How Damage Works

The Damage Pipeline

When one Icaroid fires at another, damage usually resolves in a fixed order depending on the type of shot. Understanding this order is the key to everything else. Each step operates on the results of the previous step:

1. Roll to hit. The attacker's accuracy alone. Missed shots deal no damage, but in some cases may strike other nearby targets.
2. Roll hit quality. A landed shot may be a critical hit or a glancing hit, scaling its damage and how well armor holds against it.
3. Pick a target component. A weighted roll chooses which part of the Icaroid takes the blow.
4. Shields absorb damage. Energy shielding soaks the unmodified base hit before anything else.
5. Resistances & reductions. Type resistance and reduction auras shave the leftover damage.
6. Armor blunts the rest. Armor subtracts from what reaches the component.
7. Structure takes the remainder. Whatever damage remains takes a chunk out of the component's structure.

Hit chance & hit quality

Before any damage is dealt, the attack must land. Hit chance is simply the attacker's accuracy - the defender's evasion does not reduce it. The accuracy value (plus any situational modifiers) is checked against a roll from 0-100; if it meets or beats the roll, the shot connects. Every shot keeps at least a 10% chance to land - hit chance will never be less than 10%.

Evasion instead decides how well a connecting shot lands. It only pays off in full when the defender's mobility can carry its weight: an Icaroid whose mobility meets or exceeds its weight gets its full evasion bonus; but once weight outpaces mobility, evasion is scaled down by mobi1lity / weight, leaving heavy, sluggish Icaroids very exposed to crits.

evasion scale = (mobility ≥ weight) ? 1 : mobility / weight
effective evasion = defender evasion × evasion scale
glancing chance = effective evasion
crit chance grows with (attacker accuracy − effective evasion)

A few things move the numbers around:

• Moving penalises attackers. A unit that moved this round is harder to draw a bead on - attackers take roughly a −5 to-hit penalty per hex it covered, applied for the whole round, which also blunts their critical-hit chance. Firing on the move costs the mover no accuracy of its own. See Movement & Positioning.
• Effects stack on top. Shadowed on the defender and Suppressed on the attacker cut the attacker's accuracy; Entangled halves a target's evasion. These come from status effects.
• Accuracy and evasion meet in the quality rolls. The attacker's accuracy edge (accuracy − effective evasion, after every modifier above) determines the critical-hit chance, and the defender's effective evasion is its glancing-hit chance - so a slippery target that does get clipped is often only grazed, while a slow, heavy one may get cored.

Damage types

Each weapon's damage type decides how it interacts with shields, armor, and structure. The five basic physical types target a single component and run the full mitigation pipeline. Each carries three multipliers:

• Shield multiplier - how much shielding absorbs. Higher percentages indicate the shield soaks more (draining slowly); 0 means any shields are bypassed entirely.
• Armor multiplier - how effective the target's armor is. Higher percentages mean armor deflects this damage type easily; lower means armor is a poor protection.
• Structure multiplier - how effective the remaining damage is once it reaches structure.

The Weapons guide covers which damage types each weapon inflicts.

Mitigation: shields & armor

Sooner or later, every Icaroid will take a hit. Once a physical shot lands and a component is chosen, the damage is whittled down in stages.

1. Shields

Shields absorb the incoming weapon damage - already scaled by hit quality, so a critical hit burns through a shield 25% faster and a glancing hit 25% slower. The amount a shield can soak is scaled by the type's shield multiplier, so Blunt drains a shield twice as effectively while Laser ignores it outright. Whatever the shield absorbs is subtracted before anything else happens.

2. Resistances & reductions

Only the damage that leaks past the shield continues. Two things can trim it here:

• Type resistance - e.g. Plasma Resistance soaks a percentage of plasma damage. Resistances are capped at 90%.
• Incoming-damage reduction - flat percentage cuts that apply to all types, such as the Dampening Field aura's 20%. Also capped at 90%.

3. Armor

The component's armor, scaled by the type's armor multiplier, is subtracted from the remaining damage. Hit quality scales it too: a critical hit ignores 25% of the armor, while armor is 25% more effective against a glancing hit. Three more modifiers can tilt this exchange:

• Armor-piercing sends a percentage of the damage straight past armor to structure.
• Armor delta adds flat armor (e.g. Siege Mode).
• Armor reduction weakens effective armor by a percentage (e.g. Resonance Weakened from ichor glyphs).

4. Structure

Whatever survives armor is multiplied by the structure multiplier and damage is applied to the component's structure. A hit always deals at least 1 structure damage, even against overwhelming armor. When a component's structure hits zero it is destroyed - and any effects it was granting to the Icaroid go with it.

Which part gets hit

You don't usually choose the component you hit - it's a weighted random roll biased toward bigger parts. Every intact component (and the core, while it lives) rolls a die sized to it, and the highest roll takes the shot:

• Large components and the Core roll a d20.
• Medium and Mobility components roll a d10.
• Small components roll a d5.

Bigger parts win far more often, so they soak most of the punishment - but a small component can still catch a stray hit on a lucky roll. Destroyed components cannot be hit and do not roll, which means the more of an Icaroid you wreck, the more concentrated the remaining fire becomes.

A shield component rolls an extra die of its own size and keeps the better result, so it wins the targeting roll far more often than its size alone would suggest - deliberately drawing fire away from the rest of the Icaroid.

How components are sized and connected is covered in Building an Icaroid.

Stability & crashes

Stability damage doesn't target a component - it attacks an Icaroid's footing. An Icaroid stays upright as long as its base mobility (the sum of its components' mobility) plus any stability modifiers stays at or above zero. Push that total below zero and the Icaroid suffers a crash.

A crash is punishing:

• Damage equal to 90% of the Icaroid's weight - counting only parts that are still intact - is spread across all of its components.
• Only half armor applies, and shields are bypassed entirely.
• Each component takes at least 1 damage from the fall.

Stability is hard to defend directly - there is no armor for footing. Your best counters are staying mobile and not clustering into a single barrage. Note that Blunt weapons leak 10% of their raw damage as stability on top of their structural damage, so a wall of blunt fire can topple an Icaroid that never lost a single component.

Explosive blasts

Explosive damage trades single-target focus for spread. It still rolls a primary target component the same weighted way as a physical hit, but the blast doesn't stop there - and it can never land a critical or glancing hit, resolving on flat numbers instead. The pool is whittled down in its own short pipeline:

1. Resistance first. Explosive type resistance - such as Fortified cover - soaks its percentage off the whole blast before anything else touches it.
2. Shields next. Whatever remains is drained from shields one-for-one: there is no shield multiplier, so a full shield simply eats that much of the explosion.
3. Split the leftover. The damage that survives the shield is divided evenly across the primary component and every component directly connected to it - its parent and its immediate children.
4. Armor, per component. Each component subtracts its own full armor from its share (hit quality never scales it), and always takes at least 1 structure damage.

Warheads reshape the blast: Tandem Warhead converts part of it to piercing for armor penetration, while Incendiary Warhead converts part to a plasma burn that ticks over time.

Special damage types

Beyond the five physical types, a handful of damage types skip normal component targeting and behave on their own terms:

Explosive

Covered above - splits its blast across the struck component and everything directly connected to it, making it great at quickly destroying clusters of poorly-armored small components.

Electrical

Drains shields directly - armor is irrelevant - and leaves the target Electric Disruption, weakening its positive effects. Electrical charge accumulates: once a unit is holding 200 or more, it violently overcharges - each discharge burns a random surviving part with a 50-damage plasma burst and bleeds off 200 charge, repeating until it drops below the threshold. Resisted by Electrical Resist.

Sensory

Deals no structure damage; instead it applies Sensory Disrupted, degrading the target's accuracy when it fires.

Stability

Covered above - purely attacks an Icaroid's footing rather than its structure, threatening a crash and reducing its ability to move.

Modifiers & effects

Almost every number above can be nudged by an effect, an ability, or an ichor glyph. The common offensive and defensive levers:

These are only a sample. The full catalogue of how effects are applied, how long they last, and how they stack lives in the status effects guide.