AP Minigun

The **Armour Piercing Minigun** is an Armourdillo exclusive upgrade/variant of the minigun.

## Characteristics

### Pros

Capability to pierce materials, high damage to devices.

### Cons

Expensive, low damage to bracing, not useful in the stage of the game they are used.

### Special

0.375x damage to bracing, requires Armourdillo and a base Minigun in order to be created

The AP minigun is an early game weapon built by upgrading a minigun with an upgrade center that specializes at destroying devices and weapons behind small amounts of armour. It functions similarly to the standard minigun, firing a burst of 13 rounds with a short windup time. Its bullets are uniquely able to penetrate 1 piece armour or 3 pieces of bracing, an attribute which sets it apart from normal miniguns.

AP miniguns are fairly expensive to use for multiple reasons. First, creating them takes a long time and many steps, requiring an upgrade center and two earlier stages before being built. The weapon also requires 325 metal to be created from the base machine gunner, meaning that only three AP miniguns cost nearly 1,000 total metal. Additionally, they are costly to fire when used over an extended period of time. Because of this, AP miniguns should be used carefully and defended from weapons such as snipers which destroy them in one shot in order to avoid wasting resources.

### Strategies

AP miniguns are very effective against an opponent who has foregone defenses in favor of more economy or to get out weapons faster. Since this weapon does high damage to devices, it may pierce through the starting armour of an opponent's fort and deal damage directly to their mines or storages (battery, metal store). Repairing these is extremely costly, and their economy will be crippled if they do not prevent the miniguns from targeting their devices again.

This weapon is also effective at destroying specific targets, including wind turbines and lightly defended machine gunners. Destroying these things may give the upper hand in the early game.

If a player forgets to scout the base of someone planning to use AP miniguns, the player may scrap the protection around their core without defending it with anything else. This can result in the AP minigun user simply being able to target the opponent's core and win on the spot.

### Counters

AP miniguns are especially ineffective against materials, dealing very low damage to bracing and struggling to destroy armour. This means that AP miniguns can simply be defended from by a layer of bracing, completely invalidating the strategy with minimal resource losses. Additionally, the windup time that miniguns and AP miniguns have makes them vulnerable to snipers. Considering the immense investment that a single AP minigun is, a sniper can easily shut down the strategy by just destroying a few of them.

One of the best counters to AP miniguns is simply scouting; seeing them before they fire allows a player to effectively defend from them, while the opponent wastes resources and significant amounts of time and technology making them. When AP miniguns are defended, there is little to pivot to as a backup option since the only piece of technology a player may have is the upgrade center required to make them.