This actually just made me wonder... what about having enemies alter their strategies and AI based on their status in battle? As in, instead of just dead or alive, if you say shoot a leg off a crawler, it realizes and alters its strategy to compensate. Or if you see a biped has a weapon in each hand and you happen to shoot off its primary arm, after a reactive animation it has to adjust and begins a different attack/defense strategy with whatever it has left.

The idea of a crawler's actual *AI* being damaged, like your example of the wounded 'angry dog' smashing into the wall I think would be genius. It's like, you don't have to have enemies be just either alive and fighting or dead. Add personality and variety in how they maneuver and act on the field throughout the fight, even if they're no longer a threat, no longer battle capable. I could kill an enemy, or I might end up just dramatically wounding it. Sure one could argue it becomes a drag on active processing power within the game when combat may still be going on having non-combat entities still moving about... but boy would that add to the depth of character and effects of combat.

And then, altering an enemy's combat AI produces a much greater range of play strategy, especially for example, if say two fully capable enemies are a threat and too hard to take out entirely together - but reducing the effectiveness of one in some manner provides an open door to take out #2, then return to #1 to complete the job.