I agree that Willpower looks like just another “mana” resource that can be spent and refilled and it may be confusing when it is used for various actions.
We need to remember it has been introduced to represent current mental state of a soldier. When the soldier is calm and concentrated, s/he can guard the area during enemy turn, use specialized equipment or perform medical treatment. However when s/he is exhausted, wounded, outnumbered, with shaky hands and near panic (0 Willpower), you can’t expect any of those “extra” actions to be done properly. It looks more reasonable now.
And I think it’s a great idea to allow some desperate last resort actions even at 0 WP when the soldier succeeds with “panic check”, but with additional risks to fail/malfunction.
As for the Willpower status in the game, perhaps it should be called “concentration” if it’s positive, or “stress” if negative.
Speaking of the stress, the Darkest Dungeon handled its presentation pretty well, but stress in DD has pretty wide threshold 0-100 (or even 200) and it changes constantly every few actions: discovering artifacts, landing critical hits, receiving damage, healing, resting etc.
I’m not sure how important will be mental health (or “concentration”) in PP and if the DD approach described above would fit here in a intuitive way - imagine soldiers gaining tiny amounts of Willpower when looting ammo crate, getting healed, landing critical hit and succeed with mission objective, but losing it when wounded, suppressed, out of ammo, or when new mutant appears.
It may be less confusing… or more annoying.
Well I mean they have found plenty of guns with multiple rounds loaded into them back in the US Civil War because people wouldn’t fire but would reload when told to. Though I would say most people would be more likely to just unload on a monstrosity than not fire on it. But even what you’re talking about is actually going to be a thing as Julian has stated that there’s going to be some enemies that merely seeing them on the battlefield can/will lower your troops Will.
It’d take a whole heap of will in my case - I’m scared of heights!
For a solider who’s trained in the use of that equipment, I’m not so sure, presumably they’ve been trained to use it, and in particular trained to use it within a combat situation, it might be that they get a buzz from using something like a jump pack, it might be that they feel nothing as they’ve got tunnel vision, considering only the objective of the mission. I think everyone would react differently.
Regards jump jet use/willpower expenditure in game, I kind of like the idea of them being tied together, as you need a way to limit use of such a powerful ability. I do think it could work just as well if those jump jets had a recharge timer and/or limited amounts of use.
You could even tie the two together - Have a jump jet that needs a recharge time, but allow the solider to use it more regularly if they expend will power to do so, that to me would make sense in terms of both realism and game-play. I think it would cost even the trained soldier some amount of will to make use of equipment a 2nd time before they and it were fully ready to do so.
if the latest battletech proves anything, that is flat out false. That game has not 1 but 2 bars that start at 0 and can increase, with the increase meaning bad things (stability and heat). And players seem able to manage that just fine. On second thought, can we just rename it to fatigue? Or stress? I propose that it might actually better communicate through name alone that while it’s high, the soldier is more vulnerable, while simply calling it Will Points makes it sound like a fancy way of saying “mana bar” and fails to communicate that with it’s depletion the soldier becomes more vulnerable to mental effects. (Show of hands: who when hearing will points first thinks of force points from KotoR? Which was just a fancy way of saying mana bar for that universe)
How? How is it harder? It’s literally the same bar but starts out empty and fills with use, as opposed to starting out full and emptying with use.
Again: battletech is doing it with 2 bars and it’s doing fine. I’ve yet to see people complain they don’t understand how the stability or the heat bar works.
And that’s the thing, BT does not tell us lots of numbers I want to know during battle.
I don’t know my Heat-dissipation per turn, all I see is the blinking bar then I have to eyeball it for subsequent turns. The game does not even tell us that every mech has 10 built-in heatsinks, so you can count on the 30 heat/turn (+/- some depending on Biome).
I don’t know how much stability damage I or the enemy received, all I know is that it’s neaaaarly enough for a KD… Of course I can eyeball it on the bar, but when I’m distributing 2-3 SRMs/LRMs/ACs between enemies, I don’t want to miss a KD due to 1 stab more needed which I didn’t see.
Battletech may have intuitive UI, but it’s doing a poor job at showing all the numbers.
I want to know how many WP I have, I don’t want to watch a bar filling up. And it’s a lot easier to count down to 0 compared to showing 3/8 WP (simply because we know that 0 is the number to count to, while the maximum may change depending on soldiers).
Is it possible to show on the UI? Yes. But it does take more place, needs one more number to be shown, and that can be double the digits you have to place somewhere near your Soldier.
But is it a real problem though? Yeah, UI will become more clogged with digits but at the same time we will have the information we need. And this isn’t necessary going to be the ugly UI.
The thing is that not every player need all this exact numbers. This is where intuitive UI come into play. And to please all types of players I would suggest to have ability to turn on/off number value display while having intuitive UI.
lots to unpack so I’ll try to be brief but no promises.
First off: heat dissipation per turn is not that relevant actually once in the tactical potion of the game. Surprising I know, but that’s not what matters. What matters is how much you can fire each turn and discovering the rhythm of your damage output (in classic BT TT terms, the famous awesome-8Q 3-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2 rhythm of using it’s 3 PPCs). And that rythm is altered by terrain and the loud-out, which brings me to why it’s irrelevant in the tactical portion: you should already know it from the mech-lab portion of the game. YOU built that mech, selected the loud-out and fitted heatsinks. And no, the game in it’s mech-lab tutorial does tell you each mech has 10 heatsinks btw. Talk to Yang next time so you should know when you deploy what the expected generation and dissipation is. It’s intuitive because it sets up the systems and informs the player unconsciously of the rhythm of firepower typical to the universe. And even if you don’t bother looking at the numbers to optimize your design (which is honestly the main part of the game, not the actual fights, sue me ) the bar still does a well enough job of gradually teaching you the rhythm of your design.
Stability is even more blatant. it’s a 0 to 100 bar divided into 5 segments. Idk if the game gives you the numbers, but spoilers: you do know how much stability each gun inflicts when you equip them and see their stats,so you end up deducing the numbers in 1 or 2 missions, again if you bothered looking at the mech lab. Even without the numbers, the bar is designed in such intuitive manner that over time, you develop an understanding of how many segments each gun fills anyway so missing the KD comes down more to how willing are you to risk a miss if using an AC/PPC for the final hit. If you use LRMs and SRMs … you have no excuse to not get it right. Those 2 bars are actually a perfect example of intuitive systems of delivering imperfect information that work so well perfect information is not needed, though it is available if you look for it in the mech lab. I’ll have to remember to reference them in that thread I am planning (waiting to play more of the beta, maybe at least one more build).
On to the numbers question: is another intuitive number next to something CLEARLY labeled and tutorialized as bad if it ever gets too high such a complex and daunting task for players these days? Are we catering to the kindergarten audience now?
And again, using WP as they are used now clashes with what I call gamer education. Across genres, across games, players are given abilities. These cost a resource. This resource starts full and depletes with use. This resource is depleted prevents further ability use. This is an algorithm as old as gaming. Call it mana, call it force points, call it stamina, I don’t care, that is an intuitive mechanic intrinsic to basic game design principles. Phoenix point takes that mechanic … and slaps another HIDDEN negative to the depletion of the bar. That’s not intuitive in the least. If the goal is to transmit that extensive usage will result in bad things … a climbing bar labeled something negative and immediately understandable is a far more intuitive means of achieving that. be it with a simple bar you are meant to understand via another portion of the game that precedes the one where the bar appears, OR via numbers. I mean come on dude … you’re telling me you can’t manage having soldiers with gasp different maximum thresholds for stress! I mean if that’s that big of a concern (though I don’t see it) … just make it so everyone has a threshold of 10 then. And the Will stat is simply a boost to the dice roll to see if the soldier goes mad. But again … I fail to see how having a climbing number labeled fatigue or stress or something that would communicate the intent worse then having a decreasing Will Points bar.
If anything, all the threads and people complaining about how it is right now prove the bar fails at it’s intended design goal, since people as trained by one of the fundamental rules of that transcends games and genres are educated to regard it as another fancy way of saying “mana bar” and not even considering the implied negative effects of low will, nor really understanding in context why some things need WP to happen. Something here is not working as intended, and I posit that is because the way the bar functions now, it violates and age old rule ingrained in the gamer’s mindset for years now in such a way that unless the player constantly reminds himself about the extra tacked on rule, automatism takes over and it becomes “fancy named mana bar”. It’s even worse because A)having it full does not mean you are immune to panic so it being full does not communicate effectively in any way that benefit it gives and B)having it empty does not communicate in any way your soldier is now weak willed and more prone to panic. I mean these could be solved by having the bar simply have a permanent buff called “Strong will” on the soldier that gets weaker as the bar gets lower, and a “weak Willed” debuff that replaces it when empty … but isn’t that just more UI clutter that can easily be replaced by a small text called “Stress” next to a bar of empty pips that fill red as skills are used? A such bar that communicates without the need for explanatory debuffs or constant self-reminders and references to a tutorial that “oi chunder-head, stop spamming the JJ, that poor bastard is getting sick of it and he’ll soon be a wreck unless you give him a time-out”.
EDIT: well that wasn’t short at all … I tried … I should change my name to Captain Wall’O’Text …
Which then gets modified by biome (by about 4 different %) and special terrain (like geothermal). Sure, you can remember everything, or have a handy number on the UI. I choose the second.
Missiles give 1-6 stability (depending on Brace and +++ status), and you don’t know for sure how many hit with <100% hit chance. Sometimes I just needed one more LRM5 to have a knockdown, but I thought that the other 3 weapons were enough… nope, it had a sliver left on the bar, (almost) unnoticeable by eye.
I want numbers, not bars where I have to remember that |…| means 5 damage and that || may still need 1-4 just the UI is incapable of showing it. Just today I saw my mech not getting KDd by enemy LRM-spam while it had “full” bar of stability (after previously getting unstable, yes). I couldn’t see even a sliver left, but it seems it still needed a bit more… I hate this.
And “stress level” vs “will points” low/high being intuitive depends on what kind of games you played before, but the gamers do have the usual “smaller number = worse” mindset for about 90% the other things (remaining hp, stamina, mana, ammo, medpack, armor, etc.), so changing that is not making it “more intuitive”, it’s changing.
I could argue pro and contra for both way (increasing or decreasing), and I don’t think that one is inherently better than the other, but I stand by my opinion that for showing exact numbers decreasing is better.
The case when increasing is not worse than decreasing with exact numbers for me is when you go with percentage (0-100%), as you know that the maximum the same way you know the minimum for decreasing, but I can only hope that in those cases there is no rounding on UI.
I disagree with this as there’s been plenty of different things out there that have had different effects based on the depletion/filling of a bar. In World of Warcraft the Arcane Mage (mage class, arcane specialization for those that haven’t played it) had abilities that increased in damage as their mana bar depleted (not sure if they’re still balanced this way). This meant that they had to find a proper balance of depleting their mana bar for extra damage but yet not depleting to the point of being unable to do anything. Or bosses who gained new abilities as their resource bar filled up and then was dumped in a massive ability once it hit 100%. Or in Dragon Age Origins the mana bar replenished faster the lower that it was. This in turn allowed for some crazy Arcane Warrior builds that focused around passive effects with only a few spells (which your quickly replenishing mana could almost always cast once they were off of CD).
Likewise you’re pretty much hitting a six of one, half-dozen of another situation. I would say that having zero Willpower is pretty clearly a bad thing (aka zero Morale of the OGs). My issue with “Stress” is that I think of it as a 0-100% scale, thus the cost of abilities would need to change based on the soldier (it would be more “stressful” for a chubby Assault to use the Exertion ability than a fit Assault for example). Increasing one’s Willpower is far more intuitive and easier on the player than decreasing the Stress cost of abilities (and to me increasing one’s maximum “Stress” level just doesn’t make sense as previously stated).
Games have been dumbed down. Gamers often don’t even bother to really learn the mechanics of games these days. Plenty of games don’t even bother to come with a manual to explain things (probably partly because gamers weren’t bothering to read them). As a prior WoW Raider the amount of poor play I’ve seen from wanna-be raiders is staggering (wrong stat allocation for build, wrong ability rotations, not understanding boss mechanics, etc). In World of Tanks I’ve been accused of hacking because they didn’t understand spotting mechanics, because they don’t understand how armor works, etc. Your “solution” isn’t going to change anything for the better as plenty of gamers are still going to complain and not bother to learn the mechanics (or claim it’s too restrictive, not properly explained, etc). If a player thinks of it as a “fancy mana bar” that’s fine so long as they remember to do their best to not let it hit zero (which really in the majority of games out there you don’t want a mana bar to hit zero either since then you can’t cast anything and such characters are often sitting ducks without mana). Being forced to use “Restore” in the battle is no different than being forced to use an “Ether” in battle, and both situations should be avoided if possible.
EDIT: Personally I’ve never been a huge fan of bars barring a few exceptions (like the ATB in the FF games). Numbers are far more clear/precise and let people plan better. The health bars of X2 were horrible for planning and changing them to numbers was the first mod that I got, so I really hope they don’t go with bars without numbers in PP.
replaced by overload bar. Fill it up for extra damage, but spells cost more. Because the old way of doing it was needlessly obtuse and appended 2 different contradictory functions to one display element (and by this I mean low bar signifying both a proportionally bad thing in lack of resources and an inversely proportional good thing in more damage before anyone asks what I mean).
ok random but this bit just made me laugh … who the hell sends chubbies as frontline soldiers? I mean I get soldier customization, but come on … the very fact they are trained soldiers prevents this from this bit ever becoming an issue as soldiers all have a set standard of fitness they have to meet.
It’s not Willpower. That’s the point. it’s Will Points. It’s arbitrary and it makes no sense contextually. Does having 0 mean my soldier is now devoid of will and can’t act and will go into a panic at anything and loose control? No … not realy. He’s just more likely to. It has the same clarity issue the way arcane mages communicated their class mechanic in the past had. My point was not that people might just regard it as a fancy resource bar, my point was it does not communicate in a clear and immediate way that there are extra bad things that happen the lower it gets. By associating it with a magical point number that dictates items and abilities, it fails to communicate that it’s also a form of shield against mental effects. In other words it does not effectively train the player on it’s proper use and lacks a certain clarity in communicating to the player on an instinctual level what is expected of him. And in a game that tries to be a simulation, will points just is discordant, it sounds like a magical thing (like force points, it’s why I referenced that earlier), while stress is an easily grasped real world concept transplanted and simulated in the game that everyone has experienced in their life and thus has an easy grasp over it without even trying.
You’ll never fix bad players, but you can trick them into learning the game without trying without also reducing complexity. Because ultimately … a change like this would not reduce the complexity. It’s the same deal … in reverse. You accrue risk by performing powerful actions to a cap until you have to “vent” said risk. It’s the same mechanic, nothing changes, the UI and numbers stay the same but for the reverse of the bar from depletion to growth, but … it gains a dose of clarity and instinctive training of the player that can overcome generic “I want to play but I don’t want to bother to LEARN how to play” not through dumbing down the mechanics, but through subtly injecting into the player’s head the proper attitude to take.
I’ll say it: manuals are boring. Tutorials are boring. Just because I happen to like manuals and appreciate good complex tutorials I am under no illusion that in general people will go “I payed to PLAY, not sit here reading, or having a very slow condescending text/voice preach at me for however long the tutorial lasts.” Bad games get around this by dumbing down the mechanics and making the game less complex. Good games keep the game complex, but slap on a presentation style and certain crutches to help even those who can’t be bothered to learn stick with the game and eventually win. (looking at you aim assist and flashy animations in firaXCOM) Great games don’t need tutorials because their mechanics and systems, their modes of operation to borrow a term, are so intrinsically clear and easy to grasp but hard to master that just by looking at the screen you can deduce what everything does and means, yet the complexity of the systems become apparent only as you iterate upon the modes of operation the game provides you. Sometimes that is not possible, sometimes the elements of the game are too complex. But here, in the resource bar for your mental shield AND ability use AND item usage, there is I think room to add clarity for those who may need it AND fix the incongruities that may arise from associating mental resources with physical ones in the player’s mind.
My final point is one of immersion. Frankly put: will points is such a “game” term it just grind any sort of immersion out the window. Straight up. “Ammo? Magazine sizes? Yeah I can dig that. Health points? Fair enough, I have to be able to judge how wounded I am. Will Points? What is that, what even is that? It’s like mana? But I thought this tried to be a simulation of lovecraftian horror … what do I spend it to resist fear attacks or? Oh it goes down when I use abilities but … the name makes it sound like it’s for mental defenses and … what now it’s just a mana bar? what the hell am I playing here?” Simulating a fish our of water type gamer first faced with this system here. Clarity is lacking and due to it, immersion flies out the window. Thinking becomes less inner (as in inside the game thinking) and has to move to an outside the game place to process and decipher the meaning of the will points. Once more: Stress. A word everyone knows, a concept everyone has heard of and comprehends. The moment a player sees “Stress 0/10” (chosen randomly here for the number) in his mind the lighbulb instantly goes “ding” and shines bright “if this gets high, it’s bad, now tell me game, what makes it grow?” Over the course of a single mission, WITH NO TUTORIAL I might add, a player just by understanding the concept from simply looking at it will also completely understand the system without the system ever loosing complexity. He will learn abilities and items make his soldiers stressed, he will see that making progress in the mission reduces stress and he will discover that high stress sends his soldiers panicking. Instead of having to decipher the arcane meaning of “Will Points” and most likely having to read a tutorial and memorizing it, he has learned the same system by simply framing it through lens he can understand intrinsically. As for altering the cost based on soldier … well beyond how ridiculous the chubby assault line was … soldiers have a default standard of fitness. That standard is what makes the system uniform. You do not ever alter the cost of abilities, you permit soldier stats to dictate available resources. Your entire arguments about stress can be just as easily be twisted around to talk about will points. Watch: “it would take greater will points for a chubby assault to use Exertion and act more than for a fit assault”. Same system. More of the “will stat” means either soldier has more will points, or he can accrue more stress points. It’s the exact same mechanic, but one has intrinsic clarity, the other is “mcguffin points I have to read about to fully grasp”.
To put it in TL;DR terms: walk down the street and ask a random dude “what does a bar counting Will Points going down mean?” He will look at you like you’re on drugs. Now ask him “what does a bar that measures Stress going up mean?” and I guaran-damn-tee you he will be able to respond with more conviction and certainty and be closer to the money than the previous question, without even needing to ask for clarification of what “Will Points” is supposed to mean. The system remains unchanged, clarity is added and you don’t even need to have items not use WP anymore because there is no incongruity between the resource used and the activity anymore.
And as a side note: you do know an arrangement of pips and a number near it is still a bar right? I say bar because it’s faster to type, I never once implied it should be a bar without numbers. Far from it, it should behave like the current UI element,with clear pips and numbers visible. Because a lot of people seem to assume I mean featureless bar. Not that it can’t work, hell BT proves it can, but it takes a certain context I don’t see in PP.
Well I mean they gave all classes/specs basically two bars now, IIRC. Basically just variations on the Energy/Combo Point system. Haven’t logged in in like 8 months but I felt like they made things needlessly complicated in some situations.
I actually chose that verbiage as I viewed it as humorous but the point still stands. A soldier fresh out of Basic isn’t going to be as fit as a veteran who’s been training for years and out in the field for months. Thus doing the same action would have different “Stress” costs for the two soldiers (since I view Stress as a 0-100% system). They could do a 0->X system for Stress/Fatigue instead of a X->0 system for Will, but I personally don’t see that as intuitive or really making sense for either name (of course this could be done in the background and then converted to 0-100% and used to determine the Stress cost of abilities but I’m not a fan of the cost of abilities changing).
Bolded bit is TomAto vs Tomato to me. Will Power, Will Points, Will, they’re all the same thing to me. As to the rest, I think it comes back to the person but really to people not bothering to understand mechanics. In Might & Magic Charisma increased my Mana for my Priest while Intellect was useless. For the Mage this was reversed. The Druid used both, the Knight didn’t care about either of them, and it was up to me to know and understand all of this and not just throw stats at people willy-nilly.
Likewise I don’t consider the Will Points to be some magical thing. I view them as a visual representation of one’s overall Will. One starts out full, different things cost different amounts, and the “points” are just easy visuals for one’s overall Will.
My thing is that I don’t think this change would result in anything positive while I think “Will” better fits with the Lovecraftian theme of the game. At most I see changing it from Will to Stress/Fatigue as being neutral. At worst I personally see it as being counter-intuitive and not fitting with the game’s theme.
Indeed manuals can be boring and tutorials get old. The thing is, the more complex of a system you have the more something like that is needed to reasonably bring a player into the game set up for success. I think manuals are generally better as you can reference them at any point (or not at all) while tutorials are nice as you’re getting to actually learn by playing the game (but get old when you can’t skip them and can suck when they are tied to story elements but FORCE you into actions).
Overall I don’t think we will ever agree as this is more of a difference in opinions over a naming convention. If I were to hit 10/10 Stress I wouldn’t inherently assume that bad things could/would happen just as how I wouldn’t assume that at 0/10 Will. Likewise I wouldn’t think that being on Overwatch would “stress” me out as I should already be scanning and ready to shoot the enemy. So just as how you don’t think Will (or Will Points) fits, I don’t think Stress does a good job of encapsulating the mechanic.
Likewise we could flip your statement back around. The player has no need to “decipher” the meaning of Will Points as they see them attached to abilities. Then instead of learning that high Stress causes bad things they learn that low Will causes bad things. The problem is that one is going in ASSUMING things instead of bothering to actually learn what they do, and changing the name does nothing to solve this while also in no way guaranteeing that the player assumes the correct thing (again I wouldn’t assume that 10/10 Stress will cause bad things, just that I can’t do any stressful actions).
I also think your Chubby Assault example doesn’t work. It’s going to cost him the same amount of Will to make that action. The difference is that it’s going to tire him out more quickly, or in other words the more fit Assault can take more actions before being tired, which is already displayed by the difference in Points. For a non-Points system this would need to be displayed as 40% vs 18% if they had 5 vs 11 Will. And if “Will Points” are an issue then Stress would need to be a 0->100% system or else you basically just have actions giving you “Stress Points” and thus you’re right back to your immersion-breaking complaint. If you can drop “Points” off of the stress one, then why not off of the Will system?
TLDR - TomAto, Tomato. I personally think the Will system fits better both thematically and overall than a Stress system would but you’re free to disagree. Have a good day
Quoted for emphasis. Sleek and streamlined UI may look good but if it fails to properly convey the information it is displaying, it is only as good as a cosmetic doodad. If a game mechanic cannot be properly visualized by a bar or a set of pips, UI must be changed to accommodate the mechanic, not the other way around unless the game is made for pre-schoolers.
Now back to the topic at hand. I think the idea of soldier requiring mental energy(as in concentration, not psionic power) to perform particular actions is an interesting and realistic concept. However, I would like to see some changes to the way it is currently implemented in PP.
On the very basic level, which I consider a must-have change to WP, I would prefer “WP energy” to be changed from something positive that is consumed into something negative that is being accumulated, i.e. stress, mental fatigue etc. This step is purely cosmetic, so no meaningful mechanical changes to how skills are dependant on mental state are necessary. The only differences are that soldiers start with 0 mental fatigue(MF) and a limit of how much of it they can accumulate. Actions then will increase the MF and will be prevented from being performed when a soldier is at max MF level. Resting a turn will reduce the MF. WP costs of actions will be translated 1 to 1 into MF costs, max MF value will be different from soldier to soldier, based on an appropriate stat or a combination of stats. All that, while keeping game mechanics practically unchanged, will make the MF system more intuitive IMO.
Second level of changes is to add most item-dependant actions some kind of actual resource to consume, rather that having those actions purely MF-limited. It does makes sense that operating a jetpack requires mental efforts. It doesn’t makes much sense that mental effort is the only thing jetpack needs, making this action way more game-y that it should be. I’m not against unlimited elerium-powered flying armour as long as its tech level feels appropriate but a crude-looking and seemingly disposable rocket booster is definitely not that. So, just like limited-use medkits, other appropriate items should have charges as well, which should be the main limit of their power.
Third level of changes should introduce(or, rather, expand) the downsides of being at high level of MF. On top of existing susceptibility to panic, each action which generates MF and even some that do not, should require a check against some kind of mental resilience stat(willpower, focus, resilience etc) to determine which negative side effects might be applicable due to current level of MF. For low MF, no side effects will apply, moderate MF may lower the effectiveness of the action(lower healing values for medkits, less accurate jump for jetpacks etc). High levels of MF will apply severe penalties to MF-generating actions(a chance of no positive effect when using medkits, a chance to crash when using jetpack) as well as mild to moderate penalties to regular actions(regular attacks being less accurate, reduced movement range etc). Panic chances will have to be reduced to compensate for these new side effects of high MF. At this point,
MF reduction mechanics may have to be revisited to accommodate the changes to the way MF interacts with actions and soldier stats.
Note that all actions, even MF-generating ones, will still be available for soldiers, which will be balanced by a high chance of failure or negative side effects and maybe even permanent damage to the soldier, mental and/or physical. This will turn MF from it’s mana bar-like hard limiter state into a more realistic soft limiter, giving the player the choice of taking a particular action despite high MF at the cost of negative consequences.
Considering said jetpack isn’t meant to hover in the air but provide short bursts to allow one to move around, it’s not unreasonable to think it has enough fuel not to run out on a basic mission. I’m not overly bothered by it, especially considering that willpower seems to be a much more severe limiter (I rarely jetpack more than twice in a mission)
Also : Usual alpha disclaimer. Charges may come up later after all
Well I mean the current Jet Packs are limited to two uses per mission, this just isn’t visible anywhere currently (or at least not in the first build, I haven’t tried 1.2 due to work to see if they show the limited uses in there).
As for some of the things I’ve seen being repeated in this thread. I said this before and I’ll say it again. Just because a piece of equipment “allows” you to do something doesn’t mean it wouldn’t take Willpower to actually do it. So I don’t mind some equipment to require Willpoints to use (especially if most abilities come from equipment).
Likewise I think the Willpower vs X name (Mental Fatigue, Stress, etc) is a TomAto vs Tomato argument. That said so far I haven’t really heard a compelling reason to switch it. WP (to me) has done the best job of encompassing everything that it does while also being the most intuitive. Sure one most likely won’t assume that bad things happen at 0/X WP, but they likely wouldn’t make that assumption regardless of what system is used. To me Willpower vs Mental Fatigue is mechanically semantics but ultimately WP just sounds better to me and I generally like “spending” points as opposed to gaining them (though gaining can work in the right situations, such as Heat in the various Mech Warrior games).
I’ve only been able to use it twice in a mission and UnstableVoltage has stated that it’s only usable twice but that there’s currently no UI to actually show this.
Now it is attached to the Rocket Launcher currently so maybe finding additional rockets and reloading it will also let you jump again? As this is a pre-alpha I wouldn’t be surprised if there were bugs or unintended things that let you use it more (like if you jump twice then drop the RL and a different person equips it, can he now jump?) but it is indeed coded to only be two jumps.
so you should know when you deploy what the expected generation and dissipation is. It’s intuitive because it sets up the systems and informs the player unconsciously of the rhythm of firepower typical to the universe. And even if you don’t bother looking at the numbers to optimize your design (which is honestly the main part of the game, not the actual fights, sue me 
) the bar still does a well enough job of gradually teaching you the rhythm of your design.
- I’d always thought that they went when devs started making tutorials in game.