Do you feel bad when losing units in strategy games?

[Biodeamon]

I do feel a bit saddened at the loss of my units, however i do realize that progress requires sacrifice and quickly brush it off.

it's important to not be attached to your soldiers to be a good general, however it's also important not to be neutral and take them for granted. mourning their loss is okay as long as you do it quick and set it aside

 

[LandoCristo]

I always feel a little bad when my scout force gets surrounded by Stalkers and Zealots in Starcraft II, and I'm like Nooooooo, poor zerglings!

But later on, I just send thousands of my little guys into those Protoss lasers, and I just shrug it off while I make more.

 

[Harkonnen64]

Maybe Fire Emblem purely because each character is unique and named and when they die that's it they are gone.

Same thing with "Valkyria Chronicles".

I remember when one of my snipers got ran over by the mega-death tank in one of the desert levels, and I was all like:

 

[Dedtoo]

Well, to say it this way:
My favorite race on Dawn of war: Orks.
My favorite race on Battle of Middle earth 2: Goblins.
Buy a lot of them and swamp the enemy.

So no.

 

[Treblaine]

Well they are quite literally faceless units. How can you emotionally care?

The problem is very few RTS games have any even objective consequences of huge losses, it seems you can always recruit more men (to spite the knowledge of huge casualties) and somehow retrain them in short order to almost as good.

In reality if your best unit gets wiped out it cannot be replaced. There is a huge incentive to get your men to withdraw if it is likely they will be wiped out as a decimated unit can be rebuilt but a destroyed unit cannot.

That's why at the Dunkirk Evacuation machine-guns, tanks and other valuable equipment were being thrown into the ocean to stuff as many soldiers onto each ship to evacuate, because pound for pound a professional soldier is worth 10x what any weapon is worth. Hitler's greatest military mistakes was holding his generals back from destroying/capturing the allies at Dunkirk, Hitler thought he could bully them into capitulation. British used that opportunity to escape mainland Europe with as many free European officers and men as they could.

The most extreme example is the Navy SEALS, you can't take someone fresh out of high-school and in a few years make him a SEAL. It takes literally decades of experience and training to get so good to do such jobs as hunt down Al-Qaeda in Afghan-Pak region.

Pound for pound a Naby SEAL costs more than a Cruise Missile and as has been shown in the killing of Osama Bin Laden, they are WORTH more. Can a cruise missile selectively kill just the targets, identify it and then extract the remains as well as a booty of intelligence? Nope.

I wonder, would it be fun to play an RTS game with recruitment resource management. Balancing the cruelties of conscription with the cost of professional army.

 

[XMark]

I have kind of a weird code of honor with strategy games - I'll never send a unit on a guaranteed suicide mission, though high-risk missions are okay.

 

[MarxII]

It certainly irks me to know that an errant cannonball has reduced by the three unluckiest some random rifle regiment. I keep staring at the slightly lowered unit count, drives me nuts.

 

[poppabaggins]

Only occasionally. Sometimes I like to make up stories or meta-games involving my units and this makes me get quite attached to them.

Example:
While playing Starcraft 2, I made a reaper towards the end of a team game that I was losing (badly). I named him Stan Lagislaw and made it my goal to get him to the edge of the map, alive, before the game ended. He survived, so I brought him back in the next game (built another reaper). I moved him to an island where he became king of Lagisland. Unfortunately, Lagisland was discovered and Stan was mercilessly slaughtered. I was more than a little upset.

I also like to occasionally make an SCV go out and hunt the npc animals so that he can bring back food to his SCV family.

 

[DarkNazgul]

Here's my answer.
Build up a gigantic army of troops
Save the game
Force march the troops into the enemy base without letting them fire just to watch them get slaughtered for amusement.
Load the game
Tell the troops to assault the enemy base, wherein 80% of them still get slaughtered for amusement before the enemy base is destroyed.
I love the smell of pawn blood in the morning.

 

[Akytalusia]

i wouldn't say i felt anything for the unit in particular, but when i lose a unit, i feel unsatisfied with my strategy and usually end up starting over.

 

[artanis_neravar]

Normal units are only useful for sending waves against the enemy until I have the time to build up my air-force. Besides all of my men are happy to die for the glory of NOD

 

[GBlair88]

Only if they are either expensive or important at that particular time. To take Total War games as in example of the latter, it might be a cheap unit of spearmen which aren't good on their own, but they may make the difference between holding onto a town/city/castle or losing it. Although that is less to do with attachment to the unit and more to do with wanting to hold territory.

 

[Melon_Commander]

Half-life 2 rebels, I have to load if I lose any of them. Its hard not to feel kinda sorry, the way they follow you into any danger and say things when you walk up to them :') The whole dark future theme doesnt really help tbh, particulary at the beginning when you witness the raids on the apartments and people being dragged off. And Nova Prospekt is very depressing. Wow, I have to play HL2 again now...

I didn't like losing the Antlions either, even though they spent most of the game trying to kill me...

 

[ruben6f]

I get really upset in Warlords Battlecry 3 when I loose a retinue unit (I think that's how they are called atleast that's what I call them) they are normal units that you train at the normal buildings but after killing they gain XP and they can join your retinue, when that happens they get a name and bonuses on damage armor and that stuff, and since these units only get 1xp for each unit they kill, and for example level 3 requires 120xp the only way to get xp is by sending them into epic fights wich sometimes end in the death of your soldiers and I rage.

But I for some reason feel bad about the enemie in RTSs when I win, in games like Age Of Empires, Age Of Mythology, Rise of Nations, etc, if I just walk into the enemie base and destroy and kill all that isn't mine with out any resistance I feel bad for the enemie (even if I am fighting the PC) maybe it's because it was to easy.

 

[Twad]

Yes, but only in the sense that i dont like losing units unless i choose to.

Like, in most FPS, if it is possible to hoard friendly NPCs i try to keep them alive. So when the troubles come, i have a little army right behind me.

Like one user said above, Xcom is quite another experience. you get attached to your little fragile troopers. Some manage heroic feats put of luck/skill, only to be taken down by a sneaky, lucky hit from an ennemy.

 

[ntw3001]

With Pikmin it depends. They're cute little guys, but they seem to be pretty much okay with dying. I don't mind if they die in the heat of combat or for some other worthy cause, but I do not leave a soldier behind at nightfall.

In Battle For Wesnoth, it's often a big thing when units die, because the process of raising them over the course of a campaign is painstaking. It does, unfortunately, contribute to a playstyle I don't really care for whereby save scumming is a pretty much unavoidable strategy. As a campaign draws on, you can't afford to lose experienced units. An inexperienced army can easily be too weak to win later missions.

 

[meowchef]

If it was an expensive unit, or one that you can only build one of... I am angry that I lost it. I build as much of an emotional attachment to the ones you can name as I can. When I lose them, I feel bad.

 

[uzo]

Hmm .. I don't feel so bad when I lose men - men die in battles, and everything is a calculated risk. But once in Empire:Total War, the guy I was playing against walked straight into a trap. I'd set up my riflemen in a deep 'V' formation, in concealment. At the crux of the 'V' were a few artillery units and my general, and the poor bastard took the bait - cutting a path straight for my general, and without artillery he couldn't blast the woods to check where my concealed units were.

Once most of his minutemen were within the 'V' of infantry, I gave the order to open fire whilst the ends of the 'V' quick marched forwards to close the trap. He desperately tried to form ranks under heavy fire, and pushed the heavy cavalry deeper into the V - straight into the range of my grapeshot.

From there I didn't need to give a single order. Any move he made put himself into a less attractive position, and the battle was won. I guess he'd figured his minutemen - who are quite good troops - would be able to handle my regular line infantry, and the heavy cavalry would handle the casualties on charging my cannons. He was wrong on both counts.

It wasn't a battle, it was a goddamn massacre.

But that's what happens when a Starcraft player of 10 years experience goes against a Total war player of 10 years experience - bloodbath. Naturally, if we'd played Starcraft he would have absolutely obliterated anything I could have fielded.

 

[Kryzantine]

Depends on the game, but generally, it's an exponential function. The more useful the unit is, the more I care for it.

I'm the kind of guy that loves to send in a death squad - a unit explicitly meant to prolong the battle, but who I honestly do not care if they live or not - before utilizing my units in another manner which won't exactly lead to their deaths.

Europa Barbarorum, a mod for Rome: Total War, is actually amazing for this. The simpler, weaker levies that are there actually do jack shit in battle other than keeping the enemy at bay while you are meant to use your stronger attack units to do the damage. Sending them to hold the line is part of the job. As long as your damage units aren't being wiped out, those losses are acceptable.

But the heavier units that I got, I fucking loved them. This one game, I was trying out the Casse, and I managed to conquer the British Isles - opening up a unit that is only produced in Southern Ireland, and that was an absolute monster. This unit was about as expensive as a ship, and 10 times as expensive as regular units in terms of upkeep. Just two of these units could cripple your economy in upkeep. But they were unstoppable on the battlefield - heavy infantry with a defense rating so good you could put them up against any other unit and they would hold the line for practically forever. So it hurts to see that unit lose more than 10 soldiers in a battle. If that unit got wiped out miraculously (and I maintain you need an actual army to destroy one of those units), it would be a huge blow to that army. So those losses, I avoid them. If I lose that many soldiers, I pull them out and start sucking up the damage to the damage units instead.