New wound and healing system on 2.5-dev

[cmmps]

Hi

On the current master the new system for wounded soldiers and the new healing abilities seem fine!
The idea of including the body parts affected when a soldier is at the hospital is also excellent!

However, healing is now too much weak! It barely heals a soldier and now he's/her's health will start to decrease in each turn and more than each healing.

I'd like to hear more about this new system and how it works now.
I hope there will be some more balancing on healing... I'm not saying that healing should heal as much as on previous times but reduce the amount of healing in more than 50%... Mmmm... 

Regards

[DarkRain]

Hi,

Maybe I went overboard in weakening the medikit...
the idea is that the main use of the medikit in battle isn't to heal the soldiers but to prevent them form bleeding to death, see when a soldier (or alien, they are also affected) receives sufficient damage to a certain body part that part is considered wounded and will start bleeding (HP goes down each turn), the healing mode of the medikit will stop bleeding (serious/multiple wounds might require more than one use to fully stop bleeding - at least at its current power) and recover just a little HP, also the medikit will only have effect when the soldiers have untreated wounds at other times it will do nothing, the idea is to have you actually need to have your soldiers treated in a hospital after battle.

Other things you might want to know:
Each body part causes certain penalties when wounded, treated (no longer bleeding) wounds cause only half the penalty
You can check physdat window (the one you open with the 'P' key) during combat to check the soldier wounds

Admittedly I might have gone too far weakening the medikit (I was considering doubling its power before submitting the patch but I forgot to do it), and on top of that I completely overlooked to adjust the hospital healing rate (game balancing isn't exactly my thing), at least all that was made scriptable so it should be easy to adjust.

PS
I will try to document any and all differences from the wiki proposal in the talk page in the next days

[Battlescared]

I like those changes.  Med kits are way to powerful in 2.4 and I like the idea of making the hospital more useful.  I would love to see it all backed up with stats on doctors, but I know you're headed in the direction of making doctors just a spin dial and removing them from the hiring screen, which is cool.  This will put a good balance to the need for hospitals and more detail in the soldiers vs. too much detail in the hiring process.

[H-Hour]

I also like the idea that medikits stop bleeding instead of providing HP.

I think the balancing will come from reconfiguring the number of soldiers a player has at his disposal. The real problem at the moment is that the player will quickly run out of soldiers if too many are wounded. Since I'd like to move to a more bruising battlescape, it will be more important to make more soldiers available for hire.

[ShipIt]

... the idea is that the main use of the medikit in battle isn't to heal the soldiers but to prevent them form bleeding to death, see when a soldier (or alien, they are also affected) receives sufficient damage to a certain body part that part is considered wounded and will start bleeding (HP goes down each turn), the healing mode of the medikit will stop bleeding (serious/multiple wounds might require more than one use to fully stop bleeding - at least at its current power) and recover just a little HP, also the medikit will only have effect when the soldiers have untreated wounds at other times it will do nothing, the idea is to have you actually need to have your soldiers treated in a hospital after battle. ...

I like this.

[cmmps]

Well, you have conviced me.
Anyway, a little of more HP would be welcome.

As someone posted, you may get out of available soldiers fast, specially at the beggining of the game.
Or you can get out of space in the base to build more livintg quarters! What you going to do? Unhire wounded soldiers? 

So, IMHO, the hospital should have a better recovery rate.
It also makes sense the question of having doctors and, maybe, with skills... The better the skills, the faster the soldiers are recovered.. 

Carlos

[Battlescared]

On further thought, it may end up nerfing the med kit too much.  Perhaps there could be a limit to the amount of healing that can be done on the battlefield?  Maybe a 60% or 70% healing health cap, in addition to the wounds, that the med packs can't heal beyond.  That would give them some general use on the battlefield and let us get soldiers healed up to a point they might be able to take one good hit, but still have a use for the hospital to finish the healing between battles.

[Wirelizard]

One thing I've talked about with friends who also play UFOAI and who played XCOM was to make the medkit healing "temporary" or "field" healing. You're patching people up and pumping them full of drugs so they can complete the mission, then afterward most of that "healing" wears off and they're into the hospital for real, proper recovery.

So someone gets wounded down to, say, 30 out of 90 or so HP, you medkit them back up to 75 or 80 HP in the field, but when they get back to the base hospital their real healing starts back at 30 or whatever HP. Maybe give a bit of a bonus for field treatment, as that would help somewhat, but currently it's almost better to take moderately wounded and valuable people on simpler missions (clearing a scout crash, say) and medkit them back up rather than wait for the hospital, which is... not quite right!

[Thurak]

It is a possibility, but what do you do when a wounded gets healed up to 90%, is shot again, gets healed and shot again and so on and then dies with -1000 health at mission end? Maybe that's even realistic (to be patched up and, drugged so one is combat ready for one more minute or so before dying), but as a player I want to know after the battle that every soldier alive now is alive when the dropship returns to base and then stays alive at the hospital.

Just give the medkits ~20 hp instead of 2 and I think that would work fine. Definitely makes it more difficult, but that's not a bad thing! Oh and as mention: improve the hospital recovery rate.


It's a cool feature, thank you very much!

[Jon_dArc]

It is a possibility, but what do you do when a wounded gets healed up to 90%, is shot again, gets healed and shot again and so on and then dies with -1000 health at mission end? Maybe that's even realistic (to be patched up and, drugged so one is combat ready for one more minute or so before dying), but as a player I want to know after the battle that every soldier alive now is alive when the dropship returns to base and then stays alive at the hospital.

There are three obvious ways to handle that. One is, as you note, allowing soldiers to die at the end of a mission, which IMO is a bad way to handle it (for your reason, among others). Another is to raise all 0 or negative health values for surviving soldiers to 1 at the close of a mission. The third would be to redefine death—a soldier would die when taking damage that leaves that soldier at 0 health or less, and so the temporary healing could allow a soldier's real health to become negative, extending recovery time. This seems messy and error-prone, so I guess the more reasonable version would be to tack on a recovery-time penalty whenever a soldier is raised to 1 real health at the end of a mission. I'm not going to dig into the pros and cons of these approaches unless it looks like temporary healing is actually being considered, though.

~J

[Starbug]

A fourth way would be that during a mission, the medkit can only heal soldiers by a certain percentage of their max health, say (for argument's sake) 80%.

So for example if a soldier had 100 max health, and took some damage, the medkit could heal up to 80hp, regardless of how many times he is wounded, however after it has healed 80hp total, using the medkit won't have any more effect for that mission. So he needs to go back to hospital to heal.

This could be exploited a bit though, if you take wounded soldiers on fresh, easy missions to heal them up, but you could make it so that soldiers that are 'moderately' or 'heavily' wounded can't leave the hospital.

Alternately, just give a cap on how much health the medkit can heal in a mission, per solider. That way the medkit still has 'infinite ammo', but limited use. If that made any sense...

[H-Hour]

I don't see any reason in the game to have the medikit restore HP for soldiers. It's a life-saver -- not a healing potion. If your soldier is near death, protect him.

(It's also a stimulant pack, but that's a separate thing.)

[ShipIt]

I don't see any reason in the game to have the medikit restore HP for soldiers. It's a life-saver -- not a healing potion. If your soldier is near death, protect him.

Me thinking the same way.

[Nokim]

I don't see any reason in the game to have the medikit restore HP for soldiers. It's a life-saver -- not a healing potion. If your soldier is near death, protect him.

Totally agree. But now there is no need in gas grenades, stun rods and electrolasers - there is a lot of stunned(wounded) aliens in usual fight. So, maybe they should randomly die in contamination unit especially under research? Just to make more sense in taking captives. Bitwise in reports it's said that aliens die during experiments especially before getting the universal serum...

[Telok]

What XCOM did was to track wounds and base both bleeding and damage off of that.

Each wound bled, more wounds meant faster bleed out (makes needler and shotgun very slightly better if they penetrate armor). Each wound was treated individually by the medi-kit and only healed 3 hp (I'd suggest about 65% for UFO:AI). Each wound could only be treated once by the medi-kit. Furthermore medi-kits could heal morale and stun damage by using different medications. The medi-kits had 10 charges for each type of healing.

edit: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Medi-Kit_%28EU%29