I like the idea of games penalizing the player for failure, and I've always been a little miffed when a guy with 1% health is still at 100% combat effective status. If I run into some dude's line of fire and he sprays lead at me, it makes sense that I'd be punished for it somehow. Lots of times in games, I can sprint through a poisoned cloud, take three arrows to the face and get his with an axe, then unleash some close-range area-of-effect attack that devastates the bad guys. Then I drink three potions and go on to the next round. The screen effects help to give credibility to ideas like area denial or tactical superiority. I read recently that Battlefield 3 will allow machinegunners to use a "cover fire" maneuver that will somehow de-buff anyone who is downrange of them when they unleash it. I like that, because it makes fields of fire and zones of cover more relevant in a genre that is so often ruled by simple line-of-sight and reflexes.

[font="arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"]It's not quite so much about punishment as it is altering behavior.

When you have 1% health, or when you can't see and hear, you have to throw out what you were doing and come up with the new plan for recovery.

This is engagement. The game has a new state that prompts you to reassess what you're doing.

The punishment is death. Having partial health or grey-vision is a warning; they let you fail a series of interactions without punishment, as long as there aren't too many consecutive failures. The different warning mechanisms prompt different kinds of action from the player in order to recover.

Or something, I dunno.

I had a project recently where on the first iterations, units would have a percentage chance of killing opponents, until all were gone. Later on I changed it, to give them HP and wait-to-recover abilities, and this radically changed the dynamic of the game; it now became necessary to hit a unit multiple times in a turn to prevent it from recovering, so the game became one where you craft situations where you have multiple shots on an enemy without letting the enemy do the same to you.[/font]

It dramatically boosted the value of combat maneuvering, especially maneuvering of multiple units as teams.