So, I’m not talking about a healthbar above a marine’s head, but more like a thing where a xeno inspects a human and gets messages like “This host is healthy.” “This host is bloodied.” “This host is slightly injured.” and/or “This host looks like it’s about to drop!” in addition to the “We sense this creature is dead.” type of messages. another idea is to have an aura around a marine that indicates their health.
Also, the equipment a marine is carrying won’t be easily recognizable to a xeno lore wise, but it’d be nice if there were descriptors like “This tall has red/blue/yellow/purple accents.” or" “This host is carrying a boomrock!” or “This host has a short/long/widespitter” in reference to the kinds of guns a marine can hold.
For me I think it would be quite useless if it was on examine. If you have time to examine a SADAR and then look at chat, then you had time to look close enough at his sprite to notice rocket launcher, even if he is facing north.
Health of a marine (that matters) you can already judge by how fast they move and if that was on examine, would it change your behaviour at all if you know that one of the marines is heavily injured? During capping, you should always attempt to, even if marine dies the second a facehugger lands on his face, because if ever recovered he will have to go shipside, or to medical part of the colony with operating fob doc. All of that while facehuggers are basically free and infinite.
Aura showing health would be more usefull, but that it a balance issue who knows how devs will react, since it is not in the game already one could assume that it is not inteded. Marines die to a few slashes anyway.
The only information about marine gear that xenos need is if that one has a buckshot-capable weapon, or not. The rest is more or less meaningless, if it is a spec, it is a spec, if it is SG, it is SG, if it isn’t shotgun then it doesn’t do much difference to anyone if he is wielding HPR, or regular pulse rifle.
“ This host looks important…” or “Hosts seem to follow this one’s orders.” for SLs and other administrative roles
“It’s wearing a red cross.” for medics. could also just have it be like “this host has red accents” reused from alpha squad
“It has a strange cloak.” for people wearing scout gear, or for headhunters
“It has a stone mask.” For predators wearing their masks, and “Its mask has been knocked off!” or “Its mask is gone!” for preds w/o masks
But the main reason why I’d like this to exist is because knowledge of marine roles in the xeno mind is mostly derived from other people saying “that’s the sg/flamer/sl/scout” and you gotta go off of visuals alone, which xenos who have played marine before have knowledge of, but can be kinda hard to figure out without prior knowledge of rine structure, and can give hints as to the role of a marine to the untrained xeno eye. can also help for confirming which key marines are dead/capped. (basically, i have gibbed the wrong person thinking it was a flamer and the dude got recovered. yeah skill issue on my part but also, think it could be useful for newer players.)
I do wonder how useful this mechanic would be but I like it’s intent. Makes it a bit easier for new players to know when to jump on a marine. However I feel it is a double edged sword. Plus you can just have the meta knowledge of how fast Marines walk paired with how injured they are.