Unavailable inventory

[Chinamark]

In my "armour" inventory I have combat, nanocomposite, alien body and medium alien armour available. The figures say:

Nanocomposite Armour - 9 / 3

Alien Body Armour  - 4 / 9

Medium Alien Armour - 8 / 4

The problem is I have my squad in nanocomposite armour, which seems to work great, but I'd really like to put them in the medium alien armour.

When I go to equip my soldiers, I have 8 of them, in the "Armour" section there is just the one spare nanocomposite armour, which I'd expect to see but there there is no alien body or medium alien armour in there!

When I hover the mouse over the alien body and medium alien armour in the buy/sell list, it doesn't say that they need researching.

How can I use this armour?

[blondandy]

nanocomposite is currently the best armour available to phalanx.

armour with "alien" in the name is strictly for aliens!

the base inventory (as seen through the buy/sell menu) lists all equipment in the base, even that which is currently assigned to a soldier.

there are plans for more advanced armour types
http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/Equipment/Armour

i think the main hold up here is the need for more 3D artists.

hope that answers all your questions

[Chinamark]

Thanks for answering, it helps but I'm still a little confused as to why, if it's strictly for the aliens to use, I have the option to buy it if I can't use it.

[blondandy]

yeah. buying it does not make much sense. selling it is source of income.

i suppose you could sell them all early, to make money, while all of your scientists are busy on other projects. then buy some back later when you have some spare cash and spare research capacity.

tenuous. this is probably the real reason: having an item you can sell and not buy is that it is an unecessary complication to the coding of the game.

[Wanderer]

I haven't seen anything on the TODO for it yet, but there's one other reason to be able to buy things from the aliens you can't equip... breaking it down to base parts.  

In the original game, especially for elerium, I know there was some things you could 'disassemble' to get the correct goods.  Might not be much in the alien armor for it, but if this ever gets instituted (along with materials costs in the equipment for production), you'll be happy it's there.

[inquisiteur2]

In a somewhat related note, in X-com Apocalypse (my favorite) items prices used to decrease while user was selling alien material (Which is logical).

We could tweak a little bit the code to decrease items prices by (E.g.) 1% when an item is sold, and increase it by 0.5% when I item is bought, up to a fixed limit/level.

I think that would add more realism to the game.

I'll post that in the suggestion thread.