Suggestion for a Change in the Armor Mecanic

I don’t think how you implemented armor melds well with how combat works. The way each shot having a chance to hit makes it extremely difficult to get through even easy missions without injuries and that could cascade in the strategy phase.
I would suggest changing the armor system from damage absorption to Integrity that act’s more like health, like what was done in the X-COM Long War mod. That way each soldier would be able to take a few hit’s without a trip to the infirmary and would possibly mean that you would be able to, eventually, kill a boss without armor shred or explosives. It could still reduce damage, just less than it is now. In fact, you could have the ways to research your troops armor to either be more Integrity or more damage absorption.

If the team include research opportunities for enemy corpses and armament, I would assume there would also be opportunities to develop methods for overcoming the enemies defences or defending against weapons, such as increased damage to armour joints, or bullets that can shatter shields.

Yes, but we have exactly the same necessity of bringing those armor-penetrating bullets and grenades in XCOM(or XCOM2), and it wasn’t much fun.
But I guess the main reason of that was strict limitations to the amount of things to carry in vanilla game, together with limited squad size: you simply had to have at least 2-3 soldiers with armor shredding grenades/EMP grenades (for robotic units to make great internal damage) or special bullets made with the same fashion.

In PP, where squads could be bigger and equipment capacity not that restricted, it actually might work better.

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Hopefully with the inventory system it would allow for multiple ammo types, per soldier.

If items are limited, perhaps research could be used to develop squad skills in a knowledge based approach. That way new enemies and mutations might stand on equal footing as the squad develops.

It’d be nice to get multiple armour types - Some that absorb damage, others that prevent it.

Absorbing armour could consistently reduce damage and have the potential to be more useful if taking a large number of shots, whereas preventing armour could absorb all armour, but after x number of hits then be useless for the remainder of a mission (kinda like how a cycle helmet is designed to work)

I’d also like to see differing armour types with strengths against melee/ranged, and different types of damage such as ballistic/fire/chemical etc

Re: Injuries and the strategic layer - I don’t think it overly matters provided that you can have a large enough roster to have time to allow injuries soldiers to recover. In fact I’d rather be in a position where troops need to rotate, than to keep selecting the same 8 every mission.

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Bigger squads just lets you have more variety in equipment/weapons so soldiers could be better prepared for different situations during missions than in a small squad with limited inventory capacity (when each item had to be carefully chosen among the others because of capacity limitations).

I like the current armour system. It’s intuitive and makes sense, and it adds much needed diversity to damage types: many weaks hits vs a few powerful ones is a consideration with this type of armour, but wouldn’t be with “integrity”. How much damage leads to how much time spent recovering is a separate concern, and needn’t be tied to armour providing “integrity” as in XCOM.

I liked the ablative plating ststem for LW2. But I’m not sure that it would work for what we’ve already seen for the armour system.

Would it kick in after the armour was removed or for any qualifying hit? It wouldn’t work if the ablative armour was seperate from the main armour because you might end up taking off the ablative points for shot that may not have penetrated the armour.

Also, I’m not sure we’ve seen all the damage types. There may be enough to manage as there is. I’m thinking already there is: ballistic, poison, fire, stun, bleed, will and fall. I’ll imagine there might be acid, some kind of non-frag explosive, maybe ice, and some special damage for the virus.

Would ablative stop ballistic only, other, or all types? Which ones?

We will probably get several different armours good against different damage types. Ablative might be an option, among many others.

Edit: if it were seperate armour, I could see a strategy being to put ablative armour on you arms to avoid having weapon wielding appendages disabled.

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