I would like to know this as well.
The penalty of a permanent -1hp each time a character falls sounded a bit extreme if it can not be repaired. Especially considering that you don't directly control your level up stats.

As such I decided to play on the easier difficulty for now.

There is no way to recover that, no--characters that die over and over again simply become good candidates for replacement by the characters that join you later.

Thank you for the info!

Happy to help! ;)

I chose the difficulty level (soldier?) where you suffer the -1 health with fallen characters and after about 15 hours of playing the game, I regret choosing this difficulty level.

I understood the penalty but I wanted something that made the battles more meaningful. What I wasn't expecting was the complete (so far) lack of opportunity to grind to improve my party abilities if I make a few mistakes. That, combined with the massive advantage in numbers the AI opponents are given makes the game too frustrating to play. I would guess that the current battle I am stuck on the enemy outnumbers me at least 2 to 1, probably 3 to 1.

I will say that the AI plays the game pretty well, which impresses me. But given the massive numbers advantage the enemy has the result, for me, is a game I don't enjoy playing.

In addition to the lack of grinding, the other issue for me is the lack of ability to go back to a store/town to stock up between battles. I dislike only being given an opportunity to buy equipment once every few battles. Add in the equipment that quickly wears out and I'm about ready to give up on the game. Which is unfortunate because, despite its rough edges, I do enjoy playing the game apart from these issues.

Yep - agreed. I like the Soldier difficulty, but the -1 health with NO WAY to ever restore it is just not fun. I really wish the developer would make an option to play at this difficulty, but let us be able to restore our health.

Playing on the difficulty below Soldier is probably much easier, and I am not interested in that. But the permanent -1 health penalty is just way too brutal, and borderline unfair.

Originally posted by FroBodine:

Yep - agreed. I like the Soldier difficulty, but the -1 health with NO WAY to ever restore it is just not fun. I really wish the developer would make an option to play at this difficulty, but let us be able to restore our health.

Playing on the difficulty below Soldier is probably much easier, and I am not interested in that. But the permanent -1 health penalty is just way too brutal, and borderline unfair.

I think that's what Custom difficulty is for. Saw it on a new playthrough after beating the game, so I'm unsure if it was always available or not.

Originally posted by malcolmmackay224:

I chose the difficulty level (soldier?) where you suffer the -1 health with fallen characters and after about 15 hours of playing the game, I regret choosing this difficulty level.

I understood the penalty but I wanted something that made the battles more meaningful. What I wasn't expecting was the complete (so far) lack of opportunity to grind to improve my party abilities if I make a few mistakes. That, combined with the massive advantage in numbers the AI opponents are given makes the game too frustrating to play. I would guess that the current battle I am stuck on the enemy outnumbers me at least 2 to 1, probably 3 to 1.

I will say that the AI plays the game pretty well, which impresses me. But given the massive numbers advantage the enemy has the result, for me, is a game I don't enjoy playing.

In addition to the lack of grinding, the other issue for me is the lack of ability to go back to a store/town to stock up between battles. I dislike only being given an opportunity to buy equipment once every few battles. Add in the equipment that quickly wears out and I'm about ready to give up on the game. Which is unfortunate because, despite its rough edges, I do enjoy playing the game apart from these issues.

Now that I have finished the campaign I've changed my mind of the -1 health difficulty. Now I've decided that I like it.

It turned out that it really isn't a big penalty, your characters end up with quite a lot of health points so losing one or two isn't a big deal.

I do like the idea of there being some permanent cost to having a character lose all their hit points in battle. Without the -1 permanent penalty I think the combat would become a bit easy.

I did notice (I think) that the difficulty level one above the default normal difficulty (Soldier?) had tougher AI. Am I remembering this correctly? If so, for the next game, Together in Battle, I think it would be great to have a recommended difficulty level that includes the toughest AI. If the AI is so good that this makes the game too challenging for the average player then I think the -1 health should be optional. I want to play the best AI the developer can create. I found the AI in TTL to be very good, the only issue was that at times the AI seemed to not prioritise going for the killing blow.

Maybe my memory is faulty about the difficulty levels.

If the AI didn't go for killing blow i think thats most likely due to turn order. Not complety sure about it but the impression i got is that the AI only calculates its turn sequentially. In most cases its not a problem but it does get a bit wonky when you turtle and theres so many melee enemies that they pile up and block ranged ones and each other. Also have seen a few enemies with movement and pulling skills that never got used, maybe making the ai shove frontliner to deal extra damage to backliners would be possible and a good challenge. On the side, i hate missions with ledges because the AI usually goes pretty hard with the shoving when and where it can.

As of right now, Together in Battle has three difficulty levels. "Challenging" is the recommended default, with an AI handicap of 5. (This is identical to the AI difficulty level for Soldier difficulty in TTL.)

Instead of using the -1 health penalty for death, however, Challenging difficulty in TiB uses a "wounds" system that makes fallen characters unusable for a certain number of days dependent on how far below 0 the character's health dropped. The longer a character takes to recover, the greater the chance they might not make it. (If a character had 5 health left and they took 5 damage, for instance, they're guaranteed to recover quickly with no chance of permadeath because they didn't dip below zero. If a character had 5 health left and they took 50 damage, though, they're probably going to be unusable for more than a week and there's a solid chance that they may not make it at all.)