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Ambulances


RedWardancer

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As many of us know, there are basically two types of medics in SB: Ambulance vehicles such as the M113A3 Medic, and medic teams found in infantry platoons comprised of the platoon sergeant with a medic.  Ambulance vehicles heal wounded crew members with incredible success, while medic teams MIGHT heal infantry with a base success chance of 40% if set quality is conscript.  Medic vehicles does not help infantry, and medic teams does not assist crews.  In reality, this is bogus, but that's the game.

 

Has there been any talk about changing this?  To where vehicles can and will assist infantry and so on?  Forgive me if this has been brought up before, but topic search did not produce any results other than in OOB posts.

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I've been lead to believe (based solely on what was stated in the latest release notes for the PE) that in the classroom version medic teams are now assigned to ambulance vehicles, thereby changing the default behavior of such vehicles to better reflect the changes since 4.000, but I may be wrong there.

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At the heart of the problem is that in SB Pro the vehicle is the entity, and crew members are components of it. So it's just a specialized form of repair.

Infantry on the other hand, even the smallest team is a formation. Once that a soldier is hit and taken out of the game you can't simply reset his state, not the least because the formation may have traveled a good distance between the moment of casualty, and when then medic arrives.

 

So, a direct consequence of that is the problem to actually find the casualties. Wherever they get hit, they drop to the ground. We don't really want to simulate wounded states where injured soldiers get carried by their comrades, casualty collection points, triage stations, etc. But a consequence of that is, there's inanimate bodies strewn all over the place, so to "repair" them you'd need to find them in the first place, and when you reanimate a soldier character you don't know where he belonged to because that information is contained in the infantry formation that may be even kilometers away.

In the classroom version, the instructor can simply right-click and "repair all" on a squad (which is not without its own set of complications; once rendered incapacitated/inanimate, crucial meta information is simply deleted like to which squad the soldier originally belonged (or, if it's a pool actor, what was his target destination, should he immediately attempt to move back to the pool, ...))


Just a few examples that I can think of right off the cuff; once that the programmers would get to it they would probably come up with a lot of other things that would need to be addressed first before we could even think of applying medics to regular infantry. So, in the light of this we usually come to the conclusion that other work items offer a bigger pay-off to the average user.

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On 3/31/2019 at 3:32 PM, Ssnake said:

Infantry on the other hand, even the smallest team is a formation

 

Just want to clarify something unrelated....

 

To heal infantry, do you place medic near the infantry (that are alive) or the dead bodies?

 

Edit: Wiki says this, but I rarely have success, even with elite medics

Quote

The use of the medic team is fairly simple. When infantry units suffer casualties, simply move the platoon XO unit to the location where the casualties are located. Once the platoon XO (or Medic Team) units arrives and is in a battle position, the medic will move around to heal (revive) casualties that can be saved if they are located within a small radius of his location (approximately 25m or so)

 

Edited by Apocalypse 31
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  • 1 month later...

Has anyone actually seen this work?  I have playtested a platoon on platoon shoot out between APC units just to see how it works.  Even with Elite quality medic teams and integrated medics, I have yet to see any troops healed after about five test runs.

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8 minutes ago, RedWardancer said:

Has anyone actually seen this work?  I have playtested a platoon on platoon shoot out between APC units just to see how it works.  Even with Elite quality medic teams and integrated medics, I have yet to see any troops healed after about five test runs.

Don't worry about it. They work very well in the new version.

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im not a big fan of the medic concept in the scope pf steel beasts except generally under the circumstance to medevac already established casualities as an established mission conceit at the outset of the mission.

 

healing killed troops during play begs the question- would that not require the computer to calculate the chance something may be more or less lethal and track types of events which affected a unit, that is, it should be unlikely that troops run over by tanks or have been unconscious in a burning building for 30 minutes would be revived because they are still in placeholder living state rather than killed and removed. and then to that end it might get more granular- hits to body parts which would probably severe an artery immediately, or hit by certain calibers should not have the same base chance of being revived as others.

 

in principle i'm never against content, and i also recognize that casualty rates tend to be artificially high in simulation environments, and that modern medical procedures on the battlefield save a lot more lives than previously anytime in history. at the same time, this seems to be a very difficult area to program that would necessarily be abstracted even if a large amount of time were put into it.

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Steel Beasts stores no information whatsoever about medical conditions. Whenever infantry (or a crew member, for that matter) "goes down" it is considered "incapacitated" - which looks like one of those wonderful military euphemisms, but it's really just the word to describe eeverone who is no longer capable of fighting. And then the medic's function is purely statistical. There's a certain chance to restore the fighting capacity of a casualty which goes up with the training level of the medic.

 

We can certainly debate whether those levels are reasonable or realistic. From a gaming perspective you want to reward the player for taking care of his men, so that favors higher-than-average chances for successful necromancy. From a wargaming perspective maybe you'd favor lower chances of success to reflect actual casualty statistics. Right now our model is based on the "reward" approach. It might not be entirely realistic, but then again we have a large number of other cases in SB Pro where we're "not realistic" either. AI behavior, tank guns that don't collide with anything, ... it's called abstraction.

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