Introduction

Ghost Recon's damage model can be a little bit of a mystery. How quickly do characters heal? Do different parts of the body react differently? Is multiplayer damage different from single player? Can one shot generate more than one wound? By examining details revealed by the Development Team, and undertaking experiments, we can answer these questions and with our new injury and recovery awareness, be better prepared to assemble the Ghosts for battle.

The Damage Model

Let's take a look at how Ghost Recon handles injuries, up steps Greg Stelmack (Ghost Recon Designer) with a detailed explanation.

"The combat model generates a chance for each hit to be an incapacitation vs. a wound. There is always a base 10% chance for an incapacitation no matter where you hit. An actor in the game can take (1+stamina) wounds before going down (i.e. a 2 stamina goes down on the third wound).

In multiplayer, all players in the game get their attributes from the multiplayer actor files. The base versions that ship have 1's for all attributes. This means that in multiplayer players can only take 2 hits anywhere before going out.

Note that over penetration is modeled. This means that if you shoot an arm or leg at the proper angle, you can generate multiple wounds if it penetrates through to the other leg, arm, chest, or other body part.

And if you aren't happy with most of these odds, most of it is moddable (not the base 10% for incapacitation, but the "kill energy" of each round, the multipliers used for each body part, and the stamina values for the actors in the game can all be tweaked to match how you want it to play)."

That explains how the team designed the damage model to work - but how does it really work in practice?

How it works

Injured characters will heal at different rates according to various factors. The major factor towards recovery is obviously rest. Leaving an injured Ghost out of the following mission will speed his recovery back to a normal level.

The endurance statistic also has a part to play, as does the area of the body that is injured. Usually the arms and legs will heal faster than a body injury. For a Rifleman with an Endurance rating of 2 for example, the limbs could heal from a light injury in 3 missions, the body might take 5 missions to recover.

A Rifleman with maximum Endurance has a faster healing process, and may recover from a limb injury in only one mission, and a body injury in two.

Always remember that there are other factors involved that will introduce a variable recovery period, but generally speaking, the above is a good indicator.

Conclusion

We hope this report helps explain some of the mystery behind Ghost Recon injuries, and assists with the character selection during your campaign.