Fallout Tactics mod Xkcon's ultimate rip off Mod (0.895)

He he he that was me, complaining about encounters. Sorry m8 I didn`t play FOT for a long time. FO4 and lately FO76 crap
But I get FOT (and FO1, FO2) for free only because I have FO76. Yeah, I already say is crap !
Maybe some of this days I will install your mod and make a run
BTW your mod is compatible with FOT Scripting Engine made by Melindil ? Because I have it installed and I like it a lot !!!
CYA and keep up the great work with the mod. Is awesome ! In real life I can't be a raider, pimp, drug dealer or whatever, but FALLOUT let me do that, he he he.

 

Excuses and complaints is all I'm seeing there. Every point made you get defensive or dismissive that it is unimportant. Fact is that I played the Heat thread until it broke at scouting the cathouse in FC for Neil. It's waiting for some trigger or event that won't go off. Bought the silly sex pass and it does nothing. I tried every character and door in the building and Neil is still waiting for me to scout it. There isn't even a Gino in the building to buddy up to and the sex pass seller has only one response.

But whether you plan to be defensive or not, you didn't make a plan to mod the game the way it was created. Everything that can affect character rep should have multiple paths that finish the scenario in the way the chosen rep is fulfilled -or- find a way that it doesn't affect rep at all and makes sure the player knows this. That you never did a proper walkthrough or at least scenario overview says you were more interested in getting each scenario completed than completed it right. You chose quantity over quality and the player a mostly linear path that fit your personal mores.

You can't even summon useful rationale for the paths needed. eg How do you write a goodguy outcome for a bank robbery. Simple. First you make the bank somehow evil and then just turn it into a burglary where there are no innocent bystanders. Hurting bad people is never evil, in the context of a game that follows Wild West style justice. Neither are spoils of war in that setting.

Your locale files are a mess. You just kept slapping stuff in. If you had ever hope any other modder would use some of your mod you just locked them out. They could never untangle your mixmatch. You were so pleased to include the Quartz scenario in your mod but you didn't offer the next guy the same consideration.

As for saying everyone knows it is merely a work in progress is talking out both sides of your mouth. Technically the mod is 'Complete' are your own words from page six of this thread. It either is or isn't. And it is very much a long way from technically done. You skipped essential technical aspects. The fact of the matter, it is never complete when bugs exist, documentation is a mess, instructions are nonexistent, and it suffers from unnecessary bloat. Making content isn't the only job in game construction. Rationalizing why you chose not to bother doesn't get the job done.

Sure, you addressed some problems but it seems to me you have hit your tolerance for criticism limit before all the problems got fixed. If you were hoping players would help you with bug testing then you had better reset your criticism threshold. I'm not the one spouting ad hominem and taunts here.

 

There's an image of some wild west map :^)

 

And yet you just wrote a sermon. Sorry, but it may be your mod, but it is the form's thread. They own any content here. That's the way forum copyright works. I have as much right in this thread as you do. You might want to read the TOS link at the bottom of the forum and note both the ownership and the rules about insulting speech.

What was I expecting with documentation? What they teach in every introductory computer coding class on the first day. Label and explain what you've done. Every subcomponent segregated and label what part it pertains to. You just kept slapping stuff in until you can't be sure what part goes to what other part.

As for getting further on into the Heat plotline, I have no blood on my character's hands. Neil and his characters do. My character isn't wanted anywhere. I can approach the sheriff in LC without risk of arrest. Tried it to be sure. All I did was pop some locks and grab some bags. My own team member was set up to direct guard rage and just soak up attacks. I did the bank job with my characters set to sentry mode off and my main character never lost their stealth mode. My other character just played bullet magnet but they can take repeated hits without trouble. The guards and Neil's team did all the firing. I had so much time that I got both vaults open but you didn't bother coding that possibility in. Still was out the door with 20 seconds to spare. So I've got an unusable extra bag of cash in my trophy locker. The game doesn't count theft against your rep if you don't get caught.

But it is pretty clear you wanted a linear plotline that fed your highwayman fantasy. Some of your other scenarios even more extreme, but little for the good rep. Of course you want to dismiss criticism. It's not like your defensive attitude could be any clearer. You get to deny any criticism if you can rationalize it. You focused so hard on your fantasy that you forgot how the game can be played. The game makers offered a choice of rep and allowed you to play every scenario through any rep style you wanted. No Robinhood option for Neil's plot. So no, not only did you make a hash of the technical aspects you didn't even complete the story lines. Nothing "technically complete" about it. You just say that because you are satisfied your linear fantasy is set the way you like it.

Bloat, lots of duplicates that add almost nothing original, documentation that would make a BASIC class student blush when the instructor tried to parse their content, QC mistakes, and a linear storyline that doesn't match what the makers intended. Sure, keep being dismissive. Egos are fragile things. Be insulting too. I've heard worse before you were born. It's you that has to answer if the mods here start talking about TOS violations. But when you log off you are still stuck with the truth. If you had any pride in workmanship and believed you had "technically finished" then you would go fix the technical stuff.

And no, I'm not looking to grab parts of your mod. I'm not making FT mods or mods for any game these days. My real life barely has time to even play games. If I had that kind of free time I'd be day trading.

 

Neither do I, that's why I abandoned the other project I had. Frankly I only enjoy fallout tactics now because I get to build some maps, design buildings, create small scenarios etc...

FOT takes a load of time to create a decent building, it has to be a map/terrain generator made, so the work will go quicker.

 

And yet you did. You are incapable of taking criticism without being defensive.


I think it's time for a proper review of your mod for everyone else. Now that I have to reload the game due it CTD every time I pass certain portions of the map and because it simply refuses to load the saves beyond a certain point in the time line.

Review:

I can see this mod took ages to build. The amount of hours put in must have been staggering. But it isn't stable. The game was never the bastion of stable code to begin with and this builds it out overhanging the edge. Some of the locations lag very hard, notably the Forbidden Zone and Agarapichu maps. They are overbuilt and when things set into motion the frame rate suffers badly. You also will have trouble using the player controls when this happens. I don't own a latest gen pc, but it was in 2016 and is a robust gamer model. It has no problem running the vanilla version of FT. It suffers with this mod in certain spots and I suspect it has little to do with my pc. I chalk it up the game engine being taxed to hard. Those two maps are fragile houses of cards and monuments to self indulgence.

The mod tries to insert scripted storylines throughout. Heavy use of control on player options is how this is achieved. Locked doors that only open to triggers and keys predominate. The number of keys you will accumulate is staggering. The mod likes to channel you by closing and locking doors ahead and behind you all the time. Backing out or trying to go sideways is met frequently with door that refuses locking picking. This reinforces the scripts to stay on track. But it severely limits player creativity. All the while challenge is either offered by aimlessly trying to find a clue/person/thing without much hint short of poke everything until it pops up, or being dumped into a death trap.

This mod is rather fond of dumping you into death traps with no room to maneuver. One step can land a dozen 23rd level buffed Deathclaws in your lap at close range where the firepower needed to fight it causes a lot of blue on blue damage. Or you are forced to dump your squad and strip down just to enter. A good idea for his snuff film ambush is when it demands a naked female to come with you that you take Mother in with you.

I suppose there is a good reason you get the option of turning off random encounters. The world map was heavily tinkered with. Need to move a few squares? Pack a lunch. Moving long distances is a click festival. You could spend more than an few hours just to trace the edge of the map to remove the black tiles. Given 4-5 seconds a click to refuse an encounter and as many as 8 clicks to get through a single square then it can take an entire minute sometimes to reach the next square. Since most squares are this way then you can imagine trying to clear the black off the map. The mod offers no sane middle ground. Either constant encounters or none. No chance to do what most players like, hunting occasionally to add cash or experience before returning to the missions. Special encounters have truly been torqued. I have like 8 squares with 4 special encounters in them. It seems the mod tried to channel them in fewer places. I also suspect that it why I get my CTD's. Either one is now faulty when it tries to load or I have exhausted the special encounters list and should I stray near the areas it can't cope with a roll coming up positive with nothing on the list. I believe it's the former because I think I have a couple left I haven't found yet. Since I didn't edit the special encounters then it was flawed from the modding. But yeah, the world map has been ruined by this mod. While I fully agree it was not very impressive to begin with, the mod has made it worse. Sure, I do appreciated the added variety with the drug runners but overall you can expect this map to be tedious when trying to cross it. Someone needs to fix the map encounters in this game, but this wasn't the way. More than one encounter per square is too much.

The added scenarios are a mixed bag. There are a lot of plot lines involved, many of which require traversing between map locations. See my former paragraph why this is aggravating. The mod tried to make them harder to solve than the generic game's adventures. But the limits of the game itself means complexity just ends up as irritation. You are expected to search and poke everything and likely kick off some different script you had no interest in starting. More obvious clues or a walktrough is sorely needed. Worse is you have to choose early on your main character's morals and ride it all the way through. Many scenarios are dependent on early choices. You just don't see then otherwise. Many are heavily dependent on ditching most or all of your squad as well. The idea that experience is shared equally isn't exactly true. My main character really began pulling ahead in their level. When I could bring along a team member or two they pulled ahead as well, plus achieved promotion faster. While the player's character always gets a much faster promotion track the others also have radical disparities. One of my characters is still an initiate when my main character is a general, and it isn't just because of charisma score. They just don't get to be around for so many moments of achievement on these extra scenarios. The boxing is an exercise in tedium. Great way to create an unarmed and unarmored slayer character that will end up being shredded by the 1st 50cal they meet in the field.

Completing some maps are a real hassle. Anything where you have to insert a special part is potential problem. All the right parts in hand at the satellite station and cloning center is no guarantee it will work right without many tries.

All in all it is a monument to the creator's boredom. None more so than Agarapichu. A maze designed to bore you to tears and frustrate you with the isometric flaws of the game. Trying to move around when the controls are laggy, the frame rate is choppy, and you can't even see all the pathways will make you wish this game had a physics engine so you could use explosives on it. That and his really stupid way to create cold threats. The map is basically able to sniper shoot you and you can't do anything about it. If I ever play this mod again that will not be a map worth revisiting. Total pain in the ass.

The mod would have been better if he had put half the content in and refined it a lot better.

I'm still hunting for Chief Chattanooga to reward me and I'll be damned if I ever find that starter motor.

 

Sure, I will post the DL link here. I had that map in my map pack too.
If I had the modder tag I would post some of my resources in there.

DOWNLOAD

Also, I don't put much time in the game anyway, that's why I post here monthly or when I am interested.

 

I've been playing with this mod, and have been having issues with doors in towns that trigger hostile behaviour crashing the game to desktop.

Has anyone else had this problem, and if so, is there a fix for it?

 

Hello! I ma enjoying this mod a lot. I am fond of George and Nova, my starting recruits. It's harder than vanilla for sure but that's a plus in my opinion. Hope you continue to develop this great mod. Cheers!

 

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 ).

 

Hi xkcon, how are you? Have you postpond further mod development? Pity if so, was going to replay it, but latest version is 895(845?), so not much changed for passed year( which is totaly not bad, just was hoping brand new version awaits me). I dont remember if I suggested before( and if you are going to continue development) but there was totaly not bad russian mod "Modern Guns 1.7.2 - Renegat" which adds a lot of weapons with good quality images, and actually what I really lacked in your mod were weapon and armor divercity between different towns. Hadnt you planned to integrate something like this in your mod? I can give you a link to the mod if you are interested( it really can be googled easy).

 

Hi, this mod is really good.
I was playing previous versions, but broke some quests and decided to wait for new version.
In my previous game i couldn't trigger Neil to spawn, his hideout is empty and lock is easily picked...
So i had to do quests only for Pimp story....i don't like it much, but hey, those girls are willing, and i need money and rep
So, how to spawn Neil (i have some checkpoint saves saved before starting Pimp story)

Also, there is a killer in town, and as i remember those are the guys that make snuff films....i remember ratting them out in previos game, but now i go all the way to kill the Machine....quest updates "Machine has been killed", but all other participants just stand there, and no one gave me that quest....
I have stolen both contracts and brought drugged up and drunk Angela with me (playing female char.),...i go in with my character, or just Angela, kill the machine, but no one moves after that....i want to kill the others and return to quest giver...
I also left all equipment in BOS base in F.C. and left shotgun and amo in front of the door....when machine attacked i used one charatcter to open doors and bring shotgun to my char.....easy kill....
No matter what i do, quest hangs....

Ill try ratting them out to Zionists or church, but i think that isn't it....after that ill leave that quest alone for a while...

Also, where to check reputation ?
It doesn't change and i am "Guardian of the wastes" even with lieutenant rank in Pimping....

 

Ok, found Neil at river crossing, so i have to replay from "Take the keycard" point...
I will leave Cage to wait in Casino while i travel alone to that river crossing to start Neil's quests....
Still need help with F.C. Killer quest and snuff movie quest

 

Ok, stuck again in "scout the merchant store" in Salt lake...
Pausing here and will try to figure out what i am doing wrong...but i think i wont figure it out like last time i played...then i thought it was a bug....
Good mod with tricky parts...

 

Hi! Some time ago i finished this mod. It was nice to come back to my lovely Fot.. I would like to thank you for your hard work.. It was really fun to play! I discovered so many places but i could not find few places that i found in FOT:editor editing the campaign Maybe i missed something or someone.. Anyway great work !

 

How did you scout that General shop for Neil, if you did that quest ?

What is the rope for ?
How do you make a phonecall in Quartz (there is a usable booth iin the middle of the town) ?