RECOVERY TIME
Units and characters needing time to recover after exertion or injury — wounded soldiers benched for in-game weeks, stamina regeneration between missions, cooldown days after surgery or stress breaks.
- SOLO-DEV COST LOW
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN TACTICS · STRATEGY · COLONY-SIM · ROGUELIKE
XCOM's infirmary timers are the canonical strategic version (your best soldiers wounded for two weeks forces B-team missions — the roster-depth generator), Darkest Dungeon sends stressed heroes to the abbey for recovery weeks that cost gold and roster slots, Football Manager and sports sims run injury layers as squad-rotation engines, and RimWorld colonists convalesce in medical beds whose quality sets the timetable. Designers price recovery in time because it converts damage into scheduling: health restored instantly means consequences end at the victory screen, but a two-week bench makes every wound a strategic event that ripples forward — missions get taken by second-stringers (who thereby become first-stringers: forced rotation is the mechanic's secret gift, building the deep roster the player would never voluntarily train), risky tactics acquire real prices, and the campaign calendar becomes a resource under pressure. Recovery time also creates the triage question that defines the genre's texture: deploy the half-healed veteran or the fresh rookie? Key decisions: recovery duration relative to mission cadence (recovery that outlasts the campaign's tempo forces roster depth; shorter just adds flavor), acceleration options and their costs (infirmary upgrades, medics, spending to heal faster — a good money sink), and whether recovering units are fully absent or available-but-degraded, which converts a binary bench into a gradient of desperate choices. Pitfall: recovery as pure waiting — if the player can trivially pass time without cost until everyone heals, the timer is a fast-forward button's worth of nothing; recovery only bites when the calendar itself is under pressure from clocks, events, or economy, so resting has a price the player can feel.