I must disagree. Every time I play, my Heavy can use it more than 2 times no matter how many missiles he has. It looks like infinite number of uses. Just remember to have Willpoints. Maybe it is intended to have a limit of 2 uses but it doesn’t work. Just went (I don’t play Backers Build 1.2 anymore since it is too easy) through random mission without loosing any soldiers and jumping 4 times around the map.
Ultimately, I agree that those changes are cosmetic. I would’ve preferred to have a fatugue-like stat with it’s value increasing with each use but I am ok with WP as long as other two mechanics(item charges, penalties for being in high FM/low WP state) from my post above are in the game.
As for how to convey the risk of having low WPs/high MF, that’s quite easy:
*popup stat penalties are for illustration purposes only
This is interesting. I haven’t used JJs more than twice in any battle so far. Might need to do some more testing to see how it currently works, especially given it seems to be tied to missile launcher somehow…
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Realize it being tied to the RL is a bug. It’s supposed to be tied to the armor itself. Maybe 1.2 has fixed this but when UV stated that it’s supposed to be tied to the armor multiple people gave feedback about it currently being tied to the RL instead.
patch didn’t change anything in this matter 
IMO, it’s better to have it as a separate equipment piece, not a built-in element of heavy armour. And soldiers wearing heavy suits can simply have a large climbing penalty(like having to spend an entire turn climbing one level) instead to being outright unable to scale obstacles without a jetpack.
I love the concept of the bar starting in 0. Just to give ideas, I’d rename it “fatigue” as was proposed before (fatigue being both phisical and mental weariness), and add an additional “fear” bar overlaping with that one. While fatigue would be generated by using abilities, “fear” would increase slightly each turn (if there are enemies on sight) up to the level of fatigue the soldier has.
The amount of fear generated each turn could be tied to the amount of enemies the soldier, or the squad, can see, and when an enemy is killed, 1/x of the fear the soldier has is deducted (x being the amount of enemies in sight, or twice as much to rise the difficulty of resource management). Fatigue would decrease each turn at the same rate fear is generated
So let say we have bar of 15 fatigue. And if in 15th round when our soldier has only 1 point of fatigue and he sees one enemy he will panic? Unless we can regain it during mission I can say “No, thank you”. I have played with ‘green fog’ option in XCOM Enemy Within Long War mod (-1 point of accuracy each turn) and it was too difficult in some point.
if 15=100% in the bar, fear would need to get to 10ish before a soldier panics. If a soldier only has 1 point of fatigue, then fear could only rise to 1, so no panic. Only if you make the soldier to use a lot of abilities in a row and manage to get to 10 points of fatigue or more, then fear could rise up to 10 and start giving panic-chance to that soldier. That considering you didn’t manage to kill any enemy up to that point using so many abilities
I don’t like using fear like that. I don’t want my soldiers panicking just because a new alien appeared.
I personally like the will point system. The only thing I disagree with is with the recovery ability. I believe will points should only be recovered by killing enemies and completing objectives. It makes sense soldiers will feel more confident after taking an enemy down or completing an objective, and mechanically speaking that would reward players for playing aggressively instead of camping recovering their will points. I also had a very interesting discussion on discord where it was discussed that tying the after mission fatigue time of a soldier to the total of willpoints used in the mission would be a very interesting mechanic since it would be reflective of how long and hard a mission turned out to be.
Now, tying will to equipment is arguable. I believe Jetpacks should be tied to fuel, and having to dedicate to it a whole turn is already very costly. Regarding Medkits, one could argue that healing a wounded comrade would a very stressful thing, but in the end I agree it is quite punishing and feels off. I would prefer to have wounds removing will than medkits costing will. After all saving from death a bleeding out soldier should be a relief. It makes more sense thematically and mechanically in my opinion, and complements well the body part targeting system. You can make each body part disabled remove X amount of will points.
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It may be interesting to read Allen Stroud’s thoughts on this on Reddit, as well as this Discord chat pasted on RPGCodex.
This clears up some things very nicely, but it looks like it will need to be explained in a tutorial in the game (as others have said).
There’s one bit from the Discord chat that I found interesting:
AllenStroud - heute um 10:28 Uhr
So, when you complete a mission, you have soldiers with lowish will point levels. These will take time to return. There may even be some residual (permanent) loss owing to specific trauma.
This means as a player you are required to manage your roster. Your best troops will accumulate issues if you continually pitch them into evvery battle.
However, what this roster management also does is it spreads around the positive, battle hardened, experience of your group, meaning that in certain missions, you’ll have a large (16) effective fighting force to pull out.
madxav - heute um 10:30 Uhr
@AllenStroud Hmmm… I see where you are going, but that would make a recovery ability even worse. since before taking the last enemy everyone would just recover all their units. I believe it would be more fitting to calculate exhaustion with the total of will points used in a mission. That way longer missions that required more use of will points would reflect in the strategical layer.
What if your max will points went down during the mission? For example, a soldier has 8 WP at the start of the mission. He spends them all and now has 0/8WP. He recovers, and now has 4/7WP. So he regains half of what he had, but his maximum is now 7, not 8. This continues every time he recovers, with a minimum of 1 total WP (or maybe even 0?). By using this method, you get an easy way to calculate exhaustion for after the mission. At the same time, it prevents recovery spam during the mission, because it becomes less effective. It also goes well with the Lovecraftian theme.
Although, right now it looks to me like the game would need rebalancing to accommodate such a change, like recovering all WPs instead of half. Another question is how this would affect recovering will from strategic points? Do you still lose one max WP or not?
One last thing… I know that taking out mutants won’t give you WP, but what about bosses?
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unless 1.2 changed it, killing the normal mutants gives WP back to your soldiers
It did. My soldiers don’t regain WP for kills.
noted. I’m waiting on backer build 2 to play some more
I wasn’t getting WP back from kills in the first build. I haven’t played the new build yet though.
It can be hard to see the gain with the camera flying all over the map. Best way to tell is to remember how many WP a soldier has and see if they’ve gained any, either by having only spent 1 or all WP and seeing if you have full or 1 WP after the kill
That’s what I did and they weren’t getting WP back. At least not regularly.
Boy this thread goes long (as well as what we would not like to see … _(based on Enemy Within oversimplifications of XCom mechanics, like they were unable to fully reproduce it and 1994 Xcom flaws).
Back to this topic, I find willpower system as good one to reduce abuse of “powers” or well, equipment special uses, by us or aliens. So degrading or getting WP by kills is nice reward/punishment system and is way better then more action RPG related “cool-down” system used in Enemy Within.
Always remember that same mechanics is used by aliens, so in future this will also prevent them of abusing special abilities.
For long, long missions I believe it would be best to leave it be, but to slowly replenish something like 0.2/per turn.
I expect Psionics to drain WPs 
I think the key point of this thread was that item use should be limited by item charges. There were some interesting points brought up in this thread regarding how concentration and determination(supposedly represented by willpower) could be required to perform some item-based actions. But I, for one, still would very much liked any item-based action to be limited by the item itself, first and foremost. Just like weapons requiring ammo to shoot or medkits having limited healing gel supply, any other action which is strongly connected to an item should have a natural limitation in said item’s nature as outlined above.
My take on current WP mechanics several posts above is what I see as a middle ground between a more realistic approach and the current approach where WP is essentially a glorified mana pool.
More dynamic, maybe. But in my opinion, regardless of the active skill limitation system, the problem is in skills themselves. They are too abundant, too reliable and way, way too game-breaking. FXcom needed almost superhero-like soldiers because it severely limited the squad size as well as total soldier pool. If you could only bring 6 soldiers to the mission(and only after all the upgrades are researched and purchased) while being regularly outnumbered 3 to 1, you had to let them do crazy s#it all over the battlefield otherwise they had no chance against the enemy. Hence we got soldiers who could fire a sniper rifle as fast as a machinegun, have unlimited melee attacks, automatically avoid an enemy attack after a certain unrelated condition is met etc etc.
Many such skills break core game mechanics without making much sense from game world perspective and are only there “because videogames”. Yes, I know, rule of cool and all that but with all that over-the-top super sayan level(yes, over 9000) craziness in the game, it loses the feeling original XCom had. When FXCom soldiers use their “magic”, being invincible, gaining extra actions out of thin air and making unavoidable shots, the game feels much less like colonial marines storming the aliens’ nest or special forces team fending off a Predator; it feels like “Incredibles with guns”.
What saddens me when I look at PP is that we can already see it moving very steadily in the FXCom’s direction when it comes to skills. Sniper’s “shoot your pistol as fast as you want if your will is strong enough” thing, newly added engineer’s magical healing powers – all of this is a very bad sign for me.
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I am much more for some XP like progression whereby he would become specialist in weapons he use or aliens he has killed instead of Enemy Within special and advancing skills to the roof RPG like system
But after Enemy Within people expect classes. Hm,now I remember we had a vote here for classless system. I ment that guy was completely against separated specialists as classes, but he might also be against “classess superpowers”.
To explain it bluntly e.g. Enemy Within LIGHTNING REFLEXES should not be earned by simple “level up” but by soldier hidding and being shot many times in cover and run and mostly being NOT hit or lightly + enough kills as XP indicator to level up.
That way our battlefield use influences specialization, not a mere leveling up choice. Its far more complex mechanics, but more realistic and LS/Xcom: Enemy Unknown alike.
Items should not be limited by item charges - I agree for medikit. If it has limited charges, put a recharger on map. That is balanced solution instead of making something infinite.
My original objection, before the thread spiralled off into a discussion on the validity of the WP system in and of itself, was with WPs being affected by equipment usage specifically. Especially when it comes to medkits. Equipment use should be limited by equipment charges.