Posted by: DFNewb
« on: April 20, 2020, 03:35:04 PM »AC is best for Light Vehicles that operate alone - for example, GeoSurvey or XenoArchaeology protection unit.
This is because light vehicles only have 1 component slot. Medium+ vehicles have 2, 3 or 4 component slots. So for a Medium Vehicle, you can make it use MAV and HCAP so that it can counter effectively both hard and soft targets. For a Super-Heavy vehicle, you might want to hedge your best and put HAC alongside SHAV and HCAP. For an Ultra-Heavy Vehicle, 2xSHAV and 2xHCAP is the best combination.
And also, if your formation has multiple types of units in it, then AC is again less useful, though it still has its niche - if you build a formation with armoured infantry (many), light vehicles (some) and medium+ vehicles (few) to create a combined arms force on the cheap, then AC on the light vehicles complements the others fairly well.
If you know your enemy composition, then tailoring your force for either mopping up infantry or busting armour is always better than using AC. If you want to see the math, look at the Ground Combat thread in the Development forum, people calculated it there.
Note that this assumes equal weapon/armour tech levels. If your weapons are higher tech than their armour, then AC becomes stronger. If your weapons are lower-tech than their armour, then AC becomes weaker.
This is 1 thing I noticed mathematically too. AC is more consistent against lower tech enemies and would be ideal to use against them to preserve as much as their infrastructure as possible.