Random encounters from hell

D

Demetrious

First time out of the vault
A few months ago, I was dashing through my first play-through of Fallout 2, with Killap's patch installed, when I noticed something weird- the random encounters seemed determined to kick my ass. To wit, there were simply too many enemies.

How many? Try eight. Eight raiders, that is.

Which according to the random encounter tables in worldmap.txt, is exactly double what I should be getting. On the off chance I'm actually reading these tables right, they should never spawn more then four.

This swiftly led to the ludicrous sight of me and poor Sulik getting caught between eight Vault City patrolmen and eight bandits, all of them dutifully laid out in huge "V" formations. I spent some time playing with variables, including party size, to see if that was having an effect. It didn't seem to. I re-installed the game, re-patched, made sure it was running in compatibility mode (i.e only on one processor) and underwent various other gymnastics, to no avail. The frequencies of encounters are just fine (worldmapdelay however, was inexplicably set to 0, not to 16777216, which it should have been post-killap patch, according to this. Frequency rates and everything else about the patch seem to be working just fine, however.

I eventually got fed up and made a new character, and running around the wastes so far has yielded nice, sane, proper random encounter sizes. This leads me to believe that the old save file was corrupted in some arcane fashion- both it and it's back-up save were yielding the odd behavior.

Since I would love to be able to salvage that old game, and because I'm just plain curious, do any of you fine folks know why the game would have been rolling for bad guys twice, as it appeared to have been?
 
I noticed this too playing with the Killap patch. Right off the bat, encounters were much harder than the original. i.e. Me with a stupid spear + 32 HPs and them with with 5 guys w/ 50 HPs each. The problem you were talking about was not frequency or speed, but matching encounters to your level.

I think it is great the way it is set now. Once you get Sulik, he'll kill everything for you for a while. I am level 11 now and just left the Den. (In the original, I guess the level should have been 6-7). Once I got Vic, a .44 and some ammo, and rifles/smg in harder random encounters, I took out a Deathclaw cave in a random and went up 2 levels. This is awesome.

With higher level encounters, you can go for the higher levels which you couldnt do in the original unless you were near the very end. And by that time you wanted to end the game anyway after being sick of it. So bravo for being able to reach level 12-13 before you even get to vault city! (Oh, you might want to lower Intelligence because you will end up w/ loads of points)
 
PS - That was the problem w/ Fallout 1 if you played the original. Who wants to have the best weapons, be a high level, and fight molerats.
 
Grasshopper said:
PS - That was the problem w/ Fallout 1 if you played the original. Who wants to have the best weapons, be a high level, and fight molerats.
Click to expand...

Wrong. I reached the level cap with quests and "just playing" and not planned "kill as much as possible on worldmap, to level up an' shit." To get the best weapons is also not that hard. You also don't need to kill lots of stuff on worldmap to use it.
 
Grasshopper said:
I noticed this too playing with the Killap patch. Right off the bat, encounters were much harder than the original. i.e. Me with a stupid spear + 32 HPs and them with with 5 guys w/ 50 HPs each. The problem you were talking about was not frequency or speed, but matching encounters to your level.

I think it is great the way it is set now. Once you get Sulik, he'll kill everything for you for a while. I am level 11 now and just left the Den. (In the original, I guess the level should have been 6-7). Once I got Vic, a .44 and some ammo, and rifles/smg in harder random encounters, I took out a Deathclaw cave in a random and went up 2 levels. This is awesome.

With higher level encounters, you can go for the higher levels which you couldnt do in the original unless you were near the very end. And by that time you wanted to end the game anyway after being sick of it. So bravo for being able to reach level 12-13 before you even get to vault city! (Oh, you might want to lower Intelligence because you will end up w/ loads of points)
Click to expand...

Aaah, was encounter difficulty also boosted in Killaps' patch, not just encounter rate? That's interesting.

Usually, I would not complain about having more things to kill, but around the Den area, at level 10-11, with a hunting rifle and Sulik packing an SMG... the random encounters featuring 8 thugs, two with hunting rifles, are almost always lethal. I have also noticed that my newest game simply doesn't generate such viciously impossible encounters- just the normal, well-balanced four thugs/robbers.

The "encounters from hell" feature two sets of those four robbers/thugs/bandits, which is why it feels like a bug- almost like the game rolled for baddies twice.

I would take a screenshot of the hilariously oversized hordes, but my attempts always render a mostly black screen- probably because of the large difference in resolutions and colorsets. Can anybody tell me how to bypass that (beside downloading that exe that lets you change resolution/run windowed.)

I have a funny feeling that Per has that particular image macro at the top of his bookmarks. :)
 
I've noticed the large groups but thought it was related to either time passed and/or level. I sort of like the insanity even after having to reload (also running killaps patch but also running my own mods so take this with a grain of salt).

Regarding screen caps, print screen doesn't work with DirectX. Personally I use Snag-it (not sure if the free older version is still available for that) but I think whatever you use probably requires a program to capture.
 
Demetrious said:
I would take a screenshot of the hilariously oversized hordes, but my attempts always render a mostly black screen- probably because of the large difference in resolutions and colorsets. Can anybody tell me how to bypass that
Click to expand...

Press F12.
 
Or alt f7, for a shot of the whole map
I myself find the screen hidden on my mapper folder (have to look the folder with gimp or paint to see them, then save it under .bmp in another folder). Don't know why.
 
On another forum I visit, i've been getting PM'd alot about this, never encountered it myself, so i'm unsure what to say.

What causes this?
 
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