Down but not out mechanic

This feedback is so simple that I almost felt like I shouldn’t post it but the longer I think about it the more I believe that this feature would improve my experience dramatically.

A bleedout mechanic. Something that stands between “an arthron got a lucky shot off on my soldier” and the frustration of losing a soldier instantly.

I definitely believe that soldiers dying is an integral part of this game and the genre as a whole. But I think a down but not out mechanic with a bleedout timer and the ability to stabilise or maybe even help up a downed soldier would remove some of the the extreme necessity for alpha strike capability and would provide more tactical variety by creating saving private Ryan scenarios.
I also believe that this would create headroom for nerfs to the most op skills.

*also just so I’m not misunderstood. I don’t mean simple as in necessarily simple to implement but as in simple idea that has probably already been considered.

Could have implemented it, but… XCOM already did it :slight_smile:
I agree, it’s kinda sad that the soldier is fresh and running with 1 HP but dead at 0 HP.
Snapshot could just swallow the pride and implement the bleedout mechanic the way Firaxis did it.

This was in early builds. I had a fun experience of finishing mission with a last standing sniper who had broken arm. Had to use pistol and scavange for a grenade from a box to kill last few enemies, who where severely crippled too. Managed to kill last guy just one turn before one of the friendlies would bleed out.
No idea why this was removed, perhaps they don’t want you to keep your soldier busy by hauling wounded friendlies to evac or don’t want to spend time on coding all edge cases with carrying and placing wounded.

I dunno, to me the war story of carrying the bleeding bro with one hand while shooting with the other feels epic.
Why would you ever remove this from a game is beyond me.
I guess limited by timeframes and such, but still, it’s a great mechanic that makes the game more tactical.

Technically there is a bleed out mechanic in game. When a body part is disabled you start bleeding out. The more body parts disabled the quicker you bleed out. You have until your HP reaches 0 to use a medkit to stabilize the bleeding.

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OP means different mechanics - when your soldiers HP drops to zero he goes into unconscious state and timer start, in X turns he dies, unless you stabilize him or evacuate before time runs out. This mechanic is good for cases when you make a mistake or something unexpected happens. You are still penalized but not sent into a downwards spiral. If you loose multiple characters.

Yeah, loved that feature in Xcom 2. Not only did your soldier not insta die which is really annoying in this game, but you had to rescue him so he wouldn’t get captured by carrying the unconscious soldier to an evac spot, failing that, the soldier got captured which led to missions exclusively focusing on the rescue of a captured soldier.

Now I get it that in PP there are not many prisoner situations (there could be between the human factions), but a system that does not instantly kill soldiers would be very welcome.

I know, he was talking about the mechanic in XCOM2. Maybe in the future or in one of the DLC something similar might be added. But I think that would take away from how PP was designed. The game is close to the original Xcom and not the newer ones. Any of us who have played the originals know how unkind they were to mistakes or bad luck and thats something I like about PP.

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Most of the time soldiers with 1 HP are severely limited due to disabled body parts, low will, panic, and the high risk of bleeding to death the next turn.
OP must be referring to the case of one-shot kills only, otherwise PP is a huge improvement over X-Com 2.

Phoenix Point was about to redefine the notion of death, since soldiers would be difficult to kill, but relatively easy to put out of battle and deeply scarred. Here, from the metro.co.uk interview:

Interestingly, while there is still permadeath soldiers are relatively difficult to kill and are more likely to suffer permanent physical or mental scaring if defeated, resulting in the loss of limbs or seeing them resort to drink or drugs to cope with what they’ve experienced

And that would be the mechanic, but it seems to have been pushed to a future DLC (maybe Blood & Titanium, seems to fit)

In the original recruits were easy to come by and cheap. Losing one wasn’t nearly as much of a hit as it is in this game. Phoenix Point is a lot closer to the new titles with how hard it is to get a B-team online.

Also Xenonauts, which while not being an original title is a very faithful reimagining of the original game, had a mechanic that worked really well, where there was simply a chance for a downed soldier to survive if there was no further damage to the body afterwards.