Alien Critical Wound System (Long Term Damage)

[Steelpoint]

Summary: Another one of my weird ideas but here goes.

A new 'critical damage' system is added to Xenomorphs as a way to add more long term consequences to sustaining significant amounts of damage.

Critical damage is a cumulative damage system. If you either fall into critical damage (guaranteeing you suffer a critical wound) or you fall to below 75% non-crit health and roll a bad RNG roll, you will suffer a critical wound.

A single critical wound is relatively a minor nuisance, as explained below, however if you continue to acclimate critical wounds the Alien will start to suffer serious complications and handicaps to their role.

Benefits: This proposed system would add an actual, serious, long term effect to being badly wounded to Xenos BUT the system will not be as close to as crippling as it is for Humans.

Aliens should not have to suffer similar wounds as Humans do, but I think they should still suffer some kind of deliberating wound if they suffer extensive damage but they survive.

Details

What is a critical wound?
A single critical wound confers a small negative modifier to the victim xeno. For example, one critical wound could reduce a Aliens maximum run speed by 2.5% to 5%, another could reduce a Aliens pounce/charge/spit recharge rate by 5%. The exact kind of negative modifier would depend on the Alien class affected.

If an Alien triggers being afflicted by a critical wound, they have a RNG chance of rolling between one to three random modifiers (60% for one, 35% for two and 5% for three). Meaning a unlucky xeno could get slapped with three bad effects in one wound.

Critical wounds stack, the upper limit is debatable (anywhere from 20% to 50%) but multiple critical wounds will continue to climb, and if left untreated can result in an Alien being severally handicapped.

How do you get a critical wound?
There are only two ways a Alien can suffer a critical wound.

First, almost every xeno has a % chance to suffer a critical wound if their health falls below 75% (that number being their health BEFORE they reach critical damage). The chance of the Alien suffering a critical wound would depend on their Upgrade age. A Young Alien would have a 75% chance to suffer a wound, Mature a 50% chance, Elite a 25% chance and a Ancient Alien will have a 0% chance to suffer a critical wound from this trigger.

The only exception to this rule is the Crusher, a Crusher will never suffer a critical wound if their health falls below 75%.

Secondly, if an Alien falls into crit, then they will suffer a critical wound no matter what.

How do you remove a critical wound?
I propose there are two main ways to remove critical wounds.

Firstly, if a Alien upgrades or evolves, they remove all current critical wounds they are suffering.

Secondly, a new "regen nest" is added as a xeno construction. This is a very expensive building that only a Queen or Hivelord can construct, the regen nest has two structures that must be built next to each other, only three can exist at any time and they emit a powerful light (like a flood light) around it. An Alien can sleep in the regen chamber and after two minutes all of their critical wounds will be healed, however a xeno inside the chamber will be fully asleep, cannot be woken up unless dragged out of the chamber, and is very vulnerable to literally anything. This encourages regen nests to be placed in a isolated and safe location.

Also, the Queen is unique in that she will automatically heal any critical wounds she is suffering from over time.

[Ikmalmn]

Ahh cool, just like how dieing (in CM case, critical wounds) in E.Y.E Cybermancy would not give any bad effects, but doing it too much will give a permanent forever stat debuff on the character.

Seems like a pretty cool idea, this would encourage xeno's to play a bit passive and discourage them from hoarding themselves as a Young to evolve to T2/T3

[Steelpoint]

Pretty much.

The system is more to encourage Aliens to keep up to date with their maintenance, or to encourage them to evolve/upgrade.

It also can punish Aliens if their Queen dies as now they lose the ability to evolve away their injuries and further regen nests are now harder to make.

[OatzAndHoes]

-1
All this will do is make xenos less aggressive and more cautious. Last thing we need is a bunch of turtling xenos afraid of leaving cover because they'll get stat debuffs.

[TJ3003]

-1
This would seriously effect the bounce back of aliens as Oatz said. And make them far to cautious, The eventual build up of very large stat negatives, especially like 60% is just asking for the Xeno to die. While marines can suffer wounds and be pulled out of battle just fine, eventually being healed up that is marines, there 70-100 of them at round start, 1 marine out of 70 isnt going to make much of a difference, but 1 Xeno severely crippled out of 20 is a serious hit to hives capabilities as a whole, especially if its a T3 such as a crusher or a ravager.

[Swagile]

A xeno's greatest strength is their attrition, and removing that makes xenos weak.

This all boils down to the fact that weed healing is cancerous in how fast it is (especially if you have a competent drone / carrier / queen using recovery pheremone) compared to how long it takes to heal a fracture / broken wound / busted lung, etc. Weed healing as a concept is alright, just not how fast it is in general.

Thats a different topic altogether, but it illustrates that this is an extreme suggestion to fixing the concept that is weed healing and just won't work in the long term.

[Butterrobber202]

-1

Xenos have... Weird abilities to say the least, one of those strange powers is a ridiculous healing factor. They are Bio-Engineered to be the best organic Killing machines money can buy, they heal from that kind of stuff.

[shyshadow]

-1

Xenos have... Weird abilities to say the least, one of those strange powers is a ridiculous healing factor. They are Bio-Engineered to be the best organic Killing machines money can buy, they heal from that kind of stuff.

Money can buy? Bro, I hate Xenos and I even know Weyland-Yutani didn't make them.

[Butterrobber202]

Money can buy? Bro, I hate Xenos and I even know Weyland-Yutani didn't make them.

It was something of a metaphor, they were engineered by the Engineers.

[Garrison]

I'm rather neutral to this, while I do agree Xeno's recover way too quickly, which constantly forces Marines to be on the defensive. This feels really punishing in some scenarios; Such as RNG screwing you over in a skirmish or two. I suppose it would depend on how easy or hard it is to attain/remove a critical wound on an alien.

In addition, I believe there is some debate on altering how Xeno's heal. Any changes to the current healing system would possibly make this proposed concept be a bit too crippling for the Aliens. I think the guaranteed crit wound on near death should still be chance based, it could be a bit higher then normal.

I like the idea of the regeneration nest, the Dev's could probably recycle the Surgical-Pod code from Whisky outpost for it. but I think it should only emit light when it is in an active state.

[Jory13]

+1 I think people are over-estimating the effect this will cause, and most CM players are afraid of change anyway.

EDIT: Maybe we should have a test-server?

[TheMaskedMan2]

I was sorta with you until you wound up just making them stat decreased, I thought this was leading up to delimbing or more tangible wounds like a severed tail or something, also overall I think this would just mostly change playstyles of Xenos for the worse.

[caleeb101]

I was sorta with you until you wound up just making yhem stat decreased, I thought this was leading up to delimbing or more tangible wounds like a severed tail or something, also overall I think this would just mostly change playstyles of Xenos for the worse.

I agree with delimbing but not really stat debuffs.

[Steelpoint]

Replace stat debuff with delimbing if you want, the core system is my suggestion not really the side affect of it.

[Garrison]

And I think we just found our compromise.

[Jory13]

Xenos rarely use their tail anyway, plus I'd look cool to see a xeno without a tail.

[Crab_Spider]

Xenos rarely use their tail anyway, plus I'd look cool to see a xeno without a tail.

I use my tail all the time