FO2 Mechanics Overhaul Mod

[JimTheDinosaur]

So, did you find a solution to the fastshot/bonus rate thing?

You mean that the perk shouldn't have a penalty? Currently I intend to have bonus rate of fire just make unaimed shots cost 1 less AP; still extremely powerful, but can't see any other way of nerfing it. Might just make it relatively late level.

 

[QuFu]

I think bonus rof should give -1AP to burst and big guns and maybe aimed shots (but i remember you had some other perk in mind with that). And the snapshot could lose it's penalty. So, together with fastshot it has no penalty anymore (which matches with vanilla - 3AP, no penalties).

 

[QuFu]

Beside, i've some 2nd thoughts about economy. I try to avoid, but ending every time in hoarding money. The reason is, that money is rare. If a trader has a good expensive item i try to pay only with collected weapons. If i have too give up money, i think twice, mostly not buying the item.

If the traders have more money (*3 or more) then i would feel more free to spend money on things i want. I think your new system is powerful enough to raise the traders money for this reason.

And how s development going? I'd love to test the new combat system.

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

Beside, i've some 2nd thoughts about economy. I try to avoid, but ending every time in hoarding money. The reason is, that money is rare. If a trader has a good expensive item i try to pay only with collected weapons. If i have too give up money, i think twice, mostly not buying the item.

If the traders have more money (*3 or more) then i would feel more free to spend money on things i want. I think your new system is powerful enough to raise the traders money for this reason.

Could be, but I want to see first how the new inflation system works, and how it impacts the desirability of cash.

And how s development going? I'd love to test the new combat system.

Slow but steady (I'm pretty busy these days). The new economy system is almost done, now I need to tweak the gear randomization thing to tie into it. Then on to the damage calcs. Will probably take a while still, so go do something else

 

[UniversalWolf]

I've often wondered whether the game's economy wouldn't be better if gold were done away with completely.

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

I've often wondered whether the game's economy wouldn't be better if gold were done away with completely.

Nah, it's good to have something that's (a) weightless and (b) divisible. Paying for armor in guns is hard to do exactly after all.

Another problem which sort of ties in to this is that you can't use the goods carried by your pack mules to trade. If you have a max weight of 50 pounds, then you absolutely need that gold to be able to buy anything.

Incidentally, this gives me an idea for dealing with pack mule-related sillyness: I can add an option for raising the player's max carry weight to that of himself + his party members (- what they're already carrying).

I guess this might conceivably be used as an exploit, in the sense that you'd have access to more weighty stuff during combat than you'd normally be, but the vast majority of the stuff you're using during combat is either weightless (consumables) or relatively light weight (ammo)...

I think it could work, finnicking around with party members' inventories is annoying as hell and it makes no sense whatsoever that you can take companions' stuff, but can't involve their stuff in a transaction.

 

[UniversalWolf]

Personally, I wouldn't expect barters made in a post-apocalyptic wasteland to be balanced to the last penny. That's one of the things I dislike about gold in the game. Besides, there's always mine scrip or other local currencies which otherwise are nothing but scenery.

If I ever make a Fallout 2 mod, the first thing it's going to do is remove all the most expensive items from all stores. No more buying power armor, gauss rifles, pancor jackhammers or .223 pistols....

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

I'm working on a solution to what I think breaks the entire concept of sequence: surprise turns.

Right now sequence works like this: the combat initiator gets the first "surprise" attack, then the others, and for the following turn, the one with the highest sequence gets the first attack.

What this means, is that in a fight between someone with awesome reflexes (dude A), who initiates combat, and someone with crappy reflexes (dude B), combat turns progress like this: A, B, B, A, B, A, B, etc. Who has the advantage in this situation? Clearly depends on the chance of killing someone in the first round (A has the advantage) or in two rounds (B has the advantage), but on the whole this is about even, which defeats the entire purpose of having awesome sequence: what most matters is who starts combat with a "surprise" attack, even if it isn't actually a surprise.

I want to fix this by making a "surprise" attack, an actual surprise: if your target (the one you're aiming your weapon at in the first turn) doesn't see you, then everything works as normal and you get your surprise advantage. If, additionally, you have higher sequence than the opponent, you also keep your second turn advantage, so turns progress A, A, B, A, B, A, etc. If you have lower sequence, then you lose your second turn advantage, but now so does the enemy (in practice this means that his sequence gets lowered to 0), which means that turns progress A, B, A, B, A, B, A, etc.

However, if he does see you, then one of two things can happen:

(1) you have higher sequence than the enemy, which means you "keep" your first turn, but "lose" your advantage in the second, so turns progress A, B, A, B, A, B, etc.

(2) you have lower sequence than the enemy, which means you lose your first turn, but the enemy loses his advantage in the second, so turns progress B, A, B, A, B, A, B, etc.

Long story short: who initiates combat won't be important anymore, unless it's a sneak attack that the enemy (and his team mates) don't see coming.

 

[Sduibek]

I'm working on a solution to what I think breaks the entire concept of sequence: surprise turns.

Right now sequence works like this: the combat initiator gets the first "surprise" attack, then the others, and for the following turn, the one with the highest sequence gets the first attack.

What this means, is that in a fight between someone with awesome reflexes (dude A), who initiates combat, and someone with crappy reflexes (dude B), combat turns progress like this: A, B, B, A, B, A, B, etc. Who has the advantage in this situation? Clearly depends on the chance of killing someone in the first round (A has the advantage) or in two rounds (B has the advantage), but on the whole this is about even, which defeats the entire purpose of having awesome sequence: what most matters is who starts combat with a "surprise" attack, even if it isn't actually a surprise.

I want to fix this by making a "surprise" attack, an actual surprise: if your target (the one you're aiming your weapon at in the first turn) doesn't see you, then everything works as normal and you get your surprise advantage. If, additionally, you have higher sequence than the opponent, you also keep your second turn advantage, so turns progress A, A, B, A, B, A, etc. If you have lower sequence, then you lose your second turn advantage, but now so does the enemy (in practice this means that his sequence gets lowered to 0), which means that turns progress A, B, A, B, A, B, A, etc.

However, if he does see you, then one of two things can happen:

(1) you have higher sequence than the enemy, which means you "keep" your first turn, but "lose" your advantage in the second, so turns progress A, B, A, B, A, B, etc.

(2) you have lower sequence than the enemy, which means you lose your first turn, but the enemy loses his advantage in the second, so turns progress B, A, B, A, B, A, B, etc.

Long story short: who initiates combat won't be important anymore, unless it's a sneak attack that the enemy (and his team mates) don't see coming.

Very nice, I like it.

[aside: I personally haven't seen what you're describing very often; usually when I have high Agility, I'm the one getting back-to-back rounds, 9 times out of 10. I know this for certain because some Invading Mutants got 2 rounds before I could go again a few days ago and I was like "WTF?!?!" because I'm not used to seeing that.]

Is there any feasible way to make to make Sequence matter throughout the entirety of combat? Maybe it can give a little AC bonus or something? Personally I think it's total BS that Sequence only matters for the first turn of combat. It says "Determines how soon in a combat turn your character can react." not "have an extra round one time each combat no matter how long the combat lasts". I mean having an extra round at the start, in endgame is great and a big advantage because you'll be using much better weapons etc etc. But most players are awesome near endgame anyway so it's kind of a moot point. Early to mid game is where something like Sequence should really shine.

 

[UniversalWolf]

Yes, I concur. If anything can be done to improve things in that direction, I'll be impressed.

This is just a thought, but I've always wanted Fallout combat to have an AP cost for things like working the bolt on a rifle. Jagged Alliance 2 has that. I have no idea whether or not that's possible, but since you seem to be attempting the impossible...

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

Is there any feasible way to make to make Sequence matter throughout the entirety of combat?

Not really, it's turn based combat, deal with it

This is just a thought, but I've always wanted Fallout combat to have an AP cost for things like working the bolt on a rifle. Jagged Alliance 2 has that. I have no idea whether or not that's possible, but since you seem to be attempting the impossible...

Don't really see how I could do that, sorry.

 

[Sduibek]

Is there any feasible way to make to make Sequence matter throughout the entirety of combat?

Not really, it's turn based combat, deal with it

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

I'm working on another idea which I'm still not totally sure about. It's mainly meant as a "fix" for the peek-around-the-corner-jump-back exploit, but it has a pretty big impact which might be cool or not.

What it does is check at the beginning of everyone's turn who they can "see" (this is a built in feature of fallout, which checks for facing (can't see anything right behind), perception and blocking tiles); it then lists these visible targets, and then if you want to attack one of them later in the turn everything works as normal. If, however, you want to attack someone who wasn't visible at the beginning of your turn, then you get a to hit penalty.

So, what this means is that if you're hiding behind a wall, and jump out for a shot, you get a penalty. But it also means that if you shoot at someone who was behind you at the beginning of the turn, you get a penalty, same if someone was beyond your visual range. I'm still not sure if these side affects are a net positive or a net negative.

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

I've decided to make my own ammo formula, because I wasn't totally happy with the Glovz and YAAM formulas. You can find an excel sheet with all the damage outputs compared with those of YAAM and the Vanilla formula here. Just flick through the tabs for the different types of ammo. If you could check it out and give some feedback I'd appreciate it.

The reason I didn't like the original formula speaks for itself (it's a broken mess). The primary reason I don't like YAAM (which had the Ammo mod substract first from the DT, and then, if the DT was "gone", from the DR) is that good ammo turns armor into butter: wearing combat armor or nothing, it literally doesn't matter if your enemy is packing gauss or AP rocket ammo. Even if I'd liked this principle, it can't possibly work in FO which effectively has two seperate ammo formulas: one for "normal" ammo, and one for energy weapons. Normal ammo has different modifiers to differentiate them, energy weapons have damage types. The thing is that plasma, laser and electricity always have certain relative advantages against certain types of armor, it never absolutely blows it away. Second big reason I don't like it is that it has certain weird effects. For instance, using 10mm ammo against combat armor, you're better of with AP with low damage ranges; but with high damage ranges you're better off with JHP. Glovz's formula generally has better outcomes than YAAM, but it's really complex, and I want something that allows people to change around values easily if they don't like something.

What I came up with is something that basically brings "normal" ammo more in line with the different damage types by making the modifiers relative. The damage multipliers still work the same as always, but now it has a modifier that adds or substracts a certain percentage from both the DT and DR. So, for instance, if you have 10mm AP against combat armor, then it has a modifier of -20% which gets substracted from the DT and DR (so the DT becomes 5*0.8 = 4 and the DR becomes 40*0.8=32). In choosing the new ammo values I've tried mostly to make sure that if there's both AP and non-AP ammo, AP starts getting better against from combat armor upwards (the only exception is AP rockets, which are (a lot) better from PA onward).

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

Updated the ammo excel sheet (same link), because for some reason Haen rounded up all his values, which caused the comparison to get a bit wonkey.

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

Finally figured out what I'm going to with radiation:

random radiation zones on the world map (not on towns): these zones are circular shaped (noticed that Timeslip has added stuff like sine and tan, which gave me nightmares during math class, but I managed to figure out hex geometry to some degree, so should work out), and varying in size. Bigger zones have small bigger radiation zones within them. With a geiger counter, you get the geiger counter sound when you enter one of the zones, which means you either change direction, possibly adding days worth of dangerous encounters to your travel time, or slog on and hope for the best. In my head it's really cool.

So, nobody around happens to have made a circle in sfall I can shamelessly copy from yet, right?

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

I've been thinking about the combat stats. Two things I think most people consider problems: (1) throwing: you want to be able to toss a grenade once in a while, but don't feel like investing in a skill, (2) hth vs. firearms: I think Sawyer made the point somewhere that it's weird how hth is a question of pick one and stick with it till the end, while with firearms you have to go with small arms, and then maybe branch out if you don't like gauss rifles.

Because I'd like to keep any changes as straightforward as possible, I thought I'd just do everything based on animation type:

Small Arms => Pistols/SMG's (pistol & smg anims)
Big Guns => Big Guns (minigun, big gun & rocket launcher anims)
Energy Weapons => Rifles (rifle anim)
Unarmed => Unarmed (no anim, so unarmed + grenades/rocks)
Melee => Light Melee (spear & knife anims, so including throwing knives and spears)
Throwing => Heavy Melee (club & sledge anims)

This approach is attractive for me because it makes a large number of calculations easier/more straightforward, especially in the to hit script (e.g. I can't check for attack type there, so I have to use an inexact workaround when checking whether you're throwing or thrusting a spear, but I can of course check for animations).

One problem is that it brings some issues with the animation types to the fore: why is a laser rifle, which looks exactly like a sniper rifle, not a rifle but a big gun? Just giving it a rifle animation creates incompatibility issues with Super Muties (though no problem results with the projectiles, thankfully).

Here's what I could do though: make all rifles (including plasma and laser) into rifle animations, and simply copy a whole lot of super mutie big gun animation frames and rename them to rifle animations; problem solved at the cost of a bit bigger download.

edit: Incidentally, I could take the same approach to Vic & Cassidy etc. so they can also use more types of weapons.

edit 2: now that I think about it, I shouldn't overpower rifles too much... maybe the laser rifle should become a rifle, but pulse & plasma should stay big guns... not sure.

edit 3: Light melee might be a bit underpowered too... while I'm not that big a fan of defensive skills, a blocking skill might be an idea. This'd work on top of the agility-based evasion check against melee and unarmed attacks (and at a penalty when carrying a two handed weapon). The alternative scheme would then be:

Small Arms => Pistols/SMG's (pistol & smg anims)
Big Guns => Big Guns (minigun, big gun & rocket launcher anims)
Energy Weapons => Rifles (rifle anim)
Unarmed => Unarmed (no anim, so unarmed + grenades/rocks)
Melee => Melee (club, spear, sledge & knife anims, so including throwing knives and spears)
Throwing => Blocking

 

[Glovz]

I've been thinking about the combat stats. Two things I think most people consider problems: (1) throwing: you want to be able to toss a grenade once in a while, but don't feel like investing in a skill, (2) hth vs. firearms: I think Sawyer made the point somewhere that it's weird how hth is a question of pick one and stick with it till the end, while with firearms you have to go with small arms, and then maybe branch out if you don't like gauss rifles.

I like this a lot. Feedback:

edit 2: now that I think about it, I shouldn't overpower rifles too much... maybe the laser rifle should become a rifle, but pulse & plasma should stay big guns... not sure.

Correct - Plasma and Pulse should be big guns

edit: Incidentally, I could take the same approach to Vic & Cassidy etc. so they can also use more types of weapons.

If Plasma and Pulse stay big guns then this should not be needed.

edit 3: Light melee might be a bit underpowered too... while I'm not that big a fan of defensive skills, a blocking skill might be an idea. This'd work on top of the agility-based evasion check against melee and unarmed attacks (and at a penalty when carrying a two handed weapon).

I like this but breaking "Blocking" out feels strange because when I think of "Melee", to me it means everything to do with hand weapons (offensive and defensive). While Throwing is a skill very different from straight forward Melee; different muscle training, different hand-eye coordination, and different timing.

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

I like this but breaking "Blocking" out feels strange because when I think of "Melee", to me it means everything to do with hand weapons (offensive and defensive).

I mostly agree; that's why I don't like defensive skills. I'm still considering it because (1) splitting up melee seems almost as arbitrary, (2) I've incorporated defensive melee/unarmed in the to hit formula, but I'm never sure which one to use in what situation; a block skill would solve that issue.

edit: there's a more important reason still: giving melee characters a "free" defensive advantage over firearms characters would seem to throw everything off balance.

edit2: I have to start thinking about the blocking mechanic more seriously whether I go the second route or not: while unused AP's no longer affect your dodge (if anything you should be more evasive while on the move), it does make sense that spending time to anticipate an attack would aid you in blocking it. Also, strength should play a role: blocking an attack by someone three times your size shouldn't be that effective (though it might still do something like raise your DT/DR slightly). Of course, to avoid bruisers getting too much of an advantage over nimble characters, heavy, strength based, weapons should be easier to dodge.

 

[Glovz]

edit: there's a more important reason still: giving melee characters a "free" defensive advantage over firearms characters would seem to throw everything off balance.

I don't think there should be any defensive bonus given to a melee character when facing character using firearms, any defensive bonus should be restricted to when the melee character is facing another HtH or melee character.