Using Equipment

Weapons

One of the most confusing aspect of Metal Gear Acid, at least in our opinion, is the bizarre equipping system, which forces you to equip most weapons, then drawn another weapon that uses the same type of ammo before you can fire it. It's pretty confusing, especially when you first encounter the system after Teliko joins your party, but with a little - well, a lot - of practice, you should get the hang of it.

Luckily, Teliko will join your party at the same time that Metal Gear Solid 2 packs become available; these packs have arguably the best weapons in the game, in the M4 and the M4 (Laser S.). These count as different cards for the purpose of the four-card-per-deck limit, meaning that you can have four M4's and four M4 Laser's in the same deck.

At its most basic, the equipment system works like so: say you draw up an M4 into your hand. You can equip it to one of the two original equipment slots right away. When you have one equipped, then any M4 or M4 (Laser S.) can be used to load it (since they both have the same kind of ammo) and fire. To do so, just select the card (for the purpose of this discussion, say it's an M4 (Laser S.)) from your hand, choose "Equip", then move it over the already-equipped weapon. Since they share ammo, the text will change to "Loading." When you select that, you'll be switched over to aiming mode, which will let you fire the weapon. Firing an equipped weapon like this won't make you lose the weapon that's already equipped (i.e. your equipped M4), but the card you use to load it (i.e. the M4 (Laser S.)) will indeed be dropped from your hand, and won't come up again until you reload your deck. (Speaking of that specific card, of course; if you have multiple copies of it, then the other copies will appear as normal.)

Speaking more generally, any weapon that uses the same kind of ammo as the M4 can be used to load it. Since it uses 5.56mm ammo, then any weapon card that lists itself as using that kind of ammo could be used as a loading card. So, if you had an M4 equipped, then you could use an M4, an M4 (Laser S.), an XM16E, a Stoner M63, or an R-5 weapon to load it. What's more, if you had any of these listed weapons equipped, then any of the listed weapons could also be used to load it, since they all use the same kind of ammo. It's a bit of a nebulous concept; suffice to say, in order to use an equippable weapon, you're going to need to put a lot of copies of it and weapons with similar ammunition into your deck.

Ammo Counts

What makes matters a bit more complicated is the fact that each weapon has a different number of shots loaded into it automatically. To build on our example of weapons with 5.56mm ammo, both the M4 and the M4 (Laser S.) hold eight shots, whereas the Stoner, R-5, and XM16E each fire five times. What's important to remember about these cards is that the number of time each weapon will fire is based on what weapon you use to load it, not the ammo capacity of the weapon itself. For example, if you have an M4 equipped, but load it with a Stoner, it will only fire five times; if you have a Stoner equipped, however, and use an M4 to fire it, it'll fire eight times. Thus, if you equip weapons that do high damage but have low ammo capacities, then use high-ammo, low-damage weapons to load them, you'll get the best of both worlds.

Balancing multiple weapons like this can be difficult, though, as you'll find yourself wanting to put in enough of the low-ammo weapons to find one early on to equip, but also requiring a number of the high-ammo weapons for use in loading. It's a difficult balance to achieve, honestly, and will require some skillful deck-building.