MANAGING WOUNDS: My Achey, Breaky Heart

Roguelikes are often about some form of resource management. Even in the original Rogue, this took the form of your actual health, which was not simple to replenish, but also in the form of Hunger. Nowhere Prophet's 'hunger' is the Wound system; and often it will force you to adapt and improvise new strategies out of the healthy followers on your convoy - or risk the lives of your injured followers, throwing them relentlessly at enemies your backup squad can't handle. This is the crux of the game, a system which I personally am in love with. If anyone's every played Darkest Dungeon or Battle Brothers, you'll be familiar with the poor, unfortunate souls who get recruited on a 'milk run' and then left to die, securing a better future for those that succeed them. If anyone's played Dungeon of the Endless, 'dark rooms'/monster spawns will be familiar as something to be carefully managed at a low level but impossible to eliminate. Once you accept injuries, and even death, as part of life, your enjoyment of this game will skyrocket.The wound system will constantly have you trying to maintain a coherent strategy that works with your leader + items; after every tough battle you'll be scrambling to figure out a new plan of action until you can drag yourself to the next campfire. One thing that bears special mention is that the campfire will heal your convoy deck first. Therefore, if there's followers you absolutely NEED to be rested, you should be sure that they are in your deck before you click on "Heal Followers"!While you don't need to min max this hard by any means to win, you can absolutely control who gets healed if you have a wounded unit that is crucial to a strategy. Now that that's said, I can move on to the actual management of wounds in battle.Because a unit can be healthy, wounded, or blessed, but no combination of the three, a blessing will heal your follower - and therefore, if you can engineer games to allow only healthy units to be destroyed while a Wounded follower lands the last blow, you'll never actually be losing any followers in combat, and you'll also reach an equilibrium where you gain 1 to 3 wounds a fight, but you also1 wound a fight as well, allowing you to last MUCH longer between campfires. To engineer this situation you'll need to take a good look at who needs to live and who can die in your convoy.Fundamentally, there are three types of followers: Followers who are powerful but precious and must only be used when healthy, followers who are dime-a-dozen whose deaths are irrelevant to the overall health of the convoy, and followers who are precious BUT fast or clever enough to sneak in at the end of a combat and strike the last blow, even when wounded.Let's take a look at the starting convoy deck: An example of the first would be perhaps Wild Hand on account of being rare and your best 2 drop, or even the lowly Warrior Monk on account of being so damn useful. These are the cards that enable your strategies - your best Beasts or your Drone Overseers or whatever, without these cards your deck is much worse. The goal is to run as many of these cards as you can until they get wounded - at which point they are sidelined until healed at a camp, while a similarly-costed follower from the expendable group substitutes for them. While the obvious rare cards fit in this category, any decent taunt guys in general fall into this category as well, even Warrior Monk level commons. Since they're guaranteed to get focused down once they're played, sending out a wounded Taunt guy is basically sending them to their death - if you're not okay with that, don't do it. This is especially important for some elite or boss fights (see the boss in Part 3) where you'll want to put in all of those taunt guys you'd previously sidelined.An example of the second is my endless supply of Raiders and Bandits. The ones I have in my deck right now are to ensure I have an early play. If they get removed, or trade into a better creature, that's fine. If they die permanently in the process... well, who's going to miss them? Not only that, a Wounded unit loses half an energy worth of stats, but costs a whole energy less - generally speaking, a Wounded unit is *much* stronger than a comparable healthy unit at the same energy cost. Compare a wounded Crashjacker to a Raider - both 3 mana, but Raider is 4/3 vs Crashjacker's 5/3. These units are not essential to my strategy, and instead simply provide me with filler for my curve so I do not fall behind or run out of followers with which to kill my opponent.The third category includes things like Bandit Sapper or Janwar Bear, and to a lesser extent guys with Stealth, Barrier, and Shielded. Even while wounded, these guys can sneak in and land a last hit without exposing themselves to undue damage. At any given moment, I'll run 2 or 3 of these guys - not so many that they're all at risk, but enough that I can have one in my hand when it's time to execute my opponent.In this image, you can see what I've described. I've just beaten the first boss, and naturally I have received some wounds in the process, but at the same time you can also see that a fair number of my followers were blessed. Here is the image for my deck *before* the fight; as you can see the I have managed my wounds throughout the first level and am going into this fight with both my Warrior Monks alive, but only one healthy. In Pt. 3, the Walkthrough, I've been constantly taking one out whenever it's gotten injured and swapping them as necessary so I always have one healthy and a wounded one never has to fight. While I can't truly avoid wounds entirely, by being careful, I can avoid *deaths* long enough to build up my caravan faster than it dies.