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One of the changes we are planning to include in Xenonauts-2 is a "modular armour" system, which is intended to give the player much more flexibility in terms of how they equip their units - and if all goes well, it should also be visually more "cool" than the armour system in the first game! Problems with the Xenonauts 1 System: The first Xenonauts game had six suits of armour in it which could be simplified down into three tiers of technology that contained a "heavy" armour and a lighter and usually more mobile "light" variant: Basic Armour (starting) / Combat Armour Wolf Armour / Buzzard Armour Sentinel Battlesuit / Predator Battlesuit The light armour typically offered less protection but had a jetpack, and the two battlesuits also offered 360-degree vision or maximum Strength respectively. This sytem worked fairly well in general but there were a couple of instances where it ran into difficulties. The pace of the campaign and the sheer number of armour suits meant that you were constantly unlocking new armour, which meant you were often replacing your shiny new armour every two or three missions. Such a short lifespan rather detracts from the cool factor of getting new gear. There was no way to customise armour - e.g. a Buzzard jumpsuit would always have a jetpack, but on missions like Alien Base attack missions a jetpack was completely useless. There was no option to drop the jetpack and, say, use the reduced weight to bring along a few more grenades instead. The Xenonauts-2 system is designed to take everything good about the Xenonauts 1 armour system and fix the problems that it had. How the Xenonauts 2 Modular Armour System will work: In Xenonauts-2 those six armours would be collapsed down into three suits of armour that each have a number of "modules" that allow you to customise them. For the purposes of this thread I'll use similar names for the armour: Tactical Armour (starting) Wolf Armour Battlesuit Armour The modules currently planned for the Tactical and Wolf Armour are the following: Heavy Armour (+armour, +weight) Rebreather (gas immmunity, -acc) Tactical Visor (+acc, -armour) Jetpack (+weight, vertical movement) It is a little deceptive that there's now only three armours, as you can easily recreate the six armours from X1 - the Buzzard is just Wolf Armour with a jetpack, whereas removing the jetpack and equipping Heavy Armour gives you the equivalent of the X1 Wolf. It's better than that, though: there's no reason why a particularly strong soldier can't equip everything at once (although ideally the penalties on the items mean it'd be suboptimal to do so from a min-maxing point of view). The modules are controlled by a series of toggle buttons shown below the armour dropdown. You can see a simple (programmer art) concept for how it will look in the image below: Each of the buttons is toggled independently from the others, so each soldier can equip any combination of the modules for any given armour. They will also be compatible with the loadout system so you can say all your Assault troops have Heavy Armour and Rebreathers, while all your Snipers have Tactical Visors and Jetpacks (obviously you can also customise individual soldiers too). The art will also update to reflect the equipped modules, which I think is going to be one of those "cool" moments when people when people first see it happening and start to mix and match different components on their armour. Research, Progression and Armour Modules: Clearly, not all of the modules for the armour are available from the start of the game - the jetpack and tactical visor are unlocked via research and then can be shared across multiple types of armour. But the idea is that individual modules can also be upgraded. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed the first image has three different armours in it, and this is because the first image represents the basic Tactical armour and the second image shows the Tactical armour with the Heavy Armour (Kevlar Vest) option enabled. The third armour shows the Warden Vest, which is an upgraded version of the Heavy Armour that is unlocked by early game research. Similarly, we could also put a SENTINEL Visor in the game that is an upgraded version of the Tactical Visor that also grants 360 degree vision. We need to spend some time working through the UI / UX of how this could work, particularly if the module items are limited quantity, but it the potential is definitely there for a cool system. Finally, I should say that it would definitely be possible to make a more complex system with loads of different modules for each armour if we wanted to, but I don't think it would be practical. The art requirements get really complex really fast (because each module needs to work with any other combination of modules), and the user interface would also start to fall apart. Having four or five modules per armour tier means we can have a UI button for each, which means changing modules is quick and easy for the player - anything more complex would need a seperate menu (which I think would be pretty laborious to use).

It's a good point to bring up. As ground combat is zoomed out, it's going to be difficult to tell smaller details like gas masks. The ground combat UI has a bust portrait of the solider at the bottom of the screen with the solider in their armour, and there's a facial portrait of each soldier at the top of the screen. I'd suggest that the facial portraits are updated the same as the bust portraits once modular armour is introduced.