:? US Version Hits the Streets – Questions/Differences?

[Farside Fireball]

The US version is 1.2

 

It has three levels of difficulty - Easy, Normal, and Hard. Normal seems like the demo's Hard setting (you can't save while in TB mode). Does Easy have all the same parameter settings as Normal in the demo?

 

What is the deal with Healing and the base Doctor? It seems like after every mission, you can heal up your team to 100% health by talking to the doctor (allies campaign). I thought on the harder difficulty levels you would have to rest-up your more seriously wounded characters and have them skip a mission or two (x-com style). It their something I'm missing?

 

Characters left at base gain NO experience or skill progression. From the forums it seemed like characters left behind did gain experience. Did this change or did I miss understand?

 

What is the difference between green health (on the health bar) and the yellow health that is shown after dressing the wounds? Is it the same or is the yellow health somehow not as good as the green health?

 

How do you call up the console? It's in the input configuration file for the US version as the ` key. I press the ` key while in a mission and I don't see any change. Do I need a command line parameter? Is the console invisible?

 

All in all the game is awesome!! I just like to know how the game works under the hood so to speak. Thanks for any help you can give us noobs.

[The Silent Master]

Great to hear! I'm picking it up today on my lunchbreak, I post my comments to night. From what im hearing, I doubt I will be disappointed...

[kermix]

You probably already know this, but the three levels in the UK version are Normal, Hard and "Impossible", and I guess the US market didn't like them odds. They've got to be the same three settings as the UK though.

 

As far as healing goes, the game text is slightly misleading. The doctor at the base always heals you to 100% no matter what; the minor healing that the game is referring to occurs immediately after you complete a mission or an encounter. This is of no consequence... if, after every encounter, you manage to return to base without hitting any more random encounters. If one of your units was incapacitated, carried out of a mission, and then ended up in a random encounter, he or she will have minimal health at the start of the new encounter. I think I read that, after you leave a combat area, they consider each unconscious character to have been treated by the best Medical skill the team currently possesses. I'm pretty sure this excludes leaving a camp area.

 

As far as experience, from what I saw, the characters at base don't change on a regular basis... but it seemed to me that after I had done a few missions with the same squad, the characters at base suddenly "jumped" a bit - their experience levels didn't go up as far as my squad, but their skills appeared to suddenly have improved beyond those of my teammates. If you're not seeing it, then parhaps it does occur, but very infrequently, and perhaps you just have to wait a little longer?

 

On health: Yellow VPs - dressed wounds - count towards your full VP, and from what I can find in the manual, the only real purpose for denoting this is so that you know that your character was wounded and treated. (Since a dressed wound counts towards certain game mechanics, like keeping your character from bleeding further. and removing some of the skill penalties they received from the VP loss, I think it's good to keep track of the fact that your character was hurt in the first place.)

 

And finally, enabling the console is actually a howto on this very site's Home link, in the left navbar down there. I know, it's tough to spot; I actually used google to find it and that's how I ended up here in the first place

 

I'm still fairly noob to the game itself - I've only just started Brandenburg as the Allies, and I keep backtracking to start campaigns with other characters - but I've quickly become a big enough fan to read as much as I could about it, so I hope I managed to hit all the nails on the head

[Paingod]

Characters left in the base don't gain skill in increments, like the active characters do, that's for sure.

 

I never bothered checking there (I had read in the manual that characters left in the base gain levels, just slower than the team does) until I was level 9 and checked out of curiosity. All the spares were level 7, and had all increased a stat point, like my primary team did. Can't say I checked their skills against mine, though.

 

Healing is fun... :roll: If the soldier gets wounded, and I only heal 50% of the damage with one tool, I need to switch to another tool to try and 'heal' him the rest of the way... Unless he's bleeding and gets 'hit' again. Also, I could have sworn that a 'healed' soldier had been hit and lost some of his 'healed' life instead of normal life... The green and yellow bars both dropped a bit... So there might be more benefit than just for show. I could also be hallucinating. I'm also fairly positive that even if your yellow bar is near full, and you loose what little green they have left, they go unconcious.

[kermix]

Healing is fun...  :roll: If the soldier gets wounded, and I only heal 50% of the damage with one tool, I need to switch to another tool to try and 'heal' him the rest of the way... Unless he's bleeding and gets 'hit' again.

 

I can't tell if that's a complaint or not. I can understand the reasoning though.

 

I'm also fairly positive that even if your yellow bar is near full, and you loose what little green they have left, they go unconcious.

 

That wouldn't surprise me. Bandages can only help so much, and it feels like a soldier who's been previously wounded and bandaged won't hold up so well under the same amount of new damage as a soldier in perfect health.

 

On the flip side of that, I'm betting that a bandaged soldier is less likely to die outright from a new wound than to simply go unconscious.

 

Bandaging a wound quickly also helps to prevent additional bleeding conditions, as well as getting rid of that pesky "VP loss" skill-reducing condition if you get them close enough to full VP with it, which are really good enough reasons to bandage units promptly.

[Seabee]

I have found wounds like Loss Of Hearing, Loss Of Eyesight, ect. listed in one of the six little box's next to the small picture of your injured character in the lower left of your game play screen. My medic failed to heal these conditions using a first aid kit even though the bleeding wound was fixed. But succeeded in removing the impairment when using an Abby Forceps for a while. So you do have to try different medical tools until you find the combination that works.

 

Seabee

USA

[kermix]

My medic failed to heal these conditions using a first aid kit even though the bleeding wound was fixed. But succeeded in removing the impairment when using an Abby Forceps for a while. So you do have to try different medical tools until you find the combination that works.

 

Those critical conditions are tricky, too. The manual mentions that some are "temporary" (lasting only a few turns) while others are "permanent" (they stay there until healed by a medic or at base). You can tell the difference with a mouseover; a "Duration: N/A" is a permanent condition, while a "Duration: 2" will take care of itself in 2 turns.

 

The permanent conditions can be really tough to get rid of, depending on their difficulty vs. the skill of your medic and the skill bonus on the tools you have at their disposal. But yeah, you'll notice that the bandaging tools heal more VP on the average than the surgical tools, which try harder to deal with the critical conditions. So it depends on how you want to try and deal with the wound.

 

Speaking of criticals, I do have a problem with one of the conditions and the reasoning behind it. A leg wound, as you might know, can result in a temporary or "permanent" decrease in the character's AP per turn. This is kind of wrong to me; I think it should have just been a decrease in movement speed, which is way different when you're carrying a weapon that requires ~30AP to reload, and you can't reload your weapon because... you've been hit in the legs. :roll: