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)

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"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)

It's the same as the Medikit. Why bother with it until you get armor - that's the usual comment that I hear. I don't know. I like having a medikit even if my team is in all coveralls. I'd like to at least have the chance of saving a trooper and not get the morale hit, or the negative mission points if at all possible. But that's just me - others find it easier to buy more rookies, and that's fair enough.

Everyone has their own approach - though the classic All Flying Suits approach generally works out well enough.

My approach to armour is that it's a semi-luxury. To warp and paraphrase one of my favourite phrases from another game: "Personal armour for everyone!". The odds of surviving are half that of the power suits, and considerably more than that of coveralls. You can still get wiped out, but hey a chance to survive is still a chance. It's cheaper (relatively speaking). It gets rid of alloys. It's easy to mass produce. You don't have to put too much effort into researching it at the start and can concentrate on the more important things (like the plasma beam or hyperwave decoder). Plus it looks spiffy!

Power suits I start to produce for my elite groundpounders as the resources become available. Just for those that have served well - the longer I can keep them alive, the better they can look after the rookies.

Flying Suits are special. Only one or two are built purely to position a sniper above the Skyranger to provide support fire/last-resort/cheap-shots for the ground troops as they start to spread out into the field. I suppose it doesn't have to be that special - but I do it since I like to have ground troops as well as those in the air. Amazing how you can miss things that you can easily see on the ground.

With the coveralls - there's one comment I recall that I think sums it up quite well: It's better than sectoid armor! -NKF 04:42, 6 March 2009 (CST)

The difference between medikits and Personal Armor: I would estimate that, before you get Armor, a soldier that is HIT by an alien has around... 15% chance of survival? I'm going to write out the tables for this later, I think. The medkit would probably save this soldier from fatal wounds 2/3s of the time. So, overall, if a soldier is hit by a shot, a medkit will save him 10% of the time.

Whereas for personal armor, it will tend to save his life around 40% of the time. (following which you need the medkit, usually)

These are estimates, I need to draw out a table for this one of these days.

Come to think of it, I think my greatest use of medkits are those stimulants. Jasonred 05:34, 6 March 2009 (CST)

Armour - Survival Rates

I can probably whip up a full table up from my Firepower spreadsheet - just select alien weapons vs human targets. But just eyeballing it, to take the typical case at the start of the game, Plasma Pistol vs Coveralls: 52 Base Damage vs 12 Front armour. Assuming 30 Health, that's an immediate kill in about (104-30)/104 hits (just over 71%) for zero armour, versus an immediate kill in (104-30-12)/104 hits (just under 60%) wearing factor=12 Coveralls. That probability doesn't include dying of your wounds later (which of course is the purpose of immediate MedKit use). Anyway that's a useful survival margin, bringing 70% kill down to 60% kill is better than nothing though nowhere near plasma-proof of course. As NKF rightly said, better than Sectoid skin. ;) Spike 06:19, 6 March 2009 (CST)