How much flexibility is there both in composing your team and in building individual characters over time?
Brawley: Well, each character has their talent specialization. For some characters it’s fixed and cannot be changed; for the custom operators that you generate on your own, there is a pool of different talents that you can select from. They have a weapon specialization, (our four primary weapon specializations are the pistol, the rifle, the long arm, and the repeater). You select your primary tactical specialization, and then in the middle of the game, you can select that secondary.
So, you have four points that combine to create a kit for each operator on your squad, and get four operators on your team. It gives you a pretty wide slate of possibilities for how to compose your team. It also makes it very easy and comfortable to rotate one character out and rotate another character in without disrupting the play for the rest of the team in a particularly severe way.
Tell us more about the Advantage Points system and how having a shared resource pool for special abilities across your squad affects gameplay.
Brawley: Advantage is a shared resource that, during gameplay, you earn by damaging enemies. Each time one of your operators damages an enemy, it adds a point of advantage to the whole squad. Many of the squad’s special abilities consume advantage instead of action points. So, they don’t count against your normal action limit. They’re basically an extra action that that character can take. And many of the most powerful attacks in the game rely on and consume the advantage resource. But that also means if I want my soldier to fire a rocket, it will consume the advantage that I might use to have my medic use morale boost to provide regeneration to the team, for example. This is another interesting level of decision making.
I also like the system because it provides momentum in combat. You can’t just open with all your powerful moves and just, like, shoot rockets all over the place and annihilate everything you’re facing. You need to do a little bit of tactical action to build up to those.
