SUGGESTION - Fatigue?

[Vulgar Monkey]

Hi,

Apologies if this has been bought up already (didnt find anything by Search) but is it theoretically possible to add a fatigue state to your troops, pretty much directly ripped-off from LongWar?

I figure it may make for interesting logistical/strategic considerations for pretty much the same reason as in Longwar.....it's doubly important to spread your experience around and not have all your eggs in one basket. Unless you have a dearth of veteran badasses, you may not be able to commit all of your best men to a single mission, no matter the importance, just in case you find yourself shorthanded a day later. And I am suggesting a day or two....I dont think Longwars week off per mission would work here!

Might provide a bit more impetus to continually train rooks too....I dunno about anyone else, but (aside from the old psi-screening stage) I always found that in the late game once I had managed to collect a couple of A-Teams, I hadnt much reason not to keep using them, even on reaaaally busy months.

Tbh I'd be amazed if this hasnt been discussed already but I was just curious.

[pmprog]

Soldiers already have energy, and the more they move, the more they use up, to a point when you can have TUs remaining and not move

[Yankes]

not that fatigue, he mean form fighting and need for rest after battle.

[luke83]

not that fatigue, he mean form fighting and need for rest after battle.

This would force me to train up other squads... I like it

[Solarius Scorch]

This would force me to train up other squads... I like it

I like it too, since I've been roleplaying this for years anyway.

[Vulgar Monkey]

Same.
Or at least I try to rp it that way, but without any in-game mechanic to communicate it, I have to fudge it by just recruiting lots of different strike teams across the globe and arbitrarily swapping them out when I remember.

I suppose I could continually note down who did what on a word doc, but nobody got time for that.

If I'm going to crit my own idea, I'd suggest that it may make bit multi-mission operations (like when you get supply ships and battleships swarming around a new alien base site) a bit tricky....at the moment it may not be a huge deal since you have to scramble several teams anyway because the skyranger cant go direct from mission to mission, but if that ever changes it'd potentially conflict with fatigue. Maybe the fatigue would only be applied after they return to base? Maybe it'd be proportional to how much work they did, by some measure or another?

Probably overcomplicating it a bit now, but I just wanted to explore any potential extra headroom for the future. Could be a great way of making such big 'operations' a bit more strategic, especially synergised with the other logistic considerations that have been discussed like awacs, refuelling, transport interceptions and fighter escorts.....

[Muukalainen]

Interesting idea.

I always thought that are the soldiers always on duty? Never having weekends free or any other holidays Who would work at Christmas? At least make them have double salary on holidays Sleeping rhymes and work schedules could be fun on simulation point of view, but maybe too overkill. But simply making new stat fatigue could work and still be fun to play the game. It would be fun to make a "base manager" game where you only controlled these kind of things and the battles were more automatic and you could only sit in your command room and give simple orders, abort, defencive, aggressive etc... how well they did was calculated on how good condition they were in.

Have you thought about how to implement this and what kind of effects it had?

I thought that it could drop the soldiers morale by the amount they had fatigue. So with fatigue 20 the soldier can only have maximum of 80 morale. Eventually if your soldiers had no rest they would start to go berserk and panic, because of the low morale. Other stat drops they could combat automatically with drugs so they don't fall asleep on the field.

How would they gain fatigue? Maybe  20 points from day mission? And 40 from night mission? Terror mission and alien base mission could have some bonus like +10. Every hour spent outside base, on the Skyranger + 10?

At the base they could recover every hour 5 to 10 points or something like that?

[Sharp]

I always thought like a sleepiness factor would have been nice for Apoc, not just a fatigue thing but something that you need to cycle soldiers so you have active duty ones while others go to sleep, or maybe even off-duty ones who will then go around town.

Still sounds like a nice idea for OXC as well.

[Vulgar Monkey]

Well I dont know the first thing about coding (I just paint stuff), so didnt want to get carried away, but yes I did wonder about how they might accrue temporary stat maluses in the tactical layer. Assuming the code allows that to even be implemented, you could take it in any number of directions. Less energy seems obvious, less reaction maybe, and everything besides.

As for implementation, I'd presume it could be done like in Longwar where they get flagged by the game as injured and are therefor benched for a number of days derived from their stats. I would presume that if the game can derive the number of injured days from damage taken, it could just as easily be told to check fatigue against other stats (morale, energy, mission score, mission type). If it could be scaled against stats, I wonder if it would have to scale linearly or if you could put a curve of it?
Or you could sideline the stats entirely and enforce a hard limit from the moment they land back at base. I'm not too keen on tying it to turns, but the idea of a disastrous drop burning out your troops is interesting. But then again I suppose a disasterous drop is going to leave them with injuries and morale hits anyway, so maybe that's enough. I dunno, I'm just spitballing.

To me it seems the hardest part would be balancing....given how quickly missions can appear in the late game in old x-com as opposed to 2012 xcom, the recovery time would need to be much shorter. I'd strongly suggest a day or two, although if multiple-drops per flight are ever possible I'd suggest it scales with that. 2 missions back-to-back equals double the down time, etc.

Also, this means any given base would need an A-squad for big missions, a rapid-response team kept on backup for unpredictable situations, and probably a full squad of security guys in case of base assault. Lots of guys. Dunno if that'd necessitate a cost rebalancing, but I always ran with 100+ troops in vanilla and still made more money than I could spend. Always found that there was still plenty of experience to spread around the men too.

Worth noting that it necessitates good balanced recruitment too. It's no good just having lots of bodies, you want some redundancy built into your roster. Have spare specialists. And while you want them to perform their designated role well, you also need them to be able to fill in for benched men. Personally I always have a pretty standard deployment (two 5-man fireteams with good aim, mobility and reaction, and a base-of fire element with the rocket, a loader, and autocannons...all strongmen, basically), but this'd force me to either adapt that setup or make sure I have enough appropriately skilled men to fill it.

Mainly I was just wondering if anyone more familiar with the code could confirm whether it is theoretically possible. As I said, curiosity.

[Falko]

if any coder wants to do that the easiest would be a copy of the health mechanism
each human turn check if energy is lower than 50% if so add one to the "energy wounds"
each human turn check if energy is lower than 20% if so add two to the "energy wounds"
so if you have 20 rounds of running around with a soldier he has ~20 "energy wounds"
(perhaps do not lower energy lower than 20% of max energy)
the soldier cant revover its full energy during battle the "wounds" can only be healed in base
i would say 1 wound recovers in options::energywoundrecover hours in the base
the option = 0 = default= off ;  with >0 you enable it and can determine the effect of fatigue yourself

Edit:
a fatigued soldier still can go to missions but has lot less energy to run around
so give him a sniper rifle or let him work with the mindprobes

[Sturm]

In my case average soldier life time is 3-4 missions.

[xracer]

Is called battle fatigue, basically a soldier morale  and stats start to take a hit if you soldier has been in battle constantly, it is well known. In war that is why they have rotation of soldiers they need to removed the soldier from the battlefield and give time to recover not from physical  tiredness but from the stress of being on the battle front.

EDIT
It is also called shell shock, this also has to do with the  thousand yard stare

[Sturm]

Is called battle fatigue, basically a soldier morale  and stats start to take a hit if you soldier has been in battle constantly, it is well known. In war that is why they have rotation of soldiers they need to removed the soldier from the battlefield and give time to recover not from physical  tiredness but from the stress of being on the battle front.

EDIT
It is also called shell shock, this also has to do with the  thousand yard stare

Do X-Com soldiers live long enough to experience it, though ?

[Solarius Scorch]

Do X-Com soldiers live long enough to experience it, though ?

Yes, they mostly do!

[xracer]

Do X-Com soldiers live long enough to experience it, though ?

Some may not but your hardy soldier the ones that get to higher ranks i suppose the do
If not you need to care a little more about your little men