Or not. take a look at the gruesome pictures posted by Sodin. It’s mechanically not possible to use your arm when the fracture is that severe. Add to this the shock and pain, and there’s a limit to what the human body can do, despite what Hollywood shows.
That said, gameplay trumps realism in my book, and I find that arm damage is a bit too severe atm, and head damage isn’t enough.
Ehh… that’s not true, armor can also simply reduce the damage taken. Take a bulletproof vest for instance. If you get shot while wearing one of those, there’s a good chance you’ll break (or at least bruise) some ribs. Still quite a bit better than no armor at all.
For me I like a balance between realism and gameplay, but with both, what I dislike above all else is dumbing down of systems to make games into lighter versions of what they would otherwise be. I mainly game on a PC because I expect some complexity from PC games, if I wanted quick easy win games where nobody ever died or got injured I’d buy a phone game
To touch on some of the points made by others in the thread - I agree with vargata that you should be able to crouch at any time, whether immediately behind cover or not. Especially as PP has a realistic ballistics system, I feel that soldiers should have a realistic means of getting out of the way of those bullets. If they only crouch when stood next to cover it’s neither realistic or good gameplay.
I also agree that there should be a movement cost for turning to view different angles (4 AP to move and 1 AP to turn sounds good), and that you shouldn’t automatically view 360 degrees.
I’d like to see perma-death in the game, along with injuries and disabilities, and I’m more than happy to see them being inflicted via one shot kills (I don’t think that every shot should kill, but it should be possible for one shot to kill if it hits a vital area). - This a war, people die in wars, what’s more is that the game’s genre is horror. It would be a pretty poor example of a horror game imho if everyone who got injured sat about drinking cocoa for a couple of weeks then went back into battle as good as new. I think by the end of the game, that the squad you take into the final battle should be the only guys still alive after the rest have been wiped out, it shouldn’t be a case of picking your best squad of 16 from a total pool of 50 with the rest being surplus to requirement.
Finally I love to see RNG in games, it’s why I play the TBS genre, and the basis upon why this genre became popular in the first place. I think there’s a group of people who are not used to playing games where as a player you don’t automatically win all the time and/or who don’t understand the logic which sits behind managing risk within a percentage driven game, and they’ll call repeated against RNG. But life itself is random, it’s a not just a puzzle to work out, sometimes even the best solution to a problem results in failure (on other occasions you get lucky, but strangely this is far less complained about). I think when TBS games use RNG well within them that this creates the most fun, tense and enjoyable of all games to play.
It’s funny people don’t like the limb disable mechanic. It is probably one of my favorite mechanics in the game. Look at it just as when in nuXCOM a soldier gets critically wounded and stabilized. Will be prsctically useless for the rest of the mission, but he will be alive and useful in future missions. Furthermore, Julian already mentioned there will be ways to fix disabled limbs mid-mission.
Guys, keep in mind the build is not a finished game.
Well, broken arms but fine legs allows you to run to live another day. Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for 
A disabled head currently isn’t horrible. The loss of willpower may be more severe when these are more integrated into the game, but I don’t think a malus to just abuot every action would be out of order, either: reduced accuracy, perception, willpower, at the least.
Guys, your conclusions are incorrect. People are willing to have new interesting mechanics but don’t want to have unusable soldiers on the battlefield. It was stated many many times in many posts, as many times as was answered that things are going to change in the final game (along with possible ways of dealing with injuries if we are talking about them.)
The same goes with stances-who doesn’t want them?
But we can’t state: this or that is dumbed down (like Vargata did) when game is still in early development…Geez…
I do. From a game play perspective I think it’s an interesting mechanic in itself to have soldiers on the battlefield that are unusable due to injury. It gives the player a dilemma as to whether to try to protect those soldiers or not. I think that’s far more interesting tactically, than to just have a soldier be dead or alive. On the realism side, I also thing it makes far more sense for a guy who’s down to his last HP to also be compromised in terms of his efficiency in battle.
It may be interesting on paper, but not necessary in game. Making soldiers unpowered “just like that” because of some sort of bad luck, sounds to me like not much fun… During the game I’d like to focus on aliens and tactics, not my fatally injured troops with hands disabled.
With useless soldiers more frustration would came as chances of losing any mission would increase drastically. And imagine having few of them on one of your hive missions…
Making soldier useless when he loses all (or almost all) of his health is another thing though, more interesting and more based on player’s mistakes than just bad luck.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. What you call frustration, I call tension, and I’m hoping that the game will be full of that. I want there to be a real sense of facing situations within the game where the your best laid plans might go wrong, and that as a player you’ll need to be ready to adapt.
I hope myself that game will be full of tension with high chances to retreat - in fact I’m prettty sure of it. But tension may be expressed by many other things, excluding badluck-related, immersion breaking things like necessity to hide your injured soldiers because there is nothing to do with them until the end of mission.
We could argue for ages as it’s really a matter of preference and there’s no perfect answer, but having played FXComs with Red fog (injured soldiers have reduced stats based on the severity of their wounds, also applies to aliens), dealing with crippled soldiers is more interesting than dealing with dead soldiers that got a 1-crit hit from a pissed off muton. A few things to take into consideration though.
Considering that targeting body parts to disable crabmen is the way to go, there has to be some parity here. If you can do it to them, they can do it to you. Otherwise you fall into the “entitled gamer” bias, asking for a balanced game but also asking for “adjusted RNG” to fit their expectations (if anyone’s got a link to Sid Meyer’s speech about this, feel free to post).
Disabling crabmen weapons is the way to go in this alpha. Things may change and I expect a rebalancing of body parts damage, but if it becomes much harder to disable PP soldiers and aliens alike, then alien return fire may become more significant and cause casualties instead of limb damage.
Bad luck is always a point of disagreement between gamers, but I consider it an essential part of a tactical game. Military history if full of brilliant battle plans that got ruined by bad luck or a stupid blunder and I like my games to feature that possibility. I consider the ability to deal with bad luck, salvage what you can and make the most of it a core skill for these games.
How is it immersion breaking to have to deal with useless injured soldiers? There’s a reason why military forces in RL have medkits, field training, evacuation procedures and the like. Soldiers do get wounded and incapacitated to various levels and it has to be accounted for. I liked FXCOM2’s idea of calling for evac and removing unconscious/bleeding soldiers from the battlefield, at the cost of having one of your guys carrying them away. There were balance issues around this, but the core idea was nice.
Totally agree with you, this may be fun if not overdone.
But I believe our discussion about useless injured soldiers is quite pointless as (probably) final game give us tools to mitigate effects of disabled limbs (during the mission or right after - during hospitalization).
It’s no different to having a soldier be completely disabled because he’s dead “just like that”. At least with someone who has been disabled or partially disabled, there will be opportunities to get them back into the action, or to make use of them in other ways. A dead soldier is always a dead soldier. Again, try not to judge systems too much on their current implementation. Remember, there’s still a lot missing.
I’m not the one judging anything based on pre-alpha, UV. I was just referring to Madxav answer who assumed people don’t like the limb disable mechanic (and disagreeing with him) and then to Vathar’s who would like to see some situations with soldiers useless on battle so we could take care of them.
I’m not against injured limbs mechanics, never said that. Again, we were discussing about situations where soldiers could be totally useless but I’m sure that final game gives us tools to make them useful again, one way or another, so we won’t have situations like these too often.
I’ve just said it in my previous comment so I’m not sure why do you think I’m judging anything or have negative approach? I’m not judging or whining about any particular ideas, just tried to say how too much (so-called) realism not always means better game and discussed this over.
I’m sorry if my reply came off as being solely directed at you. I was aiming to address the whole thread. People are making a lot of pre-conceptions and asking for redesigns of systems which haven’t even been completely shown yet.
I think this is the one you mean
Robba: sad that video from sid is full of poor, flawed math. Just because he has made a few good games it doesnt mean he is good at randomness or logic. I could get started to explain all the bollocks in it but it just isnt worth my time and you wouldnt belive me anyway because I dont have the name 
(ohh, Ive just realised Ive already commented on this video why its bull have a good reading)
Of course it’s total bullshit, but the point is that it’s not his bullshit, but what players come up with to complain when they lose and engagement in an RNG driven 4X game.
I’d be much happier if the answer to disgruntled/entitled players had always been “learn maths and deal with it”
Actually the video explains how psychology in games is very illogical. How someone will feel like occasionally losing a 2 against 1 battle is ok, but losing a 20 against 10 is not. Logically those are the same odds, but he goes on explaining that in games logic doesn’t matter and it’s more important how gamers perceive the game.
Anyway, I wasn’t actually advocating in favor of the video. I merely linked it because @Vathar mentioned it and I figured I’d link it.
look for tuareg’s explanation on why 2 vs 1 is not the same as 20 vs 10 under the video you have linked its pretty simple… you might even learn from it.