When it comes to Arma 3, I prefer to play a medic. That’s mostly because I need someone dependable to patch me up. So the question; What’s ACE Medical?
The ACE 3 Medical system is an advanced medical system for use in Arma 3. ACE 3 is more realistic, and it’s not too difficult to learn. If it’s bleeding bandage them; no heartbeat, use CPR; low pressure, add blood. Anything more is situational.
ACE 3 Medical Basics
Because the ACE 3 Medical system can be customized to suit anyone’s needs, how you go about treating people will be very different on each server. We’ll go over the equipment and basics first.
Your Equipment
All the equipment is dependent on settings where and when you can use them.
- Splints are very important, they restore a broken bone to a usable condition. They stabilize your aim and restore walking speed.
- Tourniquets(CAT) are applied to arms and legs. They temporarily stop bleeding, meaning you should remove them when possible. They can also interfere with taking blood pressure or heart rate. Tourniquets left on too long will cause pain.
- Morphine suppresses pain and thins out the blood (lowers the viscosity and pressure). It’s easy to overdose or can cause a heart attack when applied too much. A general rule is no more than 1 morphine every 10 minutes.
- Epinephrine increases the heart rate, this acts to counter some effects of morphine. EpiPens can also be used to help with stamina. Epinephrine also increases the chance for resuscitation using CPR.
- Atropine & Adenosine both lower the heart rate, a lot more mildly than morphine.
- Surgical Kits stitch and close wounds, this prevents them from reopening.
Personal Aid Kits (PAK) are used to fully heal someone. Where and when depends on server settings, usually it requires someone to be stable and conscious.
Bandages
- Field Dressings are basic bandages, not recommended unless you don’t have any other option.
- Packing bandages good all around, but have a high chance to reopen. However, they’ll hold for a while. Giving you a while to get to a medic. These are recommended for all non medics out in the field.
- Elastic Bandages are the best for closing wounds, but they open up very quickly. These are best for a combat medic.
- Quick-Clots have the lowest chance to reopen and give you a while before they break. However, these are all terrible for coverage and effectiveness. As a non-medic, you can finish up with Quick-clots but never as your main bandage.
In short, what you take really depends on how soon a medic can get to you.
IVs
- Blood is your primary way to restore someone’s blood pressure. Blood does a body good.
- Plasma can bring up the pressure.
- Saline is a sodium chloride(Salt) mixture in water. It’s used to clean wounds, help with dehydration, and in our case. Like the others, this brings up the blood pressure.
IVs all raise the blood pressure, which fixes the “lost a lot of blood” issue you’ll find.
Non-Medics
Never say “I’m hit”, no one knows who “I” is, call your name, especially if you are new to a unit. You want to communicate actionable information.
Listen to your medics. If you’re injured, they outrank you.
Mostly, just stay still if a medic is working on you. Laying down can help.
No one likes to see their buddy go down, it’s natural to want to help. Most of the time helping is pulling security. Unless asked to help, try not to have more than 2 people on an injured person. Pulling security means watching over the medic and his patient, but staying in earshot if they require more support.
Medics
Guidelines:
Stay back. You’re no good to your squad if you die. The last thing you want to do is add to the pile of injured people.
Use Elastic Bandages as much as possible.
Take charge of the player’s health/injuries. Don’t permit them to make their injuries worse.
Let someone know you’re working on them. There’s no notification on their end when you do something.
The Medical menu is the best way to work on someone. All medical actions can be performed in this menu. Click on different body parts to select them. The Medical Menu can also be used for the basic medical system, allowing bandaging and medication.
Triage is assessing the situation and giving priority to people. An experienced medic can prioritize people that are more likely to live. In the medical menu, this option is under the body. However, most medics typically ignore this, as there isn’t any time when seconds can mean death.
When working on someone, it’s important to keep vitals up. Sometimes this means IVs of blood while they’re still bleeding out. Overall you should prioritize the head and chest as you can’t tie those down to slow the bleeding, the other limbs you can. However, you need one limb to administer blood and medicine. CPR doesn’t require a lot of skill and is better to ask non-medics to perform this action. Medics are better at bandaging and should focus there.
Often wounds to the head and chest mean the heart will stop, if you’re working on someone alone you will need to do CPR at least once every 3 minutes. With extra IVs going in and CPR, the chance someone will die while being worked on will be reduced drastically.
Unconscious
There are a lot of factors that can cause someone to pass out. Bringing someone back into the fight is a critical skill when it comes to ACE Medical. It all comes down to making a person stable. ACE checks the body state every 15 seconds. If it passes the check, the person can wake up. Here’s a quick checklist:
- Bandaged and stitched up
- Blood pressure normal
- Heart rate normal
- No pain (Depends on settings)
- Epinephrine has a chance to jolt the person awake.
I’ve gone through great lengths to have accurate stats for the ace medical system. If you doubt me, check the SOURCE yourself. In their own words:
Field dressing is normal average treatment
packing bandage is average treatment, higher reopen change, longer reopening delay
elastic bandage is higher treatment, higher reopen change, shorter reopen delay
quickclot is lower treatment, lower reopen change, longer reopening delay
Click on the image below to view the table. If you want the table in a file format, message me.
Always Check the ACE Settings, every time
If you’ve played with a few units, you have likely noticed that ACE feels different with every server. Always open up the additional options and go to the ACE medical section and review the local settings. You may find that you can’t epi yourself or a buddy if you’re not at a medical station for some reason. Or if you’re like me, you slow down the bleeding to give medics a better chance to save people.
ACE Settings determine how the operation flows, and every server is different. To start, press “ESC” -> then go to Options then -> addon options. This will put you in the CBA_A3 addon menu. You won’t be able to change the settings, but you can observe them for yourself. In the addon dropdown menu, -> select “ACE Medical”.
Important things to note here are:
- Player critical damage threshold
- Epinephrine Wake Up Chance Boost
- Player Fatal Injuries
- AI Fatal Injuries
- Cardiac Arrest Time
- Bleeding Coefficient
- Wound reopening Coefficient
- Allow Epinephrine
- Locations Epinephrine
- Allow PAK
- Locations PAK
- Self PAK Usage
- Locations Surgical Kit
- Self Stitching
It’s good to review everything, but those are the most important things to look for in the ACE settings.
Interesting things to do
Deadman walking: Medicine and blood will not travel around the body if you have a tourniquet on. So you can inject a lethal dose of morphine (1-6) to a limb that has a tourniquet. This will not affect them until the tourniquet is removed, then they will pass out. (A lot of servers will ban you for this.)
Juicing is when you give yourself morphine and epinephrine before going into battle. The advantage is you are more pain resistant during the firefight. This can give you precious seconds in a firefight and help with your aim.
Berserker mode is when you administer morphine and epinephrine to yourself. After the medicine circulates in your body, tie off all of your limbs. This doesn’t make you invincible, but it does make you harder to kill.
Generally, you’ll want to avoid these things, as your medics and commander may chew you out.
For Server Admins, change the “Player Critical Damage” to 4-5. This allows players to be able to survive helicopter crashes. ~10% will walk away from it, ~60% will pass out and wake back up, ~30% will require emergency attention. This allows for some interesting mission situations. The side effects are that players will require a 4 to 1 epi to morphine ratio. You can counter this by just letting medics pack where ever.
Body bagging a healthy person, if allowed, will cause instant death.
