Playing a medic
I tried playing a bit as a medic today, simply by always sticking to the main force of the army, using a simple rifle (G36 / M16) and keeping my eyes peeled for wounded comrades. It wasn't very interesting, for various reasons:
1. Response time: Whenever I saw someone get hit, the AI was on the scene in no-time to do my job for me.
2. Number of medics: Same as above, the quantity of medics does not represent the number of medics in a real conflict. Someone was always on the scene before me.
3. Not enough patients: There are too few AI soldiers with vests. Playing a medic in a serious conflict in a zone should feel like crisis management, not waiting for someone with a vest to get hit.
4. Sometimes wounded soldiers were under heavy fire, but still one medic after the other tries to get to him, all dying in the process.
5. Fun fact: healing an enemy soldier does NOT convert him to your side. My men had actually pinned down an enemy on a roof in Vaal. He got wounded, I climbed the ladder and healed him. He proceeded to reload his weapon and walked of the edge right into a bunch of my men. He didn't stand a chance.

Some suggestions to make the role of a medic more interesting:
- A clear visual indicator to show where a nearby wounded unit is located, which only appears if you have a medkit equipped.
- Vests should greatly increase the chances of surviving a hit, but not wearing a vest shouldn't automatically mean you get killed by a single hit. Wearing a vest could mean that your chances of not getting killed instantly from a bullet are increased from 10% to 80%, with sniper fire ignoring vests altogether.
- Increase the number of AI with vests.
- Reduce the number of AI with medkits.
- Medics should only get in to heal when the target is not under direct fire from the enemy.
- RP or XP bonus for healing a soldier.
- Healing an enemy soldier should convert him to your side or at least reward your with a substantial bonus of RP or XP. Just for the heck of it.

'Class' distinction suggestions
If you have a medkit equipped (or in hand, not in inventory) you should have a white helmet and/or arm band.
If you have a LAW equipped (with 1 or more RPGs) it should be visible on your back.
If you have a riot shield equipped it should be visible on your back.

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Moderator /u/Myrandall of the RWR subreddit.
http://www.reddit.com/r/RunningWithRifles

Nailed it.

I agree with all of these. I wish you could get wounded without a vest. Albeit more rarely.

Edit: Kickass updates dev team, I'm away for a month and im blown away again!

Yeah, that was the next thing I wanted to suggest, too. Way too many medics but wounded soldiers are very rare during the gameplay. I like also your idea of the class distinction. Good ideas!

Here's a Picture to demonstrate how it could be:

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Creator of the "Alternative Icons" Mod (http://www.modulaatio.com/runningwithrifles/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1764)

This is interesting as I had this discussion with pasik a few days ago and we didn't have the same opinion about this so it's good to discuss it with the community.
We will externalize such settings as script so that we could make a mod and see how it feels like.

I totally agree to all of your points listed. Here a few things/facts:

- Vests will have more "hitpoints" in future version, maybe even in 0.90 so that more than one hit will be required to wound you.
- I agree that there are not enough wounded soldiers on the battlefield (about 4% are wearing a vest if I remember right, I'd rather see it at 8%).
- I agree that a weapon should have a slight chance to wound an enemy, no matter if he wears a vest or not.
- Having more wounded soldiers on the battlefield might raise the killing/stabbing abuse over defenseless soldiers. That would require some light changes in the experience gain logic. Killing a wounded soldier would substract the XP you earned while wounding him as killing a wounded soldier isn't allowed in "clean modern warfare". Also killing the medic would substract the gained XP but that might be too hard to track, so not too sure about this.
- Hmm I think you already get some RP when healing a soldier, or?

Hmm I've healed a few downed soldiers and haven't gotten any xp (at least it didn't show that I did). I agree that more AI soldiers should have vests but the number with medkits is fine, I think, especially if you raise the number with vests. Definitely like the idea of losing xp if you stab a wounded soldier. However, what about shooting them? I wouldn't mind losing xp for that as well but don't want to see the AI not shoot a wounded soldier; that would defeat the whole experience of trying to heal a wounded soldier in the middle of a fire fight.

Speaking of that; I was thinking about how cool it would be to somehow have the AI occasionally wound a soldier and just leave them there to "lure" other soldiers out to pick them off. I know that's probably extremely difficult to program and wouldn't even necessarily fit the pace of the game... but would still be cool.

Shooting or stabbing it doesn't matter, you'd just get the XP penalty as you are not allowed to kill wounded soldiers. The AI would probably still do it as the bots don't care anyway if they get a XP penalty or not

How about this: Have the game treat wounded soldiers as dead in most ways. Don't reward or subtract XP when a wounded soldier is finished off. Enemy soldiers should ignore wounded soldiers if there are any living enemies remaining. If the allies of the wounded manage to push back the enemies, most of the wounded would still be alive. Wounded soldiers would also be able to respawn by clicking on a spawn point or pressing space.

This isn't perfect, but it solves the XP abuse problem and lets wounded survive until the end of the battle. Any thoughts?

Edit:


In real life, combat medics carry and use firearms, so they aren't protected by the Geneva Convention. They don't wear any extra markings either. Why not just show the medikit on the back, like the other "classes"?

Edit II: Another awesome addition would be to let players pick up wounded allies and carry them to safety if medikits aren't available

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[0.90] Running with Bolters v5



[0.92] Worldwar v2

I support the idea of making this role more interesting. And for that I'm just going to throw out the few ideas that I have relating to this.

1. I think all weapons data should carry the wound capability, possibly related to the kill chance or like this:



And vest would have only hit points.
This kind of system would increase the total stop power of the weapon to 70% (in this example). Could be high, and this particular 20% wound chance could cause too much wounded soldiers on field. But the system would allow to control the numbers. I would also bind the wound chance decay to kill decay start and stop. (both start and stop the decay in the same time)

Now that does bring up the problem Jack here described, also known as the "Field surgery incompatible with Geneva treaty" or Free XP for knife wielding maniacs. The XP reduction system is one way, I think another way could be time related. The wounded could have a random severity index. Some (say 50%) you would only have like 1-3 seconds to start the interaction with the wounded (to begin the CPR or commence the stab!) and other 50% would have like 10-20 seconds of threshold. Also the latter could do stuff like yell for medic, identifying them self as wounded with hope of surviving.

If there is a part of good idea in there, well... good!

I don't want killing a wounded soldier to be seen as a neutral thing but rather a penalty. But if you wound a soldier (let's say +20XP) and you finish him off (-20XP) so that a the end you neither lose nor gain XP. If you finish off a wounded guy that has been shot by another then you'll have -20XP on your bill.
Ignoring a wounded soldier might be an issue as you might end up barely dying as long as you have a medic not too far away.
Maybe a wounded soldier could respawn before the end of the timer (hmm it was 30 seconds I guess) but not right away, maybe at around 10-15 seconds.

Since the medic would be alive, he wouldn't be ignored by the AI. Also, remember that wounded soldiers would still get killed by grenades and missed bullets.


This would change the game significantly. We won't be able to use grenades in larger fights, for example. The grenade would kill more wounded than healthy enemies, since the wounded can't move out of the blast radius. Spraying machine gun fire and using the tank would be more difficult too. If you do feel the need to implement this, please externalize this penalty so it can be changed. I can't stress this enough.


Why not? It would fit the fast pace of vanilla RWR.

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[0.90] Running with Bolters v5



[0.92] Worldwar v2