Referring to the quote above by Captain Deathbeard himself (yeah I got bored and scavaged the internet for articles to read) he really did delivered his promises. Had a long and terrible fight between my team against a group of Holy nation. We were badly beaten so retreated and I ran through a group of dust bandits to shake off my pursuers. Just a couple of them were left chasing so I thought I could turn back and finish them.The basic idea is that the player should never feel the need to re-load. There will be no permanent, irreversible wounds (thats why I'm still undecided against severing limbs) and everything that seems bad also has a benefit. Characters actually get slightly more XP from losing fights than by winning (learn from your mistakes). Characters can still go on fighting for a long time while wounded.
And the main point of this whole medical system is that it blurs the line between life and death. If a character goes down, you can still save them, and the most common cause of re-loading games is characters dying.
Jagged Alliance 2 had a similar system of slow-recovery, and that was an awesome game. Like JA2 it won't be a standard game where you just charge in and kill everything without thinking about it, and it also won't be the kind where you just wander the map non-stop slaughtering a nice steady stream of enemies. Battles are fewer but bigger things, so hopefully I can balance it well enough so that it doesn't become an endless repeated cycle of "fight, walk all the way back to town, recover, walk all the way back, fight...) and during your recovery there will be lots of other things to do (professions, team management etc).
The Dust Bandits were slaughtered just as I've finished with the remnant of my pursuers and the whole group of Holy nation soldiers turned back on me. Well both side were badly wounded. We fought hard until just one of us and two of them remain. I was thinking of running away until a Dust bandit got up and continue fighting one of the Holy soldiers. The other one got a badly injured leg so he was just limping toward me.
I ran around leading him away and turned back to treat my team injuries. Several of us got back up...then the cycle goes on and on, fell down, heal while some team members were fighting, it's like a terrible battlefield. Eventually we've won, got good stuff to loot though all of us are badly injured and it was a long journey back to the safety of a city. Had to stop several times fighting bandits along the way but the battle with the Holy soldiers had trained my team so that they are good enough to fend off bandits.
This taught me a good lesson on the importance of medical treatment and splint. Also a good lesson on not just limping around waiting for your team to revive--pick them out and get the hell out of there! Also why you need a team member with a good speed to scout ahead so that you won't stumble into a large group of armed patrol, maybe with stealth implemented this might be a good idea...if only the enemy would not chase you to the end of the world...
All in all...it was very satisfying although at this level of development I still can't see all the point of fighting. The battle was so intense but pointless at this moment so for now I'm focusing toward building an outpost near to the combat area...doing research, gathering resources and arming myself so that I could venture again into that Holy Order infested region and have a nearby base to return to recuperate.
Anyway would be nice if you could put a limit on how far the enemy would give chase...had an experience where several sand ninjas was chasing a single surviving Holy soldiers and they happen to cross our path...well it kind of nice seeing events like that happening...but if you have to run half way across the map to the nearest "friendly" city all the time, it's just too ridiculous.
At least by limiting how far enemy would give chase you could avoid the missuse of luring them to city for city guards to kill them...also perhaps when archery or other concept is implemented it might be harder to setup ambush as we can't precisely gauge how far the enemy could be lured away so this would add another element of uncertainty to the game, more real life.