Ammo Tactica: Armour Piercing

Hi again and welcome to the second part of this ongoing ammo nonsense!

Today we are talking about AP rounds, the Armour Piercing ammunition:

Armour Piercing Ammo

AP ammo reduces the natural armour of your target by half rounded up (and by natural I mean the armour before cover bonus). This might seem awesome on paper but sadly is not that cool. The armies with most access to this ammo are Ariadna and Haqqislam, other armies do have AP ammo in the form of Multi Ammo weapons, which allow you to shoot normal, AP or DA ammo, the only exception at the moment is the Tohaa, poor aliens came late to the party and got no multi neither AP ammo.

Ariadna has the exclusivity of the feared AP HMG which combines the sheer destructive power of an HMG with the heavy armour control provided by its special ammo. You can also find AP rounds in its most basic form within AP rifles and in some cases in AP Sniper Rifles, Ojotniks, CCW …

Additionally you’ll find AP rounds combined with other types of ammo, EXP and DA being the more common types and we will talk about those when the time comes.

So, how do you use AP? First of all it offers no use against targets with 0-1 Arm because it HALVES ROUNDING UP. I’m no mathematician but against 0-1 armour that means 0 reduction, which is just sad because a decent quantity of troops in this game have those armour levels. The next common armour tier ranges from 2 to 4 and here things start to look a bit better but still, pale in comparison to the effects of other ammo (which we will cover soon!! :D). Armour 2 goes to just armour 1 which  marginally improves the odds of killing your target but it just doesn’t do the trick. Even heavy infantry (2 wounds, ARM 3-6) in cover will get their armour knocked down just by 2, which is not worth going out of your way to pay for AP weaponry.

Of course AP HMG will mow down any opponent cover or not, but that is not thanks to the AP, it is because is a damn heavy machine gun!

Now if we are going after big game, AP starts to shine. It shreds armour 10 down to 5 which allow a humble rifle loaded with this ammo to have decent odds of bringing down a big target with few orders (or in a single full burst if you are that disgustingly lucky!).

It is good to remember that AP ammo has no effect on Total Immunity so don’t expect much if you are shooting Karakuris with it.—although a couple of HMG rounds should suffice to put those stupid geisha-bots down in pieces.

So to sum up:

• Effective against big targets preferably out of cover (but that applies to every shot you fire :P) like TAGs and very heavy HI, like Sogarats of the Morat Aggression Force (MAF), or other 4+ armour beasts.
• Mediocre against lower armour targets, pales in comparison to other ammo.
• Still if you have it, use it, even if what you are getting is just a marginal advantage, every bit counts.

Thanks for reading this far!