I spoke too soon. You also need to set the Armor Threshold to prevent naked dudes and those wearing fatigues and BDUs from getting the armor buff.

Putting minimum necessary Armor Threshold at 12 allows recon fatigues, track suit, and granit suit to get the buff from your mod, but at 12.5 they're the same as normal. They don't normally stop most 9mm, but will with the buff of 31. People can decide whether they want the default outfits of most of the enemies to be more durable or less with that.

Strangely, the tactical vests show as slightly more armored under ACE Arsenal as the above clothing, but in practice actually has a slightly lower actual armor. Might be as a result of cloths having a slightly different armor calculation than everything else, or perhaps an error with ACE Arsenal bar graphs. But that's junky level 1 armor, so it's debatable whether it should be getting any buff. If you want the above cloths to get the buff, though, you might want to put the Armor Threshold at 10 so that the tactical vests aren't more like fantasy ultra junk of quasi level 1a.

The special purpose suit cannot normally stop 300 Blackout subsonic from the Honey Badger, but at 16 on the Armor Threshold it will with the buff of 31, and at 17 it's back to no buff.

In summary, hierarchy of Armor Threshold settings:

17 NOT to buff special purpose suit

16 or below to buff special purpose suits and above

12.5 NOT to buff recon fatigues, track suit, and granit suit

12 to buff recon fatigues, track suit, and granit suit and above (maybe not bad idea, weigh 2/3 of special purpose suit)

10 to buff tactical vests and above (judgement call)

On a side note, I also found that I have ACE set up currently to let a naked dude get up too easily after being penetrated with 9mm once or twice in the chest, so I need to tweak my personal ACE Medical settings, too, if I want to increase general lethality.

Thanks to Sysroot for the great improvements to his mod.

P.S. Found that 1.02 is necessary to kill with a single pistol round to the chest with not just vital organs selected but 'both' selected in ACE Medical. That will necessitate the use of not only surgical kits but Personal Aid Kits (PAKs) with 'sum of trauma' allowed, as otherwise even accumulated bruising will eventually cause fatality with enough of them.

P.P.S.

The Armor Threshold value is cumulative, so even though you might not want to buff an NIJ level 1 tactical vest, if someone puts it on top of a special purpose suit and you have it set to 17, then the combination will get the same buff as a level III carrier lite. So, people can just adjust it from 10 to 17 based on the combined armor of their adversaries and whether they want them significantly armored, like against all pistol rounds, or not.

I got the buff value wrong when I said 31 using M993 AP 7.62 rounds and level III & IV armor. Once you deviate towards the tail (level II and below or level V and modded maxed out space age stuff), it starts to get weird. Also, ACE seems to have either little ability to model AP vs FMJ correctly past about level II or III, or M993 and the FMJ 308 rounds are flip flopped, because the FMJ actually oddly has better penetration. So I've settled on 36 as a happy medium between 31 and 41 that I found varying sweet spots for the other armor.

@Reticuli Heya! What are your adjustments exactly? You seem to have done a in depth research

18 threshold and 34-36 coefficient on chest, abdomen, and diaphragm is a good sweetspot. Every other body part unchecked. Keeps everything 3A and below from buffing, even twin soft layers, and gives everything above the press vest enhancement so that you have a range of almost full level 3 to very capable level 4 stuff that isn't sci fi level. I was previously using 17 threshold, but CSAT was a pain without NGSW stuff or beyond, IMO. YMMV. If you want near pear adversaries, then 17 might be the easiest way to get it when CSAT have Kevlar fatigues combined with a tactical vest.

Was looking for any tips on how to set it up, since I've noticed that my civvies could eat .45 ACP from CUP revolver like it was barely anything. It took 5 shots to the chest to kill them. Since I found this guide I don't have such problems no more ^^. Thanks a lot !

I started lowering the ACE medical critical threshold from 1.02 to 1.0 to 0.7 and now 0.5. Maybe it's too low now or maybe because I have so many mods I'm running (150ish) that something else was suddenly buffing them, but now I can chew someone up with 9mm or 45 cal with ease if they're only wearing level 1 or less.

Doubled pain unconsciousness chance, reduced fatal injury death chance to 0.75. Used to have that even lower, like 0.5, but I think that made 1 shot head kills too rare. Reduced bleed out rate to 0.4. To compensate, I increased wake up chance from epi, which for a long while I had like at 50 or 66%, but I think I have at 33% now. Causes you to be more dependent on teammates and makes injured adversaries more vulnerable and easier to finish off. Might put that back up a bit. Also heavily tweaked other medical stuff so it's balanced but not too much of a hassle.

I continue to use the 18 and 36 numbers for ACE Armor Adjuster and only with the various torso boxes checked, because this still holds up for various calibers vs body armor levels even after making injury easier in ACE medical. I have a level 3 Opscore helmet I tweaked and the Yamam level 4 helmet from some other mod, but if you don't, you might want the head check box if you want to simulate the latest borderline level 3 helmets. Your call. I still wouldn't do that for face protection, though, because that's notoriously bad in real life. Heck, the poly level 3 helmets in particular are pretty bad.

I've put together an interesting combination of various injury effect and reaction mods, too, and they are doing a good job in concert. Useful indicator of hits, injury, and death... with the final indignity of losing your pants. If that doesn't happen, then I just either do a head shot or walk over the body to make sure they're no longer a threat.

Oh, the ACE medical critical threshold lowering was essential to get one of the injury reaction mods to work how I wanted with leg injuries causing limping and then forcing prone. Forgot about that. I think it was still a bit screwed up and not quite working right, so I put the ACE medical bone breaking back up to default.