[HoneyBadger]

Years ago, when I was working on my own strategy games, I came up with the idea that damage types be assigned a number-say from 1-99-and that units could be resistant to 1 or more of these numbered damage types, but they'd only be specified by name, as flavour.

So for instance, damage type 1 would be "fire", damage type 2 would be "acid", and so forth. The name itself didn't mean anything beyond the number it was assigned to.

If you wanted a unit to have a new damage type that another unit wasn't resistant to, you'd just have it reference damage type '74' or whatever. It made it very easy to add new weapons into the game, and also to have an actual arms-race, since you'd have an advantage with a weapon that did damage # 74, until someone developed a corresponding armour #74, which would eventually happen.

Resistances would also tie into this system easily. You could have a unit that was 50% resistant to weapons doing damage #3, 25% resistant to damages 5-8, and 100% resistant to 9-14, but any other type of damage would do the maximum.

Ofcourse, this would further be modified by armour that negated damage, but the same basic system would still be used-a given armour might deduct 1 point of damage from weapon types 1-30, and then be resistant to 50% of the left over damage from weapons 5-45.

It might seem a little complicated, over just having a few named damage types, but it made incorporating new ideas into the game extremely easy, and also allowed some extremely specialized attributes into the system, without bogging it down into a million little house-rules.