Alright, so can someone tell me what the point of the "no arm" effect is in this game?

And how does this status improve the game over either a) making critical hits like that simply kill the actor or b) removing them entirely?

An actor with no arm cannot hold or fire a gun.
Unless of course it's an offhand shiled or sidearm.
Therefore said actor is useless, but still has health, so you can sell it at the tradestar with no risk.

It's not a critical hit, it's just the arm getting hit until it gibs, like the legs or head.

It's just a consequence about how Cortex Command work.

An AHuman is composed from five different body parts stitched together. They all have their own carateristics, that's why they can explode separately.

That's cool, because you can create guns with so much recoil that when shot the arm of the actor is destroyed completely instead of dying.

Surviving a big blow by sacrificing a limb makes things intense as hell.

Then again, the battlefield could just as well be full of soldiers losing their limbs.

this is the loss of the "right" arm (though if you face the other way they're using their left arm if i'm not mistaken)..
you know you can lose the other arm as well and it actually impacts weapon accuracy.

they should flesh this out more, like some guns cannot be used at all if an actor loses the other "less important" arm. seriously, coalitions shooting a man portable mini-gun with one arm?

It's simpler to refer to them as foreground/background limbs, really, rather than left or right. The background arm is the supporting arm, and the foreground arm the main wielding arm. Try not to think about it too much when it comes to changing facing and arms disappearing/reappearing.

Take in mind that with most weapons, the shakerange can be massively amplified by having no support arm (or using a shield, or off-hand weapon, and so on) which will make accuracy go downhill.

For instance, the Coalition Gatling. It has a ShakeRange of 9 when unaimed, or 5 when sharpaimed - pretty high values already. But top those off with the fact it has a NoSupportFactor of 4, and those values are going to be multiplied (I think) by 4 when the support arm is not capable of supporting the weapon. Those shakeranges jump to 36 and 20 respectively! So you can fire that gatling all you want with only one hand, but you're not going to hit anything with most of your rounds.

yeah but it's impossible, like literally, to aim or fire it with one arm...


plus think about it as a dynamic. the guy with the rocket launcher got his left arm vaporized so he drops it and another grunt with two arms needs to pick it up for you to use it.

So, the idea of losing an arm and just being able to wield one handed weapons is cool. That is a status effect that actually contributes to the game.

But sofar, I've seen nothing that suggests to me that keeping in the NO ARM effect improves any aspect of the game at all.

Again, the units' limbs are entirely separate from each other. It isn't a "status effect;" it means your arms have literally been blown off and so you're incapable of holding a gun. It's there for the same reason that you can have no legs — it doesn't serve a purpose, necessarily, but it's part of how the game's engine works. The "NO ARMS" indicator is just to make it clear to you why you suddenly can't pick up any weapons.

An armless soldier suddenly becomes the most powerful weapon thanks to Cortex Command's physics engine; the human rocket, which is much better than losing your soldier entirely just because one of your arms exploded.

That's enough reason.

Armless legless ballistic missile.

the best kind

a dropship's worst nightmare

someone actually made a cannon that shot limbless clones.


i never tried it, and i kind of regret not. but iirc the clones were shot chest first as if they were standing up, instead of head first...