Is bravery backwards?

[vyvian]

Just finished my first playthrough of Xenonuats. Took me approx. 100hrs and enjoyed 95% of that time but there were a few things that bothered me so I thought I'd post a few of them to see what people think. The first I'll start with is bravery and psionics.

1. Currently a soldier gains a point in bravery at the end of the mission if they break and flee, panic etc, and then survive the battle. Basically they gain a point in bravery by learning that running away might be the best possibility.

Surely they should gain a point in bravery if they are forced to take a morale check but pass it and stay and fight.

Also it makes more sense to me that a soldier should gain a point in bravery if they manage to beat off an aliens psionic attack. They become more brave as they learn that the alien's attacks on their minds can be beaten.

2. Hallucinate and berserk. Please correct me if I'm wrong but currently when a soldier goes berserk they turn to the nearest unit, friend, civilian or alien and unload their weapon at them. Seeing as in my entire playthrough only once was a civilian closest to my unit and never an alien, the hallucinate attack might as well be called 'mind control'.

In X-Com of old a soldier going berserk would turn to face a random direction and then unload their weapon at it's full range hitting any poor unfortunate standing in the way. This lead to the odd bit of friendly fire but not almost every time.

3. I'm sure that this is just me being paranoid but I swear that every time one of my soldiers gets mind controlled it's one with higher bravery, while my lower bravery soldiers always beat the attack off. Is it possible that somewhere in the script for mind control there is a </> the wrong way round?

[Specialist290]

1. Currently a soldier gains a point in bravery at the end of the mission if they break and flee, panic etc, and then survive the battle. Basically they gain a point in bravery by learning that running away might be the best possibility.

I've always justified it as the soldier "getting it out of their system" -- once they've panicked one time and had time to calm down and realize that they're still alive, then they're less easily scared by the proposition of facing down Horrible Things. It is a bit odd that they don't get more courageous for passing fear checks, though, like you've said.

[quiescat]

i dont know if you want to bring the real world into it, my personal example would be Chucky (Child's Play) scared the living hell out of me as a child( 10 or so ). i had nightmares and all that jazz. today i could marathon pretty much any scary movie made, i bet pretty good money i find most of them funny or sad, yet despite my yearly Halloween horror night movie marathon

to this day creeps me out despite no traumatizing moments for me with a harmless cute doll yet chuckys just funny now

yet trying to rebuild the real world limits it self when you account for trying to make effectively a DnD system

with the way bravery gains work as i understand it, you would have to rework at lot of things to gain skill every time a solider "passed a check" because effectively they do so every turn, at the start if the moral is above a level they are immune to the non-psionic moral effects IE dropping their gun and running away, which can happen by losing a lot of friendly's or even simple weapons fire. if they break down because of that they still gain bravery.

more on point with the Hallucinate vs berserk think if i am not mistaken berserk is just something that you soldiers can do if there moral gets to low, where as hallucinate is a pisonic that makes them shoot at stuff but if there out of turn units not much happens, where as mind control it self lets the aliens use your guy on there turn with full turn units ( if some one better informed would like to correct me feel free )

Edited July 2, 2014 by quiescat
words