Every Day We Fight Weapons Guide: Loadouts, AP Costs, and Armor Counters

Every Day We Fight features twelve primary and secondary weapons split across civilian firearms, specialist launchers, and disposable alien hardware. Choosing the right gun dictates how your squad cracks Rifter armor plates and strips recharging shields during turn-based encounters.

Weapon Slot System and Loadout Rules

Each resistance fighter equips one primary firearm and one sidearm in the secondary slot. You cannot run dual primary weapons on a single operative. If a fighter carries a Long Haul rifle and attempts to equip a Rattler shotgun into the secondary slot, the game swaps out the primary rifle instead of replacing the handgun. Secondary options include standard pistols, the Stumper compact shotgun, and the Riptide automatic pistol.

Weapons cannot be directly passed between squad members while standing in the hideout unless you pick up a fourth weapon from the floor to rotate slots. Starting weapons inside the sewer hideout are drawn randomly from your unlocked loot tables at the start of each run. When you scavenge a new weapon or mod in the city, taking it into your inventory registers the schematic, making it craftable at workbenches using scrap collected during exploration.

Primary Resistance Firearms

Primary weapons form the foundation of your fire teams, providing sustained damage and long-range engagement options. Each firearm balances base damage, initial firing Action Point (AP) costs, and continued shot costs.

The Long Haul serves as the dedicated precision rifle. It deals heavy single-hit kinetic damage capable of punching straight through helmet plates and chest armor. Its primary drawbacks are high initial AP consumption and steep reload costs. Equipping Vivian with high-AP recovery skills offsets these expenses, allowing her to fire multiple precision rounds in a single turn.

The Rattler shotgun delivers rapid point-blank spread damage, with base damage tuned to 23 per pellet. It quickly tears through unarmored targets at close quarters, but spread limits its effectiveness against distant foes. Pairing the Rattler with Dylan allows him to capitalize on close-range knockouts after closing distances.

The Shredder heavy machine gun fires in sustained bursts. The weapon requires an initial cost of 4 AP for the first trigger pull, after which each continuous bullet consumes 0.5 AP. Firing stability increases the longer you maintain the trigger, creating tighter groupings against clustered squads.

The Hailstorm assault rifle deals 40 base damage per shot with a 1.5 AP continued firing cost. It works well as a mid-range suppression weapon, chipping away external armor pieces before sidearms clean up the underlying health bar.

The Roaster flamethrower provides continuous area-of-effect burning damage. It applies an ignited status effect that inflicts 25 burn damage to affected targets at the start of their subsequent turns. The Roaster ignores standard cover shields to burn raw enemy hit points directly.

The Boomer launches explosive projectiles that create localized blast radiuses. It strips outer armor plating from heavy targets and destabilizes enemy formations, though its projectiles carry trajectory deviations that require clear sightlines.

Secondary Sidearms and Utility Tools

Secondary sidearms provide cheap AP alternatives when your primary weapon magazine empties mid-turn. While standard semi-automatic handguns serve as baseline backups, specialized sidearms offer distinct combat roles.

The Stumper acts as a sawn-off secondary shotgun, providing immediate point-blank stopping power when enemies breach your cover line. It allows long-range rifle users to defend themselves without spending massive AP reserves on heavy weapon repositioning.

The Riptide functions as a fully automatic machine pistol. It rapidly empties a burst into softened targets to finish off low-health enemies within short distances.

The Resonator Dart Gun acts as both an exploration utility and a tactical crowd-control tool. In free-roam exploration, dart rounds shatter blue Elixium mineral encrustations that block doorways and ladders. Inside tactical combat encounters, firing a dart encrusts target Rifters in crystalline webbing for two turns. Encrusted enemies cannot act, though they remain immune to direct weapon damage until the mineral breaks.

Rifter Alien Weapons

Defeated Rifter units drop alien firearms across combat zones, including the Mangler, the Razerbolt, and the Deadbolt sniper rifle. Rifter weapons feature high armor-piercing damage and built-in projectile velocity, but they carry a strict logistical limitation: alien guns cannot be reloaded.

Once an alien weapon magazine is emptied, the weapon is discarded. Using these weapons allows your squad to conserve primary ammunition magazines during prolonged skirmishes or eliminate high-threat Rifter Sentinels and Enforcers without crafting additional explosives.

Tactical Selection: Choosing the Right Arsenal

Picking the proper weapon configuration depends on target defensive layers, action point budgets, and line of sight.

Combat Mechanics: Stripping Shields and Cracking Armor

Enemy defenses are divided into hit points, rechargeable energy shields, and localized armor plates. Understanding how specific weapons interact with these layers prevents wasted action economy.

Energy shields absorb all incoming ballistic damage until depleted. Electrified status effects instantly shatter active shields. Deploying tech options, shocking grenades, or specialized attachment magazines rapidly collapses shield barriers, allowing follow-up shots to impact physical armor.

Armor reduces incoming damage by 15 points per hit. Low-damage automatic fire plinking against armored plates results in negligible damage. To break armor, rely on high single-hit kinetic weapons like the Long Haul, blast chunks away using the Boomer, or use standard 5 AP melee strikes that bypass armor values entirely. Once armor plating on limbs, chests, or heads breaks away, manual aiming at exposed red weak spots deals full critical damage to the target base health pool.

Modifying your weapons at base workbenches with precision scopes, extended magazines, and recoil compensators further refines weapon performance. For detailed stat breakdowns on every attachment modifier, consult our weapon attachments guide.

To coordinate defensive positioning and suppressive capabilities during enemy turns, evaluate your squad's reflex actions. Pairing weapon choices with character upgrades like Leo's Covering Fire or Dylan's close-range knockouts is detailed in our skills guide. If you intend to take your customized loadouts into post-campaign cycles with escalating modifiers, prepare by studying Forever War mode.