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. Accuracy versus evasion. Missed shots deal no damage, but in some cases may strike other nearby targets.
2. Pick a target component. A weighted roll chooses which part of the Icaroid takes the blow.
3. Shields absorb damage. Energy shielding soaks the unmodified base hit before anything else.
4. Resistances & reductions. Type resistance and reduction auras shave the leftover damage.
5. Armor blunts the rest. Armor subtracts from what reaches the component.
6. Structure takes the remainder. Whatever damage remains takes a chunk out of the component's structure.

Hit chance

Before any damage is dealt, the attack must land. Hit chance compares the attacker's accuracy against the defender's evasion, but evasion 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; once weight outpaces mobility, evasion is scaled down by mobility / weight, making heavy, sluggish Icaroids much easier to hit.

evasion scale = (mobility ≥ weight) ? 1 : mobility / weight
hit value = attacker accuracy − (defender evasion × evasion scale)

That value is then checked against a roll from 0-100. If the hit value meets or beats the roll, the shot connects. A few things move the number around:

• Moving costs accuracy. Firing after advancing applies roughly −5 accuracy per hex moved that phase.
• Moving grants evasion. The same motion makes the moving Icaroid harder to hit. 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.

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 base weapon damage only - the 2d6 damage criticality roll does not count against the shield, nor does the 2d6 defensive roll. 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. During this stage the the 2d6 damage criticality roll is added on. 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

Armor is rolled fresh each hit: the component's armor plus a 2d6 armor roll, scaled by the type's armor multiplier. That total is subtracted from the remaining damage. Three 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.

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 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.

Special damage types

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

Explosive

Shields absorb against the full blast first; the remainder is split evenly across the struck component and everything directly connected to it (its parent and immediate children). Full armor applies per component. Great at quickly destroying poorly-armored small components.

Electrical

Drains shields directly - armor is irrelevant - and leaves the target Electrical Dampened, weakening its positive effects. 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.