Ace Medical for Laymen

I'm aware Ace Medical is disliked by a noticeable portion of the ARMA 3 community, but once you understand how it functions, it actually is quite straight forwards and intuitive.

So in order to ensure the best experience playing Dead's Overthrow, I have prepared a FREE explanation on how ACE Medical functions, that hopefully shouldn't be too long or too complex.

Essentials

The essentials to ACE Medical are as follows:

• Ace Medical introduces several different Medical States, as opposed to ARMA 3's default three:
  • Conscious (The default state)
  • Unconscious (primarily occurs whenever a player obtains too much damage, or from blood loss, they are no longer able to move, interact, and their vision is greatly obscured.)
  • Fatally Wounded (Occurs when a player occurs a lethal blow from any single damage source, what happens next is based off the ACE Medical addon settings. This state can be identified by a "heart" sound effect (only if the affect player is still conscious)
  • Cardiac Arrest (The death knell, can occurs even if a player is conscious. It is essentially an invisible timer before a player dies. It can be identified by a "heart racing" sound effect if the player is still conscious. This is what actually "kills" players.)
  • Dead (The one we all know and love.)
• With ACE Medical, each "hit" to a player is called a Damage Source and deals an injury based on a wide variety of unimportant factors. What is important is that if the damage source is calculated to be "lethal" (I.e something which is guaranteed to kill a person.) What happens next is based off the ACE Medical Addon settings:
  • It can kill the player. (The realistic option)
  • It can put the player in cardiac arrest
  • It can put the player in the "fatally wounded state" (The overthrow default)
  • It can be ignored. (In this case the only way for a player to die is by being turned into Swiss Cheese and literally running out of blood, or by entering cardiac arrest.)
• Assuming the damage is not lethal, it gets added to the limb where it struck, the exact type depending on the damage source. The most important factor to this is the fact the player has a Pain value, which is calculated by adding all untreated injuries, and lesser, all treated injuries. If the amount of Pain a player is enduring is greater than the arbitrary Pain Threshold the player will enter the unconscious state. (It is not possible for a non-lethal damage source to put a player into cardiac arrest or kill the player explicitly). *Now to the importantish bits, while unconscious, if the player is not bleeding, they will have a chance to wake up. (I have never had this happened naturally.) But, if they have Epinephrine in their system, they have a high chance to wake up no matter what. (They also bleed out faster, and it increases heart rate, which gives a higher chance of entering cardiac arrest.) If a player has a Fatal Wound, they will be unable to wake up until that wound has been treated, and without treatment, will sit there until blood loss causes them to enter Cardiac arrest. *Most likely while your unconscious, but maybe also while you have been grated by bullets, you may experience severe blood loss. The main thing this does is increase your heart rate (as does pain) if your heart rate surpasses an arbitrary threshold (somewhere in the low-mid 200's of BPM), you will enter Cardiac Arrest
• Cardiac Arrest Will Always Kill You After A Set Amount Of Time If Untreated The only way to prevent this is for your heart rate to fall below another arbitrary threshold (somewhere around 120-140 BPM.) I.e. enough of your wounds need to be treated, and enough blood to be restored, and maybe morphine to be administered. There is no real way for another player to tell if you're in the cardiac arrest state (other than currently having an absurd heart rate.) One last note on cardiac arrest: applying CPR extends the amount of time before a player dies from cardiac arrest, and a player cannot die from cardiac arrest while having CPR applied. However, the bad news is the time extension for applying CPR is only slightly longer than the time it takes to apply, meaning unless you have another bot (very unlikely) or another player treating the subject, preforming CPR is pretty useless.
• The Ideal outcome for ACE Medical after being "downed" is for the medic or AI to:
  • Treat any "lethal" injuries.
  • Administer Epinephrine.
  • Keep patching minor wounds with basic bandages till you regain consciousness.
  • Assume if they were in cardiac arrest, they'd probably be dead by now.
• One important thing to know about ACE Medical is to NEVER use multiple morphine injections or epinephrine injections. Either will cause your heart rate to keep slowly creeping towards the cardiac arrest threshold until you die. They Both Last 10 Minutes and this is why each player has a "Triage" card, in case you want to mark down when the last injection was.
  • Epinephrine and Morphine cancel each other out, although I'm unsure what would happen if you tried using 2 morphine doses over 1 epinephrine or such. I'd assume death.
• I've never tested this, but I'm sure there's a bunch of edge cases that can also kill a player. I.e if your heart rate hits a hard minimum or hard maximum, it will just skip the cardiac arrest step and explode. Same probably goes for blood.
• A last miscellaneous detail I couldn't really segway too is that preforming CPR does have a decent chance of waking a player to consciousness. (I believe around 35% per attempt) given they are not fatally wounded. So if you are urgently trying to wake up a player, spamming CPR is the next step after patching fatal wounds and administering Epinephrine.
• Most guides refer to "Not Fatally Wounded" as the patient being "Stable", which was one source of confusion for me. Then again it is not made clear what is classified as a fatal wound. Assume all head wounds are fatal as well as large torso wounds.
• Tourniquets are a thing, I've never found a use them. As by the time you could have attached them the subject has already bled to death, or in the same amount of time you could have just treated the wounds. I think they may be useful in temporally "increasing" the amount of blood in the torso and head, I've never tested this.

TLDR: Pain adds up, morphine lets you stay conscious longer but stops Epinephrine. Epinephrine brings you back to life if you do go down. Only ever use one in a 15 minute duration. PAK and Surgical Kits are the only immediate ways to remove injuries. (Surgical Kits are needed to instantly remove larger injuries.) Blood loss and pain combined are what kills you.

Even shorter TDLR: just carry a ton of basic bandages, and keep a few AI Medics in your squad with Epinephrine pens

Injuries

This can get very complex, and you really don't need to know that much to effectively use Ace Medical. The quickest explanation I can give: you use different bandages for different injuries. Using the correct type lowers the pain the treated injury gives and reduces the chance of it "reopening." An injury Reopens when another damage source occurs on the same limb, it causes the old injury to go up a rank and become its untreated form. Ex: A bandaged small cut will become an open medium cut. Your best off just spamming basic bandages 9/10 times (they also take the shortest time to be applied.) Alternative, Quik Clot bandages are the Ultra Ball of bandages, there rarer to come buy but basically heal everything well.

The AI is awful when it comes to actually trying to tend to you, so don't count on it. By that I both mean physically coming to you, but also in knowing the correct medical items to use. If you want to have laugh, you can test this by applying injuries to one bot, having another heal them, and laugh as they apply multiple epinephrine pens to the bot who is more holes than blood.