// TRANSMISSION STATUS
RELAY: RECOVERED ARCHIVE
ENCRYPTION: DEGRADED
DATA INTEGRITY: 84% RECOVERED
— PARTIAL RECONSTRUCTION FROM FRAGMENTED OPERATIONAL LOGS —
WHAT CHANGED
Up to this point, the base and the battlefield were two systems that didn’t talk to each other. The base had a real roster — named soldiers, hired and trained, building up history. The battlefield had five anonymous units on a grid. Nothing that happened on one side touched the other.
That’s fixed now. The soldiers you pick in base management are the soldiers who show up on the mission map. Not placeholders — the actual people, with the actual stats they’ve earned.
And it goes both ways. When a soldier dies in the field, that’s recorded and sent back to the base. They’re marked KIA. Removed from the active roster. Permanently. Credits and mission results come back the same way.
FIELD OBSERVATION — RECOVERED LOG FRAGMENT
Soldiers selected from the active roster. Named. Records on file.
Mission loaded. They were there — names matched, stats matched. The soldiers sent were the soldiers who arrived.
The mission ran. Some of them died.
Result screen: casualties listed. Back at base: roster updated, KIA flagged. Not deleted, not reset. Gone from active duty, permanently.
Credits applied. The economy reflected what actually happened in the field.
WHY IT MATTERS
Before this, you could run both halves of the game forever and they’d never affect each other. Now a soldier with twelve kills built up over real missions can walk into a bad engagement and not come back. For good.
That’s the difference between two systems bolted together and one game.
ADDENDUM
One open question at the time this was written: would this consequence model survive crossing a bigger boundary — one neither system could directly see into? It has since been answered. See: Revolve.