Fallout 2 mod Economy and Combat Rebalance mod

;P

Funny you mention Fallout 2 tributes!
http://stalker.wikia.com/wiki/.223_pistol
http://stalker.wikia.com/wiki/.223_FMJ
http://stalker.wikia.com/wiki/Bozar

 

Dude, they straight up hand you an M72 Gauss rifle at the end of the game. All that's missing is if they give you a car and one of the bosses is a Deathclaw.

 

To be fair, the Gauss rifle looks different...Based more on an AR 15.

 

There's a super easy way to get the Gauss rifle and pistol, guaranteed - just become a child killer. At high levels bounty hunters carry Gauss weapons. With fast shot and high luck you will wipe them out in a single round...then its just a case of gathering the ammo and selling the weapons - rinse and repeat.

 

We all now know what kind of character you RP as.

 

"You successfully plant the Ball Gag on Little Bobby"

 

Phobos,

I'm having a problem with setting traps. I've updated to the latest RP project, and have a few custom perk mods (via perks.ini), and no other major mods that I can recall.

I can place the trap (by using it on my character), but when I use the traps skill (at 105 currently), it says "You failed to find a trap." When I attempt to disarm, the read out displays "Error Identify Trap." I've never had this issue before with traps.

Any suggestions on a fix? Thanks!

 

Hi Phobos,

A while ago you asked me what would I want/expect from your mod. Well, now I'm at 29 level and almost ready for Enclave, so I can provide some feedback (I'm afraid I might be posting feedback in the future too).

I. Feedback about minor things:

1. Why does deathclaw gauntlet requires 4 AP for attack while power fist attack cost is ''standard'' 3 AP? I see that you probably intend deathclaw gauntlet to be a mid weapon for unarmed characters, but even with 10 AP you can only attack with it twice. Mega power fist is much better (20-45 3 AP vs 18-35 and 4 AP cost) and I understand that, but being able to attack only twice isn't the best thing for unarmed characters. Or maybe you could give deathclaw gauntlet a perk (+20% to hit chance - it makes sense because those claws are damn long and thus it's easier to hit!)

2. Shiv currently has no real use in game, but it should! You could probably turn it into a real stealth&crit weapon. Shiv is pretty useless at the moment. My proposition: lower it's regular attack cost from standard 3 AP to 2 AP (it has low damage though), make it unnoticeable by the guards, maybe give it a hidden crital hit bonus and hide it in some early game location (Klamath/Den?) so you would reward exploring players, but hide it good.

3. It would be very, very cool if you could add new weapons and recipes for your crafting system. In Klamath you can find two pipe rifles, so I thought that a pipe shotgun would fit (maybe requiring a tool and two pipe rifles). 10-20 dmg, range 12 (way worse than the first shotgun the player can get now). Maybe we can add some tribal, early-game drugs (obvious Honest Hearts influence), maybe mixing xander root and broc flower with alcohol or jet (maybe drugs for raising sequence and armor class)?
IMO crafting should reward players that raise their skills even over 120% (because it's too easy to raise science and repair with books!). Some very good or very expensive items should be craftable when your science/repair skill is over 150%.

4. Barter could be used more often in dialogue (too bad that in F2 speech is for getting discounts), but not only for getting a discount, but it should also represent your knowledge about the trade or let you access the ''special stock'' (because who says that every trader will reveal their best goods for the player?). I know that messing with vanilla traders isn't the best thing - you could probably add new, random encounter only traders and with high enough barter skill they could let you see their entire stock, not only some trash. A rare junk trader perhaps? Fishermans near the costline?

5. This is very minor thing, but some unused items like Gold nuggets should have their purpose. Gold is gold, it's always valuable. Maybe gold nuggets should get a rigid minimum selling price of 50$?

6. Maybe ''crafting''/extracting poison from radscorpion glands (high outdoorsman required)? To poison bullets and melee weapons? AFAIK It's possible to poison the enemy already (mutated toe). Try Age of Decadence if you haven't, it's a brilliant RPG with cool alchemy system.

7. You could add (and hide!) 1 Traps and 1 Barter books to Klamath (In Vic's house there is only a Repair book). Traps should be presented to the player in early game and in poor communities (makes sense: people use cheap traps if they can't afford ammo) of Klamath, Den, Modoc (so I would hide 1 traps books in each of those towns).

8. Since ''Raiders'' location is filled with traps, I would hide a Traps books there somewhere, it makes sense.

Eh... this post is long already. I've got even more ideas.

II General ideas

To even further encourage investing in Traps skill you could add even more traps to Raiders location and Great Wannamingo Mine. Please make them hardcore and filled with various traps - put traps even on shelves. Shelves in Great Wannamingo Mine (I mean the ruined jail area) are sadly empty, please put some loot there and bobby-trap it! Failing to disarm means the loot is lost.
Traps are so damn rare that those two ''trap'' locations should have even more traps.

Umbra Tribe needs a trader (that ''bring me wood'' woman? Fisherman maybe?) that could sell fishes, junk (mines, yeah!), ropes, spears, flints - to make this location worth revisiting and to make life easier for traps users. Keep in mind that they live near the sea and the great sea can occasionaly give them even various pre-war treasures (high barter skill needed to buy ''sacred'' items?). So a trader would be nice!

As someone said earlier, fire geckos should give more xp. They always are such pain.... you know where.

More bounty runs please! More gangs! Please.
A long time ago you said that maybe you'll add more perks - new perks would be awesome.

III. (optional) Major powers hit squads? Vilified reputation consequences

And finally I think that a ''being hunted by the major powers'' mechanics would add more sense to the wasteland and it's politics. I mean that earning ''vilified'' reputation in places like San Fran, NCR, Vault City and Navarro (well, attacking Navarro) should result in hit squads that would actively hunt you like Bounty hunters hunt childkillers. To stop them once and for all, you have to destroy that faction entirely : Shi -> kill Ken Lee and the Emperor, NCR -> kill Tandi and chief Elise, VC -> kill Lynette and Stark, Enclave ->blow oil rig. I think right now it doesn't make any sense that you can mess with powerful factions and they will let you live and move freely.

I see those hit squads like that:

Vault City Elite Guards - 4 soldiers, each has 100 hp and 3 stimpacks, armed with assault rifles, wearing metal armours mk II, one should throw frag grenades at the player. Since they usually protect the city they aren't used to wasteland thus you can avoid them with over 80% in outdoorsman. They hunt you near Vault City only.

NCR Ranger hit squad (true to the lore!) - 5 elite rangers (120hp) with one police dog (40 hp?), armed with various weapons, wearing combat armours of course, 1 sniper with DKS maybe, you need at least 100% outdoorsman to escape from them. They can operate everywhere (maybe not near Navarro and San Fran).

Shi Assasins - 4 or 5 Shi guards (120 hp), armed with high tech weapons, all very good in unarmed combat. 90% outdoorsman needed to avoid since they rarely operate out of San Fran.

Enclave Elite Assault Team (verti-assault team if we want to respect lore) - those guys can see you from above and you need over 120% outdoorsman to avoid them! 4-5 soldiers in PA (200 hp each), best weapons possible, 1 or 2 cyberdogs. They mean death! They should make the player want to reload, lol. If the player has less than 100% outdoorsman there should be a high chance that the player enters combat with some part of HP gone (to represent the fact that miniguns on vertibird did hurt and due to lack of skill you weren't able to take cover in time).

Hit squads/ death squads should generally shoot ''first to cripple & then to kill''', so it should be hard for the player to escape from such encounter with crippled legs!

I think that's enough feedback for now.
***

Thank you once again for this excellent mod, @phobos2077 !
To all: if you're reading this and haven't tried this mod yet, please try .

 

ok, whatever

 

Im trying this mod out. I like some of the changes, but the weapon balance seems pretty bad.

JHP seems meh. You get roughly 33% more damage in exchange for a to hit penalty. I dont understand the rationale for this...an extra 10 points in guns is enough to compensate for the to hit penalty.

AP ammo is so good that it basically negates almost all early armor. Most human enemies are wearing metal armor or below...this is easily negated by AP ammo. It looks like DR gets reduced if the DT modifier exceeds the target's DT as well, so with the FN FAL, you easily negate all DT/DR.

Most of the early game AP ammo is too hard to obtain before they become obsolete and superseded by superior weapons/ammo types. I was easily able to get a FN FAL by doing the redding -> vault city caravan run, and vault city sells plenty of 7.62 ammo. Not only does the FN FAL have the weapon accurate perk now, but it deals massive damage per shot and has a 4 round burst, and 7.62 ammo is the best ammo type available at this point and negates combat armor DT. It is way too powerful at this stage of the game.

Weapon progression seems odd. Sawed off shotguns should show up at around the same time as normal shotguns, but are actually much rarer outside of the redidng frog morton encounter. Needler pistols show up around NCR, but the ammo modifiers are meh (despite the rarity of the ammo) and the weapon itself is uimpressive. Magnum revolvers also show up too late IMHO, along with 10mm SMGs.

Shotguns as a whole seem underpowered. The hunting rifle is much better than the shotgun and shows up at roughly the same time. It has a much longer range, is more accurate and can negate DT. The shotgun does lower damage in practice because the ammo type only has a -10% AC modifier. The sawed off shotgun is too short range, at that range, you are better off with a burst weapon. With some testing, the FN FAL basically outdamages all shotguns in the game, as it can eaisly do 25+ damage per shot by negating all DT/DR, and is much longer ranged to boot.

Since armor is so ineffective now, whoever gets to shoot first basically wins. With the assault rifle and JHP rounds, i can do a burst and kill 2-3 rogues in the first round, which pretty much decides the encounter.

9mm mausers/smgs are too rare compared to 10mm SMGs.

I like the economy changes though, unfortunately, it doesnt seem to fix the problem wth balthas/happy harry not stocking leather armor mk 2, so by the time you get to new reno and can buy it, it is obsolete.

Edit : Laser rifles are also massively OP. Claim jumpers carry them and show up very early in the game, and laser rifles do 30-40 damage to combat armor...super mutants near NCR also carry them, and its basically impossible to survive an encounter with them unless you are using metal/tesla armor.

 

I haven't tried this mod, but since it's based on an earlier version of my own, I'm guessing it probably also makes it so that not every random encounter is winnable. That's a big step away from regular Fallout 2, where the player can stomp all enemies with little investment. You can no longer travel safely on the worldmap until very late in the game, and that may or may not be to your liking. My advice: if there are encounters you can't beat, just run! Come back later with more people and bigger guns.

About the sawed-off shotguns: Editing when and where they appear requires meddling with maps or restock scripts, which is why most people are reluctant to do it since it breaks compatibility with other mods unless you use their sources. We didn't use to have Killap's RP sources until recently (2014 I believe it was), so that mentality is kind of stuck among modders. In my own mod I've made it so you can find them in random encounters around the Den, but that's about it.

As for why shotguns are relatively underpowered, it's because a lot of enemies use them, and making them stronger means the game suddenly becomes a lot harder. Desert Eagles, 10mm pistols, Shotguns and Hunting Rifles share this trait: the player isn't likely to use them for very long, but a lot of enemies do. So they're balanced with enemies in mind, not you.

 

The problem with making every random encounter non winnable is that it just encourages saving/reloading since its all RNG based. Especially for caravan runs where running isnt really a solution.

I think combat armor was fine, its just that metal/powered armor had ridiculously high laser resistances for some reason. To top it off, microfusion cells have -8 DT...that negates everything that isnt power armor which is silly.

I think balancing with enemies in mind is a bad idea. It simply means that when the player gets hold of certain weapons, they become OP in comparison to enemies. Human enemies are largely weak due to poor armor and low hp...most human enemies have less than 80 hp, even press gangs around san francisco, and most of them have leather armor or jacket stats. Unless you attack every caravan you see, its very hard to get into a fight with metal armor/combat armor enemies...infact, i dont think there are any random encounters where the enemies have metal armor and up (that are instantly hostile to you). Except for bounty hunters and you have to deliberately go out of your way to be a childkiller, since it locks you out of tons of quests.

For some reason, this mod also makes the first floor sierra army depot robots go hostile the moment you open the locker containing corporal dixon's eye. Now i want to uninstall the mod, but im not sure how to remove the map/weapon specific changes while keeping the economy changes...any ideas on that?

 

You can't uninstall the mod without breaking your savegames to some extent, all the visited maps and global vars are a part of your saves. It depends on how much those maps and scripts are changed by the mod. In the SAD case, all the bots would still be hostile.

Like I said I haven't tried this mod, but you're wrong about balancing weapons with enemies in mind being a bad idea. It's completely necessary if you want to make the game enjoyable without having to redesign it from the ground up. For example, the Sniper Rifle is essentially the same weapon type as a Scoped Hunting Rifle, so it should have the same low-accuracy-when-close-high-accuracy-when-distant behavior, right? Makes sense in theory, but a lot of enemies use Sniper Rifles, and they are all too thick to understand how that behavior works, so they will happily run straight up to you and miss every shot. So that weapon can't function like that, but the Scoped Hunting Rifle can, because only the player ever uses it.

Also, I doubt the mod makes every encounter unwinnable, I only said that some encounters are. But if you're the type who saves and reloads a lot then you probably won't enjoy the mod, or even the game. Live with your choices, is the design philosophy the devs had. I tend not to reload ever, even if my NPCs die. The exception is if I randomly get stuck in some encounter where I can't even run away, like getting instagibbed by a mutant with a rocket launcher before reaching the car. That just plain sucks, but even that's not a problem once you get power armor. This mod uses a modified damage calculation, so I don't know how effective power armor is, but it should still make you pretty unstoppable against anything but gauss weapons and big guns.

 

I was able to uninstall parts of the mod by :

-Saving the game outside the SAD

-Deleting the SAD maps from the save game itself using the f12se save editor (this reset the SAD to default when i re-entered it)

-Replacing the scripts with the RP scripts (to remove the trapwire that triggers the bots when you go to take Dixon's eye), the downside is that this affects merchants/quests as well but that should be easy to fix by replacing the ones from the mod again

-Replacing the maps with the RP maps

OK lets use the sniper rifle example. IMHO this isnt a very good example because the scope weapon perk is of limited use in the first place...I mean, yes, you can do easy long ranged shots. Unfortunately, most of the combat in the game takes place within 15 hexes. Even with 8-10 perception, random encounters almost always put you within 15 hexes or less of the enemies.

Cave encounters? All short ranged. All those indoor areas like mariposa, vault 15, etc? All short ranged. Even if you start 20+ hexes away, enemies usually get close very quickly. Off the top of my head, only a few places allow you to use long ranged to its full effect :

-Exterior of the SAD because turrets are immobile

-Navarro (but sniper rifles at this point wont cut it anyway)

-EPA spore plants (even an assault rifle at this point suffices though)

-Raiders if going in through the front entrance and leaving the doors locked to snipe the raiders (this is mostly because the AI is too dumb to unlock the doors to get at you)

I never use the scoped hunting rifle because the normal hunting rifle is extremely accurate as it is and you want to be able to keep shooting at close range.

I think the base hunting rifle is a good baseline. Its very common early game (den to vault city), it hits pretty hard, it is long ranged and is accurate. I think the most common sources are early caravan guards, some raiders/highwaymen/etc and ghoul crazies. But despite being a pretty well balanced weapon, I dont think it becomes unbalanced when enemies have easy access to it.

On the other hand, look at stuff like the CAWs and combat shotguns. Very common from Vault City->Broken Hills IIRC. But they dont really have a niche, other than having a 30% to hit bonus which is nice for NPCs I suppose. In the base game, the difference is actually not that large to other weapons available like the assault rifle...the assault rifle is better at long range and can burst, while the shotguns hit much harder per shot. But in regards to this mod, weapons like the assault rifle/FN FAL got massively buffed to the point where the shotguns are obsolete. An assault rifle with AP rounds/FN FAL basically negates DT/DR for almost all enemies until you reach the SAD, while shotguns seem to have been left alone. NPCs with sniper rifles are ridiculous since they negate metal armor mk2 and hit for 30+ damage per shot easily.

I tried bumping shotgun damage by about 50%, so combat shotguns do 20-30 damage with a max range of 16 hexes. That hits pretty hard, but its short range there is no DT reduction available. I dont think encounters with shotgun enemies are too difficult either but I was wearing metal armor mk2 at that point.

But I understand what you mean in terms of difficulty as there are some OP weapons in the base game like the pulse rifle/gauss rifle that most enemies do not carry, and encounters vs enemies gets very difficult if you do run into them. I never really realised it till I ran into cave robbers with those weapons and I was taking 50+ damage per shot. But still, I think the better solution is to balance the weapons so they aren't overpowered in the first place...that way when the player uses them, it doesnt make the game too easy and when enemies use them, they dont make the game too hard either.

 

J_Fred do you still have those crafting schematics? Files from your link are damaged.

 

Is there a way to safely install v3.8.4 of sfall onto this? Or maybe even Crafty's sfall?

 

3.8.4 is fine. I believe Crafty's too, although I didn't test.

 

I'm mainly worried about specific ini changes that this mod's installer might have made - I might just slog through both inis and compare them by hand, though.
PS. after making sure everything in the original ddraw ini is in the new one, seems like all's fine... for now. Hopefully nothing gets borked later on.

 

I do not off hand. It's on my old hard drive at the moment. Also, the last windows update screwed up Fallout for me. I get a resolution error. I'll need to redownload everything.


What kind of items are you wanting to add? It's basically just editing a text file and some images (though the images are optional). Adding new items to the game is a bit more modding intensive though.

 

phobos2077

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