Using armour won't make this game unique, it has been done before. One example is the game Defiance, which Nathan has worked on previously. That particular game featured varying levels of armour that would deteriorate when taking damage. It wasn't a bad system but it didn't make the gameplay feel any better either. Now if the suggestion was using deteriorating armour and (slowly*) regenerating health, I might consider it. * and I mean VERY slowly, so that it still makes sense to have healers on the team or to include medkits in a loadout.
First off; the "original" game is the table-top. While the game is based on the universe more than the exact table-top, they still use a lot of references to it, and almost every table-top player will compare this (at least at a subconsious level) to the table-top. This armor/shield idea would change the way the game is played, and a lot of stuff would have to be reworked. As @Baractius said, it's a hell-of-a lot more work than someone who isn't in the development-scene can guess. Also, I've seen plenty of games use a tried-and-true system and gotten far with it. "Being different" can end up in either being groundbreakingly awesome, but there's a huge risk of people not liking it, because it's "worse" in their opinion than what is currently out there. ...what's Star Citizen? Why does it have to be up to par with a game some people have never even heard of? What you're proposing would grind the pace of the game to a crawl. This is war, and hordes of soldiers are thrown into the grinder on countless fronts. Individual soldiers (players) don't want to die outright, no, but making them guard their health-pool like the father of a teenage daughter guarding her virginity would make people unwilling to take risks, because after said risk they'd have to sit down and use precious time to repair their armour. Time they could use to be assaulting the next objective. Time they could use to actually play and enjoy the game. When it comes to a lot of games, the developers want you to see as much content as possible. By sitting in one spot for a prolonged amount of time (not just one time, but think about how long you'd be spending sitting down, repairing, in total in a day? A week?), you're not out there, seeing something a developer has spent countless hours creating. In a bigger scale, sitting down after every assault to repair will become a massively tedious thing, and people would ditch the game quickly. Combat-games are fast-paced, and the idea of "finding a place to do a quick repair" would break said pace. As a last remark; the shield-system works, and the majority of people out there enjoy it. Why fix what isn't broken?
To be honest, I never saw much of a difference in incoming damage, due to armour levels, in Defiance. In PvP it didn't make much of a difference, as the best guns pretty much slaughtered you anyways!
With recharging Armor, you have a simple Bar that depletes and recharges. With actual Armor, while more realistic, immersive and possibly more fun if properly done, you have the Armor Value/s of the Armor or the individual pieces, need new resources with which to fix up Armor and/or new classes that are able to repair Armor, using more server resources, splitting players further amongst classes and making each individual player dependent upon a particular class in order to remain effective.
Considering all the outrageous things in Warhammer 40k up to an including magic I don't see why people would draw the line at armor that had some augmentations to make it self repairing. Chaos does this shit all the time, pretend Ragnar would of kicked the shit out of the Mechanicus rep if he objected.
Not in Closed-Alpha yet, so no real opinion on that, BUT... Lore-arguments are the wrong way to go here. Logical thinking is the wrong way to go. Why? Because lore would break this game. Example: How long would it take to replace the losses of a single battle? Let's see: 16-vs-16... everyone dies 5 times... that's 80 dead Space Marines. In a single battle. And the Scout-Company only delivers 100 new Space Marines per cycle. And a cycle takes YEARS. 10 battles and the imperial strike-force on Arkhona is wiped out. The only way to make this game more "lore"-like in that respect would be to alter the game-mechanism to make the player afraid of getting wounded or dying. If shields lead to a good game and depleting armour leads to a bad game, then I say we should ignore lore and go with the shield.
Well to be fair, this isn't a typical battle. It's the tail end of the 13th Black Crusade and Chaos is being led by Abaddon the despoiler. The circumstances and resources being put forward are pretty extrodinary.
That's a pretty weak argument when the numbers of dead would rapidly reach proportions that would effectively eradicate whole Chapters of SM or Craftworlds of Eldar. Sticking to the fluff is important, but there has to be some leeway in favour of fun and smooth mechanics.
