Musings about wounds/health/damage

So, after reading a thread on r.g.r.d in which people were talking about hit points, regeneration and healing spells, I've made a tentative decision. in X-Com, before you get the best armor, the game tends to be very brutal in that many agents will be killed with a single shot. I want the game to be gritty and brutal, but this is relatively unacceptable.
I think what I'll do is make weapons do less direct-to-HP damage, while doing more 'fatal wound' damage. Also, units will have a certain amount of regeneration, something relatively small, like 2 or 3 HP per turn (not move, but 'end-of-turn,' which would be counteracted by their fatal wounds... so, 10 fatal wounds would be -10 hp each turn, while the regen would be +3, so they would lose 7 HP each round. Healing via medi-kits would take 'longer', costing more TUs; though I'll allow for agents to (if they are reasonably conscious) use medi-kits on themselves. Basically, in X-com, early in the game, you either have to play it incredibly cautious, get lucky, save-scum, or just buy new agents to replace the dead.
I really want the game to remain dangerous, but at a level that fits better in the rogue-like world. I want for units to get injured, have it be scary, have to be dragged out of the line-of-fire, and I want for other units to haver to come to their rescue. I don't want them to be expendable. But, this is just me.

Also, before I go to be tonight, I hope to have the bugs ironed out of loading weapons; then I'll be able to move on to non-inventory stuff.

UPDATE: It looks like I have a working 'load', which is just an extension of 'move', where if you're moving ammo and it matches a wielded weapon that isn't already loaded, it gives you that option (in addition to others) as a place to put it. I'm sure that as I progress, I'll find more glitches as I just found and eliminated a few move glitches that I previously overlooked. For example, a particularly nasty one that only happened if you were moving things from certain compartments to others; an errant 'break' command was causing a for loop to remove everything in the linked list. Not very fun. I'm not even sure why I used break. I guess that's what happens when I code at 6am. Now, I might eventually combing move, drop, and get into one command, but for now I won't worry about it.