Fatal Wounds
For each Fatal Wound a unit has, a until will lose one point of Health each turn. For instance, a soldier with 2 Fatal Wounds will lose 2 Health points per turn.
Fatal Wounds can be healed using a Medi-Kit. 3 Health points will also be restored with each wound healed. Quickly healing a wounded soldier also means less wound recovery time (back at base), because recovery time is based on the number of health points lost in a mission.
Warning: Unconcious soldiers still take damage from Fatal Wounds each turn and CAN DIE if not treated. So if one of your soldiers is knocked unconscious by shots or explosions (as opposed to a stun bomb), it is important that you immediately run a diagnostics scan on him or her. See Medi-Kit and Unconscious for more information on how to do this. Keep in mind that you can pick up and move (or even throw) someone, if you have a man down in a hot zone.
Other effects of Fatal Wounds
- Each wound to the head or gun-holding arm applies a 10% penalty to your Firing Accuracy, down to but not below -90%. This means that someone with 100 base firing accuracy who has 9 or more wounds will be left with a base accuracy level of 10 points. This is before you consider any other accuracy modifiers such as your remaining health percentage (see Accuracy formula).
- Each wound to the legs reduces the soldier's TUs by 10%.
- Each wound to the torso reduces the soldier's Energy by 10%.
Aliens and Fatal Wounds
Aliens never get fatal wounds - they never crawl off and die - except if you were mind controlling them when they were wounded. In other words, only friendlies can get Fatal Wounds, and MC'd aliens count as friendlies. Be careful of mixing MC'd with non-MC'd aliens - you might reaction shoot the one, and hit the other. But wait, there's more - aliens with Fatal Wounds do not suffer any health decrease, for as long as you MC them. They only suffer health loss from their Fatal Wounds on turns that you do not MC them.
Once I had an MC'd alien taking point, when a different one blaster bombed the lot of us. All hell broke loose, and I lost track of the pet (I assumed he got killed in the blast). Many turns later I heard the entirely unexpected cry of an alien dying, far off in the distance. "Oops" - MikeTheRed