How to get points?

[sinisteragent]

There are so many options. Listen to your heart! And give everything a try, and a second chance later if you didn't like it the first time. I'm currently finding that one or two gals do surprisingly well with the bastard sword, something I previously discounted because on paper it was crap against armour.

I always keep at least one spiked mace on a ship, they often come in handy.

[legionof1]

Most melee despite the negative armor value generally has sufficient raw damage with good stats to not really care. +20% armor on a base of 50 is only 60 final armor. And honestly very few things aside from terror units have much above 40-50 armor. Most of the weapons with negative armor% can swing in the 80-100+ range.

[KiriKaneko]

Wow, thats incredible. I should make more serious use of lethal melee weapons

[legionof1]

Raw base damage is more effective at getting through armor because of how damage is applied. A weapon has a base damage that then rolls against a multiplier(0-200% for most ranged, 50-150 for most melee and explosives, formula for plasma ect) this is then modified by targets resists then armor is subtracted. If damage gets through to hp armor is damaged by 10% of the penetrating damage. Some weapons like chem have additional armor damage that is applied irregardless of penetration.

Because base damage is at the start of the calculations it has the greatest impact on final performance. Alot of high raw weapons are more broadly effective then one would first assume because of this order of calculation. 

[KiriKaneko]

Thanks. I'd kind of realised it was the most important but I didn't understand why until you explained the formula to me. It also seems melee is more reliably since the minimum damage is 50%, it's theoretically to roll 0% over and over with ranged shots which explains some nomads tanking like 6 laser shots, and one of my soldiers face tanking 4 AP shotgun shots at point blank

[legionof1]

It gets pretty silly sometimes. Like when a baby nuke goes off on someones face and they come out unharmed apart from standing a in 15 tile wide fire.

[KiriKaneko]

Speaking of which, there sure is a lot of explosive users in this mod. Fortunately this defender armour has saved our lives from quite a few spartan rockets