Every soldier has a face. And you can lose them forever
Permadeath, soldiers gone missing in action, and carrying your wounded out under fire.
In most tactics games a soldier is an icon with numbers. He dies — you hire an identical one. Terminal Leave goes the other way: your soldiers are the most valuable thing you own.
Everyone is a person. Each soldier has their own portrait (a pool of 100+ faces), a name, an age, a country and an ethnicity that actually match each other. Open a dossier and it's not “unit #4” — it's Miguel from Mexico, 28, 23 missions, a month in your service. Before that he served under a commander called Owl, until Owl left him wounded on the battlefield.
That biography isn't made up by a generator. It's built from real matches: the battles he fought in, his awards, promotions and wounds. A recruit arrives with no history — a portrait, an age, a country and stats — and everything else accumulates battle by battle.
They only grow in combat. There are no levels. Seven stats and per-weapon skills grow from what a soldier actually does: he runs — stamina grows; he shoots a DMR — his sniper-rifle skill grows. A twenty-battle veteran is valuable not because of a level number, but because of his biography.
And you can lose all of it. Permadeath is real: a killed soldier doesn't come back. A wounded one can be saved — if someone drags him to the evac zone. A soldier left on the field isn't just lost gear: he goes MIA and moves to a separate section of the memorial. The list of your dead and missing is part of your HQ.
Missing isn't dead. Usually an MIA soldier returns to the squad once he has recovered. But a soldier who was abandoned wounded may not come back. That happens when you disconnect and your soldiers fight on their own, or when the rest of the squad is evacuated and the wounded are left lying on the field. Such a soldier may decide he's done with you and go to the hiring board to look for a new employer. That's how Miguel ended up with you. It's the price of every “it's fine, I'll make it”.
Playtests already show it: the game writes its best stories by itself. “We pulled out a badly wounded sniper and lost a rookie doing it.” “Two went missing covering the squad's retreat once things were hopeless.”, ect.
Build your squad in the closed alpha (invite code or waitlist: play the demo battle), and bring your veterans' stories to Discord.