Brutal should carry damage within a campaign

[slayernz]

When you're playing Crazy or Brutal, you end up really having the same experience. Yes, Xeno's are a little harder to kill and pack more of a punch, and yes, gear is a tad more expensive, but in reality, if you can succeed on Crazy, you can easily succeed on Brutal. The biggest reason why is that although your knights can die if they only have 1HP left at the end of a mission, they get a full tank of health for the next battle.

Now wouldn't it be awesome IF on Brutal, your HP carries over from one mission to the next within a campaign? If your squad limped through a mission and each member had only 2HP left, then you're going to be crapping yourself at the start of the next mission!

To offset the fact that you are going to take damage, and some campaigns like Narv Dawn are extra long, maybe you get +1HP regenerated at the end of each mission, so if you have only 2HP left at the end of a battle, you get 3HP at the start of the next. This HP regeneration occurs irrespective of whether the squad member was used or not (so you need to effectively manage squad rotation).

In other words, if you rest a squad member for a mission, they still regenerate +1HP per mission. This means if you have a beat up scout down to 2HP at the end of mission 1 and you rest him for mission 2, at the beginning of Mission 3, he will have 4HP

[Cory Trese]

Very interesting idea. Wouldn't be that hard to implement either.

[Cyrus]

I wouldn't confine this idea to brutal only.

Right now I find that in any difficulty I set up my favorite team as early as I can afford the specialist (right after plasma rifles) and after that the rest of my "Templar Battleforce" effectively gets extended shore leave for the duration of the game. If one of the star players bites the dust I restart the level, since the cost to train up a replacement is too steep for my taste. That makes the choices very black and white.

Being forced to swap out wounded templars would encourage spreading the xp around a bit more and perhaps experimenting with different setups. I'd tweak the system by having the unused templars recover more hp (in the medbay), so you have to choose whether to run with a wounded templar for 2-3 missions or skip one and have him back at full strength after.

[slayernz]

How about for Brutal, you turn off the option of aborting a mission? What you get is what you get. You're meant to be experienced enough to know what to expect in a situation (always expect the ambush), so why should you have the ability to abort or not accept the results after the battle is won?

[Cory Trese]

Ah yes ... I suppose this does get fairly complex

[Lt. Hathaway]

I'm always training up another trooper with my senior squads. How else do you figure out what squad combinations work? All my newer squads are pretty much the same, because I've been accepting casualties. I'll have about 6 + captain troops rotating through the roster. Accepting casualties changed the game a lot for a while, and now my troops only die when there's a Hydra.
(Just kidding, I only test Hydras with my mutant 8 qui 12 str captain's squad, and I never accept deaths with them, because where am I going to get more mutants?)

[fallen]

I have added #TA-1915 to see if we can add a "disable retry" option to game save data format. Would make the game much higher stakes if you had no choice but to accept those casualties.

[slayernz]

Cool ... that's a decent start to making brutal well ... brutal

OR ... should we make a difficulty level above Brutal that does all this?


New Slayerz Difficulty level
*No Abort option
*No retry option
*Damage gets carried onto next mission in a campaign (but +1 healing per new mission)

This would make Chaplains extremely valuable captains in this difficulty.

Muhahahaha

[ncaoa]

This is turning into a campaign based XCOM. Without savescuming.

I love the idea of damage carrying over between missions. Very realistic.

[fallen]

slayernz - I have added #TA-1919 to investigate an additional difficulty level. Built on the learned scars of Star Traders, new difficulty levels are possible in Templar Assault!

[Yurak]

My only queery/niggle with the continued damage is the Captain. I could be wrong, but you can't take the captain out your squad.

[Deleted]

Just an idea, but if carrying damage on adds such a large dimension to the game, could this be an option when setting up games on all difficulties (except perhaps simple difficulty, so it can't be enabled by newbies). Could it be a box you can tick called 'Hardcore Mode' or something to that effect? And on the hardest difficulties, like Brutal, it can't be disabled so you have to play with it on. That way you add quite a lot more content to the game at the same time.

[slayernz]

Yurak, good point. Captains would be the only squad members to either regenerate 2HP per mission, or start each mission with full HP. I'm reluctant to pick the full HP approach though, because if your captain is quite injured, it would change your entire tactics as you'd definitely want to shepherd him with protective units through the next mission or two until he is back to a position of strength.

Regenerating 2HP per turn also means that you can't be quite so gung ho and send him on a solo quest. He would need the team as much as they need him.

[johndramey]

This is something totally different from slayernz's (awesome) suggestion, but I was thinking about the current abort feature in the game this morning on the subway. As it is now we really have no consequence to just aborting a mission if we lose a Templar.

Now, I know that one could easily self-implement a "no restarts" option, but that is hard to do! Tempting to try to save your star templar when he falls to some unlucky rolls. I also realize this has been talked to death in the past, and no consensus has ever been reached. With that said, I have an idea! haha. My idea is this, why not have an abort reset your progress in a campaign? That way there is some definite downside to aborting your mission. Sure, you can keep all your squadies and not worry about losing them, but that would really make you think twice about it if you are on the last mission in a campaign. Especially now that we have a graduated honor system, would it really be worth losing out on the big bonus for completing the last mission?

This could be another thing that is added on to the upper difficulty levels, so you could leave the lower difficulty levels largely untouched. In fact, I think this system would work really well for Brutal and maybe not so well for the lower stuff. I guess you could add it into Crazy as well, but it's totally up to you.

Just my two cents