Good evening,
I've nearly completed my first playthrough of your mod, and I thought I'd leave a few thoughts about some things that could be changed. Overall I really enjoyed it, but there are a couple things that could use some work:
Balance Recommendations
1. Re-chamber the sniper mark II to .50 BMG / .50 BMG DU. The sniper mark II was so egregiously powerful that once I managed to dig up 6 of them (and as soon as I saw one I went deliberately looking for them at all costs) I never felt the need to use any other 7.62 chambered weapon, with rare exception of the M249 or the vindicator when I needed my squad's fast shots bro to hose a crowd of deathclaws. I feel it could just as easily be balanced with its current damage simply by using the much heavier, rarer ammo, especially with regards to late game where .50 BMG DU is .75 pounds per round, and 7.62 AP may as well not have a weight its so light.
2. Give stock 5.56 ammo 25% penetration, and add a 5.56 AP shell that has -25% damage and +66% pen. Even in the vanilla game, I felt that 5.56mm weaponry is rendered totally obsolete by not having any discernable advantage over 7.62 weaponry (very low damage per shot, less range). This could be easily fixed for most 5.56 weaponry by giving it superior penetration capabilities among the assault weapons.
3. Add rare, end-game powered melee and unarmed weapons. Although I can understand the power-gaming drive to have the typical best melee weapons unpowered, it seems silly to leave it that way (with the exception of the atlantean sword, you have to dig really hard to get that out). Unarmed in particular needs some love, a) because of the heavy focus on boxing in the early to mid storyline, which should be rewarded later on with endgame viability, and b) so that deathclaws can be viable endgame (they just don't do enough damage to keep up with the guns, even with a shotgun fist pumping out emp slugs). For unarmed, I'd recommend adding the mega power fist from fallout 2 (which should have ~10-15 more damage than the normal power fist, and, by its description, should probably do electric damage), and for melee it would be simple enough to add an enhanced ripper.
4. Give all adult deathclaws under the critters folder the perks brutish hulk, hide of scars, and talon of fear. Again, deathclaws suffer in the game's scaling, and even by the time you encounter them in the campaign, if you've done any amount of exploring around, they just aren't scary at all. I applied these changes locally to my own folder (as well as giving them a 5 points bump to their endurance stat), and it makes it much more interesting when I run into deathclaws.
Perhaps also consider modifying the capabilities of some of the vanilla game's unique/very rare weapons to be competetive with the mod's rare weapons and/or just in general: noteably, the Bren gun, the browning auto rifle, the XL70E3, the FN P90C, Walther MPL, the tommy gun, the mp38, the sten gun; (alternatively, the gold uzi and the red colt .45 don't really need to exist to be honest).
Functionality
1. Agarapichu cold damage: change this from invisible/invulnerable creeps to damage floor. It was silly being able to sneak past the cold damage.
2. Agarapichu minimap: disable it. Probably not a popular suggestion from some people who have explored it, but to me it felt silly that I had a detailed local map showing for an ancient, long-lost city type dungeon.
3. Neutral to hostile conversion scripts: any time a script flips a group hostile when you go somewhere your not supposed to be, add an additional condition that they can see you. Those areas should be available to dedicated thieving builds as well as bad karma characters that clean them out. Also, check your scripting in particular on door opens along these lines: most doors that trigger a hostility flip cause a CTD (which can be worked around by a well-timed quicksave as the door is opening, but thats fiddly as hell).
4. Alkida Mountain: Tone the Zianist cannon fodder WAY WAAAAYYYYY down. There was so much friendly cannon fodder that a) they cleaned the place out on their own before I could have much of a say about it, b) it lags the zone like crazy, and c) I had enormously more difficulty trying navigate past the blobs of friendlies than I did with clearing the zone. At most, give the player 12 Zianist friendlies that work with you, but frankly even that might be too much.
5. Locked doors: any time a door is locked, unless the key is very obviously in the same room, or there is an obvious storyline reason why it can't be opened IE lack of power, give it a lockpicking difficulty of 320% instead of "not possible". It would be nice to be able to get into things that either a) players haven't been able to solve due to missing an item or killing someone who was important, or b) players haven't been able to get into due to a script breaking. 320% I think is high enough to encourage early to mid game players to try solving the puzzle, while still being attainable by a dedicated thieving build.
Stylistic recommendations
1. Zianist speech: write out all of the talk about "people should leave us alone to our profiteering". I get it, there is a joke implied there, but it was at best a mild snort the first time, and by the eleven billionth sermon from the Zianist leader about it, it was stale to the level of boulder-shattering baguette. Besides, an actual group of clever profiteers would never walk around preaching like a Jehova's witness to everybody nearby about how they'd like to be left to their profitable devices; they struck me as more of a group of moppets than a clever profiteering cartel.
2. Zianist and Alkida faction names: honestly I'd just entirely rename these groups anyway. Their names are more of a facepalm than a giggle, and lets be honest, who among your probable audience is going to actually join the latter for any reason other than second playthrough curiosity?
Also, as an additional tip, I'd recommend giving XKCon an egregiously enormous endurance score so hes a little harder to knock over (sorry, I murdered you for the extra sword
).
