How do you deal with wounds?

[Zodiark12]

I was wondering how everyone was dealing with wounds exactly. What I mean is, do you take care not to be wounded or do you make the kill even if it expose you to attacks? I'm asking because I'm having a hard time keeping my knights healthy.

For exemple on my current game I'm not even on day 100 and all of my 6 knights are wounded, a new bloom just started (Which seems to be coming quite fast I might add... like 2 days after the last bloom mission expired) and I'm placed to take on two missions but this seems to be quite the task without healthy knights.

I never had issues with such games. I've played similar games (Notably Xcom) a lot but this one I seem to have a hard time grasping the strategy. Ranged weapons seems to have very little range and melee expose your knights. But hell can they take a beating.

Ranged attack just seems a waste most of the time. I'm encountering A LOT of Chaos Space Marine (Last mission I did I had like a dozen or so of these show up and like 6 cultist) and they are giving me issues. They have a fairly large health pool compared to what I've been dealing up until now + 3 armor that regenate each turn. I mean ranged attack that do 2 dmg seems pointless when the armor just gonna regenerate.

Thoughts?

[Solus]

Personally i play on standard difficulty and i always have a specific squad composition of justicar (more action points on intersessor), intersessor (full crit chance and hammerhand), apothecary (warp speed and iron hand biomancies); on the fourth slot i set whatever i fancy usually a librarian or chaplain or paladin (if i wnat to go full for executions).

With all the above and proper skills and equipment you can finish every battle (even reapers) in one turn. Just buff with everything you got your intersessor and watch him chopping everything off while the rest of the team just picks up the trash.

I am on day 980 just before the final mission and i had 0 casualties or even injuries in combat. Ofc i killed some guys off purposely to respec some of my elite guys but that doesn't count right? And some injuries may occur from some crappy events. In this case try to upgrade the infirmary or apothecarion or whatever is called, which greatly reduces the healing process.

[Zodiark12]

Originally posted by Solus:

Personally i play on standard difficulty and i always have a specific squad composition of justicar (more action points on intersessor), intersessor (full crit chance and hammerhand), apothecary (warp speed and iron hand biomancies); on the fourth slot i set whatever i fancy usually a librarian or chaplain or paladin (if i wnat to go full for executions).

With all the above and proper skills and equipment you can finish every battle (even reapers) in one turn. Just buff with everything you got your intersessor and watch him chopping everything off while the rest of the team just picks up the trash.

I am on day 980 just before the final mission and i had 0 casualties or even injuries in combat. Ofc i killed some guys off purposely to respec some of my elite guys but that doesn't count right? And some injuries may occur from some crappy events. In this case try to upgrade the infirmary or apothecarion or whatever is called, which greatly reduces the healing process.

Yeah an event left me with 4 wounded, which may be why I've felt so unbalanced. I've been focusing on maxing the ship speed for now, I didn't built anything else (aside from the initial construction for servitor production and progniscator). I guess the infirmary may be my next building step.

[Vathek1]

Originally posted by Solus:

Personally i play on standard difficulty and i always have a specific squad composition of justicar (more action points on intersessor), intersessor (full crit chance and hammerhand), apothecary (warp speed and iron hand biomancies); on the fourth slot i set whatever i fancy usually a librarian or chaplain or paladin (if i wnat to go full for executions).

With all the above and proper skills and equipment you can finish every battle (even reapers) in one turn. Just buff with everything you got your intersessor and watch him chopping everything off while the rest of the team just picks up the trash.

I am on day 980 just before the final mission and i had 0 casualties or even injuries in combat. Ofc i killed some guys off purposely to respec some of my elite guys but that doesn't count right? And some injuries may occur from some crappy events. In this case try to upgrade the infirmary or apothecarion or whatever is called, which greatly reduces the healing process.

Playing on Legendary, I will do one of two things:

1. If Knights only have standard wounds and I really do need them, I will just field them anyway. If you take missions slow and play carefully, you should be fine.
   
2. If the Knight has a serious wound (-6 HP), you could let him sit the mission out. But ideally, you'd have a substitute. If you absolutely need that particularly chap, just play it carefully and keep him from getting beat up too badly

In general, when it comes to "playing it slow," the important thing to realise is that there are only a few actually nasty Warp events. These are
[/list]

• Denizens of the Warp (spawns additional reinforcements at the end of the turn)
  
• Additional Bloomspawn (spawns static lesser Bloomspawn). The ones to worry about are the green or brown pods which actually have ranged attacks. The bigger brown clusters can be shot down from a safe range. And all lesser Bloomspawn can be insta-killed by a use of Hammerhand or Astral Aim
  
• Plague zones spawn for three turns. Very annoying, especially since the zones can spawn right under your Knights
  
• Zones of weakness--again annoying, but not necessarily an issue if your Knights have good ranged attacks, or you run a stun-heavy composition
  
• Plague host--gives the enemy an additional potential spawn of Denizens of the Warp, or spawning help when you attack a greater Bloomspawn or Bloom Spreader

With Denizens of the Warp, you can only get this event a limited number of times per mission. Additional reinforcements which spawn in when you attack a Bloomspawn (or spreader) will decrement enemy reinforcements, so it's possible that even on a Bloom Seed mission, you may not encounter the additional reinforcements after collecting the last seed, depending on the warp events you faced up to that point.

[Baby Beluga]

On legendary, I ignore wounds and use the same knights anyway. I play safely by using the purgator's astral aim to disable any enemy capable of inflicting plague or shooting missiles. Grenades I'll often use to knock back certain melee focused enemies so that they'll be unable to move and attack a knight in one turn.

[Vathek1]

Originally posted by Baby Beluga:

Grenades I'll often use to knock back certain melee focused enemies so that they'll be unable to move and attack a knight in one turn.

I imagine this is pretty terrain-dependent, since some melee enemies have rather large movement ranges. I'm not sure if most enemies also have a base movement range of 5 tiles per AP like your Knights do. However, I like using frag grenades to knock smaller enemies (i.e. anything that smaller than a Terminator-armoured plague marine) off ledges to insta-kill them. Bigger targets can be dropped if they are on white bridges, which are destructible, but Terminator armour makes enemies (and your own Knights) immune to knockback.

Only frag grenades inflict knockback IIRC. The other damaging grenades (psyk-out and krak) don't inflict knockback.

Originally posted by Baby Beluga:

On legendary, I ignore wounds and use the same knights anyway. I play safely by using the purgator's astral aim to disable any enemy capable of inflicting plague or shooting missiles

I used the same tactics in the early game, at least until I had access to Librarians and good stun-heavy loadouts. However, I've found that using astral aim (or hammerhand) to disabled ranged weaponry doesn't help much against Hellbrutes (you can't take off the plasma cannon) or Blight Haulers--for some odd reason, they can still blast you with their meltaguns (which hurt a lot) even if you destroy their ranged weapon. You also cannot disable Blightlord Terminators' autocannons, but blinding them does make them hurt a bit less if they shoot you.

Generally, though, by the time you start seeing Nurgle Terminator marines and Chaos Dreadnoughts in appreciable numbers, you generally have the tools to stun and execute them easily, or build up enough AP executing their buddies to focus them down on one turn. And fortunately, Blight Haulers have rather low HP.