Death cycle (d100 roll)

Heroes can die for real. When a hero’s flagship is destroyed, the mod fires a d100 roll to decide their fate. The roll is not a coin flip — it is a symmetric distribution around a “wounded” bucket, and it is tunable by the player.

What triggers the roll

Only flagship loss triggers the death cycle. Not:

• Loss of an escort ship (recorded but does not affect hero state — future: “attrition = N/M escorts”)
• Hero NPC missing from flagship (boarding / kidnap — future stage 2)
• Flagship faction change (capture — separate case, not a death event)

This is a deliberate MVP simplification. The clean flow is: flagship dies → hero loses command → roll for fate → cooldown → recovery.

The roll

When the mod’s MlogHeroesFleetLossWatcher fires with event.object == hero.$flagship, the mod rolls:

crit = clamp($crit_fail_chance + perk modifiers, 0, 100)
roll = random 1..100

if   roll <= crit          → KIA
elif roll <= (100 - crit)  → wounded
else                       → unscathed

The distribution is symmetric around the wounded bucket. With the default $crit_fail_chance = 20 and no perks:

Roll	Outcome	Probability
1–20	KIA	20%
21–80	Wounded	60%
81–100	Unscathed	20%

Perks move the dial, per hero

crit is not a constant. It is the setting plus whatever the hero’s own perks contribute, clamped to 0–100.

One perk does this today: Lucky — rare, available to all six archetypes — carries $kia_chance_bonus = -10. A Lucky hero rolls 10% KIA / 80% wounded / 10% unscathed, halving its chance of dying on any given flagship loss.

So 20% KIA is the galaxy default, not a fact about the hero you are watching. Check its perk list before assuming the odds.

Outcomes

KIA (Killed in Action)

• 20% chance at default settings.
• Hero is permanently gone. The instance moves to $kia_heroes archive with full stats: name, faction, final XP, final ★, kill count, last kill, cause of death, $kia_at = player.age.
• The lineage template enters vacancy: $vacant_until = player.age + $succession_cooldown_min (default 120 game-minutes).
• After the cooldown, HeroManager may pick this template again and spawn a new bearer — fresh XP, new face, new name from the pool. See Lineage succession for the full flow.
• Old bearer never returns. Dead is dead.

Wounded

• 60% chance at default settings.
• Hero survives but is out of action. The $admiral entity is destroyed on the mod side (they escape the burning wreck via game abstraction).
• Fleet is cleared: $flagship = null, $escorts = [].
• Hero enters a 120 game-minute cooldown. During cooldown, RP does not tick (see Recovery Points).
• After cooldown, the same bearer starts rebuilding from RP. XP / ★ / kill count preserved.

Unscathed

• 20% chance at default settings.
• Hero escapes the wreck intact. Flagship gone but the person is fine.
• Same state changes as wounded, but shorter cooldown: 30 game-minutes.
• Rationale: faction quickly issues a new command to a proven officer; less institutional shock.

⚠ Those are release figures. The current alpha ships with the debug flag on, and in a debug build the cooldowns are 4 minutes wounded, 2 minutes unscathed and the succession vacancy is 10 minutes rather than 120. A hero coming back far faster than this page says is the build, not a bug.

Configurable difficulty

The KIA / Unscathed share is set by $crit_fail_chance in MlogHeroesInit. Values above 50 flip the distribution, so 0–50 is the useful range.

$crit_fail_chance	Distribution	Feel
10	10% KIA / 80% wounded / 10% unscathed	”Cinematic” — deaths rare but memorable
20 (default)	20% / 60% / 20%	Balanced — regular attrition, occasional permanent losses
35	35% / 30% / 35%	“Grimdark” — heroes die often, high succession churn
50	50% / 0% / 50%	“Russian roulette” — every flagship loss is either final or clean escape

⚠ Unlike most of the mod’s tuning, this one is not a slider. It is a script constant, and there is no death-roll row anywhere on the Settings screens — changing it means editing mlog_heroes.xml. Much of the rest of the mod is declared data with a default, a range and a hint; the death roll is not, and that is a gap rather than a decision.

What the Settings → Heroes screen does carry for this system is the Succession test bench — buttons that simulate a succession, force-spawn an admiral, or audit every hero flagship — plus per-hero (debug) Force loss → KIA / Wounded / Unscathed buttons on the hero detail page. Those force an outcome rather than rolling for it, which is how the three branches get exercised without waiting for a real death.

Why symmetric 20/60/20?

• Worst-case and best-case are equiprobable — the mod does not bias toward doom or salvation.
• Wounded is the modal outcome — most losses feel like a “grinding war of attrition”, not a moment of finality. This preserves narrative momentum.
• The parameter is a dial — a balance-tester can push toward cinematic or grimdark to taste. The design is not opinionated about which flavour is “correct”.

What the player sees

• Immediate on flagship destruction: a notification banner names the hero and the outcome (“KIA” / “Wounded” / “Escaped”).
• After a KIA: the hero disappears from the roster. Their entry moves to the KIA archive, which is a menu page of its own — final stats, cause of death, and the last deeds the chronicle kept under the memorial cap.
• After a wounded / unscathed outcome: the hero remains in the roster with state = lost_flagship. The Track button is hidden. The detail page shows “Awaiting recovery” and a countdown to cooldown end.

The screenshot above is a real recovery in progress — Xenon Mil Unit rolled Wounded on flagship loss, is now in the 120-min cooldown, and their fleet slots read “rebuild pending” until Recovery Points refill.

Related mechanics

• Recovery Points — how the fleet rebuilds after wounded / unscathed outcomes
• Lineage succession — what happens after a KIA, when the successor may spawn, and how the archive works
• XP and star progression — memorial preservation across recovery (XP does not reset when a wounded hero rebuilds)