re: discussion of exposing numerical stats
Whenever I come across a numerical 'health bars' in video games it feels intrusively and annoyingly artificial to me. Whether or not the health value is exposed to users, it so often leads to situations where players quickly learn that enemy type X requires exactly Y shots from weapon Z.
There's are other ideas that aren't new, but i think could be used more widely, in even the simplest of games:
1. Scrap even having a 'health' stat altogether.
2. Do probabilistic damage. For example, each shot has a 50% probability of killing an entity.
3. Damage could manifest in various ways other than just sudden death. Taking hits could affect speed, rate of fire, accuracy of aiming, etc, until a unit is eventually rendered harmless.
In particular, don't have entities just suddenly die or explode and be removed from the map when they reach some "health" threshold. This feels ridiculously repetitive and sterile to me.
I'm not saying that health bars are a bad mechanic, just that they seem massively over-used .Ideas like those above could provide more variation and unexpectedly emotional scenarios (Wow, look at that last infantry unit go! OMG, I was bested by a crippled tank which could hardly even move! etc) with relatively little effort.
