Armor

Certain xenomorphs have armor, which reduces incoming damage by a percentage each time they take a hit. Specific castes have armor which aids in their survivability, notably the crusher and defender. Armor itself is linked in with health, reducing damage. It is similar to health in that it will regenerate overtime. Yet armor generates slower. The difference between health and armor is that, you can still die even with a lot of armor remaining, it only reduces the damage taken.

The armor icon is show on the the right hand side of your screen below the plasma icon.

Armor hardness is how much armor there is on a xenomorph. The crusher, having the most armor, will be able to sustain a lot more damage than a xenomorph with lighter armor.

The tiers in xenomorph armor is as follows:

Crushers
Defenders
Queen, Burrowers, Praetorians, Ravagers
Spitters, Warriors, Hivelords, Carriers

When taking damage with armor, it factors in the damage's armor piercing ability and the xenomorph's current armor status.

For example, if a crusher were to be shot at with a rifle bullet with full armor, the crusher would take a very small amount of damage, due to having full armor. The crusher will still take damage but the damage is heavily reduced and the armor will also take a hit, decreasing its effectiveness.

But, if an armor piercing rifle bullet were to hit the crusher, they would take full damage from the bullet as well as their armor taking a hit. It will reduce the armor's effectiveness the next time they take damage from projectiles.

When your armor has taken damage, there is grace period before your armor is able to be damaged again. It occurs when you take armor damage relative to the amount of armor piercing damage. For example, you'd roughly have a 2 second grace period per 25% of your armor being damaged. This does not mean that you won't be able to take damage, it means your armor won't take any more damage for the duration of the grace period.

Armor regeneration is different to health regeneration. Unlike health, it takes a lot longer to regenerate armor at different levels of your armor's integrity. When your armor has taken damage, it'll take roughly 30 seconds before you'll be able to regenerate your armor (on weeds of course).

If your armor is above 60% it regenerates faster. But if it falls below 60% it will take more time to regenerate it. The lower it is, the longer it takes to recover your armor.

Do remember Armor =\= more Health . It reduces the damage taken to your health.

Explosive armor

Unlike regular armor, explosive armor functions somewhat differently. It protects you from explosions and explosion stun times. It too is also directly linked to the amount of armor hardness you have. The more explosive armor you have, the less damage and stun you take from explosions.

Armor penetrating munitions and weapons

Certain weapons and ammunition types break or ignore armor entirely. All armor piercing munitions are quite efficient at piercing armor and certain munition types at breaking armor, unlike their softpoint counterparts. The following lists examples of Armor Piercing/breaking weapons and ammunition:

M240 flamethrower (ignores it)
Slugs
Flechette
Light Explosive rounds
M56D machine gun
M56 Smartgun
M42A Scoped Rifle
Any AP ammunition

Warding Pheromones

Warding gives your xenomorph a percentage reduction to the amount of damage to the armor.

Evasion

Xenomorphs that don't have armor have an added bonus to projectiles missing them. Lurkers, drones, runners and larva have this bonus. The xenomorphs evasion will increase as they mature.