[Click here to start from the first progress log]

Five hours in, and I’m still head over heels for Tempest Citadel. It’s absurdly easy to lose huge chunks of time playing it, and all of the different elements complement each other so well while remaining balanced between complex and graspable. Granted, there are still a handful of mechanics I haven’t figured out, such as what character intelligence applies to (does it make researchers and engineers better, or is it merely a prerequisite for later abilities?), but that’s hardly a barrier to enjoyment, and many problems can be worked around. For example, I’ve gone up against enemies who are strong against kinetic attacks, and my team uses kinetic attacks almost exclusively. Taking control of the different groups so that the heavy-hitters engage the enemy at an advantageous spot after the medics do some damage with long-range attacks can make a huge difference. It’s fun to experiment like that.

I’ve learned a lot about medics

At 9:22 and 20:16 in the video above, combat ends with a character being crippled. This is where having medics comes in handy; whereas this would usually result in the crippled character becoming unusable in combat, medics can actually lessen the severity of the wound and turn it into a serious or light wound that heals over time. It doesn’t happen in the video above (though it will in a later video), but fatal wounds can similarly be healed. Best of all, medic points can be stacked, though lighter wounds sometimes don’t allow you to stack medic points for some reason. Still, having two healers has allowed me to save a whole bunch of characters.

At 9:52, you’ll notice that my go-to healer Harry ends the battle as the sole wounded character. Only one medic point of my two available can be used on her, though. At first I was convinced that medics couldn’t heal themselves (which makes total sense), but it might instead be a case of the wound simply not being severe enough to allow using up that secondary medic point. I’ve seen this situation happen enough that I’m tempted to believe the former explanation, but I also eventually unlocked a perk for Harry that allowed her health to regenerate in combat, so it’s equally possible that she’s simply damage-resistant enough to rarely need the second point.

Extermination and growth

You can see medic points save a character from a fatal wound at 49:29, but the most interesting part of the video is at 11:56. That’s when the Volgar faction stages a desperate last-ditch attack on my base, and my soldiers defend it with jetpacks. Air battles thus far have been on the easier side (the automated turret I built certainly contributes to that), so the result was that the Volgar faction was entirely wiped out. One down, several more to go. What’s intriguing is that there’s another faction that I’ve been dealing with peacefully; it’s hard to say if the option will ever appear to turn on them, but I fully expect this to be a Highlander, last-man-standing kind of game.

This video opens up with a mission failure. All it takes to get through this fight with minimal injuries is a small adjustment to tactics (and some manual controlling). Then there’s 14:26, which only further confuses the issue of whether healers can heal themselves or not. See, by this point Harry has two medic points, which combined with second healer Nemo gives the party a grand total of three to use after fights. After this battle, she suffers a fatal wound, but is saved by using the two available medic points on her. The only way this possibly makes sense is if Nemo also has two points to spend, but you can see in the last fight that showed medic points (12:48) that there are only three of them rather than four. I didn’t give anyone new perks between the two or anything. Medic point confusion aside, however, I’m having a lot of fun. I started researching body mod-type stuff, and one of my soldiers reached level 9, which is the maximum level. Obviously I had to send him back to cryosleep and swap in another soldier to avoid wasting experience. You never know when you’re going to need to send out a bunch of really competent soldiers at once.

[Click here to go to Tempest Citadel log #1]

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