I just realized this game is missing a pretty obvious feature: The ability to capture and transport hostile creatures. The most obvious benefit to doing this would be for the purposes of studying them.
Perhaps with a sufficient level of medical skill you could perform a vivisection on a live captured organism to provide bonuses to damage or chance to critical hit from having knowledge of a creature’s anatomy. Failure might result in the immediate death of the subject without learning anything, getting hurt by the creature or its outright escape (Imagine a shoggoth or giant mole rat loose inside your base). You could get the same bonuses from dissecting a dead creature, but it might take multiple dissections and a higher skill level to get results.
Another potential feature would be the ability to “interrogate” captured creatures that are supposedly sentient, such as the Mi-Go and Shoggoth, using both the speech and medical skills. Failure might result in no information, no information & death of the subject, or escape of the subject.
You could also have missions to capture the various zombies, mutants, and extradimensional life forms roaming around for the Old Guard. Every lab has holding cells with creatures captured before the cataclysm, why would the government stop? Especially now that it is even more important to understand them to help humanity survive. A mission to capture a Shoggoth or interrogate a Mi-Go would be tricky and interesting.
For the capturing aspect, inflicting heavy damage or using weapons that stun might be required to weaken or incapacitate before capturing it using a net, stasis field, or some other device. Flash freezing the subject with a cryogenic grenade or cryo sprayer might be necessary for the more dangerous or robust lifeforms, such as the Shoggoth.
Humans and most animals die when frozen solid. There are a few animal species which have evolved to survive it, and I believe most fungi and some plants are pretty resistant as well. A zombie would give zero fucks how cold it is, and I doubt a shoggoth will be inconvenienced by cellular damage from freezing at all, given that they can regenerate from a full auto burst of laser fire in a couple seconds. As I said, freezing would be used on the more robust lifeforms that nothing else will work on. I doubt a zombie, amoeba, or shoggoth will have any response whatsoever to a tranquilizer dart, and I suspect a regular tazer would not have the juice to incapacitate them. You would probably need enough voltage and current to knock down an elephant in order to taze a shoggoth into submission.
this is a good mechanic, but it has an obvious disadvantage-it will greatly simplify the already simple game at the end. now we are not only a machine for the global killing of everything that we consider unworthy of life, now we have 25% damage bonus for all living things.
I believe that this system should be redesigned for creatures that are physically capable of having such weaknesses (moose, Mi-Go, trifids) and leave the other part divinely immortal (shogots, zombies (they are able not only to resurrect corpses after death but also to change themselves, for good they are all the same even to the damage of any part of the body, only the structural integrity of the whole body is important)), it would also be nice, using your interrogation system, to be able to persuade, deceive, ask, intimidate your enemy (shogot, Mi-Go, evil NPC) and force to cooperate/work for you. it would be nice to have in your hands home aliens that walk around your base saluting you like maids. in fact, I find it funny, and I’m sure I can ask my programmer friend to make a small mod that allows you to create manual shogots/migos, but he won’t create full-fledged NPCs, here’s a question for the developers
The ability to trap and capture hostile enemies at all would be something worth adding in and of itself. If only for the roleplaying oppertunities (your cannibal character keeps a living larder of human meat in the basement and you can keep living bloodbanks mad max style). It would also open up interesting new statagies in regard to potentially capturing very dangerous mutants and unleasing them into a town of zombies or capturing dangerous zombies and unleasing them into something like a wasp or ant nest.