Thoughts on Permadeath

[Asbestos]

its usually a contentious subject in strategy games. Whats the general opinion here? Im personally using it because it makes the game much more difficult and forces me to be a perfectionist (save scum), however unlike my prior experience with the mechanic, i dont think it fits this game as well as it did fire emblem or blood bowl, (the only other strategy games ive played lol). FE is almost completely built around the mechanic and in BB its not as difficult to replace a dead unit. In this game though, losing a unit is a huge time and resource loss, and replacing them is expensive and difficult if youve gotta train a new unit back up. not sure if comparing this to those games is exactly fair but it is what it is, dont play too many strategy games.

Edit: everything above is a first impression im still early in the game

[Simple Kind of Man]

the only way it matters is if you dont save scum
it fits well

[Dancing Dragon Games]

It's basically the opposite - you are given ample opportunities to refill your ranks throughout the whole game

[Asbestos]

Originally posted by Dancing Dragon Games:

It's basically the opposite - you are given ample opportunities to refill your ranks throughout the whole game

ah you see i hate spending money. and watching people die. and watching people that cost a lot of money die. however this is very true, if i wasnt so scared about losing on an investment thered be no issue. its a mindset thing really, i cant view something i spent so much money doing my best to perfect as expendable. However, if i can change my mindset going in it probably wouldnt be as big a deal

[Ishan451]

Originally posted by Asbestos:

ah you see i hate spending money. and watching people die

Then turn off perma death. If you savescum anyway it shouldn't make a difference.

[Simple Kind of Man]

Originally posted by Ishan451:

Originally posted by Asbestos:

ah you see i hate spending money. and watching people die

Then turn off perma death. If you savescum anyway it shouldn't make a difference.

"i dont like water" (jumps into lake) "i dont like this at all"

[Felius]

Personally I'd like an intermediary option where if a whole squad dies, the (non-story) characters die, but you don't lose any of them so long someone is still alive in it.

Specifically, it's not that I hate the permadeath, but with the squad system it can be a bit too easy to lose a handful of dudes in the squad, specially against boss, even if you play rather optimally. I would still want some risk, but not to the extent that perma-death brings now.

[Asbestos]

Originally posted by Ishan451:

Originally posted by Asbestos:

ah you see i hate spending money. and watching people die

Then turn off perma death. If you savescum anyway it shouldn't make a difference.

i thought that too, but it does make a difference. Its one thing to win a mission with minimal casualties because you have to play that way to win, its another to win with half your army dead (exaggeration). I enjoy the additional challenge of permadeath, i never said it was bad or that i dont like it, it just doesnt feel like it fits this game as well as it does some others ive played.

[Asbestos]

Originally posted by Felius:

Personally I'd like an intermediary option where if a whole squad dies, the (non-story) characters die, but you don't lose any of them so long someone is still alive in it.

Specifically, it's not that I hate the permadeath, but with the squad system it can be a bit too easy to lose a handful of dudes in the squad, specially against boss, even if you play rather optimally. I would still want some risk, but not to the extent that perma-death brings now.

i just had an idea. what if when you play with permadeath off, a character dying means minor stat loss. That way youre punished for not playing optimally but still able to keep your squad

[Hand of Gabriel]

I'm a little shocked and confused that you marked Blood Bowl as a game where you could easily replace a dead player and that you:
"i hate spending money. and watching people die. and watching people that cost a lot of money die"

As a Blood Bowl player with about 4 years of gameplay under my belt I can say 100% of the time that it's absolutely freaking impossible to replace a Block/Tackle/Juggernaut/MB/STR+ Vampire with 88SPP who gets curb-stomped by a Halfling and fails to regen. If you're referring to a 1million league then yeah, no one has developed anything so it's easy to replace anyone.

Sorry for getting off topic. In SoW you can replace a dead troop pretty much instantly; you'll notice a temporary drop in combat effectiveness but it won't be significant enough to worry too much. Moreover it doesn't cost your army much to buy a recruit and train them; mercenaries are more expensive but if you can handle playing BB you'll be fine in SoW.

[Talithmara]

New player; on chapter 11 without Permadeath. Just thought I'd weigh in. To get my biases in the open: I support the inclusion of Casual Mode in Fire Emblem as an option for those who wanted it, but I usually still play Classic mode since I like the stories they let me tell (such as my first playthrough of Awakening, where I only had 3 casualties, but all very closely linked and telling a tragic tale. I do not reset; that's a self-imposed Casual mode and defeats the entire point of Classic mode.)

My first thought, based on my experience with Ogrebattle, was that Permadeath would be far, FAR too punishing; there's a lot of attacks flying around in a single battle and if the RNG decides one person gets focused down hard, that's it. So I elected to not use Permadeath.

But then, I was using the protagonist to train units to reshuffle around since their capacity made them an ideal squad leader for a good sized batch of fresh recruits, And I noticed that honestly, tier 1 units are perfectly usable? If you only buy new recruits when you need them and don't try to keep a stock of reserves, their levels don't fall TOO far behind? I started to think it might not be the worst idea.

... and then Diana's entire squad got completely obliterated by crit RNG right after spending resources to promote the front two units to tier 3, and I realized that I still personally find Permadeath too punishing and would not enjoy playing it.

Unless this changes later, it seems to me like resources like Iron, Horses, etc, are essentially finite. Want a spearman to deal with cavalry? You need iron. Want a healer? Gems. And I can't imagine having fun with a run where everything goes wrong, leaving me stuck playing the game with only the few "free" tier 2 units that don't need resources for promotion because I already spent them on my lost army.

(I do know there's options like "Restart Turn" and Quicksave/Quickload, but I don't know if they exist in Permadeath mode so I'm not factoring them in. But they would make savescumming less frustrating for those who prefer a self-imposed non-permadeath mode while still picking permadeath mode. I also do not know how the temple raises work in Permadeath mode; is it like Tactics Ogre in that you have until the end of the mission to revive someone before they're lost for good?)


Final Thoughts: I think Permadeath in this game is probably decently well balanced simply since the replacement units are abundant and you can very much recover, but the ease of losing units + finite promotion resources makes it very punishing and I personally would not enjoy that... at least not for a first playthrough. Maybe on captain difficulty on future runs?

Edit History: Borked formatting with weird line breaks; fixed.

[Kimochi]

Git gud scrubs

[John Hadley]

The perma death in this game isn't real perma death. If somebody dies you just restart the level. Its by no means a true iron man challenge unless you decide to make it one yourself. You can save multiple saves and they aren't deleted or auto-saved over when someone dies. If you think you might fail when you are about to do something the game has a single quicksave slot that will allow you to save during the middle of a mission so if you are going to do something dangerous just quicksave before it and if it doesn't work out you just reload.

Even if you do play the game true hardcore without save scumming, the way units level seems to be very rapid if they are under-level, so units that got replaced because they died will catch up with the highest level ones quite quickly. The units that you buy tend to be as high as or even higher ranked than the units you already have so replacing a unit with a mercenary is not particularly troublesome. You don't even have to kill enemies to level up. Just let them shoot at you while you heal up your squad and everyone will eventually reach whatever the soft cap is for that stage.

[FlyingTorcensoredWhale]

Tbh, I am not sure it fits here too too much.

Okay, hear me out.

In them olden days, there was Fire Emblem. Units there were slightly customized with names, a few quotes they say and portraits. They were made unique enough for you to be mildly upset upon them dying, but not important enough that you couldn't just replace Joe with Bob and Bob with Jill. Gave you some stakes, made sure you aren't too thrilled about throwing dudes into the meatgrinder unless you have to and when you lose a guy it stings a bit, but not too much. At least not too much for you to restart the mission, that might just be half an hour long ordeal. Good days those were.

Then Fire Emblem decided to flesh out literally everyone. Maybe give them children even! How about that? So Permadeath, while still a major feature, became something worth avoiding at all costs. And the games even started giving you tools to avoid it, including just taking off Permadeath completely (understandable, considering that if a character dies, you might lose a HUGE chunk of dialogues, events and even other characters). Not very good design, imo.

Now this game.

It's fun. It really is. But the characters so far a separated into "Dude With Sword #1~N+1" and "Actual Characters". Seems like Actual Characters don't really die even with Permadeath (I had one go down and she was fine and dandy afterwards). The only ones that ACTUALLY die are clones that only have different names. And... Honestly, I don't really care when they do. Yeah, sure, it's a shame, but I can always replace them with more dudes. Like, I've lost a hole bunch of them in the last mission (about 6 faceless guys/gals). And just bought more. Reshuffled survivors a bit. I think I came out stronger, despite the losses.

Now here's the issue that I have: Permadeath in this game has zero impact on me as a player. I don't WANT to lose dudes, but I never do. Even when they actually come back. I like playing clean anyways.

EDIT: TO BE FAIR
Permadeath does add some management aspect to your forces, which is kind of nice. Replenishing losses, all that jazz. That I enjoy.

[cronomaster]

Sorry, but playing with permadeath and save scumming seems pointless for me.

But I agree with you, that replacing lost units is just too hard in this game. Mostly because there are no side battles, so you have no way to train your new recruits before main battle. So after winning a battle occupied with heavy losses you may find yourself in a situation when you're incapable of winning next main battle, because most of your army are new recruits. Assuming that you have enough money to hire them.
One good thing is that recrutable units have higher level as you progress but it's still not much enough. Ok, there is Arena mode, but Arena Tokens are very limited.

So I play with permadeath off, but it's not great either, because I can mindlessly rush into my opponent not worrying about casualties. I wish there would be some way to level up your new recruits, or at least permadeath would be less punishing. Maybe there could be only a random chance that defaeted units die permanently, or you could have limited numer of turns to retreat with your squad to avoid casualties.

Originally posted by Talithmara:

Unless this changes later, it seems to me like resources like Iron, Horses, etc, are essentially finite. Want a spearman to deal with cavalry? You need iron. Want a healer? Gems. And I can't imagine having fun with a run where everything goes wrong, leaving me stuck playing the game with only the few "free" tier 2 units that don't need resources for promotion because I already spent them on my lost army.

You're not right there. Units don't consume resources, they just "reserve" it, so when unit dies permanently, resources are refunded.

[KatArus]

The whole concept of permadeath in tactical games is extremely layman and lame. People don't magically instantly die the moment they are no longer combat capable, it's not like in the movies. It's one thing when you are routed and have to abandon your injured but when you actually win the field and despite magical healers being all over (and even without magic incapacitating injury survival was ~70% if treated) these losses look silly and immersion breaking in squad based army setting.