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[Callista]

So I have a squad with one of their number who's a quadriplegic. He can't wield an M16, of course; so in battle I get messages like, "...sits in thought," "...looks on with authority," "...considers the situation." (Why is he on the squad, you ask? His charisma is unaffected--he can bluff Conservatives like nobody else. He also happens to be eight years old. This game is messed up sometimes...)

Of course there are the stat penalties--heavy ones in his case--but I didn't know that the coding actually took into account that someone with a broken neck couldn't hold a rifle.

What about other injuries? Do they have mechanical effects too?

Actually, I think it would be cool if quadriplegic and armless Liberals could shout the slogan in battle, in addition to the usual messages. Possible addition to the next version?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Personally, I'm not satisfied with the injury system. It's good, but in light of DF it's rather simple.

LCS Humans have the following parts: Head, Torso, 2 Arms, 2 Legs, Upper Spine, Lower Spine, 2 Eyes, Tongue, Face, Heart, Spleen, Liver, and 32 Teeth.

I'd prefer to see a more advanced bone structure added, at least.

[Callista]

You mean like allowing for broken bones in arms and legs as well as the spine?

I guess it would be a way of having limb injury that requires the character to go to the hospital for a day instead of a month (in the way that organ injuries should). But would it be worth it for the annoyingness of having your squad broken up every time somebody broke an arm?

[DeathsDisciple]

LCS Humans have the following parts: Head, Torso, 2 Arms, 2 Legs, Upper Spine, Lower Spine, 2 Eyes, Tongue, Face, Heart, Spleen, Liver, and 32 Teeth.

There is also the lung.
But when either side collapses your pretty much done for.

[Callista]

LCS Humans have the following parts: Head, Torso, 2 Arms, 2 Legs, Upper Spine, Lower Spine, 2 Eyes, Tongue, Face, Heart, Spleen, Liver, and 32 Teeth.

There is also the lung.
But when either side collapses your pretty much done for.

Not if you can get to a hospital. It's an emergency that forces you to seek professional medical treatment, but it's nowhere near as bad as a wound to the heart. And first aid can stabilize long enough to get the Liberal offsite. (Which is sufficiently realistic. In real life a punctured lung is an emergency, but is quite survivable if you can get to a hospital.)

Oh, and LCS humans also have ribs...

Actually, there's an idea: What about a clinic (complete with makeshift operating room) as a safehouse improvement? Call the first aid skill "Medical", and let Liberals recover from serious injuries in the safehouse if they have a doctor with medical skill present. The check need only be made once, on the first day--if there's a doctor there to do the necessary surgery, then after that the patient is stable and can recover on their own (faster with treatment as usual). If nobody present has Medical skill, or the safehouse has no clinic, the Liberal is forced to go to the hospital or die. If the doctor fails their Medical check, the patient goes down a level in wounds, or if at near-death, dies. A botch could also result in a reduction in Health attribute for the patient, but you'd have to go easy on that because of how often LCS characters get hurt. Botched treatment for damaged appendages could result in an amputation.

The benefit of this would be that Liberals who are injured and go to the hospital can now be arrested without it being game-breakingly frustrating to have a Liberal arrested every time you put him in the clinic for medical care. I mean, realistically, what do you expect--Somebody shoots up a latte stand; twenty minutes later, a guy with a bullet in his kidney gets dropped off in the emergency room by a bunch of guys whose car just got described as having been in a police chase with a bunch of death squad officers. That's REALLY suspicious there. Should be an automatic arrest. Heck, I used to get my founder deliberately punched in the face a couple times just so I could check him into the clinic and avoid him catching a lucky bullet in an inevitable siege, or else provoking an inevitable siege before I was ready, because he had a few hundred murders under his belt. That kind of exploit shouldn't be possible.

A sleeper at the hospital should reduce the chances of arrest, though. For multiple high-effectiveness sleepers, it could be essentially zero.

[DeathsDisciple]

Actually, there's an idea: What about a clinic (complete with makeshift operating room) as a safehouse improvement? Call the first aid skill "Medical", and let Liberals recover from serious injuries in the safehouse if they have a doctor with medical skill present. The check need only be made once, on the first day--if there's a doctor there to do the necessary surgery, then after that the patient is stable and can recover on their own (faster with treatment as usual). If nobody present has Medical skill, or the safehouse has no clinic, the Liberal is forced to go to the hospital or die. If the doctor fails their Medical check, the patient goes down a level in wounds, or if at near-death, dies. A botch could also result in a reduction in Health attribute for the patient, but you'd have to go easy on that because of how often LCS characters get hurt. Botched treatment for damaged appendages could result in an amputation.

Nifty idea, though I agree with everything you said except for this:

A sleeper at the hospital should reduce the chances of arrest, though. For multiple high-effectiveness sleepers, it could be essentially zero.

I guess this could be plausible, though I believe it would have to be a specific character/person/thing. Almost like in the Jury Trials, where if you have multiple sleeper judges, the chances of you getting a Sleeper Judge increases significantly.

[Callista]

I was thinking of a calculation like this:

Each sleeper has a chance of successfully hiding the patient:
(Sleeper Effectiveness)*(1-Some percent based on the "badness" of the crimes committed by the person)*(0.95)*(Sleeper Category)

Sleeper type would be a number like 1 for a doctor, 0.75 for a nurse, 0.5 for anything else.

So you could get something like this:
Liberal with a bad wound and a couple of murders on his record goes to the hospital. There are three sleepers.
Sleeper 1 is a doctor with effectiveness at 100%. His odds of success are:
(1)(1-.5)(0.95)(1)=47.5%.
Sleeper 2 is a doctor with 50% effectiveness. His odds of success are half that of the first, 23.75%.
Sleeper 3 is a nurse with 100% effectiveness. He has 35.6% odds of success.
If any of the three sleepers succeed at hiding the patient, then he's safe.

For someone who got shot after spray-painting a tag at the police station, the odds would be much better because the severity of his crime would be down at something like 0.05. There'd have to be a check to make sure that injured Liberals who somehow got shot without committing a crime (probably by a conservative who didn't like music) didn't get arrested, because the odds of them getting arrested would be low, but non-zero.
With more high-effectiveness sleepers, even a murderer could be safely hidden. But the typical late-game Liberal, with multiple hundred murders and a few treason and terrorism charges, would have a crime severity percent near 1, and would probably get arrested no matter how hard the sleepers tried to hide him.

The numbers would have to be adjusted. I know there's already a system for judging crime severity which is used for trials; that could be adjusted to give a percentage, probably limited to 95% so there's always a chance of successfully hiding even the worst criminal.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I would make having a sleeper at the hospital 100% effective, and actually changed Judges and Lawyers to work that way at some point too. From a simulation standpoint, it isn't entirely realistic, but I think it makes for better gameplay to not have to worry about getting enough or high enough quality infiltration of a site. I think it's more fun if you either have it, or you don't. Complexity can come from all the different things you can infiltrate, and the difficulties in doing so, rather than worrying about how well you've infiltrated one thing, and how reliable your sleepers there are.

[Callista]

I'd agree if arrest were an automatic game-over for that Liberal, but it's not; you can retrieve them from the police station, the courthouse, or the prison.

Removing the 95% cap would make 100% effectiveness possible. Or, you could just check to see whether there are three or more sleepers, or one or more doctors. If not, roll on sleeper effectiveness, modified by crime severity.

But if I could choose the most important thing to change, it would be the fact that you can't get arrested at the hospital or clinic at all right now. That needs to change, even if having a sleeper there removes all risk.