Medics, Mechanics, and Healing

[sudden grove]

Hello Madrona, et al. Long time player, sometime doner. I'm here to make a case for healing, and how it could be made successful despite failing in the original game.

The only healing mechanic in the original game was the nanopod function in battle, where players could spend 1 nano and a turn to heal a unit; if I remember correctly, by 100 HP. This mechanic is so obscure and unused, most people don't seem to remember it, and as far as I can tell it's not even recorded on the wiki. It's difficult to imagine a situation where it is better to heal than attack with a different unit or retreating, as there was a good chance of the healed unit getting damaged again. And with the real-money cost, it's good that it hasn't returned in the Madrona era.

The absence of healing is sorely felt. Besides the PFP everyone is familiar with, medics were something z2Live toyed with per promotional material and old leaked videos of Battle Nations 2, but never ended up implementing into the live game. The following are my ideas for how to re-implement healing units into the game, keep them balanced, and how to construct quests and structures around them:

Healing units should have AOE heals
The easiest, most unobtrusive way to add healing mechanics into battle without fundamentally altering the turn economy is to providing healing units with AOE effects. If medics can only heal one unit at a time, this means that, like the nanopod spending in the original game, it will rarely make sense to heal rather than to attack or retreat. If healing is AOE, it will allow healing to exceed the pace at which units are damaged by the enemy, making it worth it for the player to bring them to battle. If they are to be viable, single target healing abilities should be much more powerful, capable of healing a heavily damaged unit nearly to full. I hazard this would be more difficult to balance however, and may be from a higher tier of medic unit.

Healing units should not count against the total number of units, but against a separate counter
Akin to how defensive structures do not count against the unit total, medics (or vehicle medics) should not count against the unit total. Instead, there should be a medic total of between 0 and 2. Players will still be limited by grid size, so there will be tradeoffs for taking medics in large battles. I think this is critical to ensuring healing balance and its viability as a mechanic. This solves a few problems. First, if medics and other units contribute to the same cap, it will rarely make sense to deploy a medic rather than simply deploying a damage dealing unit. Second, if medics are thought of as regular units, it introduces degenerate strategies which may be used for boss encounters in which a player would field one powerful unit, such as a tank killer, and a full field of medics behind it, who keep the tank killer and themselves at full health, trivializing fights like the ancient construct. For prebaked encounters already in the game not designed for medic balance, this allows the developer to avoid doing any work at all to rebalance these encounters and instead simply set the number of medics the player can bring to zero. I'm not sure how difficult this would be to implement as a dev, so let me know if this is unviable.

Healing units should have a limited amount of heals per battle
This is critical to avoiding unending battles, either in pve or pvp. Medics should have no more than two or three heals per battle. This can simply be done by giving their medical "attacks" an incredibly long reload time, and should reduce the development burden slightly. A medic unit might have multiple abilities, such as an aoe heal of moderate effectiveness with multiple ammo, and one of great effectiveness with only one use. This also allows enemy NPC healing units not to softlock the game or make encounters impossible.

Healing units should come from dedicated buildings
Adding units to the existing barracks and vehicle factory system is dicey, and could pleausibly cause issues with an already working balance. Instead, I would tie healing units to new structures and questlines. Something like a "Surgical Center" for units that heal infantry. "Trade School" for units that heal vehicles. These can either work as dedicated training facilities (my preference), or as buildings that unlock units in other buildings in same way the armor shop works. This allows you to add medics through a more fleshed questline in the traditional battle nations style (fighting battles, producing quest items from shops, constructing new buildings to unlock something). I'm not sure what the capacity of the team is to produce new art, but we already have an existing, extra character from the original game that was never used, Dr. Tessel. It would be possible to use her for this questline as a new character to introduce medical personnel.

Healing Units should have tiers and types
Other people's proposals have touched on this as well. This will likely be the most difficult thing to implement, and have the greatest development risk, as new art would need to be produced for units. Still, tiers of healers (including more powerful nano units, or nano tiers that sit between regular tiers such as the medium tank) provide a battle nationsy backbone to this whole thing. Starting out with medics, then stuff like EMTs for civilians. Field surgeons. Mad scientists. Vehicle mechanics. Riviters. Repair boats. Healing tanks. The world's your oyster

Thank you for your consideration

[sudden grove]

Some flavor texts for structures:
M*A*S*H
The place where doctors with bags under their eyes stand for 36 hours straight righting the human cost of your tactical wrongs. Coincidentally, will overfulfill your base's bleakness quota by 500%.

Trade School
Dropped out of school due to the stresses of a decade long civil war? Universities may not exist anymore, but trade schools do! Learn to work with your hands, the only useful skill 2000 miles from civilization.