Fallout Tactics mod Equilibrium (2.2)

Good job. My hope was always that my Redux mod would be a starting point for a community effort, and I'm glad to see you taking up that challenge.

 

Hello
I am playing your mod so I have couple of questions.
1.On normal dificulty on first mision enemy deals about 30-40 damage with hunting rifles. That means they just one-shot me. Its nearly imposible to outshoot them(hunting rifle has range 40). I play tough guy mode so its really frustrating. I was trying to sneak close to the enemy but its not working either considering its first mission and I have 1 level.
2.I remember that tough guy mode gave 100% percent more exp. Now I get only 30% more.Is it a bug or a feature?

 

good to see a focus on keeping vanilla stuff, do you intend in the future to release an unofficial combo of patch/restoration mod like killap does? I mean, without changes to weapons and stuff, just fixing and restoring vaniilla stuff, adding support for newest windoses, adding hi-res patch from mash into it, etc.

 

The weapons and such still do too much damage.
I thought the idea was to keep the beneficial changes of the Redux mod but roll back the game balancing back to the standard FOT? Thats what the mod description seemed to suggest.
(that means average damage for most starting guns should still be like around 10 or 15, we shouldnt be getting average stuff in the 20s or better until at least Quincy if not St. Louis)

 

Im making a mod overlay over redux to set things roughly back to normal, change weapons and ammo to reflect more historical fallout 1/2 equivalents.

I dont like jacking up the damage on melee weapons, but I do think they should cause a different kind of damage than bullets. FOT provides an excellent way to do this via that Gas damage type (which I change to Ballistic) because it has the same death animations as normal. That way armor can be good against Bullets/Knives but not so great against Clubs. And for the most effective Melee and Unarmed weapons I believe they should focus on Armor Penetration rather than damage . . . that way you can still pommel people for 15 or 25 damage in late game. And since it Knocks People Down its still effective against well armed foes since they never get a chance to shoot. As it always is with Melee it takes longer to put people down than shooting them, but it doesnt cost any ammunition.

Im a firm believer in arms escalation in games, just about everything a later thing does will be better than an earlier one, and early weapons are Supposed to be ineffective or even useless against later enemies. In fact thats a story plot, thats why the robots are sweeping across the plains even against the super mutants.

Best armor in the game should make you nearly invincible against earlier threats. Everything from pistol shots to shotguns should bounce off of power armor harmlessly. The only reason you should take damage sitting in a can is if its an enormous amount of force (some robot melee weapons do that) or it has good penetration (rifle bullets or just really strong hits).

But as you mentioned, some of the later game weapons are crap compared to the early game ones, and I would edit the maps to replace them with nicer or at least more useful things (like a crate full of 40 rockets).

Energy weapons . . . And Explosives are king, even with the best armor in the game you shouldnt be able to take more than a few hits and live, and even the weakest of those (lasers) should still hurt you.

The way I reason it Energy Weapons were built out of a need for being able to hurt people wearing Power Armor. Even though it helps with logistics, the real reason driving such a strong need to invest resources in inventing them is to have portable firepower capable of taking down walking tanks. Explosives will do the same job but energy cells dont weigh much and missiles weigh 3-8 pounds a pop. When used against anyone else yeah - they'll just blow them to pieces and pretty much kill anything, but thats a waste of valuable resources. Energy cells take advanced technology to produce and thats rare in the wasteland.

Heavy weapons (including miniguns) are only a second best, compensating for penetration with ammo availability (and more dakka). They'll shred just about anybody you point them at, but against a worthy opponent they'll only damage them (barely, if your burst was off aim).

None of the armor except Enviro or Power armor is worth a dam, and thats the way it should be. Leather armor should only shave a little damage off. Metal armor should only stop the weakest hits and slow down pistol shots, however it should stop Knives very well. Environment Armor (eg, combat armor) should be invincible against pistol shots except the strongest ones, and it should stop alot of rifle damage too. And Power armor should be like Iron Man invincibility, only something in the same ballpark can touch it (literally as tough as a tank, a Humvee will die before Power Armor will).

But then again except for the occasional Shotgun or Grenade most of what anybody throws at you before St. Louis is crap... so before then its just a Stimpack match. Ill be making the AK47 assault rifles into the AK112 ones from Fallout 1 so their damage is nerfed.

Accuracy for bad guys isnt a bad thing, thats why its called Tactics, you dont charge into enemy fire - and you take cover when they're shooting. They'll get up to chase you, or crawl closer, and then you have the Grenader blow them up. Or you have an ambush set up and then they're suddenly exposed to burst fire at close range. Or you Out Range them with your own sniper, wielding an actual sniper-worthy rifle not a hunting rifle. These are real world Tactics.

I like having small damage numbers for common weapons, with the bigger damage being in the heavy weapons and energy. For example the starting rifles and pistols will do just like they did in vanilla and even worse - the .32cal ammo (replaces 9mm) is going to go 5-10 across the board. Its got spam worthy smgs that spit out 12 or 15 shots, but against good armor thats still not much damage. The 7.62mm is now 5mm AP and it only does 8-20, but it has a penetration bonus.

The energy weapons do a hell of alot more. Compensated by needing rare ammo that you can only pretty much get from the QM. And all of the freebie energy gun ammo (like the kind the game refuses to make non-lootable from the turrets in Preoria) will be unusable in normal energy guns.

Lasers and Plasma both do Explosive damage too, so they blow people to pieces, and armor tends to be weaker against explosions. All energy weapons of a certain kind share the same ammo as opposed to weapon class. So their damage numbers are relatively similar, the difference being in range and accuracy.
Lasers: average 50 or 65
Plasma Guns: averages 75 or 90 and has Blast 1 (and will use a small green exploding effect)
Gauss Guns: averages 50 or 70 and has no projectile (instant hit)
Pulse Guns: averages 150 or 200 and has Blast 2 (and uses emp explosion impact effect)

In fact Pulse Rifle has a Triple fire mode that spits out 3 blasts at full strength. But you dont get much pulse ammo so abusing that will drain the supply and leave you empty handed at the end of the game. Because of the area effect its not that safe to use the Triple anyway.


This being compared to normal guns that do...
12 Gauge: 30-50 (no cone, bad penetration)
20 Gauge: 20-30 (no cone)
10mm: 10-20
.50ae: 18-36
45-70: 25-45
.338 Norma: 35-60 (sniper) or 16-50 (for machinegun) since it replaces .50cal

 

I'm looking forward to the next BalanceDux editions.

I too love using rl weapons and appreciate it if they are made to work similarly to real world counterparts. That adds an extra layer of fun, I love learning about weaponry, or imagine getting similar results in rl as in a game (doesn't matter if the portrayal is not 100% accurate, the effort itself counts).
And I agree with fantasy weapons not making huge sense - I doubt we'll just throw away perfectly fine and common AK-47s in the future or not develop any of the current rl weapons just because of a mid 20th century timeline divergence.

Can you advise which Redux version the mod works best with?

(Also, will you be planning updates for future releases, or updates to the current version release?)

 

I wouldnt say im necessarily a fan of the firearms in the fallout universe, some of them do things right, others could be better.

But im not a fan of RL firearms either . . . there's alot of things that could be done better across the board with real firearms that are just plain missed, or impossible to do (in the united states) because of that pesky NFA law.

For example have you heard of the .460 Rowland? Its a high pressure .45acp cartridge that hits like a .44 magnum. But you can still load .45acp (+P I think?) and it will chamber those just as well. It requires a muzzle brake but who cares, that makes it even easier to handle. There's more firepower and flexibility there than most of the common pistols. Only catch is that the ammo is rare, but that could be fixed in a theoretical world by mainstream manufacturing. Just one example.

Another example - its becoming widely known that the 6.5mm caliber is the perfect balance of firepower and ammunition size for an assault rifle. With longer boat tail bullets they have accuracy that touches .308 levels and it would be easy to make a Tumbling round that does the kind of damage the original 5.45mm 7N6 did. But yet all we get are half baked compromises to it like the 6.8mm SPC or .300 blackout. Dont get me wrong I do like the .300 but it serves a specific role, and I think it should only be used for its subsonic properties.

List goes on... the 10mm Auto had a .357sig equivalent called the 9mm Dillon. Now thats all fine and well to create a 9mm Magnum bottlenecked cartridge... but Just Imagine how effective it would be firing a Sabot armor piercing slug at 2700 feet per second. Out of a P-90, with a 50 round capacity. Or a battle rifle designed like the P-90 with a larger magazine.

In all fairness they Are catching onto creating a medium man portable machinegun, packing some of the same capabilities as a .50bmg but into something a guy can actually use (the LWMMG). But I saw the need for that years ago - take something in the .38 caliber range with 5000 to 6000 foot pounds of force - turn it into a 6mm or 7mm APFSDS and send that puppy downrange. It'll turn a man inside out, after shooting through his armor plate, and probably after shooting through his vehicle too. And while the ammunition would weigh an extra 50-100% as much as the .308 thats still tolerable compared to the recoil and weight of a .50... and even out of a rugged machinegun you could still snipe people at 800-1000 yards with it.

This is crap people missed, could have did 20 or 30 years ago, or did do decades ago but it never caught on. The kind of tweaking we'd expect from Zorg or the UNSC or Shadowrun defense contractors.

For that matter we could have Binary Propellant caseless firearms by now, there were some people who had the idea back in the vietnam war. Take a gun and use the same basic principals as an internal combustion engine, except instead of pushing a cylinder piston you're pushing a bullet out the barrel. Binary Propellant canisters could be good for several hundred shots each and could be inserted lengthwise down the gun. Heck even the ignition spark could start out with a Peizoelectric sparker, and use regenerative circuitry to charge a battery from every shot fired - the thing can always shoot at least semi automatic, no replacement batteries required. Even in case of an EMP its probable the weapon would still "work".

It also solves the problem of ammunition cook-off with standard caseless ammunition because there's no propellant in the chamber until the trigger is pressed, its just a slug sitting in an oven.

I think if anyone was ever going to create a real working M-41A Pulse Rifle (as in electrical pulse ignition) I think this is the way you'd do it. Then you really could have a Quad Stack magazine full of 100 bullet slugs, inherently caseless since its only a slug and the explosive force is provided externally.

Just imagine the logistics boon that is, the propellant canisters would be standard and even if you had different types you could transfer the gel between them with a converter. And the bullets? If the magazine fits and the bore is the same those would probably be interchangeable too.

Wouldnt say it would necessarily be a straight shot (pun) to making that tech work in our world in RL but any problems it had could probably be solved by innovation, since the principals arent that different from a car engine and we've perfected those. All of this innovation lost because of back room deals and defense contractor favoritism.

 

I'm loving the +1 range on clubs & hammers. I don't know if it was expected to matter this much, but it does. Now I want it to be in every FO:T mod please.

I barely paid attention to this weapon type before, in Redux the default knife was for some reason given better stats than any other melee weapon. In BDux though I switched over from knives to clubs pretty soon because the added range feels fantastic. It makes it much easier to catch and reach enemies in real-time moce, and I expect the same is true in turn-based mode (you need to waste less AP to reposition yourself).

Redux did good to personalize pistols & rifles and the difference between the two, but did little to add diversity for melee weapons too, so I'd say this is a must have.

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My only complaint (after the 1st level) is that BDux did not undo the horrible recruit pool changes (which is the only deal-breaking part for me that I can't accept in Redux).

 

Nah, I think blades=1, clubs=2, spears=3 is ideal. I did not mean to imply that I had any difficulty with close combat in the original game or the mod (heck, my last characters were a slasher, a puncher, and a deathclaw). Just that it feels right and adds variety. And, if you want to slice throats up close, you should pay for it.
(I wonder if the Razor Claws should get the 2 range tho, since they look like they would.)

I should probably be getting into modding more eh?
I never did figure out where a bunch of things are stored, like the character names/pics/desciptions.

PS.
I mentioned this in the Redux thread too, but my pet wish for throwables is to get improved range.
Throwing distance in FO 1-2-T is calculated from 3x Strength, ie. a max 15 or 16 range caps this at 5 ST , making any character with the skill an expert thrower regardless of specialized stats and rendering the Heave Ho! perk near-useless.
A max range of 25-35 for grenades would actually make ST matter (and it'd make Big Guns and Throwing match up nicely, same as how Small Guns/EW and Unarmed/Mellee do).

 

Great discussion! I will really try to work that out too for my mod. I love the 1-knives 2-clubs 3-spear solution! I'll test that out!