Here’s an idea. Why not have damage-over-time effects apply at the end of the owning player/faction’s turn, rather than the start? If you do 5 damage to a unit with 7 health, and apply 2 bleed, that unit is guaranteed dead because they can’t get healed in time.
If DoTs applied at end of turn, it would give you time to give emergency treatment to soldiers, otherwise enemies might as well be arbitrarily doing as much extra damage as the bleed, acid, or w/e they deal to you.
+1
At the very least, it’s a good opportunity, whilst the game is in development, to test this out.
An alternative could be to could differentiate between different damage types by when they apply, i.e. bleeds apply at the end of the next turn, whereas poison applies at the start.
It could even be a switch that the player makes in the game settings.
I like that idea 
Not like it’s a new idea, but hey, maybe they think about it again 
First ever battle in the game, I lost my technician because a crab man spit twice on him in the same turn. Couldn’t heal.
You know that then it has to work both ways?
At the moment, the fighting is logical, when you add bleeding or fire dmg, this is taken into account before the other side starts its turn.
Which look like this:
At your suggestion, bleeding or fire dmg would be counted one turn later, which means that the enemy could still attack you, as he will die at the end of his turn and not at begining.
Which would look something like this:
Sry but for me, is this a dumb idea.
You are right that it cuts both ways. It doesn’t just allow enemies to survive long enough to take one more shot before inevitably dying; it also allows your soldiers to do the same. This feels balanced enough, to me. The current system as it stands just makes all bleed and other DoT damage part of the total damage you dealt that round, since it’s applied before anyone can do anything on their turn. So in my beginning example, you didn’t deal 5, you dealt 7. Or, your soldier with 7 health that only took 5 damage isn’t going to live, he’s guaranteed to die because of bleed.
From gameplay videos I have seen causing bleed to kill enemies before they get to act seems like a fairly core gameplay design, though I can see your point.
Seems to me like both approaches might work fine.
‘Dumb idea’ is a little strong don’t you think? Disagreeing is one thing but calling it dumb because you don’t agree isn’t exactly a fair comment.
Of course it would have to work both ways, it would give both crabbies and your own soldiers a last ditch attempt at not dying. As setokavia has stated, it means that they may as well have just died immediately rather than standing around waiting for the start of their turn to keel over because not a single soldier on their team can act until after the damage kicks in.
This will probably be a fairly divisive subject but at least I hope we can all agree on it should be the same for all factions as a baseline, taking out the possibly of effects from other sources such as passive skills or possible mutations.
Yeah, obviously it’s got to work the same for both us and them whichever way it goes.
It was the thought of the alien not dying straight of bleed damage on their next turn that appealed to me, more than for my own guys. It’s too easy if you can consciously just leave something sitting their to bleed out knowing that it’s not going to be a threat to you on the next turn, I feel that it’d be more tense if that enemy had a final shot at killing your team before they bleed out.
That’s a good point actually, many times I’ve had the situation of ‘X health left and X bleed damage ticks, gonna forget that one even exists’. Would be more to consider if they still had one last potential jab at your troops before that bleed finished them off. Spend the AP to finish them off or leave it and pray they don’t do some significant damage?
This comment is mostly to Sodin, but Wormerine could also agree or disagree.
I would allow enemies to have their turn to trigger bleeding at the end of their turn. That bleeding could change their tactic (maybe move toward healing alien, or use special ability to heal in mist?). Thus not endangering our soldiers and give enemies some chance. That would also work for us.
From logic point if it is “per turn” damage then it require time and should be applied after a turn. In other words let enemy do something before he bleed out. Otherwise it is instant kill, with just some minor delay.
Fire mechanic is different, you get burned the moment you touch the fire, so in the moment someone use fire attack or you place yourself in fire zone by move or even leave fire zone. That should be fire damage per this turn, and in next turn after you left fire zone burning damage should be also applied at the end of the turn because character previously engulfed in flames could put out that flame in this second turn. If he didn’t do that then let him burn.
Poison should also work as bleeding.
Acid as fire.
That is my logic. You may think it is wrong. 
Difficult for me to discuss "should/should not"s without playing the game myself.
The question is: is bleed damage at the start of the turn too powerful? It never seemed like it to me. A significant “per-turn” damage can be only aquired when suffering multiple injuries - something which I saw achieved using explosives mostly.
My fear, I suppose is, that moving bleeding to the end of the turn, would lessen its impact, making it just too of an insignificat feature, as it will still leave an enemy to cause some damage. However, it also might bring some tactical depth - injuring enemies in such a way, so they don’t pose danger - be it destroy their weapons or shoot their legs so they can’t reach you in time before bleeding out. So I suppose it all depends how the game plays. In addition, values are to change completely for beta 5, so it will be interesting to see if and how things will change (per-turn damage compared to health pools, amount of health individual limbs have).
As to other per-turn attacks, I have no clue, as I haven’t been paying that much attention to tactical combat developments. Are those other effects (acid, burn, poison) come with initial damage or not? Of no it would make sense for them to trigger at the start of the turn, while keeping bleed at the end, as they already benefit from burst damage done by physical damage. If there is no significat difference between how those statuses are applied, I would keep them unified. Rather then playing with what triggers when, I would rather see some other exploration of what those statuses can do (I rather liked LongWars poison - which didn’t damage units outright if they chose not to take action, or burning in XCOM2, which didn’t do much damage, but disabled abilities, or acid which was effective against armor).
Or perhaps, all would be good with some number tweaking? Making bleed/poison/burn/acid less likely to simply finish an enemy or soldier after initial damage burst? If I remember well, XCOMs have DpT at the start of each turn, and it works just fine, though it is very unlikely to stack them up in a significant amount.
In lots of games, if you apply an effect on your turn, the damage is done when you get a new turn. Not giving the opponent the capacity to react isn’t great. I remember being surprised to see my tech dying before I get to heal him. A bit like FiraXCom for exploding cars would be more intuitive. If you apply the damage, then it ticks on beginning of your turn. If the aliens do it, it ticks at the beginning of their turn.
Seems fair that way. After all, this damage is applied every turn afterwards. Why make it a half-turn at the beggining ?
And yes, calling something “dumb” because you don’t agree is a bad method. Please don’t use.
Great point pantolomin. That was an argument I wanted to add in my previous post, but forget about it. 
I agree, this would be my preferred system too. It’s not that I think that one system is right or wrong, it’s just what I find more enjoyable.
I find that allowing an opportunity for units to be healed (both for enemies and player) adds to excitement and on-the-move changes of priorities/plans during battle.
Otherwise, as you mentioned, it’s basically a 5 damage weapon doing 7 on its first hit.
Obviously, in most cases, this is only an issue where the unit in question will be killed on the next turn, otherwise there is still an opportunity to heal as normal.
There are a couple of other variables that can change how this kind of system feels when you’re actually playing but I won’t go into those now.
