// TRANSMISSION STATUS

RELAY: RECOVERED ARCHIVE
ENCRYPTION: DEGRADED
DATA INTEGRITY: 84% RECOVERED

— PARTIAL RECONSTRUCTION FROM FRAGMENTED OPERATIONAL LOGS —

Up to this point, the base and the battlefield were two systems that didn’t talk to each other. The base had a real roster — named soldiers, hired and trained, building up history. The battlefield had five anonymous units on a grid. Nothing that happened on one side touched the other.

That’s fixed now. The soldiers you pick in base management are the soldiers who show up on the mission map. Not placeholders — the actual people, with the actual stats they’ve earned.

And it goes both ways. When a soldier dies in the field, that’s recorded and sent back to the base. They’re marked KIA. Removed from the active roster. Permanently. Credits and mission results come back the same way.

Before this, you could run both halves of the game forever and they’d never affect each other. Now a soldier with twelve kills built up over real missions can walk into a bad engagement and not come back. For good.

That’s the difference between two systems bolted together and one game.

One open question at the time this was written: would this consequence model survive crossing a bigger boundary — one neither system could directly see into? It has since been answered. See: Revolve.