True? Avoid wounded soldier,otherwise loose endgame

[tc04]

Is that true what I read in blogs and saw in several YouTube tutorials:

First rule in Xcom 2 :
Avoid any wounded soldier at all cost ! Otherwise you loose your best soldiers a long time while they are in hospital ...

and „snowball hurray“ you start your next missions without your best soldiers and maybe loose once again soldiers.

Then progress gets stuck a lot and you won’t have enough good soldiers to succeed in the difficult mid- and end-game.



I would like to play Xcom this way:
Trying to finish each mission with all soldiers alive but not having the need to care about wounds.... that would be perfect for me.


Is it still true that a slight wounded(one bar) soldier could be lost for days ? Even when the soldier gets healed in the mission? Or did they fix it somehow?

I am new to the game ... I play on normal

[Aranador]

Well, at any given time, about half of my soldiers are in the hospital, so I call foul on This idea. Now getting a soldier killed, if they're more than a rookie or squaddie, that hurts a bit more.

All you gotta do to avoid the 'snowball' effect, is not rely on an A team. Keep enough soldiers in rotation, getting experience, that you can always deploy a few skilled soldiers alongside some lesser soldiers. Once you do get a colonel, bench them until you've hit a super tough mission, or you've built up enough of them that you can rotate them in and out.

Ironically, the 'difficult' end game does not exist, or if it does, then you need to work on your skills, because you are not yet 'good' at the game.

If you simply will not have your soldiers be injured, well, I can do this on normal for sure, so work up to it, and so can you. But you will not be able to carry that mindset into the harder difficulties and settings.

[Create@Review(Ravire)]

I usually go thru most of the game without an injured soldier but that's not my main goal my main goal is dealing with the mission objective. Then having it where my squad is spread out enough to where if lets say a viper does the poison effect my whole team doesnt have to go through a med kit but close enough to where they are able to walk to each other. Keeping your squad alive usually you are also thinking about the fact that you can be critted as I call it you know the one shot take somehow insta kills your guy when he has full health I treat every shot as a possible crit. If you can avoid being shot thats good but don't fail the mission because that is actually worse than losing a soldier. I usually have a ranger in front two medics and a sniper I don't like to use explosives because a misclick can end up killing your guy.

[red255]

on the higher difficulties maybe thats true.

on normal, they might miss a mission or two before they are back in the saddle, should be avoided sure, but not at all costs.

[Commander Gorda]

Not true, if you play on legendary wounded soldier can be gone for 40 days without infirmary but its Hardly Game over because Of that. However i try build infirmary pretty early because it helps alot.

[Kevin Flemming]

Infirmary and a dedicated "Medic" solider (using the Specialist class, and sticking to the top tree, if you don't use mods) will help keep your squads in (more) regular rotations.

[Stardustfire]

how shoud a support help decrease infirmary times? it dosnt, it helps get less soldiers killed as long the aliens dont get again a critkinstakill streak (something i seeing more and more in my legendary runs) . wounds taken are carryied over to the base, even when you heal them up again. taking into account that loosing 2 blips sometimes count as a crittical wound (when taking 4 blips sometimes count as a light wound, at soldiers with idetical hp pool) that takes out a soldier for more than 30 days healing during mission dont helps in that department.

[Fringehunter7719]

As far as I'm concerned this is not remotely true. Particularly in WOTC you have to rotate soldiers due to fatigue anyway, and with the ability to recruit at higher ranks via the GTS, resistance ring, mission rewards, black market (and in non WOTC at HQ) you tend to have a reasonable pool of ranked soldiers to draw from at any point past about the first two missions.

You can always scan at templar HQ (or just HQ in vanilla) to improve wound times, and the infirmary (or AWC) is available for a large part of the campaign.

Medics/medikits can reduce the amount of wound time you're looking at by allowing you to heal up a wounded soldier and if there's any risk of being hit later in the mission putting that risk on them, as the only thing that matters for wound timers is the lowest HP value a given soldier hits at any point in a mission, so you get less wounded time by stacking this on a single unit, which you can't do without healing.

A long time ago I went through the .ini files to compile the wound tables in the base game:

Health min	Health max	Min Injury time	Max Injury time
0%	20%	13.02 days	52.08 days
21%	50%	7.81 days	41.67 days
51%	75%	4.56 days	26.04 days
76%	100%	1.30 days	13.02 days

Health min	Health max	Min Injury time	Max Injury time
0%	20%	7.81 days	31.25 days
21%	50%	4.69 days	25 days
51%	75%	2.73 days	15.63 days
76%	100%	0.78 days	7.81 days

As you can see, the wound times for injuries that don't take you below 50% of your HP are nowhere near as severe as the numbers that people tend to bandy about (like 40+ days), even without benefit of infirmary/base scanning.

ETA: On double checking these values are from an older game version, I've pasted the current values in a post below.

[Stardustfire]

well i still ignore your table juggling and hold at what i see live in my game....
and for the thesis of the Starter: just lost another game in Spike Mission because 7/10 of my rooster was longtime injured (the noneinjured where rookies) , so it was zombie squad trying to reach the spike.....

[Fringehunter7719]

I'm not quite sure what you mean, the tables are taken from the game files and are *exactly* what you see in game. That is to say, if we take the example of losing 2HP and being out for 40+ days it is exclusively possible if (a) You're playing on legend difficulty, (b) The soldier that's hit is a rookie (c) You roll in the top 5% of possible wound times.

So if you play the game enough to get 20 rookies injured by 2HP on legend difficulty, you would see that about once. You'd never see it by getting any squaddie or higher ranked soldier injured by 2HP and you'd never see it playing on any other difficulty.

[red255]

the table is unmodified numbers though.

if you had a long wound time but had an engineer in the inirmary and were scanning in the HQ to heal faster pretty sure you could cut the 52 days down to 13 or so.

I think the range of injury times also relate to how far along you are in the game later months you might get a soldier wounded for 52 days, but by that time you can BUY colonel soldiers so its really just putting you out that amount of INTEL.

its a cost sure, but its a fully mitigatable cost that you should seek to avoid.

Generally I get a ranger, with untouchable, a warsuit and a Dodge PCS. the armor and dodge generally reduce incoming damage to 1 Not in all cases sure. but generally.

[Fringehunter7719]

Originally posted by red255:

the table is unmodified numbers though.

if you had a long wound time but had an engineer in the inirmary and were scanning in the HQ to heal faster pretty sure you could cut the 52 days down to 13 or so.

That's true, fair point.

Originally posted by red255:

I think the range of injury times also relate to how far along you are in the game later months you might get a soldier wounded for 52 days...

That's not true. The wounds are just random on a rectangular distribution within the range of possible values. You are just as likely to get a 50 day injury on day 1 as on day 400.

I should make a correction to the tables above, the values have actually been tweaked in the three years since I made the post I took that data from. I've just checked the values from the DefaultGameData.ini file as it stands today, and the table is now:

Health min	Health max	Min Injury time	Max Injury time
0%	20%	22.79 days	50.13 days
21%	50%	7.81 days	29.95 days
51%	75%	3.91 days	20.18 days
76%	100%	1.30 days	12.37 days

Health min	Health max	Min Injury time	Max Injury time
0%	20%	13.67 days	30.08 days
21%	50%	4.69 days	17.97 days
51%	75%	2.34 days	12.11 days
76%	100%	0.78 days	7.42 days

There's not much change there, but the overlap between the 0-20% and 21-50% categories have been reduced, so in fact it's no longer possible to ever get a 40 day injury from a 2HP wound, even on legend.

[Buckaroo Banzai]

Originally posted by Stardustfire:

how shoud a support help decrease infirmary times? it dosnt, it helps get less soldiers killed as long the aliens dont get again a critkinstakill streak...

I am currently using a specialist with the "Surgeon" skill, which slightly lowers wound recovery time of any injured soldiers just by that medic participating in the mission. This doesn't involve the use of a medkit, and works more like an extra ablative shield (and a regenerating one at that!). I have rarely selected that skill before, but are coming to appreciate it more as it stacks with AWS healing rates.

[Abrakadabra]

Originally posted by tc04:

Is that true what I read in blogs and saw in several YouTube tutorials:

First rule in Xcom 2 :
Avoid any wounded soldier at all cost ! Otherwise you loose your best soldiers a long time while they are in hospital ...

and „snowball hurray“ you start your next missions without your best soldiers and maybe loose once again soldiers.

Then progress gets stuck a lot and you won’t have enough good soldiers to succeed in the difficult mid- and end-game.



I would like to play Xcom this way:
Trying to finish each mission with all soldiers alive but not having the need to care about wounds.... that would be perfect for me.


Is it still true that a slight wounded(one bar) soldier could be lost for days ? Even when the soldier gets healed in the mission? Or did they fix it somehow?

I am new to the game ... I play on normal

The problem with wounds is that your soldiers actually die quite easily Often times you are actually lucky that it was only a wound. If somebody has wounded soldiers every or every other mission then they will soon run out of soldiers not only because of injuries but because of too many dead soliers.

It does snowball.

What ppl said is true.

You dont wanne get hit at all. No injuries cause they suck. That soldier could be out for weeks or months even speically painful in early to midgame as I never build infirmary early to midgame.

[tiktaalik]

Biggest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ever. Of course you don't want to constantly have gravely wounded, but an injury here and there is completely fine.

[Stardustfire]

@Buckaro come back to Vanilla and you can continue typeing here. surgoen is nothing you get in Vanilla WotC game.