Talk:Personal Armour

Damage modifier notation incorrect

There is a bug in the soldier spawn routine which incorrectly assigns the Power Suit damage modifer category to units with Personal Armor. The programmers should have made the program check if the armor type read from the SOLDIER.DAT file was less than or equal to the value of 1 (personal armor). Instead, they check if the value is less than 1, which not being true for 1, allows the damage modifier category of the Power Armor to be assigned to the unit. -Tycho 13:42, 17 February 2013 (EST)

That explains the fire immunity it always conferred. I assume this is the same for TFTD's Plastic Aqua Armor as well? -NKF 04:57, 18 February 2013 (EST)

Yes. That section of the spawn routine in TFTD is exactly the same code.-Tycho 21:35, 18 February 2013 (EST)

Should we advocate the use of this stuff?

While, from a tactical standpoint, Personal Armour is of some use, from a strategic standpoint it's dubious at best. A suit of Personal Armour more than doubles the cost of a Rookie (in materials cost alone, never mind the engineering time), but doesn't even halve their chances of dying in one hit. So unless you're in serious danger of having a mission go south, you're better off simply forgoing Personal Armour and accepting the casualty rates.

Psi-screened soldiers, of course, are far more expensive to replace, so armour's absolutely worthwhile on those, but by then Personal Armour is obsolete. Magic9mushroom (talk) 15:32, 24 July 2018 (CEST)

Amusingly, while not my own opinion, I usually notice that it's the Power Suit that is most often considered for the chop when the value of the different suits are discussed.

You can could think of it as the same discussion around skipping mid level gear like lasers, tanks, medi-kits and most of the advanced ships. You can ignore them if you really want to. But perhaps depending on the circumstance you find yourself in, a cheap (relatively) and more accessible alternative may just be what you need to help get you by until matters improve. I certainly wouldn't discourage its use, though perhaps a refresh of the description in this article is well overdue.

That has me thinking. It might be useful to build some comparison tables to show how effective the different suits stand up to the different plasma weapons. Just pulling some numbers out of the air here, say a Heavy Plasma can damage the front plates of each suit 5%, 21%, 42% and 47% of the time respectively. NKF (talk) 11:49, 25 July 2018 (CEST)