I feel your pain.
At least it's not inline-Assembler on your side, but Java has its whole own category of nasty programmer traps (looking at you, strong/weak reference ambiguity).
I think the ecologists are being murdered by third-party animals: They always seem to die amidst a group of creatures.
"meat-grinders", I think, should always be discouraged. Even Dwarf Fortress, as bloody as it is, has an immigration push factor based on dwarf deaths, which reduces the size of immigrant waves (while accumulating wealth increases it). Rather, in the very tragic and unfortunate event that death is inevitable, the player should be presented with the very harsh decision which people to sacrifice. This, of course, requires mechanics that penalise losses beyond the individual - else the situation you describe will necessarily emerge as a form of optimised play.
... Majesty had spawning graveyards as such a mechanism, and I think it worked poorly for the simple fact that their spawns were too weak to inconvenience the player - rather, they provided cheap XP for replacement and veteran heroes alike, ending up as more of a bonus than a penalty.
It might be the most straightforward to apply a (decaying over time?) penalty factor to hiring cost, which is increased per death of (any) personnel. Something more emotionally touching might be nice, but will prove difficult to design (has to not grow stale eventually, must still have gameplay impact; morale penalty to existing personnel, depression, other mental disorders, ...).
By all means, if I am still around at the time, feel free to get in touch again. I am always hard pressed for time nowadays, but one never knows when I might be able to spare the odd hour or ten.
addendum:
A couple of oddities I found in the tutorial (not yet verified in normal play):
...
Only today did I notice that personnel actually upgrades their housing as seen in e.g. Caesar 2 (and I suppose 3, as you mentioned that earlier). Very nice.
At least it's not inline-Assembler on your side, but Java has its whole own category of nasty programmer traps (looking at you, strong/weak reference ambiguity).
I think the ecologists are being murdered by third-party animals: They always seem to die amidst a group of creatures.
"meat-grinders", I think, should always be discouraged. Even Dwarf Fortress, as bloody as it is, has an immigration push factor based on dwarf deaths, which reduces the size of immigrant waves (while accumulating wealth increases it). Rather, in the very tragic and unfortunate event that death is inevitable, the player should be presented with the very harsh decision which people to sacrifice. This, of course, requires mechanics that penalise losses beyond the individual - else the situation you describe will necessarily emerge as a form of optimised play.
... Majesty had spawning graveyards as such a mechanism, and I think it worked poorly for the simple fact that their spawns were too weak to inconvenience the player - rather, they provided cheap XP for replacement and veteran heroes alike, ending up as more of a bonus than a penalty.
It might be the most straightforward to apply a (decaying over time?) penalty factor to hiring cost, which is increased per death of (any) personnel. Something more emotionally touching might be nice, but will prove difficult to design (has to not grow stale eventually, must still have gameplay impact; morale penalty to existing personnel, depression, other mental disorders, ...).
By all means, if I am still around at the time, feel free to get in touch again. I am always hard pressed for time nowadays, but one never knows when I might be able to spare the odd hour or ten.
addendum:
A couple of oddities I found in the tutorial (not yet verified in normal play):
- Unconscious enemies can be assigned as target of a capture mission; they are brought to the Bastion, but then the mission does not end and eventually (may require auto-repair, tested on the Tripod guarding the Ruins) they wake up and are immediately free to attack.
- People build relationships with corpses, hard enemies and while unconscious (Tripod befriends the the corpses of those it killed and while unconscious befriends the trooper who carries it to the Bastion; nevertheless it happily shoots its best-friends-forever once it wakes up).
- Capture missions have no feedback for outcome (tried to capture Drones but they all died, I have no idea whether that was just bad luck or whether my troopers lacked crucial equipment).
- Capture missions do not end if the target is dead (but neither do the assigned personnel attempt to carry the corpse back home).
- Game speed affects material tooltips above buildings and personnel (it probably should to some extend, so they do not stack up into illegibility on max. speed; a 1:1 effect feels too large, however).
...
Only today did I notice that personnel actually upgrades their housing as seen in e.g. Caesar 2 (and I suppose 3, as you mentioned that earlier). Very nice.
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