Talk:Armour
- Todo: Armour needs its own section, to encapsulate anything and jolly well everything you need to know about armour, and its managment - with bits from the damage -vs- armour discussion
Have added the basic article to hang the above extensions requested off at least. --Sfnhltb 10:42, 7 March 2007 (PST)
"So the only way to keep from losing armour is to keep your soldiers alive." - Well... there's another way: you can always not bring armor if you really want to keep it ;)
Is it just me or this whole point is a little... well pointless. If you want to keep your soldiers alive then armor really helps. If you want to keep your armor then leave it at the base. If you want to keep your armor and your soldiers alive then... bring your armor and don't get killed. Bah! I think I'm goina shoot a blaster launcher at the wall behind my desktop :) . Hobbes 20:57, 26 October 2008 (CDT)
- If you think the second sentence is overkill, feel free to remove it. NightChime 22:28, 26 October 2008 (CDT)
- Well I'm perfectely OK with it since it's correct. There's more to add to it, of course, and I think that's what was tickling me but we'll leave that reasoning to the readers ;) Hobbes 10:42, 27 October 2008 (CDT)
Armour - What Use Is It Anyway?
Re the dialogue playing out on the main page - even basic coveralls do have some chance of completely stopping every non-area-effect weapon in the game, and will always reduce the damage sustained, to some small degree.
But to warm to my point - armour, what use is it?
There's a strong case that the best defence is a strong offence. I incline to that philosophy and armour is very late on my development list. I would rather put the technology effort into better ways to find and kill more of the aliens - and kill them before they kill my guys. That means detection and firepower get priority over armour. As has been noted elsewhere, early on armour doesn't improve your survival chances that much, often just leads to having lots of wounded, not particularly valuable guys hanging around in hospital. And use of armour tends to encourage the idea of getting hit. Not having any really encourages the idea of avoiding getting hit! And if worse comes to worst, a new Soldier is only a loss of 40,000. It's a much bigger financial loss if the Soldier goes down wearing that fancy high tech armour that is so expensive to replace.
Of course, it is nice to be immune to smoke, fire and (eventually) half of the weapons in the game. Gives greater flexibility. If there was a simple respirator to prevent smoke damage, I might equip my troops with that. Firing AC-HE on auto at point blank without caring whether you miss is a careless luxury I can do with out.
Scouting is the one area where I feel the most pain without armour. Scouts tend to be some of your best troops, they are unavoidably put in the line of fire, and it hurts to lose them. If I could buy better armour for the scouts, instead of having to bankroll the whole R&D programme, I would definitely do that.
One last thing on the plus side for armour, to be fair. Armour does not use up an item slot on the transport or battlescape. So it's a sneaky way of squeezing a considerable amount of extra fighting power into a mission, at no cost to the 80-item limit, and regardless of the number of soldiers you send in a squad.
On balance though, I think of armour as a luxury that I only develop when I'm rolling in cash and running out of important things to research. Just a personal opinion! Spike 04:17, 6 March 2009 (CST)