Ok, well, thank you for the reply, I'll deffinitely check it out when it's available. Party control in combat is something I don't play without as it makes both combat and inventory management too fiddly. There is an odd thing where some perks seem to apply to your companions and some don't, I'm not sure how that will affect stuff. A few thoughts about balancing stuff, and a bit of a read concerning perks (since I've had ample opportunity to really play the game a lot with most of them).
- Sulik is overpowered. Seriously, that guy is way too good as long as you can control him. I think they made him that way because of his melle tendencies to help him survive charging into stuff all the time, but once you can get tactical with him he's too good.
- The game is incredibly annoying to play without 4 move points. I'm not even abusing them, but positioning is pretty much all there is to tactics in the vanilla, and without them it's way too fiddly. Unarmed and melle in particular are terrible without them. If you're looking for better combat, make them features of everyone, not perks, and give them to opponents too. If you allready did, great job.
- Same with quick pockets. Whatever you do to the inventory AP cost, as long as this thing is here, everyone will take it all the time. Also, everyone allready takes it instead of really broken stuff, so making it even more of an impactful lifesaver would have the adverse effect. Also, one half of the tactics in this game is positioning, the other is having a bunch of different guns, weapons, ammo and grenades on you and rotating them throughout the fight. If you can't do that there's nothing much to do. If you make all of this more difficult than it allready is you'd just make the fights drag on forever while stuff that's automated right now will take manual actions. This might make melle opponents such as wanamingos overpowered, too.
- Awareness is also something that should've never been a perk, because it's just a UI thing.
- Perks, especially if balanced, are way too spread out at 1 every 3 levels, and it makes the game very boring once the distance between levels begins to stretch. The level progression where you only get a bit of health and some passive bonuses / dialogue unlocks if you have a guide to them is too pasive, and if you ding and not get a perk out of it there's no proper sense of acomplishment or reward. I've tried 4 per level, 3, 2, 1, and a lot of vanilla, and I can guarantee that if the level and stat requirements are properly adjusted and the UI improvement ones (awareness, bonus move) were made automatic / removed so you don't have to burn dings on them 1 per level starting at lvl 2 would be a decent hardcore option, with 2 being a fine baseline. They don't break anything, really. I'll be playing at 3 anyway, this is just advice from having done a lot of testing.
Having done all that testing, because I plan to make a through perk mod one day anyway, a few pointers about specific perks from my experience:
Absoultely broken vanilla stuff I haven't been taking even when they were the only things left:
- Sniper
- Slayer
- Lifegiver
- Bonus HtH attacks (far more gamechanging than Bonus Rate of Fire IMO. BroF just makes otherwise lousy companions able to shoot 2 times.)
Stuff that's rarely going to get passed up due to power:
- Better Criticals
- Living Anatomy
- Dodger
UI improvements/stuff noone'll ever pass up for sensible reasons:
- Awareness (This is only a perk so people wouldn't take Toughness all the time)
- Quick Pockets (Same thing)
- Bonus Move (Same thing)
- Bonus rate of fire (it's only broken with the silly BroF trait build, otherwise what it does is make more companions viable and not all that much else)
- Action Boy (it's not about power, but getting more AP out of a level is just more rewarding and interactively applicable than anything esle)
UI improvements/no-brainer stuff for sneaky people:
- Silent running (Sneaking without this thing is hair pullingly annoying, and I suspect this is why most people never bother with it.)
- Thief (everyone's a thief with "Thief" - even if you built for anything else!)
Stuff which is potentially very, very broken if you can take more perks than one every 3 levels, and possibly just as broken even then as long as the perk progression isn't tied up with all of the categories above:
- More Criticals (high luck, fixed/no sniper and better criticals + 3 levels of this gives you 25% base crit chance. I stopped taking it alltogather.)
- Toughness (This thing, if stacked 3 times, gives you +30% damage resistance. +5% in game costs you 8000 gold and a suit of combat armor. If the early perk progression wasn't tied up with awareness and the UI improvement stuff, at 3lvl/perk I'd take this at 3,6 and 9 and never have to go beyond leather mark II. I used to routinely stack this and actually just trade my combat armors for +10% more in implants. With this I only ever pick up power armor when I find it in Navarro)
So whatever you do, know this:
- Toughness is overpowered to the extreme, it needs a big fat nerf. (I'd cut the bonus to 5% or up it's level requirement, give it only one rank and make it 15%.)
- If you've indirectly "fixed" the damage sponge syndrome through static hitpoints, you've just nerfed Lifegiver from OP to no-brainer
- If you fix/remove sniper, you've not done all that much as More Criticals is only slightly less silly
- Bonus HtH attacks make unarmend stupidly cheap while at the same time it costs no ammo
- Only masochists play with less than 4 move points at the first opportunity. Very non-dynamic fights otherwise. I'd give at least 2 to every critter built in.
- Noone's going to ever pass up living Anatomy or Dodger. They improve every gun/armor out there.
- If the current vanilla Dodger and Toughness aren't being picked on every character, it just means people are paying perks for a decent interface or the offensive perks are wildly broken.
- Having to take a perk for the effects of silent running is a crime. I've ignored the sneaking skill alltogather for a decade because the idea of having to spend a perk to not have to keep unchecking the "always run button" is just terrible. Yes, I know I can double click, but I also know that I can happily ignore anything related to sneaking except stealing and never have to pay attention to it.
Take from it what you will. I'll give your mod a try, regardless of my outlook on certain things.
Wholy optional but not unwise textwall for your consideration, with my outlook:
My thoughts are that the game would be balanced if the perk progression were stretched out properly, with at least 1 perk per level, every monster/character having move points, all the UI perk effects made automatic or given as quest rewards, and the outlying broken perks changed. With barter prices/mechanics adjusted and a few gold drains introduced, that should be enough.
My points in case you're interested:
- The real problems with the balance/game can only be fixed if someone mods in a proper endgame and develops the existing towns better, distributing the loot, XP and stuff among more characters, quests and fights. About 1/3 of the total XP in the game (at least) ought to be moved behind resource draining fights, as well as a bunch of quests not awarding both the kill XP and the quest XP.
- By my estimate, the RP EPA has loot and XP in it for about... up to 10-15 times the difficulty and interaction needed (provided you have the skills at a set level, if you don't it just binarily doesn't). SAD a lot more. San Francisco and NCR have XP and loot in them (even accounted for level) for 2-3 more cities their size. That's not even counting the Hubologist stash or the two vaults.
- Monsters involved in quests giving XP both for kills and quests is another thing. Random encounter monster placement and map configurations also cut down on strategy and depth, as does the AI pathing (the problem isn't you running around the corner, the problem is the AI not having ways to smoke you out or doing the same to you - if neither one does it, what IS there to do?).
- There's no properly rewarding vendor trash either, so whenever there's loot in containers, and that's almost everywhere, it's either worthless in terms of money or worthwhile but also useful. Guns and ammo seem to be the only interactive basis of the economy (chems are just funny money bills which are also stats cheats), but if every place with containers contains a crapton of them you're ussually either getting a haul for free (in a city) or getting XP for killing the "guards", XP for the quest which took you there (or opening the door like in Mariposa), stuff you would spend money on (ammo, guns, armor and stims) as well as vendor trash (excess of stuff you'd buy anyway). So if your party of 4 cleans out vault 15 for Tandi, you get XP for killing all the mooks, you get XP for 3-4 quests, you get money for a quest, you get gear you can use and a Vault full of loot. That's what's broken.
- The only place where this is sort of well thought out to a degree is trying to loot the vault in VC when you get acess. There's quite a haul, but you have to figure out ways to acess it. Compare that to, say, the hubologist stash where you read through a computer (a conspicuous one) to find it, walk in, shoot a few guys and walk away with enough money to fund a New New Reno with blackjack and hookers.
- I also strongly believe that the game was never really balanced for mooks dropping weapons and armor. Sounds silly, but it's true, and you can see it with the endgame weapons. Most folks who have those only have them to be able to challenge you or prevent you from attacking them at all. Once you have said weapons, there's nowhere to go with them. That's why I'm pretty sure you can't balance the game with changing numbers on the guns. Even weight and such. If ten gauss rifles drop, and they're too heavy to take them all to a shop - who cares? You only "need" as many as you have party members who can shoot them. And if you can kill 10 guys who had them, you're probably fine with what you had allready. I'm not sure anyone ever needed a bozar - if you can kill whoever you got that Bozar off, you've allready won.
- The three best fights in the game in my opinion are - the wannamingo mine, the recently added Abandoned House near San Fran (brilliant, tough ranged mooks with 0 drops in sort of appropriate numbers (allthough even up to double wouldn't hurt), and the wolves attacking cows in Modoc (because the buggers have an objective which isn't you which makes them unpredicatble). The Metzger fight is ok if you take it early enough because the loot is significantly meaningless and the number of mooks is about right for an ok fight, and the Raiders would be fine except there's too much loot on top of their guns (and the rear entry chokepoint kills it dead, approaching from the chainlink fence actually makes you work for your cover/distance, the number of is ok-ish, loot is silly overabundant).
- Most of the problems with the game stem from realism, not lack thereof. Everything is about guns. There's no way to portray aimed shots to the eyes realistic and balanced at the same time, when you shoot something in the eye - it drops dead. Heck if you shoot just about anything anywhere it's pretty f****d. Heck people in RL wore/wear helmets to protect from debree and glancing bullets and that saved countless lives. Mechanicaly speaking, there's no real way to portray disabling shots realistically as long as they both deal damage and disable. Fallout is cursed with realism in that the interaction with the enemies is limited to weapons, and most of them are guns. That's an overdose of realism right there. And eye shots aren't even the problem, I don't think I've went for more than a handful in my life. The problem is people shooting guns at each other in anything resembling a realistic fashion. Single guys with hunting rifles / snipers have killed hundreds of men IRL, it's not eyeshots that unrealistic. They're the only thing that IS realistic in what it does, and it breaks the game completely once you start being able to do it on a regular basis. But if the game was real any shot near an artery at any point, any shotgun blast, any burst out of an SMG or 20 shots out of an assault rifle whould have the effects worse than an eye shot. A burst out of a minigun could kill you through a brick wall - it's a helicopter weapon.
And if you have a game with no proper cover, or mobility, and AI that only ever tries to get into a position to shoot, with guys having accuarcy issues and even sligtly realistic guns, it'd make a very boring game. Guys standing around trying to hit each other and whoever gets an accurate enough shot off first will just see the other guy drop. Realisticaly, the only was to kill someone with a minigun is to get a jump on him and have all your guys fire first and drop him before he gets off a single burst. Make this impossible (by removing, say, bonus rate of fire) and noone will ever survive an encounter with a minigun. And if you make a minigun burst survivable - you're playing a fantasy game. Heck, make a shotgun blast survivable under most any circumstances and you've allready pushed it well beyond realism
![Smile :) :)](/../../xencustomimages/smilies/icon_smile.gif)