Very good answers, thank you.
Hubal was right about the prefab characters-- if you attempt to edit them in-game, you can't proceed (error message "All stats must be in valid starting range before starting the game"). They can be used, as long as you don't attempt to modify them using the character creation process. I'm not immediately sure what can be done about this, but I'll give the problem some thought for the future.
If you have not created them with the starting characteristics as the rules dictate it, the game recognizes that. If you edited say, a few extra attribute points on any of the original FOT prefab characters, the result would be the same. (You could press Take but would not be able to Modify.) The solution is simple, don't cheat. If I recall correctly, the characters you made all had some bonus attribute points and that is why this happens.
In FOT Redux all Plasma weapons do radiation damage. It's mentioned as well in one of the articles found somewhere about the history of energy weapons in the game universe. This is designed to make the game harder, since player-characters suffer but enemies don't live long enough to be significantly affected by radiation. This effect can be minimized by having everyone take Rad-X at the start of each mission when fighting robots and reavers (the enemies who make frequent use of energy weapons). Rad-X supplies were a little too tight in the earlier version of Redux, so overall I probably increased the wider game availability of Rad-X in the current version by about fifty percent. I also boosted the radiation resistance of Environmental Armor and Power Armor, as they were too low before to reflect the idea that these are sealed suits of armor. Generally speaking, when wearing Environmental Armor you won't need Rad-X, and if wearing Power Armor one Rad-X will boost you to full immunity.
I love that by the way and I'd like you to do the same for poison for the Bunker Beta missions, not just all types of insects (wasp, scorp, giant roach) but also Beastmaster weapons should use poison relatively much.
It seems to me the game can be give a natural progression even with the avaliable tools, and you seem to have noticed & apllied this already, judging from the new stats you gave to Steel Armor.
If you split the game to 5 phases which all roughly map to a named bunker, you get
Raiders
Beastlords, radscorps, roaches (poison)
Mutants (high damage, explosives)
Reavers (radiation, electric)
Robots (high damage, radiation, electric)
which can be reflected in the armors that become avaliable to the character after unlocking each bunker:
Leather Armor ->
Enviromental Armor -> protects from poison (radscorp/radroach/wasp, deathclaw and beastlord)
Metal Armor -> protects from heavy gunfire (mutants) and explosions
Tesla Armor & Reaver bending -> protects from electric attacks & radiation
Power Armor -> protects from heavy damage attacks, electric attacks, and extreme radiation
and I think a point worth making before I get into the full discussion about nonhuman characters is that this means that you can give nonuman characters rad and poison resistances from the very beginning and they would STILL not be busted, even if a player wants to run them from the 1st mission, because those resistances only come into play later (and map roughly to upgrading to Enviromental and Tesla Armor and then Power Armor).
and following this logic the armors would roughly look like
Leather Armor
10 AP 20 DR
Enviromental Armor
10 AP 20 DR, % poison/fire resist
Metal Armor
20 AP 40 DR
Tesla Armor
20 AP 40 DR, % radiaton/energy resist
Power Armor
30 AP 60 DR, % radiaton/energy/poison/fire resist
FOT is guilty of aping the original FO1-2 games too much so Leather Armor starts at a very high 15 AC and if you take it off you're toast.
So you are absolutely correct about what this means to nonhumans: if you run a deathclaw through the 1st mission, it will die pretty quickly unlike a human Unarmed character, simply because of how much the basic Leather Armor means.
So, the very least, mutants and deathclaws should have default racial bonuses that are equivalent to basic Leather Armor, or they are not going to survive.
Upgrading that defense has been set up in a strange way but it's not impossible, you basically have to take perks for it. And so those perks are pretty much obligatory,
deathclaws go:
basic resistances + Brutish Hulk + Hide of Scars
mutants go:
basic resistances + mutant armor + Tough Hide
these are not without problems still:
Tough Hide is semi-busted because it requires LESS than 8 EN, not more. As long as people agree not to make a high-EN mutant character it should be fine, but it's rather dumb.
Brutish Hulk is great, as long as you don't mind using up all healing equipment x3 as fast (naturally, reducing damage is better than having more hp.)
Oh, I almost forgot to mention: I think MkII armors could easily be removed from the picture for low CH players. While everyone should be able to afford the next MkI upgrade, it is fine if only the best traders/collectors will get every MkII. (No need to make Leather Armor MkII a step before Enviro Armor, as it was in the old game.)
EDIT: One more point here:
Mardin and Quincy are the two last missions in Bunker Beta (before you re-add Springfield), and the next mission is the first mutant mission, Bunker Gamma's St. Louis. Which means that anyone who could not afford the 2nd armor upgrade is going to be toasted by heavy gunfire.
It is impossible for Deathclaws to have unlocked Hide of Scars at this point, and ghouls can only use enviromental armor, so their damage resistance is at 1 step below what'd be needed for the next missions at best.
So basically Deathclaws need the equivalent of 2 armor upgrades (built-in Metal Armor) , to be rounded up into a rudimentary power armor with Hide of Scars/Brutish Hulk later, if they want to be playable as they appear now in the campaign.
Regarding recruits, one thing I've thought about on several occassions is to bump up the basic skill levels in throwing, unarmed, and small guns to reflect the benefits of basic training by the Brotherhood. In truth I just forgot about it this time around, but since I removed the training switches from the bunkers the effect of this oversight is likely amplified during gameplay. Comments are welcomed on this issue.
I'm 110% on board with this and in fact FOT itself does this somewhat arbitarily anyway. A bigger starting bonus by say 30% on Small Guns, Throwing, Melee, Unarmed will eliminate the frequent misses for the first 2 levels (while hopefully still low enough that it does not completely eliminate the drawback from Gifted for example, or unlock every Unarmed special attack for every character). This is a much better solution that handing out 3 Guns&Bullets books.
Of all recruits, Deathclaws and Mutants are in the worst shape as I've done the least work on them. I almost always play with human recruits, and I think I in the past I was hoping someone who is really into using Deathclaws or Mutants would give some detailed feedback on how to improve them, which I haven't seen. These classes are definitely scheduled for improvement in a future version of Redux.
See above, and also,
Generally, Deathclaws move faster on the map while Mutants move slower.
Which I feel should be reflected in how far they can move per AP in combat, too, ie. Deathclaws would have an effective free Bonus Move perk, while mutants would have the opposite.
It'd be nice if this could be done.
In general, I think if a mutant/deathclaw character and a human character can reach about the same stats by taking the same number of perks and maxing all possible equipment, it can be called balanced. What I mean is that if they have a built-in Bonus HtH Damage (and with mutants Bonus Ranged Damage), Rad Resistance, Snakeeater, Bonus Move and Toughness perks, then even if a human does not actually take these perks but would reach more or less the same overall stats, that is then good. (That does not remove the need for high AC/DR on the last levels but helps.)
Does this get achieved right now, probably not, but it should not be impossible.
Ghouls are the least problematic since they can use most armors. (And their rad/energy resistance matches up nicely with the non-usable Tesla Armor.)
Eventually I'd like playable dogs and robots, for that one'd have to fix the dog no-climbing problem first. Robots are only problematic if people want to run them from the 1st mission, in which case high starting AP/DR must be swapped for new "upgrade" items you get with each new bunker.
I agree about adding higher cash-value treasure-type items, for the gameplay purpose of minimizing hauling junk around. Micromanaging inventory simply isn't fun, and is a problem with the entire genre of games to which FOT belongs. Jewelry is good for this purpose, since it's lightweight and has high monetary value.
There are a couple of features I'd love that are probably impossible to implement:
- there should be some sort of "trade items" key or button that'd effectively activate a Steal on an ally character (hijacking that skill's script or something), so that characters can trade items more easily.
- Shops & bartering should automatically use the highest Barter skill and CHA in the party, and the same would be nice for talking to the recruits master.
- also the highest Outdoorsman/LK in the party should be used while wandering on the map; this'd give actual value to Outdoorsman type recruits.
When you use an active skill (say, Lockpick) while you have the whole party selected (F12), the game already moves the character with the highest skill. Not expecting that to be something borrowable, but it's a thing.
Unfortunately the random encounter aspect of the game was a last minute add-on by Microforte, and simply doesn't work very well. Your suggestions are solid, but can't be implemented due to engine restrictions. All of the perks related to random encounters don't work at all; they're flat-out busted and can't be fixed. Hopefully I noted this in all their descriptions, if I missed any let me know.
I noticed that you could apparently tinker with the encounter tables though - at least, there were a lot less random fights than I was used too when wandering on the map - so I wonder what else you can do?
Bunker-like green circle locations should be possible to create on the map and then at least the Scout perk function of seeing 1 square further (which still works) could be salvaged.
Unarmed skill (compared to Melee skill) becomes much more useful later in the game, as numerous perks can be taken to benefit Unarmed usage. One change in Redux 1.2 is that I noted in many perk descriptions that I found an unfixable bug-- many perks you'd expect to work with both Unarmed and Melee in fact only work for Unarmed, making the latter by far the better choice over the long term. Examples include Silent Death and Slayer.
Oh, it's clear that Unarmed used to be more useful than Melee, that was the popular advice pre-patch too.
But we're talking about making every skill usable right?
I don't think the avaliableHtH perks need to be accounted for when calculating the correct strenght for Melee weapons, since not taking those perks will just let the Melee character pick a bunch of others instead - from ones that give resistance (Toughness, Dodger, Stonewall/Hit the Deck/etc., the whole pack) to ones that increase damage in other ways, like the Critical perks.
The only thing that SHOULD be accounted for is the improved special attacks you gain from Unarmed skill level. For example if a Strong Kick etc. gives armor piercing, that should be reflected/copied in the melee weapons that become avaliable later in the game.
On difficulty, I made the mod so perhaps it's to be expected to some extent, but my people hardly ever get killed. One of the ways the mod seeks to increase difficulty is to require the use of sound tactics and tactical thinking, since the original SP campaign never lived up to the name in that respect. Don't just run toward enemies and start shooting. Flank them, sneak up on them, draw them out from their positions into ambushes, position your troops so you can deliver effective fire on the enemy but he can't effectively return fire, and so forth.
Hah, funny thing is, mine rarely die by doing just that thing (running up to enemies and shooting them). Playing with this mod actually makes some stages easier in a sense and faster to complete.
The high damage strikes back on the enemies too - now you can just dispatch them quickly as long as you always shoot first.
Due to hard-coded design flaws with the way the engine handles burst fire, miniguns aren't very effective. Players who are fond of them somehow never notice this, but it's been discussed to death almost since the day the original game was initially released. Also, heavy weapons in general disrupt the "tactical" game balance. Overall, miniguns are being gradually removed from FOT Redux for all these reasons.
I'd be interested to hear more about this since I have not read those discussions and do not know what that is.
One more suggestion I want to make, you may have realized that these skills:
Barter
Lockpick
Gambling
Steal
all do the same thing (giving you rare items),
and most people probably don't even notice that Lockpick is the same category because we're all completionist and OF COURSE want to finish the level 100% and not leave that box unopened even if it only has some extra shells in it.
So just like there is on every level a lockbox that has no key, there should be on every stage where it is justifiable, a guy who is just DYING to Gamble away a valuable item; which you could also collect by pickpocketing the guy. (The new relevant armor or MkII armor or weapon, book, drug, etc.)
PS. I'm aware of the Gambling exploits, but unless someone can replace that code entirely I think it might be better to book on the player NOT knowing about the exploit than removing the Gamble option (as I've seen you've done on some) and making the skill a total loss.
The nice thing would be if every click on Gamble increased the NPC's "too rich for my blood" factor (since that is already a thing), so that after some clicks Gambling would not be possible anymore. That's eliminate the infinite 0 stakes one. Preventing saving reloading is more complex and I doubt it is doable: one should simply not make Gambling "all or nothing". You maybe you'd lose some items while gain others, and so players would be more likely to stick with an imperfect result if they ot something nice they wanted.
