[request] longer healing times - more short term consequences

[Serenity]

There are several medical mods to add more options with operations, transplants and prostheses, but I think the biggest gameplay issue is that healing just is way too fast. Even serious injuries can be healed in a day or two. This makes many elements that are in the game less useful or even useless. I feel that a lot of the time the type of medicine used or the bed doesn't make much of a difference because it's very fast in any case.
The only consequence to injury is a complete loss of a body part and scars. Long term that's fine, but are really no short term penalties.

I'm not asking for realism here. I don't want injuries to last for weeks. The time scale of the game is already compressed after all. So that wouldn't play well. But maybe something like this:

• Bruises, small cuts, light gun injuries: quick treatment. No bed rest necessary (but helps). A few days of low pain and reduced stats
• Medium injuries like more serious cuts, recovery from more significant blood loss, somewhat serious gun shot wounds: a day or two of absolute bed rest. Several days recovery
• Serious injuries: Significant bed rest and recovery period

The thing is that most of that (except maybe the differentiation of injury severity) is already in the game. There is already pain and penalties from injuries, but because they heal so fast you don't really feel it.
Or take having injured pawns being required to work instead of resting. I think that's already bad for recovery time, but in fact it doesn't really matter.

Yesterday I had an infestation event where 4 out of my 6 pawns were injured and one went down. I had my doctor patching them up while two pawns were holding the hallway leading to the hospital. Healing happened so quickly that most of them were almost fully healed right away. I liked how my hospital went into absolute emergency mode to fix everyone up, but I still was able to beat the insects on the first day. And the guy who went down was also up quickly. Even with longer healing times you still have the option of dragging everyone out of bed to fight - but at a noticeable penalty.

Injuries during raids also have next to zero consequences unless you lose body parts or get scars.


The real issue is probably balance rather than implementation. You want serious consequences for some days, but you don't want to get into a spiral were injured people make the next raid so hard that you incur even more injuries that you don't have time to heal. That's realistic, but not necessarily fun.

This could also make mods that add more options for surgeries more relevant. If someone's leg is almost mangled completely you might choose to amputate and replace it, rather than wait for it to heal on its own. That would still come with its own penalty, but if balanced right it could be less than the natural recovery.