Instant death

[Wolfways1969]

I'm not sure how a units healthbar relates to the unit. Is it the squad leaders health or the whole squad?
It seems that when the health bar gets low the whole squad dies almost instantly, usually before they even get a chance to retreat.

Please tell me that the rate marines die is a bug...

[HiveMind]

In SP, the bar below the icons on the right shows the leader's health. The squadmates' health is ignored for those ones. When you select a squad in SP, the bar shows overall health of the leader and the squad. In MP, the health bar always shows combined health.

The reason it seems that hitting low health makes the whole squad die instantly is that damage is spread across the squad rather than one member soaking up every bullet until he dies. If a Tactical squad has 66% health on its bar, then each squad member has around 66% health rather than one being dead and two being undamaged. Because of the slight randomisation of who gets hit, one Tactical will die before the others, simply because one of them will take more hits than the others, but sometimes the damage taken can be very even. If the squad's health is at 5% and none of them have died yet (a very rare occurence, but it can happen if area effects are involved), then a single volley will likely wipe the squad without warning.

As Marines, you want to retreat once you get to around 40% health, because that gives you a fairly low chance of losing anyone. Against melee, you should be running at about 60%, because they do lots of damage against retreating units. Don't wait until your troops start to die, because that means that the ones that are alive are on low health.

[Delta_Assault]

I think the moral here is to retreat before your unit's health gets too low.

[Wolfways1969]

Thanks


I think the moral here is to retreat before your unit's health gets too low.
There usually isn't time with how fast they die.

[Noble]

Moving this over to basic training.

HiveMind: Are you sure that damage is simply randomized across the squad members? It seems like individual squad members can be shot at and lose health while the rest of the squad remains untouched.

For example, if only one of the three squad mates is in range of a heavy bolter, that bolter will only do damage to the one that is in range. The other two would go unscathed. At least, that's been my experience in the game.

In answer to the original question, the bar in multiplayer represents the total health of the squad. So one marine will represent one third of the squads total health on that bar. That's why the health bar shoots up (by a third in the case of rines) when you reinforce a squad.

[HiveMind]

Noble: What I meant was that your troops don't focus fire on a single enemy. You tell them to attack a squad, and each trooper decides by some arcane calculation which Marine to fire on. Because they aren't all firing at the same person, the damage spreads around. If there's only one Marine in range, then he'll take all the hits, and if there's only one enemy firing at you then only one guy takes damage.

[Brenil]

The squad damage system appears to be exactly the same as it was in Dawn of War. The total hitpoints of a squad is the sum of all the current members of a squad. The squad is never at full health until it is fully reinforced.

As for targetting, HiveMind is right, the 'arcane calculation' determines who gets shot and how, but it is for the most part to our eyes a random event. Sometimes a single Marine in a crowded firefight will take all the damage and drop fast, other times the damage will be spread among the entire force.

[Insano-Man]

I've noticed that, in the campaign, if the leader takes too much damage while his squad takes none, the rest of the damage is either transferred onto his squadmates or they simply start randomly dying. It makes some sense, as it'd prevent a squad from either all dropping at once when the leader gets canned or being stuck in place with the unconscious sergeant.