The idea behind battles in this game is that they should be short, but keep you at the edge of your seat. An average, inexperienced player who slowly improves would have:
15% chance of losing a level
35% chance of becoming stronger
30% chance of ending the level at the same strength, or only slightly stronger
20% chance of becoming weaker
The chance of losing seems a little low here, but it stacks up. Similar to a tough roguelike game, where you have a chance of getting killed on every new dungeon level, though this game will kill off some of your team members.
After about 100 tries of just pressing random buttons, you should win around once. Which should give an unskilled, dedicated newbie a win after about a week maybe. Not too worried if most people don't win... I mean, after all, how many people have ever won Nethack? Yet they enjoy chasing the win anyway.
The chances to win drastically rises for good players, who figure out which missions give a better advantage or which weapons/skills are better.
The approach I'll use to do this is realism. A vital shot will kill. Even a weak shot will injure badly. And over all things, cover will very important.
Pistols will be an actual deadly weapon. Automatic weapons will be more likely to do harm, but also be useful in suppression. Snipers will be slower, but can possibly instakill. AP weapons will punch through many forms of covers but hurt less, rocket launchers and grenades even more so.
Your troops will make use of this cover and try to outflank the enemy or flee when under indirect fire.
A skilled character will have higher skills, meaning that they can utilize cover more effectively, be more likely to shoot first when leaving cover (and first to hit), shoot more accurately, throw grenades back, etc. This would increase their chances of winning most missions.
The battle engine itself will likely be 2.5D, that is, Golden Axe kind of side view, where they move up and down on the screen to indicate moving left and right.
Most of the shootouts would occur in a single frame. Yeah, it's partly because of technical reasons, but also because the player should be able to see the fights clearly. A sliding frame brings up the issue of trying to have the 'camera' zoom in to the interesting parts, which would be hard to determine. The big missions might have multiple frames of action, or reinforcements trickling in to the fighting area as the heroes pick them off while they come.
Anyway, I'm taking a long vacation from computers soon, so, this might be my last entry, though I'll try to toss one tomorrow if possible.
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