Improving Medical and Combat

[Zargul]

Rimworld is kinda immersive in my opinion.
Especially with mods you can create a very nice gameworld that also feels great but sadly the current Alpha seems to limit itself in a lot of ways.

The Medical System and Combat seems to feel very unfinished in my opinion and are barely realistic or challenging. Partially also, because armour is very imbalanced and in the later game, there's barely anything to do anymore except to expand.

So I'm trying to add here some suggestions and concepts that might improve the game. I believe a good part of those concepts is certainly similar to Dwarf Fortress and other games of this genre.


Health and Medical Care:

One big problem I've seen in the game is how health is handled. Of course it's an easy way to replace static hitpoints if you give hitpoints to every single bodypart. But where's the realism when you get shot in the arm with a rifle and your wound heals without medicine as good as with medicine?

Instead of having just an Arm, the Bodysystem should render a full layered arm with skin, muscles, bones, nerves and blood vessels

Hitpoints should not determine when a bodypart is destroyed but more when a bodypart (or rather function) is in critical, rendering it useless.

So if somebody got shot in the arm, there's a likelyhood of damaging also the bones, blood vessels or nerves.

Another factor is bloodloss: Instead of getting half mangled with bullets and then bleeding out in three days, pawns should suffer much much heavier and instant bloodloss.
Few bullet wounds can cause heavy bleeding that can lead to shock and death if left untreated.

This comes to the next point: During Combat, Doctors should be able to apply field treatment to wounded pawns. This will be in most cases enough to stop serious bloodloss and stabilizes them for transport.

Only those above will give the game a deeper combat experience since it is much more lethal and dangerous for everyone to engage combat. But this is not the only things that I want to be improved.

Further Medical Care should be extremly important in case you want to keep your pawns in good shape.
Currently we can fix most of their wounds with substitutes or they heal fully without damage.

Much better would be the need of specific equipments, items and technology to fix specific wounds and to keep your people in top health.

Somebody got shot? Then you need to get the bullet out or risk wound infection or worse.
Bones are broken? With bone-gel and some operating instruments a doctor can repair it. Then with a splint it can be secured to give back at least some mobility.

In the beginning you will be only able to use basic first-aid-kits and simple instruments that can leave permanent injuries.

While researching, you unlock better and improved tools: Life-Support, Genetics, Bionics and other nifty stuff to fix your pawns up and in the end improve their abilities.

Organs, Upgrades and Prosthetics are very important there:

Organ-Damage is one of the most critical injuries.
A shot in an organ can cause it to shut down (The Performance of the Organ will decrease toward zero). A skilled Doctor with the right supplies can try to repair the damage but in most of the cases the pawn will be permanently damaged.

While in some cases a new heart or even an artifical one could be applied, it is extremly expensive in the beginning of the game. Organ Transplants may need further treatment until the body is used (again) to the organ. Without proper medicine it can cause again to organ shutdown.

So Upgrades need to be used. Instead of using an expensive prosthesis to replace the heart, a pacemaker can be built and the heart can be upgraded with it.

This adds a new layer to the heart, the pacemaker device which now can be hit by everything that hits the heart. Still it restores the nerve function of the heart and therefore half of its performance.

Prosthetics act a similar way as bodyparts do.
If you have for example a bionic arm, it doesn't stop you having hands, does it?
Actually not: Adding the arm will also add bionic hands, bionic fingers. All with its own layers.
But in case any part of the arm gets damaged you still can remove the whole bionic arm but it will leave you with a malfunctioning arm which still needs repair.

Another point of the system: Mechanic and Bionic Improvements should need repair instead of treatment.
Therefore: Buying high-tech bionic legs and arms may be a good investment but during the early-game nobody will have the equipment to repair those sophisticated limbs.
The first would be to augment pawns in the first place without them dying.


The next thing that'd be interesting to improve is combat itself.
Currently using guns to fight enemies is the safest and fastest way to do it.

Therefore the one with the strongest and best guns always wins.
Example is to use mostly snipers and few people that have medium-distance weapons.

To make the game more realistic and spicy, adding ammunition is actually not a bad idea to balance Gun-Weapons even more.

You will be able to build Ammo-Storages. (Maybe even diffrent kinds for diffrent types of weapons? Like Ballistic, Laser, etc)
There you can restock your Ammunition to the maximum.

The Weapon itself features magazine size. For example a Pistol might have 12 shots. After they are used up, the pawn needs to reload in case he has a spare magazine.

There can be diffrent combat modi: Aggressive, balanced and defensive.

While balanced gives the pawn no boni in either way, he will act like he does right now.
Defensive will cause the Pawn to take cover and aim more carefully. Weapons which are normally on burst fire will be used on semi-automatic. (Unless it's forced Burst-Fire)
Having an Aggressive combat modi makes the pawn to give up his cover and go in gun-blazing.
Accuracy will be very low and he will have no defensive boni but the fire-rate increases. Weapons that can be used in full-automatic will be used with a random amount of bullets fired. (Maybe some multiplier of the burst-round?)


But now we come to some important stuff: Diffrent weapons have diffrent calibers and diffrent penetration strenght.

The current Armor system is not working very well in terms of balance. Higher penetration protection means, higher chance of the shot being completely(!) absorbed.

A better way to handle this is to give armor and clothing hitpoints, maybe even inserts.

So in case of our armor vest, we will have for example an plasteel insert which gives the vest 150 hp and a ballistic protection of 120%.

Instead of saying now "120% -> Impenetrable" the game should be able to convert damage types.
Hit by a rifle with a damage of 12, the damage would be converted from "gun wound" to "bruise" and applied to the torso.
Also the armor hp will be subtracted by 12. Leaving the armor at 138 hp and the ballistic protection at 110,4%.

Lowering it further makes the armor less effective against bullets. Some may even be capable of penetrating the armor if it's too damaged.

While some armor parts can be repaired, some need to be replaced. An example would be the armor vest which has inserts made out of metal.


Those are the concepts I thought mostly about. Of course I have also more but I sadly have not enough time to put them on paper which is visible on the lack of structure especially here.
What are your opinions about those changes? What would you want to see?

[TheClassiness]

Definitely agree. I still like this medical system, but it doesn't seem punishing enough. I know everyone doesn't like having colonists randomly becoming crippled or insta-killed, so maybe increasing the storyteller difficulty would also affect how severe injuries are? I just don't like how my colonists can take 16 LMG bullets to the neck, pass out, and then chill in the battleground for a couple days before finally deciding to die. With this medical system having a doctor is vital, and keeping them safe is top priority.

[Ink.]

Speaking in regards to your ammo idea, I really really like that sort of idea. I don't know if you ever played Men of War: Assault Squad but essentially it's a WW2 RTS and it has a heavy emphasis on infantry and infantry management. Why is this relevant?

Well in AS, each soldier is unique and has their own inventory. If you have a squad that's fighting in the trenches for awhile, at some point, they may run out of ammo. When they do, you might have to have them retreat or bring up a supply truck so they can rearm from it. In the game soldiers will automatically reload if they have ammo but the player can also tell them to specifically reload.

That is something that I'd think could be cool. Especially if one day we get vehicles and/or colonist inventory systems because then if you have a long fight and run out of ammo, you can bring medicine and ammo and other supplies to the front lines. Meaning you could set up combat zones father from your main colony so you face a lesser risk when things go wrong.

[CB elite]

Health and Medical Care:

...

Instead of having just an Arm, the Bodysystem should render a full layered arm with skin, muscles, bones, nerves and blood vessels

Hitpoints should not determine when a bodypart is destroyed but more when a bodypart (or rather function) is in critical, rendering it useless.

So if somebody got shot in the arm, there's a likelyhood of damaging also the bones, blood vessels or nerves.

...

Those are the concepts I thought mostly about. Of course I have also more but I sadly have not enough time to put them on paper which is visible on the lack of structure especially here.
What are your opinions about those changes? What would you want to see?

Honestly, I'm looking into this once I finish the mod I'm working on right now.

The hardest part about all of this is getting position and "surface area/volume" correct.

Accurately depicting how much space a muscle/nerve takes up relative to the body part is messy math 

Tynan has done a decent job of simulating superficial vs deep.

I don't really see a system being used to discern Ventral (front) from Dorsal (back) though.

Example: Let's say two people are shooting each other (facing each other). There is a chance for a projectile to hit the spine of an enemy, and the only prerequisite is that the projectile has to hit the torso first; no other internal structures have to be damaged before the projectile hits the spine. The odds of being shot in the torso from the front, and it not hitting any other internal organ before striking the spine is basically 0...

I was considering modeling the brain in a different way, so that a brain damage in different areas would have different affects on the body. Like, damage to the occipital lobe would cause blindness in both eyes, even though that person still has two eyes. And, it couldn't be fixed simply by giving that person a bionic eye. Damage to the motor cortex would cause an inability move ever again, or it just might make that person very slow and have poor manipulation. Idea being, brain damage often renders people "useless" to a colony trying to survive and gives new purpose to the option of euthanizing people.

I just don't like the idea of a person being shot in the front of the head and having the back of their brain injured...

But, you know what? I understand that creating  a system that recognize directional things like this might be really difficult. And honestly, I already appreciate the injury definitions of this game more than I can possibly describe!

Still, wouldn't hurt to see it improved upon