I’d like to bring up Yeti’s idea of fatigue here, and it comes from a conversation the FEXNA server had about World of Warcraft.
Quick backstory: WoW had a system for EXP where if you played for a long time, you were given an EXP penalty after, say, five back to back days of non-stop playing. This was to give the players who didn’t play much a chance to catch up with the other players.
Problem: Everyone hated it. It felt like a punishment for investing time in the game.
Solution: Keep the exact same system, but flip the numbers. Thus spawned the Well-Rested system.
Yeti’s idea for Fatigue is pretty simple. Don’t penalize units for being in too many chapters, give bonuses to units for not being in many chapters. Maybe for every two chapters a unit isn’t deployed, they get +1 in all stats up to a cap. When you deploy them finally, those stats last until the end of the chapter, at which point they’ve been boosted up enough they can hold their own and maybe get a bunch of levels.
Just a thought. Nobody’s tried it yet, but I personally don’t like the idea of penalizing the player for playing the way they want.