Medi-Kit (EU)
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The Medi-Kit is highly advanced healing facility with pain killers and stimulants that can be administered to injured units almost instantly under any field condition. Any unit (except large units, because you can't really access their inventories) can pick up and use a Medi-Kit. In order to use the Medi-Kit on a conscious unit the medic must be facing the unit requiring treatment, and on an adjacent tile. The medic cannot use the kit on him or herself (except in very special circumstances). If the patient is unconscious, the medic must stand over the body, on the same tile, and must not be directly facing another treatable unit.
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Uses
The Medi-Kit has four functions:
- Diagnosis: Red body parts show fatal wounds. Click on a wounded body part to display the number of wounds. If there is no living creature under the medic, or in the adjacent square in the direction the medic is facing, the diagnostic display does not activate.
- Healing: Click on a body part that is wounded and then click on the 'Heal' button. One fatal wound will be cured and three health points restored. It has no effect when used on uninjured body parts.
- Stimulant: This will restore energy (10 points) and reduce stun (4 points stun/use), thus it can be used to revive unconscious units. In order to revive an unconscious unit, you must stand directly over the body.
- Pain killer: This will restore the morale of damaged units up to an amount equivalent to the soldier's lost health. There is no effect on uninjured units. The morale benefit for each unit of lost health can only be had once. (Further health loss will allow further morale benefit from pain killers).
Each dose from the Medi-Kit uses a fixed cost of 10 TUs. Bringing up the diagnostic panel costs 0 TUs.
Tips and tricks
- Works on aliens too. This will perhaps consist mainly of reviving stunned aliens. Aliens as a general rule do not suffer fatal wounds unless they have been injured while under X-COM mind control, and then released. Large aliens can only be treated when unconscious, by standing over them (in any square). Also the only way to check, after the fact, if a fallen large alien is dead, or merely stunned (if you didn't listen for the death cry). Stunned large aliens cannot be revived.
- Can operate through walls, thus usable as a free 1-square alien detector. The most practical use would be to check behind doors to see if there is an enemy standing immediately behind it. Note that this will not detect large aliens!
- To tell if a fallen soldier has regained consciousness after a stim shot, you have to exit the medi-kit interface and try entering it again, or check inventory to see whether your medic is still standing over a body. If it can't find a target then the soldier has stood up. The soldier will normally wake up directly to the north of your medic (if the square is free), but due to a graphical glitch, will not appear unless you select a different unit first.
- For troop transport supplies: Three to five kits for every 10 soldiers is enough, as the medics can throw or pass kits around the battlefield. Too many kits will cut heavily into your alloted carrying capacity of 80 items.
- Medi-kits are fully recharged after the end of each mission. They can not be recharged during a mission, so be sure to carry enough for any eventuality.
- Every successful hit from an alien has a chance of causing from 1 to 3 fatal wounds. The chance of getting fatal wounds is about 9% multiplied by points of damage dealt (max 100%), and is evenly split between the three options. Therefore, any unit taking 11 or more points of damage from one attack is guaranteed to get fatal wounds.
- It is possible for the number of fatal wounds dealt from low-damage attacks to be high enough to allow full healing. In CE, you cannot exceed maximum health. In early DOS versions, it was sometimes possible to overflow the health stat so the soldier would be healthier after healing than he started before he was shot. This would in turn grant a bonus to firing accuracy.
- The med-kit can be used on the western or northern borders of the map to apply aid to your first unit. Said first unit can use the kit on itself in this manner. Note that if you brought any HWPs on the mission, then this glitch is of no use (as they're always first in the unit table).
Benefits
The case can be made that research and production of Medi-Kits is a distraction, and that there will always be new rookies to fill the shoes of the fallen. Especially early on, before effective armor is available, it will be rare that a soldier, even a veteran, actually survives the up-front damage of a single shot. However, in terms of XCOM game objectives, consider that the Medi-Kit provides the following strategic and tactical advantages:
Strategic advantages
- The deaths of experienced veterans from wounds can usually be prevented. This preserves the valuable experience (skill) and rank that those veterans have built up over many missions.
- Can avoid the dilemma of having to abort a mission - with loss of score and perhaps loss of strategic objectives - to preserve the life of an experienced soldier.
Economic advantages
- Each death avoided saves the the $20K hiring cost of a new soldier (unless the injured soldier is so badly injured that they are dismissed from XCOM anyway, necessitating a permanent replacement).
- Armour can't be recovered from a dead soldier; it is lost. The full replacement cost is around $50K for basic armour, $100K for a power suit or $200K for a flying suit. By saving the life of the soldier, even if the soldier retires from XCOM, this financial loss (and manufacturing opportunity cost) is avoided.
- In an Abort situation, it can be difficult to recover stunned soldiers, in effect converting them to MIAs and requiring the expense of a new hire and bringing a rookie back up to the experience level of the lost soldier. Medi-Kits allow stunned personnel to walk off the battlefield instead of being carried by comrades (who become slow and vulnerable and risk becoming further casualties).
- Also, in an Abort situation, it will be difficult to recover all equipment from dead or stunned soldiers. Resuscitated soldiers can walk their own equipment back to the transport, as well as help to bring home more loot, and more equipment from dead soldiers.
On this basis, Medi-Kits represent a good financial investment.
Tactical advantages
- Recovery from stun can be very important once Small Launchers / Stun Bombs are in use – including "friendly fire" as well as enemy fire. A Medi-Kit allows XCOM to regain an operational soldier (though perhaps not a fully effective one) which is very often tactically helpful.
- Similarly, preventing death from wounds also provides more operational soldiers for a greater time during the mission.
- In turn, the ability to mitigate the effects of being stunned or wounded allows for the use of relatively riskier, more aggressive tactics (such as close range use of Small Launchers).
- Energy restoration. If you push your soldiers' stamina to the limit and have them race across the map without rest, they may end up not being able to move even with a full TU bar. This can be dangerous if they cannot reach cover before the end of the turn. A few shots of stimulants helps mitigate this situation by giving a much needed energy boost.
- If the fight is not going well, and there are no opportunities to kill an alien for a morale boost, soldiers that are just on the brink of panicking or going berserk can be assisted with painkillers to bring their morale above the 50% mark.
- Reviving aliens. While seeming to be contradictory to your purpose in battle it can be useful under a few scenarios. For example:
- Chryssalids. Unconscious chryssalids are time bombs that can wake up at any moment, making them extremely dangerous if left unchecked. Explosives are the usual solution, but you may not want the collateral damage. The alternative is to use stimulants to wake them up so that you can shoot them until they are clearly dead.
- Similarly, the same can be used to prune unwanted alien/rank combinations that are stunned during the battle.
- Preventing MIA soldiers when fighting Sectoids. Soldiers go MIA if they are under mind control when the mission ends. To prevent this, stun and revive a non-psi Sectoid and hold it captive until you have dispatched the leading sectoid(s) and the psi attacks have ceased.
The energy-restoring and morale-restoring capabilities have a more limited tactical effect, but still, on the basis of the above, the Medi-Kit can be seen to be an important force multiplier in the tactical environment, even without longer term strategic considerations.
