Adding Body Armour to the Infantry Units

[harlikwin]

You can't do the infantry with added armor. Messes up the game. What I was doing with my dirtside2 mod was using a fixed icon (#of men never changes) and just making each PA suit = 4-5 men so a full power squad would have like 20 guys, the rationale was it was like hitpoints. Not really a good abstraction, but the best I could think of.

At this point I don't recall if the motorbike thing worked or not, it might have been an earlier (dos) version that worked. Also you can just give them infantry movment so breakdowns/terrain won't be much of an issue (you can of course up the speed if you like or add water movment)

One of the alternative methods/approaches is obviously to treat each suit of PA as a vehicle (jeep etc) And have a few types you form into a 4-5unit squad. The problem with that is the huge amount of micromanagment.

That being said, the 2 perspecitves on it are, the vehicle method, which I think is great/fine for heavier "mecha" type armor (ala mechwarrior or whatever) since your number of units is relativel small and the units are presumably tank/apc equivalent. And for this approach SPMBT works fine. The problem comes in with the mini-power armor (whats currently being developed), wich will persumably use heavier weapons, move at higher speeds than heavily loaded conventional infantry and also carry much more balistic protection than conventional infantry. All of which except for the the protection aspect can be modeled currently.

Essentially all that I would like is some decent way to make one class of infantry more survivable versus others in game (new infantry class?). i.e. reduced effects from small arms fire or HE shells. Most of the rest of it is currently pretty simple, i.e. change speed/weapons.