Hmmm, I must've made my suggestions or thoughts unclear because those don't exactly look look like what I'd suggest (what you list as my ideas)
- Make ammo harder to find through upgrades - I'm still suggesting this one. It's more of a glitch than a sensible feature, and it's only really exploitable with the New Reno basement guy. Other guys are a fine money sink, but the guy in the basment is highly exploitable. If you ever come to him with a larger haul, you're going to have enough ammo for upgradeable stuff for the rest od the game. This is very true with Deagles, FAL's and especially Assault Riffles (which share ammo with miniguns), and even more especially energy weapons. All energy weapons are upgradeable (kind of) and none are upgradeable anywhere but at that guy (far as I know), so the only way not to end up with tons of ammo is to not visit him at all.
- Make EPA encounters harder - now this is the OPPOSITE of what I'd suggest. I tend to visit the EPA while the fights in it are still challenging to a degree, and that's the mid game (ussually after the raiders). EPA has 2 fights in it, the plants at the entry, and the fight at the bottom, if they aren't challenging, then the place really falls flat. There's no fights in the "middle" because the robots ignore you, so it's kind of the best early "dungeon" to visit for me, and doing the fights with early-mid game equipment is really fun there. What happens, however, is that the random encounters AROUND EPA are rather too tough for what seems to be the natural time for me to go there. Packs of aliens, deathclaws and stuff are crazy tough! My suggestion would be to NERF those, making EPA more acessible.
Now for your own thoughts:
- I don't mind group vs group encounters, but I never wait for the other groups to shoot each other, because it's boring. The problem I have is that any encounter with a group of armed humanoids which you can survive (they don't all have mini guns), leaves you with too much ammo and potentially stimpacks. If you also get a lot of upgradeable guns and take them to the New Reno basement, you get a load of ammo on top of that, and if you also land a better gun than you have, you get multiple copies AND a bunch of ammo. The most glaring example is how if you can kill a bunch of random encounter raiders you can have a bunch of grease guns and enough ammo for 2-3 party members right after you leave VC without spending a dime. And after that every time you kill a bunch of dudes, there's ammo comming out of your ears.
- The random encounter distribution DOES look well though out (I loved checking your interactive map, I just haven't given feedback on it yet
), the problem is what I mention above - encounters with humanoids leave too much loot by default. The other is that there is no ranged "monsters" so it's kind of impossible to have a random encounter with ranged enemies which doesn't leave behind a dangerous weapon and a bunch of ammo.
- Removing loot from containers in SAD or EPA is what I'd do. There's way too much of it, and I think I know why. It's impossible to load the containers with stuff that isn't either usefull or sells well. And there's nothing to interact with in a dungeon except monsters, computers and containers - if containers aren't there there's nothing meaningfull to do, just empty rooms. And if there's containers, there IS something to do, loot them, but it fills your inventory with loot. EPA doesn't tie your ability to loot containers to your ability to survive fights - once you go down to 3rd level you can loot everything without having a fight. If you go down to lvl 5 and get the scorcher, you can go back top and THEN kill the plants easily without wasting ammo even there. So you kind of get a ton of loot for... not much, really. Certainly no resource drain. SAD is even worse in this regard, because you really don't have to fight for your loot and there's a huge load of it. One way to adress this would be to remove loot - the other to add monsters.
- I like the idea of repeatable quests, very much so. One great thing to do with them would be to tie them to loot that is allready there, as a way for combat characters to acess it while giving the non-combat characters at least a small bit of restriction. The non-combat characters shouldn't really mind, because they don't really depend on loot that much. The way it is now, they get through all their challenges by dialogue, wasting no resources, but STILL get a ton of loot. For example:
A non-combat character can rob the Redding casino easily. You can do this with no probs if your stealth and lockpick is high enough and if you have enough stims/explosives to kill the guard. A purely combat character can't do this at all. If you do this, you get the gold or the items, but you also get a TON of mining chips. It'd be really fun to be able to do repeatable bounty hunter quests for mine owners to get those chips from them, and also tie the ammount of chips in the casino to the nuber of bounties done (since they aren't being stolen, they pile up). You can tie other bounty/monster item quests to the ammount of gold a shop has, as they're improving the economy, so once late game rolls around you don't have to go all over the map to sell of all your loot. Just an idea.
I have a few more, and I'm still thinking about feedback on the random encounters.
). That's just thoughts, not promises 
especially for
). I need to study myself or if someone else share his experience with such encounters, in regards to what encounters allows you to step back and wait without participating parties not even attacking you. Their scripts could probably be changed so they be hostile (like confusing player for the enemy or being mad at player because he didn't help).
