Regain Composure

[Tres]

I am playing this on the Switch but I'm still gonna post this here.

To my understanding there is no guaranteed way to regain composure but every way to lose it.
Running out of supplies, random encounters, events at the camp, events during missions and probably some more. On top of that the whole squad loses composure upon retrying (my Switch ran out of battery at one point and apparently that counts too) and you everyone slowly loses it with every passing day.

And so far the only way I have to regain composure is random encounters/events.
Something I have literally no control over and always has the chance to lose even more composure.
I'm sorry but this is bad game design if that's the case. I don't know what soldiers will be involved in a random scene and even if its the ones who's morale I want to raise I might end up pushing them over the edge.

Why can't they regain some composure when they aren't send on a mission or pass a mission while fulfilling certain criteria?
Or let the player spend extra supplies on them to lift their spirits.
Anything that allows the player to actually have control instead of being a slave to the whim of an RNG.
Losing due to randomness never feels good.

I really hope I am overlooking something here because I like the game and the concept of morale management. But if I can't actually manage it then it is sadly an underdeveloped feature.

[kunstnerbums]

Going into spoiler territory a bit here, but there is a story reason why composure gets worse the further you get into the campaign. The soldiers are changing for the worse over time.
In the random events you get a bit more ahead in composure on average (but still depending on the event), especially if you behave less greedy and egoistic. (Compared to not picking events at all). But as the nature of the events are random, it is hard to control for the player.
I like your points about spending resources to lift their spirits. There could be some alcohol bottles they could buy in the shop, that could help the soldiers a bit through their rough time :)

[Tres]

Originally posted by kunstnerbums:

Going into spoiler territory a bit here, but there is a story reason why composure gets worse the further you get into the campaign. The soldiers are changing for the worse over time.
[...]
I like your points about spending resources to lift their spirits. There could be some alcohol bottles they could buy in the shop, that could help the soldiers a bit through their rough time :)

I totally get that the soldiers morale drops over time, even when they aren't active on missions. It makes sense from a narrative perspective and I absolutely wouldn't want it gone from the game as it provides both a challenge as well as setting the tone for the scene.
But as someone with chronical bad luck there isn't much that I hate more than losing due to factors that I could not control at all.

But I am glad you took it as the criticism it was meant to be and not blind hate, as it may have come across.
Thanks for the kind response and also taking some of the ideas into consideration.
Stay safe and have a good one :)

[Kordanor]

Ah, very interesting. I was assuming you could regain it when not going in a mission or something like that.

Now I basically just learnt that on hard difficulty wounds will not go away, meaning that it's necessary to do more retries to avoid this.
But as retries actually eat up composure...well...retrying a mission might actually give worse result.

So I am wondering now how often you are allowed to retry the game without losing.

I mean if the game is balanced around, lets say its 10 missions total (don't know the exact number) you have 100 composure and you lose 5 on avery per mission during normal story progress...then thats only 50 composure remaining for restarts. Meaning if you are restarting mission 1 a lot...you might find out at mission 7 that...well...bad luck, you should not have restarted the mission multiple times at the beginning of the game, as that was basically a hidden "game over" already.

Therefore it would be interesting to know how often you are "allowed" to restart a mission before you might end up screwing yourself (I am playing on hard difficulty).

[kunstnerbums]

If you retry more than 5-6 times during your campaign, all your soldiers will have very low composure and you will begin to lose them. So if you are playing on hard the very first time there is definitely a high risk you will not make it the entire way through the campaign. That is why we also have normal difficulty as well as various sliders in the difficulty setting where you can set things to your own liking. I generally would not restart a mission on hard unless someone dies permanently in it. (Or perhaps if 3 or more have been wounded in an early mission)

[Kordanor]

Uh, ok...thanks for the answer. That's pretty bad though. Especially as you have no idea whatoever about the impact of a restart. So after the first 2 missions (after the prologue) I am already near that limit. :/

And I guess even changing the difficulty later on (after 5-6 restarts) won't do anything anymore as you already dug your grave at that point and would lose the rest by automatic degradation.

Would have been interesting to see how many people made it if there was an achievement for finishing the game on hard difficulty. Usually play everything on hardest, but that's pretty rough.

[kunstnerbums]

Once you have lost (or won) a campaign you can choose to skip the prologue missions when you begin a new run. The campaign has branching levels, so you do not have to play the same missions though.
You get a warning in the restart pop up box, that your soldiers will lose composure though.
We do not have statistics of how many start out with the hard difficulty. Optimally the game is designed to be played first on normal (which is way more forgiving if you make mistakes), and then when you feel you know the mechanics well you can try to battle with the harder difficulties.

[Kordanor]

Ah, good news about the prologue missions. ^^

Yeah, it says that you will lose it.
But you have no idea that you cannot regain it, you don't actively see how much is lost and you don't know that some of it will be lost either way.

So you the "loss" is pretty much in an empty room and as a player you don't know the implications.
It's like saying radio-activity is bad for you. And twice the radioactivity is twice as bad.
So if you come from Hamburg and do vacation in Freiburg (which has twice the radio-activity), how long does it take till you die? The answer would still be "never", as it's far away from a deadly dosis. But without knowing about the deadly dosis, it's really just an arbitrary number.

[kunstnerbums]

Haha, that is a nice explanation, thank you, I get it :D

[Kordanor]

When you restart a mission, do only characters lose composure which are in the misson?
Meaning, that if you just focused on composure it would actually make sense to take missions with a lower max amount of people?

Also at the end of the day you get the events on your characters. Now I got two more wounds just due to these events. Didn't have the chance yet, but could you just not do these random events? Seems like the average outcome is negative, so I don't see a point in triggering them.

[kunstnerbums]

Average outcome is slightly positive in the events, so if you click on all events, you will generally come out a bit ahead.
It is only the characters who are present in the mission who lose composure. Taking a lower amount of people on the mission is a tactic if you plan to restart the mission a lot, but it gives you a big disadvantage in firepower (and slots to put grenades, healing etc. in). So I would not recommend that for normal playthroughs.

[Kordanor]

Originally posted by kunstnerbums:

Average outcome is slightly positive in the events, so if you click on all events, you will generally come out a bit ahead.
It is only the characters who are present in the mission who lose composure. Taking a lower amount of people on the mission is a tactic if you plan to restart the mission a lot, but it gives you a big disadvantage in firepower (and slots to put grenades, healing etc. in). So I would not recommend that for normal playthroughs.

Yeah, I get what you mean. However there are also missions which have a max of 5 and missions which have a max of 4 characters. So the 4 Character ones are a tiny bit more "friendly" towards the problem. ( I guess the maps are balanced against these max numbers)

[kunstnerbums]

We have set the minimum requirement for missions to be 3 soldiers, so it is up to the player to choose how many they want to bring.

[Kordanor]

Oki, so I finished the game on hard on my first attempt. Used 9 restarts total (as shown in the last screen) and haven't lost a single soldier either due to leaving the group or dieing (except of well...storyoption).
So it's not THAT harsh, but it's still quite hard. Probably could have had another 4-5 restarts until I got into trouble. Only two times people were close to leaving.

Was a great experience though and I will now just play again on super easy for other story options.

[kunstnerbums]

Good to hear! Thanks for sharing your thoughts :)

[FroBodine]

So, you lose composure if you retry a mission. That's pretty brutal. What about if you reload a saved game that you saved at the start of a mission? Do you lose composure if you do that?

So, basically saving the mission at the start, and if you do poorly, reload the mission and try again. Is that possible without losing composure?