Math/difficulty setting questions; Stowed vs. per-hit Damage

[Blunt Eversmoke]

Hi all!

I am pretty new to TA but like the chess-like minimalistic concept.

For those who run shooty Soldiers in their teams, do you prefer guns with lots of stowed damage or those with lots of damage in a single hit?


Because I have honestly searched and read the forums but cannot find any discussion of the following:

Wanting to calculate the best ranged armament for the soldiers, scouts and the captain, I ran into questions as to the game math, especially its coupling with the difficulty setting; especially for grinding with a newbie team on tougher deifficulty settings, I would like to calculate if weapons with high damage per strike are a better choice than those with more "stowed" damage/kills which matter a lot when grinding. 
Examples of trade-offs: Long Devastator(OK, bad example as it is only available pretty late ingame) (7 dam, 20 ammo, costs an arm and a leg) versus Heavy Leviathan (only 3 dam, but 24 ammo and cheap); Captain with Sidearm AND Heavy Leviathan who carries a lot of stowed ranged damage vs. Captain with Sword and Sidearm who is able to trade some HP for extra kills in melee grinding.
Because, even when grinding with melee, you still need to take into account the need to shoot from time to time, when that alien would otherwise close in on you AND be able to strike, so the actual stowed kills limit the possibility to grind honor and prestige on a single map before I have to actually take the objective or face deaths of squad members.  


Difficulty settings: The description in the manual says too little about what values of the game are affected. 

Do higher settings spawn just more of the same mix of enemies or are the proportions of the types in the mix also varied (higher setting, more of the higher HP/armor/damage variety - say, more of the modern Xeno lifeform, less of the ancient)?
Are the hard stats of a given enemy variety (say, the modern Xeno lifeform) changed in adaption to a difficulty setting, and if yes, which ones? HP, armor, ...
Are gear values affected (in hidden form) by the difficulty settings? Or just the to-hit chances of Templars and enemies?


First thing, the armor:

a) How does armor work in TA, exactly, and especially the enemy armor? Is the armor value simply subtracted from the rolled damage, or is the armor also rolled anew every single hit, together with the damage?

b) No enemy in TA ever has zero armor, the minimum that is seen in the manual is 1. Is this 1 actually subtracted from rolled damage or is this more like the splash/burst radius of most weapons saying 1 where there is actually none?

Second thing, the weapons:

a) Is the damage done when hitting rolled from 1 or from zero? (sorry if this question  - and the one above - sounds stupid, but with the damage values being little, weighing lots this one point of whack is well worth taking into account)

b) When a critical hit is done, the full weapon damage is applied and not the rolled damage (would make a difference in cases of enemy armor being stronger than the Templar's weapon), right?

Sorry if all this has been posted somewhere, but I have honestly failed to find it.
Have a time!

[Blunt Eversmoke]

Oh, damn. A Brainfart(tm) has occured in the post above. Serves me right for writing from work AND dead tired at the same time
Of course, there is no point comparing the per-hit dmg and stowed damage for Heavy Leviathan and Long Devastator because the latter is superior in both parameters. Dunno what caused that brainfart - my brain has probably filtered out all the Elite Soldier weapons between Heavy Leviathan and Plasma Rifle on the low end and the Long Devastator on the high end because I currently play on Free(waiting for this month's munny ).
Replace the Devastator with Leviathan Repeater or -Cannon and it becomes appropriate comparison again.

Reason for above questions is that some enemies are total one-shot pushovers, HP wise, and dealing too much damage in one blow would be total overkill and waste of ammo/honor for weapon purchase/grindable enemies because you have to complete mission too early when ammo runs out.
Now, IF the hard stats are majorly affected by difficulty level, preferring higher per-hit damage to lots of stowed kills makes sense even when low-level grinding.

[Cory Trese]

What is "stowed" damage?

[abysmal]

I believe he means a high damage output per shot vs DPS damage, or high critical-low damage weapons.

Personally I chose High Damage per shot because if I hit it, I want it to be dead. Not nearly dead. Then again I'm working on the Siege of Vestmarch (on Brutal) campaign so that answer may change.

[Blunt Eversmoke]

By "stowed" damage or kills I mean the total amount of ranged damage (or kills) that can be dealt(scored) before you run outta ammo. That could matter in some cases(grinding) if known how to calculate correctly.
And no, I don't mean to compare the high-dmg with the high-critical weapons because I don't know how exactly to take criticals into account at which difficulty, yet. But it would be a viable comparison all of its own especially for noobie squads, btw.


Of course, later ingame high per-hit damage matters a lot and a lot more (esp. when dealing with the armored enemies in the elite campaigns). But when the squad gets there, it should have access to weapons that have lots of both per-hit and stowed damage such as Neptune, AND lots of attack skill bonus such as Long Devastator.