Dont bother with armor.

Bother with armor. I too wonder why this is a thing. Composite vests are unreasonably heavy. 10 kg vest compared to 4 kg flak jacket. Why? I guess that since it offers considerably more protection than the flak jacket, it must be "balanced" to be heavier. Also consider the normal armor vest weighs 11 kg. I guess this will not be changed and so our pawns must be over-encumbered until you get your hands on marine armor (better protection, weight, and not as encumbering). Just annoying.

Yeah in CE 1.3 armor was actually useless. Now they balanced some things so you did not get one shot if your fully armored or not. Because in 1.3 I valued movment speed because if you get hit you were dead anyway. Or the centipede Inferno Blaster was a nightmare. Now its no longer that bad its compared to what it used to be a joke. Also the lancer. Therre was no need to run around with heavy armor because it would hurt you bad anyway. better be wwuick and kite because you got one shot anyway from it. Now you can easily surivive 2 shots without any armor sometimes even 4 depends were it hits you. Also pikeman no longer have these stupid 61 mortar shells but shoot you.
Also AE-I .303 which raiders spawnd with an a lee enfield. they just bypassed any of your armor again. So no need to have any armor anyway.

In one update they changed the weight of flak armores so you were able to wear a full set.

So they changed some things and beeing able to be fully armored in 1.4 would be OP.

Where is the fun in armor being useless? What is the point? I'm not saying you said this, I just want to know why armor can't be balanced to be effective and still not over-encumber pawns. I'm new to CE and am not playing with Mechs and Insectoids for this first run. But yeah, sitting behind embrasures and sandbags just to watch incoming raids get melted before they cross half my crop fields. I guess that is why it seems to easy, cus they have to balance armor to be effective yet not to effective to where mechs and insects can do significant damage. I think that it also might have to be enemy AI being borked as well. Rough Outlander raid and the morons stand around shooting rocks with their backs turned to my 19 armed pawns. Maybe things like this are why I don't understand the usefulness of armor as it stands in 1.4: I've never really been shot at! (Except for David who got his arm hit through his flak jacket) (I play on Blood and Dust /w Randy) (My colony value is still very high as I harvest a lot of organs sooo) Guess i'm just a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.