so with max medicine you only get 3% casualty survival chance?

[Morning★Star]

Isn't this kind of ridiculous i mean in warband you could reach ~80% survive chance with surgery skill

[nephilimnexus]

Perks are still mostly broken, so expecting them to be balanced is... well, let's not our hold our breath. In the meantime, I'm sure there's mods for this issue already. If that doesn't work, then I suggest just using a cheat to crank your medicine up to 1000 or so.

Disclaimer: Even with a medicine of 1000 and a listed save % of 100, it's still possible to "roll a 1" and fail once in a while.

[AfLIcTeD]

It may only say 3% but the survival rate is really high. From my experience it is about 80% survival.

[Zerosaiko]

When I saw the casualty survival chance in the skill window, I was pretty pissed too. The skill window just can't properly explain how helpful it is. Honestly, I think it's the healing rate that doesn't benefit enough from medicine.

tl;dr Medicine's survival chance description is wrong, "1.0%" is way more than just adding 1%, going from "1.0%" to "2.0%" means less than going from "0.0%" to "1.0%".

This forum post (https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/tactical-decisions-on-the-battlefield-should-play-a-bigger-role-in-deciding-the-tide-of-battle.426052/post-9474705) talks about someone else on the TW Discord going and crunching the numbers from the code. I'm not on that Discord though, so this is more secondhand.

If you don't feel like visiting the link, the big point is that having 100 medicine is enough to have a +50% survival rate for any troop.

I myself did go and look at the code to verify, and the numbers from that post do seem to be accurate.

There are a few different variables that affect survival chances, but this topic is focusing on the first:

1) Surgeon's Medicine skill
2) Downed character's level
3) Enemy Surgeon's Medicine skill if they have Doctor's Oath
4) Heroes start off with a 10% to die instead of the usual 100%

The big thing is that the more of 1-3 that you have, the less the next point of any of those affects survival chances. This is especially true with 4). Going from 0 Medicine to 330 Medicine only brings a Level 1 hero from a ~90.9% chance of survival to a ~93% chance, but that doesn't matter right now. Getting more medicine is great, but just grabbing a decent surgeon wanderer could be enough.

[Blood Flowers]

This skill increases casualty survival chance by +0.01 per level (see next paragraph) and increases healing rate by +0.1% per level (based on the party's Surgeon's medicine level, or the party leader's medicine level if no Surgeon is assigned). It also increases garrisoned troops' healing rate by +0.1% per medicine level of the governor of the garrison's town.

Surgery survival chance is a mildly complex formula of
1 - 1/(1 + 0.03 * c + 0.01 * s)
where c is the wounded character's overall level and s is the surgeon's medicine level.

Source: bannerlordperks.com

In other words:
-For a level 26 unit (any T5 unit), with 0 medicine the survival rate is about 44%.
-For a level 26 unit, with 100 medicine the survival rate is about 64%.
-For a level 26 unit, with 300 medicine the survival rate is about 79%.

The gap is even more noticeable for lower tier units:
-For a level 6 unit (any T1 unit), with 0 medicine the survival rate is about 15%.
-For a level 6 unit, with 100 medicine the survival rate is about 54%.

Note that the way the equation works, the early levels in medicine are worth significantly more than the later levels.