuXcom games, but it has to be said that they are both pretty shit at finding that balance. Where the old X-Com games, Apocalypse in particular, got it right was allowing you have a squad big enough so that even a major loss in personnel still didn't mean you were out of the game. Lose the wrong folk at the wrong time in NuXcom & it's game over man, game over (or at least it feels like it is, because building from scratch again is a pain in the arse, and means enduring battles where you can't do the fun things with the more advanced skills which you want to).

To say X-Com 2 has had so long to learn all these things, it's a fucking big miss-hit.

 

[Galdred]

Never played blood bowl (even if i know about it) but it reminds me of my Speedball 2 days, would be great to get a new speddball/Bloodball "RPG" mix.

There is Mutant football league, that could count as a cross between Speedball and Blood Bowl, but it certainly has a very different feel than Speedball (and it way more messy when it comes to doing what you want).
I kept my Atari STe years past its time only to play Speedball 2 with friends actually. The remakes and emulated versions are just not the same

Back to the topic, Speedball indeed had a good balance: I remember hesitating between risking a wounded star player to win a match, or just trying to keep him safe (but it was not particalrly easy to do anyway).

Players could die, but it didn't happen in a single blow, so it made it easier to take appropriate measures to avoid it.

 

[Rahdulan]

You are faggots if you care about that at all, what purpose soldiers have if not to die in glorious way for Stalin Emperor and Motherland Imperium? Never reloaded in tactical game its against its purpose how will you improve your tactics if you act like fag and reload after single time something goes wrong?

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.

DO IT, FAGGOT.

 

[Norfleet]

You'd think "eating the gun muzzle" like that would mean that you WOULD hit him, one way or another. In original X-Com, the quoted CTH was just the base chance to hit, if he was eating the gun muzle like that, even if you "missed", the stray bullet would hit him anyway.

 

[Endemic]

You'd think "eating the gun muzzle" like that would mean that you WOULD hit him, one way or another. In original X-Com, the quoted CTH was just the base chance to hit, if he was eating the gun muzle like that, even if you "missed", the stray bullet would hit him anyway.

Yes, because the CTH was related to how many degrees your shot could deviate from the target (ie, rudimentary ballistics modelling). Thus, larger aliens were easier to hit and being that close would pretty much guarantee a hit, no matter how inaccurate the rookie was at range.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

At least in X-Piratez mod it's quite common to miss point blank shots because enemy (or player unit) dodges.
That mechanic is mainly there to make melee weapons more viable.

 

[laclongquan]

On the matter of replacing soldiers.

UFO Aftershock have a feature of request your allies to send in recruits (at the cost of lowering relationship which can be replenished with gift of resources). And sometime you rather use the new recruits (and most expensive too) because their class is rare and it's a pain to train them from fresh newbies.

It's been several years so I dont remember exactly. But let's say, for example, Medic class is a pain to level it up to where they can be somewhat useful and not a fresh noob on the team. So the idea of training a level 3 Medic upward would be much easier to take than training a level 1 newbie.

 

[cretin]

I was playing a dead is dead run on ja2 stracciatella before I lost the file to a crash. It elevates the game when all your decisions are final and instills a sense of fear everytime someone shoots at one of your mercs.

Ironman mode just doesn't have the same gravitas.

 

[AdamReith]

This is the reason I can't stand NuXcom any more, I like so much about it but as other posters have said it might as well be an RPG. This costs it the sense of lethality so important to the XCOM formula.

But yeah, losing your favorite guy or gal can be a real kick in the balls. I think the "reloading just when the game acts like a dick" approach mentioned by another poster above is the best way of handling it but self control is of course a rare commodity.

 

[Norfleet]

Yes, because the CTH was related to how many degrees your shot could deviate from the target (ie, rudimentary ballistics modelling). Thus, larger aliens were easier to hit and being that close would pretty much guarantee a hit, no matter how inaccurate the rookie was at range.

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.

Now, vanilla Xenonauts played it dead weight, that CTH was REAL, and shots on a failed roll were FORCED to miss the target even if it meant really wild deviations, but a community fix pack removed this behavior and stray bullets could hit again.

 

[laclongquan]

One solution to make losing soldiers hurt psychologically is to make them good and unique.

Take Silent Storm (and SS Sentinels). Each recruitable soldier has an unique voice set and pretty distinctive. Sure you can replace loss with other soldiers of same class. But losing L.A "Done already?" purring, can be quite a downer~

SS has 80 soldiers separate on two campaigns.

 

[Norfleet]

The real question is: How much do you want to make it hurt the player? If you hurt the player too much, maybe he just reloads. I mean, nobody reloads when they lose a random marine or a zealot or a zergling.

I imagine it ultimately comes down to this: Is losing a man to be seen as a failure condition in the game, or simply the price of victory? If you make individual units TOO valuable, too unique, then the game turns into a puzzle to be solved rather than a battle to be won, with acceptable losses as the price of victory.

So should the player be conditioned by the setup of the game to treat a battle as a setpiece puzzle, where movements are to be choreographed to a reach a solution, or should he be treating it as a situation where each unit lost is simply a price to win? When every unit is extremely valuable and irreplaceable, then you probably start treating it as a puzzle. A certain balance should be struck. Take, for instance, Total War games. You PROBABLY don't reload the game every time a general dies, particularly if you otherwise win the battle, especially resoundingly or in the face of impossible odds. A hero's death is the price of victory, and all men must die, even though each of them is unique and named.

But in a game where every piece is a named, handcrafted character with content that you're expected to see to the end, at the opposite extreme, you probably make damn sure they survive to see the ending.

 

[Galdred]

The real question is: How much do you want to make it hurt the player? If you hurt the player too much, maybe he just reloads. I mean, nobody reloads when they lose a random marine or a zealot or a zergling.

I imagine it ultimately comes down to this: Is losing a man to be seen as a failure condition in the game, or simply the price of victory? If you make individual units TOO valuable, too unique, then the game turns into a puzzle to be solved rather than a battle to be won, with acceptable losses as the price of victory.

So should the player be conditioned by the setup of the game to treat a battle as a setpiece puzzle, where movements are to be choreographed to a reach a solution, or should he be treating it as a situation where each unit lost is simply a price to win? When every unit is extremely valuable and irreplaceable, then you probably start treating it as a puzzle. A certain balance should be struck. Take, for instance, Total War games. You PROBABLY don't reload the game every time a general dies, particularly if you otherwise win the battle, especially resoundingly or in the face of impossible odds.

Exactly, there is a good balance to be found on the death of a soldier being meaningful without being too dramatic.
It worked rather well in Chaos Gate, which was the first game I played with an ironman mode.
Even though they were 'just' marines in power armor, losing one of the highly decorated ones, or one with high stats did sting.