Alien armours?

[Jorgen_CAB]

Could someone with knowledge point me in the direction where the information about alien armour is. I only find a value in the aiprops.xml file which seem to be that alien natural armour value, not what actual armour they have. Or is this value suppose to reflect their actual armour and resistance against weapons.

[Ol' Stinky]

Yeah, they don't have a separate file for their armour. That's defined in the armour tag, as you suspected:

<Armour kinetic="30" energy="30" chemical="100" incendiary="30" />

Bear in mind that armour protects against suppression (in all honesty I forgot that until Jeon pointed it out to me). You might want to alter the suppressionMultiplier of races accordingly, which is usually defined right after the death/injury sound info. A value of 0 makes a unit immune to suppression while a value of 1 causes each point of Bravery to equal 1 point of suppression "health". Or you could directly change bravery, or the suppression value of guns in weapons_gc.xml.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Ah... ok... that about suppression I didn't know. Although it does make sense in a way that soldiers using heavier armour is harder to suppress, they simply is more confident.

It does seem that aliens hardly have any armour at all though in the vanilla game, to the point where armour mitigation on weapons are not that useful for X-Com agents. If it works like I suspect that it does, which is simply ignoring that much armour on whatever you shoot at.

Well, not a thing a mod can't change... thanks for your input.

Anyway, I'm toying with the idea to reduce the hit point overall on enemies and increase their armour value. Of course that also means that suppression on more advanced weapons will have to be increased little as well. It will also mean that some weapons will be very useless against certain enemies, although the mod I'm looking to create will lower the snowball effect and equalize weapons (and soldier stats) more and make each category more specialized rather than just a better choice. Certain aliens will also be better protected against certain types of damage than others and so forth. So you should probably bring different types of weapons to most missions to be safe.

[jeon]

As far as I can tell, these appear to be the formulas for damage and suppression relating to armor and such:

Damage before armor =

Random roll of between (100 - DamageRandomChance[From config.xml]) to (100 + DamageRandomChance)% -- Default of 50-150%

* Difficulty Modifier in gameconfig.xml (only used for aliens, but presumably there is a variable for humans as well)

* Range Penalty (Range of Shot / Weapon Range IF Range > Weapon Range)

* Damage of Weapon

Then, your final damage done = damage before armor - (armor value vs. damage type - weapon mitigation IF armor value - weapon mitigation > 0).

Suppression is a bit different but it goes mostly like this:

Check to see if target is in inner or outer half of suppression radius. If the radius is 3 I think the inner radius is 1.5 so anything within 1.5 tiles gets full suppression and anything from 1.5-3 tiles gets half suppression value.

The final suppression value = (suppression before armor - (armor value vs. damage type - weapon mitigation IF armor value - weapon mitigation > 0)) * the suppression modifier on the alien race.

Finally, the armor value vs. damage type is reduced by (damage before armor value * ArmourDegradation%[Also from config.xml]) -- Default of 25% of what damage the shot would have done before being reduced by armor.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Great information!

The damage formula was pretty much what I presumed but I did not know that armour was degraded after being used so this was very helpful.

Many thanks!

[TrashMan]

Why aren't aliens using armor anyway?

I know we can mod it in, but it feels like something trhat should be in the game.

[Gauddlike]

I assumed it was because it was easier to make them all tough bullet sponges when the AI was non-existent but still seems to be carrying on.

I guess Chris will get to it with one of the balance patches.

Hopefully.