Does it make sense to lose willpower when civilians are killed?

Because the haven defences seem to reach a point where it’s just a humorous (or frustrating depending on your perspective) series of chain routes, everyone constantly breaking and fleeing.

The more people break, the easier they are to kill, leading to even more people breaking. The fact the friendly AI is abysmal doesn’t help either.

It is ok, if the player has time to reach and capture them.
It is not ok, if the civilian start next to pandas, that just use an aoe attack and kills 7 civilians in the first turn.

It adds some kind of challenge to protect these civilians.

If there is no penalty for dead civilians, you just could use them as meat shield.

Yea I think it does make sense. However as much as I like the simplicity of the system, I think it needs at least some tweaking for scalability. Another example are missions with many enemies. There is a certain threshold at which missions become easier, the more enemies there are.

Also, what’s wrong with the friendly AI ? Don’t you like it when they run directly into the face of the enemy for a nice free bonus of minus two will points for everyone, after blowing off your cover ?

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I think that there just should be massive penalty in xp earned from mission if we can’t protect civilians. No WP should be lost due to death of local civilian or soldier.

What more I think that we should not take control of allied soldiers, and with civilians only be able to give them order to move few tiles when our soldier is nearby. In faction turn they should regain control and do their own things. Unfortunately AI is too poor to let something like that happen.

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I really love these ideas. I avoid using allied soldiers, i.e. “You guys handle your business and my troops will support.”

Also love the idea of having to escort civilians w/ a soldier near by to evac. I would take it a step further and have civilians become spooked if an enemy is X tiles away and there are no soldiers near by. They either panic and take cover, or simply run in a hysterical state (not using cover and exposing themselves to shots.) Honestly, I can see a civilian encountering terrors from the deep either freezing in place in shock or fleeing in panic. It would make these rescue missions more hilarious and dynamic if you have to essentially herd cats (which most civilians would be under such circumstances.)

Well it certainly “makes sense” to lose willpower when a civilian dies. I know I would. However I get your point. The same thing happened to me. I guess it is a case of controlling your use of willpower powers during that type of mission.

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Thats a definite and hard “NO!” from me. It would be like rounding up headless chickens. Unless, civies would dash toward exit by default and we could “adjust” them for a turn if we spot a danger.

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Yeah I guess hearding civs in every mission like that would become unfun, taking you away from the action.

However, I do agree with Yokes that a penalty for the mission would be best. I’d have the penalty be in resources, though. You lose a percentage of the reward related to the percentage of civilians lost (total civ lives could amount to 50% of the reward, for example). Besides that, I would make civs start about halfway between players and pandorans, in different locations like they already begin sometimes, and revealed to the player. This way you would have to make some mad dashes to get them before the pandas, like the old resource missions. The current implementation of frenzy is a bit in the way of this idea though, it buffs movement too much.

As faction soldiers were mentioned… I like to leave them to their things too, it’s more fun. However, the AI needs to improve so they don’t kill targets that we’re trying to capture. That’s a difficult task though, unless you have a troop command button on each enemy. Usually I have to take control of them when I want to capture.

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