Acceptable Losses is a great idea and an excellent framework, that is absolutely killed by the lack of content and player choices. My favorite concept the game has is that, even if you make the right decisions, you can and will still lose. The issue is the game gives you very little in terms of ways to REACT to that randomness. As it stands, it feels less like I'm actually making important decisions and more like I'm just watching whatever happens.
Effectively, there are 3 things you do in this game
- Use Influence for Citations/Missions
- Assign Troops to squads
- Decide which squad does what
That's it, that's the three things you do in this game, minus picking incident results (Which are ALSO largely RNG based, so... yknow, hell of a choice that is.)
Influence is, at least during my playthroughs, damn near worthless. Citations take time, have a chance to fail if you overshoot, and barely increase Morale. It seems that only the individual who RECEIVED the award actually gets any benefit, meaning the the other 6/8 members of the squad get no benefit- and remember, influence is rare and capped at +2 a week, so you can't compensate for this with en masse influence use. Selecting missions is also an option, but it gives you a *chance* of receiving the mission, and you still have to dedicate men to it and hope it succeeds. Sure, it's nice, but given how much the game throws at you it'll barely make a dent. You can also only use it after day 5, further limiting it's use. I'm seriously convinced that you could just remove it from the game and barely notice. If influence could be used for more significant benefits, like reinforcements, coffee and cigarettes, veteran training, they'd actually have a sizeable impact and justify their rarity and inconsistency.
Assigning troops is... a thing you can do. a squad varies from 5-10 men, with 8 being full strength and 5 being the minimum to operate. The only real choice here is if you want to poach from squads to get another to full strength. This can result in not having enough men to operate, but that's pretty rare. Realistically, you'll fall into having a Fighting Squad or two for high difficulty missions and the rest as easy duty squads that perform the simpler, easier tasks in the line. You're also discouraged from moving troops around to even out things like morale because it penalizes your cohesion (Which is also part of how they decide whether to give you a citation or not btw). Because of how global and squad effects work, every member of a squad will have virtually identical conditions barring being killed or wounded, and since there's nothing you can really DO about it, you kinda just have to sit on your hands and hope you get lucky. Or maybe you'll get bad events 7 days in a row so the morale of every man, citation or not, is in tatters. If ANY troop stat gets too low, they are no longer operational, but realistically you will only have to worry about Morale, Wounded, and KIAs. In my playtime I never saw a unit be too tired or disorganized to operate, it was only ever about numbers and morale, which further simplifies the game- Fatigue is such a non-issue that I wish it could be used as a resource somehow to help compensate for morale or inoperable squads. Maybe make it so you can hold events at night that cost your men Fatigue. Of course, as it stands there is no such system in the game.
And the moment of truth, deciding which squad does what! Every card has modifiers depending on things like weather, defense level, trench status, and multipliers depending on your mens Fatigue, Squad Size, and organization. Of course, given that Fatigue and Organization are mostly non-factors, this narrows it down to squad size. There's no realistic way to impact what cards you get, and you receive 4-5 a day. Remember, influence gives you a CHANCE to receive ONE available card, so there's no real way to handle this. Some things simply cannot be ignored- I mean that literally and figuratively. Some cards are Mandatory, and you'll ahve to take them on no matter what. Some simply have such debilitating penalties that you just *effectively* don't have any actual choice. Even if you have every squad available (Which isn't necessarily common, ESPECIALLY if you're poaching), you're likely to, realistically, be able to choose between only a couple extra cards- and no, you can't give your men a rest day, if a unit is available, they MUST participate in a task no matter what. I sure hope you got some good cards...
I love the concept, presentation, framework, but at it's core, Acceptable Losses ends up closer to a slot machine then a game. You get to choose what machine to play on, but it still has majority odds of leaving you Broken, Exhausted and Loose. Sure, you might hit that Jackpot, but was that a result of YOUR strategy? Maybe a little, but not as much as I wish. With a few additions and tweaks allowing players to properly compensate for the roulette wheel that is this game, and make it so it doesn't always end up in the same situation every game, it would be one of my favorites.
I sincerely hope the development of this game is not finished, I believe it would be a shame to lose this concept; there is no way I can sincerely recommend the game as is. Definitely a good Wishlist option for a few updates in though. I really hope I can return to this game after a few weeks/months and recommend it.
