Hello,
Now that we have a nice wounds and incapacitation system implemented, we could go further and include some features we had in the other XCOM games.
Current state (v2.5):- Wounded soldier on the battlefield lose health and morale.
- They are slowly healed at the hospital.
- Without hospital, they are very slowly healed but don't recover from their incapacitation.
- They can return to a mission (or participate to the base defence) whenever they want, with full morale, whatever their sanitary state.
- A treated wound system seems to be already implemented at the hospital, though I don't understand what the blue and red colors on the circular icons are for. Perhaps it's blue when the incapacitation disappears?
- The hospital UI shows all the soldiers in the base, and display the number of wounds to be treated, as well as the general health status (severity of the health loss).
In other games:- Wounded soldiers may be prevented from going to a mission until they're back to full health.
- Wounded soldiers in the hospital may spawn during defence base missions at the hospital (presumably, when they are in the top of the soldiers roster, and you can't pick those soldiers you want to defend the base).
Suggestion/Request:- Keep the overall view on the hospital UI (all the soldiers are monitored).
- Introduce (or develop) a "treated wound" concept.
- Automatically have the non treated (i.e. freshly wounded) soldiers assigned to a Hospital transporter-like container.
- Add a logo attached to a soldier's name in the soldiers roster, in place of the plane logo I've seen on a v2.6 picture.
- Prevent non treated soldiers from being assigned to a squad (transport or base defence).
- Eventually, spawn the baddest non treated soldiers (unarmed) at the hospital during base defence missions (when more teams are allowed on a map).
About #2, when a wounded soldier returns form mission, even if his bleedings were stopped by medipacks, and thus he is considered as "stabilized", he still suffer from incapacitation (as for now), and each of his wounds (torso, legs, etc.) need to be treated. The soldier is considered as being "non treated" until each one of his wounds is not treated. The novelty (?) here is to split the recovery time in two: first part (a third? a half? ...?) is the treatment, second part is the recovery proper (perhaps, that could correspond to the icon's color red-> blue, the icon itself disappearing when the wound is fully recovered from).
About #3, it's to prevent such soldiers from being assigned to a transporter or a base mission (though, being assigned to a transporter doesn't prevent the later in v2.5).
About #4, the logo allows to quickly identify non treated soldiers; it should be kept neutral (although I personally think that a red cross shouldn't hurt anybody in the 2080s). Perhaps a red "H" like on the road signs?
About #3-#6, while a non fully treated soldier can't leave the hospital, a recovering one may so.
He may return to a mission with full morale (as currently), only with less health, and with any non recovered incapacitation (quite as currently).
Imo, should a non treated soldier be forced to engage aliens again, his morale shouldn't be at full level as currently. Chain a few missions without returning to the base, and see how a 20 HPs left soldier behave as if at a boot camp to understand what I mean (though he'd suffer from multiple incapacitation, at least).
About #6, without any multiple team management, it would be still possible, for a base defence mission only, to automatically assign (checked box in gray) the most grievous non treated soldier(s?) to the defence team, leaving 11 or less able defenders in the squad (it would be more logical to have him spawn at the hospital, if possible).
TL;DRA severely wounded soldier shouldn't be allowed to go to a mission. You would have to shoot the medics before they release him. In the opposite, keeping a wounded soldier at the hospital until he's at full health, is exaggerated when the situation needs him. I propose a middle ground.
