Morale, stress and panic: the second health bar

A soldier in a tactics game is normally a set of numbers you spend. Morale is the one number that spends you. Push it too far and the unit stops being yours: it runs, it freezes, it fires at nothing, it refuses an order you were counting on.

No other mechanic in the genre is as disliked in the moment or as fondly remembered afterwards, and the difference between those two reactions comes down to one thing, which is whether the player could see it coming.

X-COM: UFO Defense (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994) gave every soldier a bravery rating and let morale fall as the mission went badly, mostly by watching other people die. A soldier whose morale broke might drop their weapon and run, or go berserk and start shooting.

What makes this more than a punishment is where it sits in the loop. Losing a soldier is bad. Losing a soldier and then watching the squad come apart because of it is a different kind of bad, and it means a mission can fail from one death rather than from ten. Casualties stop being arithmetic and start being contagious.

Jagged Alliance 2 (Sir-Tech Canada, 1999) did something nobody else has really matched. Its mercenaries have opinions about each other. Put two who get along in the same squad and morale runs high. Put two who cannot stand each other together and they complain, morale sags, and eventually one of them quits and goes home.

That turns hiring into a tactical problem that has nothing to do with marksmanship. The best shooter available may be the worst person to add to the squad you already have, and the game never tells you so in a tooltip. You find out because somebody will not stop talking about it.

Darkest Dungeon (Red Hook Studios, 2016) took the second health bar and promoted it to the first. Every hero carries a stress meter. Darkness, hunger, critical hits and watching a friend die all push it up. At 100 the hero resolves into an Affliction, which is a personality disorder with stat penalties and a habit of acting on its own instead of on your orders, or far less often into a Virtue, which is the same mechanic turning in your favour.

At 200 stress a hero has a heart attack: health to zero, onto Death's Door, and a second heart attack there kills them outright. The hamlet between expeditions is where that damage is treated, slowly and expensively, by people who are drinking or praying rather than fighting.

The design argument it makes is that the campaign's real resource was never the gold or the gear. It was the state of mind of the people you keep sending back in, and the game is honest that you are the one doing it to them.

Aliens: Dark Descent (Tindalos Interactive, published by Focus Entertainment, 2023) puts the meter to a structural job. A marine squad on a long mission accumulates stress, and stress becomes lasting trauma, so staying out too long costs you something that follows the squad home.

That solves a specific genre problem. Turn-based games stop players crawling forward forever by putting a timer on the mission, which is effective and resented, because a clock is an arbitrary thing bolted to the fiction. Stress does the same work from inside the fiction: nothing stops you taking another hour, except what another hour does to the people doing it.

Taking control away from a player is the strongest move a designer has and the easiest to misuse. The rule that separates the versions players accept from the versions they uninstall is simple: it has to be visible, and it has to be the player's fault.

Visible means a meter, a warning, a face that changes, something that let you know the cost was mounting while you chose to mount it. The player's fault means the chain from decision to consequence can be traced backwards. I kept them in the dark. I pushed one room further. I put those two in the same squad.

Where it fails is when morale becomes a second randomness, resolved out of sight and announced after the fact. Then it is not drama, it is the game overruling you, and players describe it in exactly those words.

A harder enemy makes a fight take longer. A frightened squad makes a fight into a story, because the thing going wrong is a person rather than a number, and people are what players remember.

It also makes victory cost something the scoreboard cannot show. A mission completed with everyone alive and everyone wrecked is a result no health bar can express, and it is the single most characteristic feeling this genre produces.

RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for Windows, real time with pause, set after a collapse, with zombies and with factions fighting over what is left. It is in development, and we are not going to describe anything in it that is not finished.

The rule above is the one we would hold ourselves to if we went anywhere near this. If a game is ever going to stop doing what a player told it, the player has to have watched it coming.