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Well, for how broad it was, you did a good job touching on the key points I was curious about.

To clarify a little, when I mentioned scale, "their" referred to the positive reinforcement mechanics, rather than the units -- but you answered that, too, with your comments about how the integration of those injury/weakening mechanics into the macro strategy renders them more tolerable.

[I had some similar thoughts on the matter -- the games I was thinking about at the time were those in the vein of X-COM: UFO Defense and Xenonauts, as opposed to the later XCOM games (Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2); tactical turn-based squad cover shooters. There's an option in XCOM:EU called "Red Fog" that implements injury mechanics where they're not in the base game, and I'm reflecting on how that pushes the balance in the direction of expendable grunts versus decked-out action movie heroes.]

Do you have thoughts on RPG mechanics that make units weaker as they lose health (e.g. injury, vulnerability, loss of morale), how scale (sheer number of units controlled by player, enemy) affects their usefulness/viability, and/or whether, in your experience, they're actually fun?

[Probably the best-known example I have off the top of my head is the Civilization games.]

Perspective is definitely nicer! It really accomodates the natural desire to simultaneously see a wide area and have plenty of ability to see what's closest to you (i.e., what's front and center is nice and big). Granted, it's subtle for small maps, but I also happen to feel like it's aesthetically nicer.

Oh. Reading the backgrounds, it seems that whatever these are a part of takes place in the same setting as TT. If it weren't for the remarks about it seeming to be a whole new game, I'd guess it was some sort of official expansion pack.

Almost certainly something Telepath, then, given those abilities. A procedural character generator, though -- a tabletop Telepath game?

Ah, kinda like the little crosshairs icon that shows up on enemy infobars in XCOM 2 when you mouse over a tile a given unit could shoot them from when moving.

Happy holidays; enjoy your solar festival of choice!

Awfully quiet around here, eh?

...

Well, drat. Turns out the art pieces were by nature surreal, thus defying any kind of literal interpretation. Serves me right for making assumptions, I guess, but I knew the risks -- if you're going to speculate, you have to at least assume that all the data derives from the same canon, and try to fit it together as best you can, until some information arrives that dictates that you shouldn't.

That information has arrived. I hope you at least got a chuckle out of this.

I'll be pretty inactive for a while, even by my standards, or at least not have the time to work on larger undertakings like my analysis/speculation thread; thing is, I'm at college now, and that'll take some adjusting to, and I'll definitely be a lot busier.

This isn't goodbye, or at least I don't think it is, but I think it's better to have something like this than to simply disappear one day.

I assume you didn't explicitly intend to wreck the reference images in my analysis/speculation thread? I know you can't have planned on me using the site's own image URLs with the intent of avoiding pointless uploads onto the forum, but I could also imagine you being not displeased with the effect created.

Heck, no. The TRPG2 Hero is gender-indeterminate. That's pure canon, not just an artificial choice in the beginning of the game; the fact that their gender isn't defined is Word of God. Plus, there's this quote from the Wiki, presumably sourced from the epilogue:

After the Shadow War, David will become a Black Cape at the head of his class in record time. He will be considered as having the most advanced Scanning abilities of any Psy alive.

Who else is going to be running such strong obfuscation and misdirection for the Resistance? That's advanced Psy technique; while the Hero was big on raw power, David sounds like he was more capable when it comes to the delicate things. I wouldn't put too much faith in "veteran of the Shadow War" -- that could just easily be a bit of exaggeration or miscommunication. After all, isn't it Baz who describes him as such? Baz could have heard him say that he was with the Psy Academy when the Shadow War was going down and just inferred his participation, for instance.

Plus, it makes more sense for the Nameless One to be detached from elemental affinities, since he's equally capable of training Duvalier in all four elemental schools. If it were the TRPG1+2 Hero, you'd think he'd have some sort of bias towards Heat training (being one of the world's most talented pyrokineticists), but nothing like that gets mentioned.

If if weren't for the smooth and metallic right shoulder, I'd be more likely to see it as potentially organic. That and the way the head under the skull looks rotationally symmetrical, as opposed to any organic heads I know of, which tend to be bilaterally symmetric when on the shoulders of a bilateral creature (e.g. anything humanoid).

However, I will note that the hand looks like it has some kind of webbing between its fingers, which looks more organic than the rest of the thing.

But nah, I haven't concluded anything. My running hypothesis is that it's not organic or even shadowganic (like the shadowlings), but I'm not convinced there's not someone in there. I will say that the armor or carapace or exosuit -- whatever it is -- looks incredibly sinister, and there's rarely room for moral absolutes in Telepath games, so that's my rationale for supposing it might easily be propaganda; propaganda is where anything can look evil in a world where evil is within everyone or no one.

If he's an android or an incredibly human-like golem, he could easily pass as an augmented human, but to Psys, he'd be obvious. Unless there are humans who've managed to transfer their mind's format to a mechanical one, in which case he'd be indistinguishable from one of them (though perhaps Psys could still tell the difference?); then again, maybe he is one.

But yeah, it seems this man's body has just been cybernetically enhanced. I'm really trying to consolidate our knowledge of all these different kinds of machine-people and person-machines that we're seeing evidence of in the images, because I imagine that if that's what they are, there probably won't be that many types of them -- which would mean I had to figure out what one thing they all were.

Then again, given the themes of diversity we get in TSoG and TT, I also wouldn't be surprised if there were as many kinds of partly or wholly mechanical people as there are those who use the technology.

Or maybe that's not what we're seeing here at all.

On the note I ended on in the evidence-based speculation thread, here's a thought -- if the setting is alternate-universe Russia, in the sense that TSoG was the alternate-universe Middle East, maybe the church and the czar are using Psys to hunt down artificial people (super-advanced golem tech??) because their thoughts stand out as distinctively mechanical, even though they look and act like organic people. And that persecution stands in place of the pogroms of the real world.

Then the wealthy man in 09 is acting as a financial backer to a cause kind of like Baz was? And he's openly letting the person he's smiling at see that he's cybernetic or mechanical because this parlour is a safe place for him, and he can reveal his nature openly.

There's a reason this is in Free Speculation. It's most likely hilariously wrong.