UFO:Alien Invasion
General => Discussion => Topic started by: cmmps on July 19, 2012, 10:39:52 pm
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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
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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 (http://ufoai.org/wiki/index.php/Gameplay_Proposals/Medikits) in the talk page in the next days
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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.
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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.
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... 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.
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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.. 8)
Carlos
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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.
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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!
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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!
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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
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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...
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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.)
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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.
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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...
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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 (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Medi-Kit_%28EU%29)
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If you keep it more or less as it is then two things must be done, IMO: A few more soldiers at game start and a better hospital.
In game I often need two charges of a medkit to treat one wound, if that's WAD five charges in total for a medkit are a bit to few, I think.
I like the wound system very much, just a bit of tweaking and it will be great.
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[...]there is a lot of stunned(wounded) aliens in usual fight.[...]
Does that mean they fall unconscious simply by shooting them? That doesn't seems right (and doesn't happen for me)
If you keep it more or less as it is then two things must be done, IMO: A few more soldiers at game start and a better hospital.
In game I often need two charges of a medkit to treat one wound, if that's WAD five charges in total for a medkit are a bit to few, I think.
I like the wound system very much, just a bit of tweaking and it will be great.
I adjusted the healing rates 4 days ago (effectively doubling the hospital healing speed), of course a lot of balancing is still needed...
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I always liked the temporary HP idea.
1 bar, with HP foreground, and 2 background colors, one real, and another for Temporary Health Points.
Combat starts with:
Temp_HP:= Max_HP
Both take damage.
Temp HP can be healed with MedKits, up to 2x Current_HP (but not more than Max_HP).
Soldier loses Current_HP AND Temp_HP when Temp_HP are not at the maximum (2*Current_HP or Max_HP, whichever is less).
The bleed tp Current_HP is equal to (Temp_HP divided by maximum allowed Temp_HP) *(scalable, for instance 100).
Half that damage is dealt to Temp_HP (so that minor bleeding can actually stop on its own).
What do you think?
Corrected crappy demo of the bar:
(different formula, but same basic idea, stun bar included)
http://plenty.w.interia.pl/hpbar/ (http://plenty.w.interia.pl/hpbar/)
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I know the team is being understandably cautious about using ideas from the X-com games and games inspired by them but would the system for recording health used in the UFO:After#### games be useful in that you have a health bar for your soldier, then depending on what weapon hits the soldier the green portion of the bar decreases and in the new space you get a red and a black portion of the bar. The red portion being hits that can be recovered by medkit, black can only be recovered in a hospital. if the soldier is hit again then depending on the damage type again the black will extend further reducing the overall damage recoverable in the field as well as the usual addition of recoverable damage.
Effectively the soldier will need 3 health variables in mission, Maximum health, Recoverable Health and a temporary Current Health. In geoscape the current health is irrelevant so can be safely dropped and time in hospital incrementally improves Recoverable health until it matches Maximum Health. This way a soldier that gets badly shot up will take ages in hospital but one who only take a few light plasma burns will be out fairly quickly.
Also instead of beefing up the hospitals directly would it be more useful to add hospital improvement research and/or be able to purchase equipment/supplies for them.
The supplies route might be useful for balance if early in the war they are plentiful and easily obtained by the player but limit the resupply of the market so as the war goes on, especially if the player uses the supplies over heavily they will find that they have to produce the supplies which takes time and restricts access while not preventing their use. Basically early on a player can get wounded soldiers battle ready quickly but later on when soldiers are more readily available it can take longer without a little management.
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I ran the update, says Aug 3rd version in console, but I'm not seeing a new wound system - I get hit and lose hitpoints, use a medkit and get the hp back, just like before?!?
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I ran the update, says Aug 3rd version in console, but I'm not seeing a new wound system - I get hit and lose hitpoints, use a medkit and get the hp back, just like before?!?
Maybe you're on another branch? Or you fetch but not merge? you should use git pull --rebase if so.
-geever
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Maybe you're on another branch? Or you fetch but not merge? you should use git pull --rebase if so.
-geever
I've only updated with fetch. I'm not really familiar with git, and it was my understanding that if I only use fetch and then rebuild with make I'm always running master, not any branch? git pull --rebase returns Cannot pull with rebase: You have unstaged changes.
Please commit or stash them.
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Does that mean they fall unconscious simply by shooting them? That doesn't seems right (and doesn't happen for me)
Yes. Not too often but i have got enough them to fill alien contamination unit several times. Sometimes they die from wounds before fight is over. In that case they are not counted as killed in stats (hoverer message in combat say so - Alien killed)
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I've only updated with fetch. I'm not really familiar with git, and it was my understanding that if I only use fetch and then rebuild with make I'm always running master, not any branch? git pull --rebase returns Cannot pull with rebase: You have unstaged changes.
Please commit or stash them.
When you fetch, you download the updates to the index, but not merging on your copy of sourcecode. So you still have the individual files unmodified. pull does this merging, --rebase is useful if you do modifications, it keeps your local commits on the top of the commit tree.
You have unstaged changes. means you have not committed changes which are in the way of the update.
A solution: save (and drop) your modifications then update and finally restore your modifications:
git stash save
git pull --rebase
git stash pop
There is a chance that your modifications conflict with the code change we made in that case you need to resolve the conflict but I don't think it will be the case now. If you have any problems, just ask.
-geever
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When you fetch, you download the updates to the index, but not merging on your copy of sourcecode. So you still have the individual files unmodified. pull does this merging, --rebase is useful if you do modifications, it keeps your local commits on the top of the commit tree.
You have unstaged changes. means you have not committed changes which are in the way of the update.
A solution: save (and drop) your modifications then update and finally restore your modifications:
git stash save
git pull --rebase
git stash pop
There is a chance that your modifications conflict with the code change we made in that case you need to resolve the conflict but I don't think it will be the case now. If you have any problems, just ask.
-geever
it appears the "modification" was the gl range indication bug fix patch(?). I ran the commands in your post, and now I get "nn has been wounded" messages in battlescape so I guess it's working...
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I'm not seeing indications of number of wounds, and medkits still have unlimited "shots" (they now have different fire modes though). When viewing wounded soldier's health stats in battlescape, there's a small exclamation mark-style symbol by the health figure which turns green after a medkit has been used. Is this right? Seems like something would not be quite in place.
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There's no number of wounds, the little icons that appear in the health and stats window show where the soldier is wounded: head, arms, torso, legs (if you hover over it you should see a tooltip showing the part affected and the amount of bleeding, if any)
Medikits with unlimited ammo is a bug or maybe you have modifications to weapons.ufo?
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There's no number of wounds, the little icons that appear in the health and stats window show where the soldier is wounded: head, arms, torso, legs (if you hover over it you should see a tooltip showing the part affected and the amount of bleeding, if any)
Medikits with unlimited ammo is a bug or maybe you have modifications to weapons.ufo?
I've no modifications. I'll test it out further, maybe it's working as intended and I just need to learn the new stuff...
I didn't think to hover over the symbol.
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There's no number of wounds, the little icons that appear in the health and stats window show where the soldier is wounded: head, arms, torso, legs (if you hover over it you should see a tooltip showing the part affected and the amount of bleeding, if any)
Tooltip on hovering wounds works in hospital but not on battlescape. Bug?
I've no modifications. I'll test it out further, maybe it's working as intended and I just need to learn the new stuff...
They should have 5 shots. Enough to save life usually.
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I've always considered that Medikits are something like a box of those square white bandages, with a built-in stimulant ampule, that dispenses when you slap it on. Which means that while they might be 'saved' with a medikit in the field, once all the aliens are defeated and you're not being shot at/in fear for your life, you can focus and pay some more proper attention to various wounds and injuries.
So you might triage in the field, but once you've got them back to the dropship, you have some slightly more potent recovery tools at your disposal. Not a full hospital, but something like an ambulance, so it's not 'only what can be done with what I have'.