fuck realism, dont kill ma soldier ;)

[mor2]

i bet this was probably requested before a lot and probably denied a lot and still.

1. dont let my soldier die, with technology where we can invent lasers weapons and deisng working models and few other things in little tiny lab  in month !! we can assume to have enough tech to sustain our soldiers, make their recovery rate long... and make me pay for but dont let them die.
2. change the game structure and let us equip our own soldier, let us re arrange them and choose who will fight on base defense.
3. keep personal stats for soldier, rank does say it a much as 20 missions and 40 aliens dead.

[Destructavator]

Huh?  Regarding 2 and 3, those are already in the game IIRC.  Soldiers have stats, and there are equip screens.

Regarding 1, Keep in mind the aliens have even more advanced technology - If a blast of plasma takes a soldier's head off, I'm sorry, that character will die.

[mor2]

equipment screens are for dropshipsand or base attack not for soldiers
on base attacks, you cannot select who defends the first 6 auto selected.

you cannot arrange the soldiers for the mission, you cannot equip them without a mission/drop ship, i didnt noticed  the mission/kills count and the promotions are just a text log line, to sum it up there is zero personal connection here.

as for advanced weapon etc, if they can do in week what takes us years than i can imagine that some company while attempting to grow penises had amazing breakthrough and manged to grow limbs, yes it long process but it made a world a safer place (and our spambox cleaner) 

[bayo]

equipment screens are for dropshipsand or base attack not for soldiers

It should be one of the bigger GUI change. Anyway, there is dependancies with game architecture.

[Jon_dArc]

Engaging in a little thread necromancy, because I don't think the issue with the current design came across clearly:

Regarding 1, Keep in mind the aliens have even more advanced technology - If a blast of plasma takes a soldier's head off, I'm sorry, that character will die.

It's a gameplay issue. Right now, you either savescum/restartscum or simply accept that you're going to take big hits pretty much at random (due to losing experienced units or supersoldiers)—your only choices for risk mitigation are either incredibly conservative play (since you can't even effectively use Reaction Fire to reliably cover corners, you really need to have most of your forces prepared to engage anything around a corner in this turn before you poke your head around it, and ensure that nothing that could be there can move and then target you) or making sure you always have a low-quality soldier on hand to act as bait and draw fire.

So really, you either eat large and random penalties by occasionally losing a high-experience soldier, or you restart the mission every time someone dies. Quite simply, neither option is fun.

Now, I can get behind the idea that sticking out your neck, or even simply the occasional bad luck, should have consequences—but those consequences should be mitigable. It should involve some kind of sacrifice, but it should be available as an option, possibly multiple options.

The most straightforward approach I can think of would be to add a "dying" status which stretches between something like zero and negative max health. Each turn they lose some health; either a fixed amount or a fixed fraction of their max health. Medkits can't restore health to a dying unit, but may be used to stabilize them, ending the HP loss. If a unit is in Dying status but still alive when combat ends, the unit is assumed to have been successfully stabilized after combat.

With something like this, instead of deciding "do I lose the unit forever or do I restart the mission", a player has the opportunity to accept a tactical disadvantage (needing to reach the dying unit with a medkit-carrying soldier in time to stabilize him before he bleeds out), or to take a very deliberate risk of losing the unit by attempting to complete the mission before the dying unit bleeds out. Even if the unit survives there's still a medium-duration penalty, since the inability to heal dying units with medkits guarantees a hospital stay at least long enough to bring them back into positive Health. Units getting sent into Dying status is still something worth being avoided, but it's no longer a permanent, unavoidable loss. End result, IMO, is people restarting missions less—which really sounds like it's more in line with developer goals, what with the FAQ answer on in-battlescape saving.

~J

[Lew Yard]

You end up worrying  a lot less about corners when you adapt your tactics to include *shooting through walls*.

[Jon_dArc]

You end up worrying  a lot less about corners when you adapt your tactics to include *shooting through walls*.

The damage penalty is big, especially since corners involve two walls (meaning you need the big giant gun of no ammo) unless you can get someone into the inside. More to the point, you also have to know where your target is—either by having sighted them, gotten someone close enough to use Goggles, or by guessing based on the source of hostile fire (probably against a civilian) or simple luck.

You can add to that the Plasma Blaster, which isn't massively accurate but has a long enough range and high enough power to allow an alien to pop around a corner across the map and snap off a pot shot which will, every now and then, actually hit someone and paste them.

~J

[petr.xxd]

1. dont let my soldier die, with technology where we can invent lasers weapons and deisng working models and few other things in little tiny lab  in month !! we can assume to have enough tech to sustain our soldiers, make their recovery rate long... and make me pay for but dont let them die.

No, no, no! Please no!! 

[CheeseshireCat]

The most straightforward approach I can think of would be to add a "dying" status which stretches between something like zero and negative max health. Each turn they lose some health; either a fixed amount or a fixed fraction of their max health. Medkits can't restore health to a dying unit, but may be used to stabilize them, ending the HP loss. If a unit is in Dying status but still alive when combat ends, the unit is assumed to have been successfully stabilized after combat.

Make it "you need to pump them with a medkit every round until the end of combat" and work only when the wound is not /too/ bad, and it might be efficient enough penalty -- essentially, tying up another of your soldiers in a vulnerable position ;)

[Jon_dArc]

Make it "you need to pump them with a medkit every round until the end of combat" and work only when the wound is not /too/ bad, and it might be efficient enough penalty -- essentially, tying up another of your soldiers in a vulnerable position ;)

Too crippling; I could see having a reduced but not eliminated post-treatment bleeding rate, but from my point of view the primary reason to change is to reduce the incentive to restartscum. If faced with the prospect of tying up another unit (especially while the deploy limit is still 8) camping by the dying unit until the end of combat, especially if they're expending 20 AP per round, I'd probably just restart unless I was solidly into the mop-up phase.

~J

[CheeseshireCat]

It is supposed to be pretty crippling... Otherwise, it would essentially eliminate the risk factor (well, barring instakills).

Maybe cut the wounded soldier's APs to say 10 then (so that they can *either* move a bit or maybe fire/RF once) and have him need to be healed if not *every* turn, then at least pretty often (every 2-3 turns).

Or, if we get the feature I proposed (heal oneself for 30AP "alt-fire" in medkits), it could just tie up the soldier himself once he's brought to consciousness by another.

[Jon_dArc]

It is supposed to be pretty crippling... Otherwise, it would essentially eliminate the risk factor (well, barring instakills).

I don't think it would; under my proposal you're still down a unit for the rest of the mission, and you still need to move a medkit-carrying unit close enough to stabilize him (and spend the AP to actually do so). More than that, he can only be stabilized but not healed with the medkit, so he's looking at a guaranteed stay in a base hospital until he gets back to positive health (if the "large permanent healing via medkits" loophole is closed the stay gets even longer, though it's no longer a jump from "no time at all" to "a bunch of time").

Remember, the result of being too crippling is in general that people end up risking their time (or their enjoyment) instead of the unit—that restart mission button is always an option. The trick to getting people to accept disadvantages is to give them control, make them feel like they chose it; unit loss is currently much too arbitrary and hard to avoid to come even close to qualifying, and having an extra unit out of the fight grinding away on something uninteresting just blows goats.

Maybe cut the wounded soldier's APs to say 10 then (so that they can *either* move a bit or maybe fire/RF once) […]

Or, if we get the feature I proposed (heal oneself for 30AP "alt-fire" in medkits), it could just tie up the soldier himself once he's brought to consciousness by another.

Could work, if the soldier is able to be returned to consciousness; I was assuming that he'd be just as thoroughly out of the fight as before, just with a way to make him not permanently gone. That said, just allowing the unit to be stabilized and out of the fight is almost identical to this (it doesn't require a medkit in the downed unit's inventory, granted) without making the player manually order the unit not to die every single turn.

have him need to be healed if not *every* turn, then at least pretty often (every 2-3 turns).

Eh. The aliens currently hole up too much for this to be meaningful; you wouldn't be able to move very far away, so under most circumstances I think you'd just end up with the same situation

~J

[NicAdi]

Oh boy... This "please don't kill my soldier" is such a noobish request, it's almost disappointing! No offense, but this is a game of *tactics*; choosing the wrong ones to approach a given situation, or being unable to adapt to changing conditions, WILL RESULT IN TAKING CASUALTIES! That's the way it works!

But, since it seems to have had uncovered a certain, rather relevant gameplay issue, I'll try to concentrate on that. I'm pretty sure you lot remembers the 'Fatal Wound' feature from the original UFO:Enemy Unknown... (if not, then grab that dusty ol' game and have a go at it -- I recommend the 'Superhuman' mode, for maximum adrenaline rush ;-) Something similar could be implemented in here as well.

[CheeseshireCat]

Actually, the way it is now (the next-to-nothing supply of personnel) *is* what makes soldier loss most frustrating in the first place.

As I see it, this is supposed to be a game where you have to take losses... And if you manage to avoid it, well, that's some awesome performance on your part. But this works only when you can replace the killed soldiers.

I recall one time I got sectoids attack my base on day three in original X-Com... Obviously, w/o save/load, it was game over. With saving and loading, I managed to get three soldiers to survive. That was the ONLY combat I was using savegames in battlescape in that run-through. Yeah, getting soldiers killed and hiring new ones drains lots of funds, but if you wanna have a breeze-through... Why not play on easy?

[Nash1992]

Well, how bout make it somewhat realism...

SUGGESTION:
How bout this. When at "0% Health" your solider will go through one of these phases.
1.) Last Stand - Your solider is conscious, but so injured that he can crawl away to try to avoid "FATALITY" . Because when he got hit. The blow didn't hurt him enough to kill him. So that would be like around -25 damage after he hits the 0% health marker. The only way he can get up again, is if one of the team-mates heals him. When in Last-Stand mode, it is the developers choice that the character can pull out a side arm or not.
2.) Un-Conscious - Your solider got hit critically, but not critically enough that he dies right away. He is just un-conscious. Therefore, making him vulnerable for aliens to hit him again and possibly kill him. At the end of the mission, the solider still lives of course to return back to base.
3.) Death - Your solider got hit so much critically (from getting killed from last stand, or un-conscious, or just getting blown up to pieces) that oh well. He is done for, it is impossible to revive him now.


I suggests these. It has some realism in it. But not to crazy that the soldiers are immortal or something. Thumbs up if you like my suggestion.

It is a Win-Win situation for players. So what do ya say? Should the devs include this in the next update? I think it is really worth it. Because yeah, I don't want my guys to die either! I want them to have a second chance! But of course I want it to be realistic, where that if the solider got epic-owned really badly, he dies!


It should