I made some more progress.. Still on the GUI side of things and nothing to show as yet.

I mapped out how the Menu will flow and have begun putting it in place, along with the new GUI Controls, I should be able to make quite a powerful and friendly system.

I'm building a Team configuration/personalisation screen.

A Team member can have 3 states. Alive and Ready, Injured and hospitalised, Dead & Buried.

An Alive team memeber can be selected to go on the next mission. Alive team memebers gain experience from each mission completed (in a similar way to UFO - Enemy unknown and XCom.)

A hospitalised team member has to recover before they can go back into action. They have to sit out for up to 5 missions (depending on the severity of the injuries). As each mission passes, a counter goes down until it reaches zero, when the team member is Alive and Well again. If you need a team member to fight, you can choose to terminate the team member which immediately hires a new one at a slightly lower rank.

Dead team members have to be replaced. The new team member wil be of a slightly lower rank to the deceased team member. Time will need to be spent to get the new member up to same level as his predecessor.

At the end of each mission, if a team member has performed really well, they can be awarded with a promotion. The higher the level of the team members in your team, the higher the end of mission bonuses affecting your teams' money.

meaning that a player with little cash who has 3 experienced team members in hospital has to choose between doing the next mission alone with a single team member or sacrificing one of his experienced yet incapacitated team members in order to get someone to fight.. should make things more interesting.

I'm thinking about adding medals too... This should add to the personalisation of the team members. Things like really accurate shooting, protecting civilians etc..

You'll be able to name them too, but I'll build in a simple random name generator for those who don't like such things.

Once your tank is destroyed, depending on the experience of the team member, they have a chance of survival. The higher the rank, the higher the chance of survival. A private will almost always die, whereas a captain would almost always survive. (albeit in a hospitalised state)

A destroyed tank will have to be replaced at a cost. It is always replaced by the default tank. Then the tank can be changed and an upgrade cost is incurred. The new tank will come complete with the default gun. This will also need to be changed if the player desires a different weapon.

I figure that this stuff, while seeming quite complex is simple enough for me to build into the game. It will add a level of customizability to the game to help the player develop a personal link to the team members.

Comments/Suggestions?