What do the acronyms for tier 2 and tier 3 heavy weapon armors stand for?
The tier 2 and tier 3 heavy weapon armor names are acronyms (they have periods between each letter):
- E.X.O. suit
- W.A.R. suit
What do these acronyms stand for? I haven't found anything in-game that says anything about it.
Solution 1:
XCOM has a habit of creating acronyms that make more sense as the acronym than the actual meaning (if one exists at all).
From the previous game, MEC (Mechanized Exoskeletal Cybersuit) is an acronym to denote what we generally call a "mech". I believe EXALT is an acronym too (from its capitalization), but its name seems to refer more to "exalted" than actually having a meaning to the acronym. Some people have offered that EXALT is named EXALT because they are the "XCOM alternative", but no confirmation on whether that's the case or not.
SHIVs are the only ones I can think of that aren't as blatantly named (a shiv is not a robot but a makeshift knife). But even though it stands for "Super Heavy Infantry Vehicle", we never call them anything else than "shivs".
Even the name XCOM is a shortening for Xeno COMmand. The game very much revels in the use of pseudo-military acronyms and concepts.
The same seems to apply to the suits in XCOM 2.
The E.X.O. suit is an external suit. Rather than mechanizing the unit from the inside like the MECs of XCOM, this is an external variant.
Insects have external skeletons, called exoskeletons... So they called the suit the "exo-suit". Making it into an acronym is just cosmetic, since we will only really use the acronym.
The W.A.R. suit seems obviously named.