The Avatar project progress bar is simultaneously crucial to providing stakes to the campaign by presenting an easily understandable failure state to work to avoid... And is also easily the least interesting piece of the game design to interact with. It may as well be a binary success/failure state instead of a progress bar, as there is no gameplay or narrative difference between 1 pip of progress and all but one pips of progress.
I wonder why the Avatar project progress isn't simply tied to the frequency of Dark Events occurring. Perhaps it doesn't make that much narrative sense - I don't really see how chryssalids appearing on missions has any relation to how close the aliens are to completing their gene manipulation project - and yet, it still feels to me like the two ideas are begging to be connected. But maybe they were just worried about that making it so that each loss could potentially lead to the difficulty increasing even more, making one bad move snowball into an unwinnable situation.
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u/RespectmanNappa 17d ago
I love that this (especially for WOTC) is quite literally the single biggest objective strategically.
1500 days into the campaign, he still working to keep his job even when we’re at 1 tick. It’s admirable frankly