I want the idea of normal soldiers to be thought of as mindless bodies. So newer players aren't dissapointed when their soldier is killed suddenly in CC's fast paced action.

I do think this should be implemented in Solo 1-man missions. Maybe even have this apply to brain actors or "high-cost HERO actors". Choose your hero at the beggining of a skirmish before you select your brain.

You proved my point. It is a real-time(meaning it plays out in real-time[give or take the delta time])strategy(meaning you strategize or whatever) game.

No matter what the soldiers are, new players WILL be disappointed by deaths. It takes time to get used to.

Besides, the experience of the soldiers can be fed into the AI computer(which I heard will be implanted as a secondary brain in the future). So it's the computer gaining experience, not the meat bags.

New players will only be 'upset' by deaths if they grow attached to some VERY easily replaced pixels. Your logic is flawed. CC has no plot that makes you care for any of your meat bags and/or robots.

So you went through it quickly.

Not all people can instantly grasp the idea of 'replaceable meat bags' at first. And will say 'What the hell?!' as a drop ship engine slapped him in the face. Once a player got used to it they'll laugh at the hilarious deaths.

If someone can't instantly grasp the meatbag concept from the introduction, where dozens of coalition forces are seen being hammered by whitebots, and that it is very quickly made clear in the tutorial mission that you are controlling crash test dummies remotely from your brain, should we really have to go out of our way to make it any clearer?

Maybe the fact that the units are called "clones" will clue in some players.

You'd know it's a meat bag, but I'm talking about embracing the idea itself. CC is filled with random deaths and explosions. Even your strongest, most well-positioned unit which has fended off hordes of enemies can suddenly die of something stupid like, a one-pixel gib goes through his head at the speed of sound.

And that's not easy to come by initially. At least to some friends I've tried to introduce CC to, they didn't like the idea of it. And they're missing the fun.

And just to avoid going completely off topic, add a comment on what you think about implantation of a leveling system.

At first, I was a bit saddened by the fact that the 'meat bags' and other actors died so easily, but their often hilarious deaths more than offset it. Now, I don't even give a second thought about their deaths. Just order new ones.

Anyways, I think that the leveling system is a neat idea; maybe more exp goes to the soldier who makes the kill, and 1/3 goes to everyone else. In that case, maybe a whole new set of actors (melee, close, medium and long range, snipers, stealth, etc.) that are tougher so that they are more likely to reach lvl 2, 3, 4...

For level bonuses, I think it should also include added inventory (access to new weapons, added instantly to inventory), and maybe more max health? Also, a small health boost (10-20 hp regained) to accompany the increase in max health.

Should I go more in-depth here?

Greater attachable gibwoundlimits or respawning attachable armor would be the ish as well.

>And just to avoid going completely off topic, add a comment on what you think about implantation of a leveling system.

:U Doesn't really go with the whole meatbag thing. "HOLY ♥♥♥♥ MY CLONE IS LEVEL 19 OHMIGAWD YE-" *dropship engine impact* "... D:"

@TT: True, but it's more of an action game at heart. All action games are real-time and have SOME kind of strategy involved; you're not going to leeroy-jenkins every level, right? I meant having stuff like unlockable or upgradeable units.

At a certain level, your unit should obviously change into better versions.
I.e. Coal Light -> Coal Heavy -> ????, etc.
This would avoid buggy things like impulse stacking and eventually having your actor covered by wounds/limbs gone.

Yeah, changing from a weaker unit to a stronger one make sense so you can avoid a lvl 9 guy missing everything but his right arm. So, would it be an evolution tree, or more like an evolution ladder? I can't imagine how you would choose which one you would want to be, or it could be randomized...

Example (basic soldier): something like coalition light(lvl 1)-->coalition heavy(lvl4)-->browncoat light(lvl7)-->browncoat heavy(lvl9)? In this case, the level would max out at 9.

If you really wanted to make this complicated you could code it to check the inventory for whatever vanilla actor weapons are in it's arsenal and then it could replace them with more souped up versions.

Perhaps clone the particles shot out by the weapon? To make it failsafe, you might have to check if they're outbound.
This would be incredibly overkill with something like the ubercannon