Yet Another Ammo Mod (YAAM) Feedback Thread

[Haenlomal]

But, whether a bullet hits or not in the sequence doesn't affect the chance of the next bullet in the sequence.

And the chance for at least 20 bullets to hit the target = 1 - 0.05^20 = 0.9999....

Urm, while the final probability is correct, the equation itself isn't quite right. Since bullets will either hit or miss, you are dealing with a binomial probability distribution. Therefore, given a 95% hit rate, the chance of at least 20 bullet hits out of 40 (or equivalently, 20 or less bullets missing) is:

C(40,0)(0.95)^40(0.05)^0 + C(40,1)(0.95)^39(0.05)^1 + C(40,2)(0.95)^38(0.05)^2 + ... + C(40,20)(0.95)^20(0.05)^20 = 0.999999...

Where C(n,r) represents the combinatorial operator n!/[(n-r)!r!]

-- The Haen.

 

[utunnels]

Hmm, it seems I have already returned what my teacher taught me to him again. 1- p0.05^n only works when n=40

Hehe, I just mean the low damage is not because of the overall low chance to hit.

 

[Haenlomal]

I'm working on the next minor update of YAAM. While it won't be out for a while, I need some of your help/input/opinion. I have my own thoughts on the issues presented below, but it'd be good to see how you see them as well:

1. Do you think that the damage bonus from Living Anatomy and Pyromaniac ought to be affected by armor? Currently, they are +5 damage bonuses tacked on after all other calculations have been completed.

2. For the same two perks: Do you think their impact should be applied to each bullet in a burst attack? Currently, this is not the case.

3. For the Demolition Expert perk, should the +10 damage currently applied to dynamite and plastic explosives be applied to other explosive devices as well?

Thanks for your consideration,

-- The Haen.

 

[utunnels]

1, 2: I don't think so, or else these perks are overpowered.

3: Yeah, unless you mean throw weapons like grenades.

 

[Glovz]

For issue 1, yes but what needs thought is to what degree should armor negate the perks bonus? And should all armor be treated the same?

For issue 2, no given burst weapons are supposedly less accurate.

For issue 3, no given grenades and rockets are not the same as handling an explosive that needs to be triggered. However, might the Molotov Cocktail be considered different from a grenade?

 

[chenw]

the +5 damage on Living anatomy after damage calculation is fine. It's a balanced talent late game, just a bit OP during early game where the +5 damage was a sizeable chunk of your original damage.

Come to think of it, having Living anatomy apply to every bullet of a burst would make Minigun more useful, if not overpowered. But then again, Miniguns eats up huge number of bullets anyway and are already quite inefficient. The issue might be with weapons that come with both single shot and burst capabilities (with special attention of H&K G11e or similar weapons).

3rd: I am for demo expert applying to rocket and grenades.

 

[utunnels]

Oh, I forget to ask.
Do or should those bonus be affected by crtical hits?

 

[Riel88]

I think all the throwing weapons, so grenades & molotovs could use a serious buff to make em more usefull.
Same for the rockets.

Btw. Are you planning on touching melee & unarmed combat ?
I hope you will !
Bye

 

[Haenlomal]

Oh, I forget to ask.
Do or should those bonus be affected by crtical hits?

Currently, Living Anatomy and Pyromaniac are unaffected by critical hits. They wait until all damage calculations have been done, and then add 5 to the figure if certain preconditions are met. For Living Anatomy, this is if the target isn't a robot or an alien. For Pyromaniac, this is if the weapon used deals out fire damage (Flamer, Improved Flamer, and Molotov Cocktail -- Cocktails are defined as dealing explosive damage in its proto definition, but I believe the engine is hardcoded to change them to deal out fire damage instead).

For Demolition Expert, the +10 damage is added before the die roll for actual explosive damage, so it is affected by armor modifiers. However, the function calculating the damage from Dynamite and Plastic Explosives -- a totally different function from normal damage calculation, btw -- doesn't take any critical multiplier into account. In other words, it's impossible to get a critical hit with Dynamite and Plastic Explosives.

-- The Haen.

 

[Glovz]

I was thinking if a strength check could be applied (say >=8) before having Living Anatomy and Pyromaniac applied to burst attacks (every shot) then maybe it could be seen as acceptable given you could argue the player/critter has the strength to keep the weapon more under control.

Hmmm... I wasn't aware that Dynamite and Plastic Explosives used a different calculation. Is there any evidence in the engine as to why that might be? A hint toward what the intention was? Also might this be a factor in the planted explosives crash bug? And would it be feasible to have them use the regular damage calculation?

The fact that the Molotov Cocktail is forced to use fire damage is bad, not because it is inappropriate but just that it is forced.

 

[utunnels]

My feeling to this ammo mod so far:

The advanced power armor is really powerful!
Well, I recall when I played the original fallout 2(with official v1.02 patch), I got killed often even with the APA on, but now I the most common message I see is 'hit for no damage'. Since i don't want to challenge Enclave base right now, I wonder whether normal encounters can be made more challenging.

BTW: Forgive me for metioning minigun again, it does no damage to APA wearers no matter it uses JHP or AP. Perhaps some guns should have at least 1 damage?

---------
Edit*

I noticed the take-damage message was lost sometimes(only a dot was displayed), I wonder whether that's a bug of the engine or...

 

[Haenlomal]

Hmmm... I wasn't aware that Dynamite and Plastic Explosives used a different calculation. Is there any evidence in the engine as to why that might be? A hint toward what the intention was? Also might this be a factor in the planted explosives crash bug? And would it be feasible to have them use the regular damage calculation?

The damage calculation routine for explosives is done by the function compute_explosion_damage, which is located at offset 0x004132CC - 0x0041332C in the engine. The damage formula itself is very similar to the routine in compute_damage, and only difference is that critical multiplier, ammo modifiers, and damage modifying perks are not calculated -- this makes the function much simpler than the one found in compute_damage. I suspect this simplification is why the original developers used another routine for explosives damage calculation.

compute_explosion_damage takes its arguments from another function named action_explode. action_explode passes the min and max damage of the explosive in question (hard-coded to be 30-50 for dynamite, 40-80 for plastic explosives, add 10 to all 4 numbers if player has Demolition Expert perk), plus a pointer to the target critter.

The fact that the Molotov Cocktail is forced to use fire damage is bad, not because it is inappropriate but just that it is forced.

I read this from somewhere, but confess to not being able to locate the actual place in the engine where this is done. Perhaps this isn't true after all -- in any case a simple test should determine if anything of the sort is going on.

The advanced power armor is really powerful!
Well, I recall when I played the original fallout 2(with official v1.02 patch), I got killed often even with the APA on, but now I the most common message I see is 'hit for no damage'. Since i don't want to challenge Enclave base right now, I wonder whether normal encounters can be made more challenging.

The Advanced Power Armor has a DT rating of 15 and a DR rating of 55 -- much tougher than the Tough Deathclaw I analyzed earlier. Under YAAM, unless you get a armor-bypassing critical hit, you won't be doing any damage with a Minigun regardless of the type of ammo you're using, period.

Like I wrote before, the Minigun isn't really a good weapon when used against heavily armoured foes, since each individual bullet has a very low damage potential -- even the lowly 10mm Pistol has a higher damage potential on a per bullet basis! This is true even if you're playing with the original Fallout 2 damage formula. Again, I'd save your Minigun for lightly armored targets if I were you. It is at best a middle level weapon even in the original unmodded game.

The real problem, in terms of game balance, is that many of your opponents also use JHP ammo instead of AP ammo. This renders many mid-level enemies useless against you. However, the high-end enemies carry weapons that will still hurt you -- in some cases, hurt you much more than before -- so hopefully it all balances out.

-- The Haen.

 

[chenw]

One thing I did notice. Is the H&K G11e supposed to do more damage than .223 pistol per shot on soft targets? I was noticing that, despite its 13-23 damage range, it was often doing 30+ damage to the mercs outside of SF. Is that normal with the YAAM?

 

[John Hancock]

One thing I did notice. Is the H&K G11e supposed to do more damage than .223 pistol per shot on soft targets? I was noticing that, despite its 13-23 damage range, it was often doing 30+ damage to the mercs outside of SF. Is that normal with the YAAM?

Yes, and it has nothing to do with YAAM per se, because YAAM doesn't change the Damage Mod for 4.7mm caseless ammo.

4.7mm caseless has a Damage Mod of 3/2, which means that the base damage against unarmored targets is actually:

13 * 1.5 = 19 (rounded down)
23 * 1.5 = 34 (rounded down)

So that's actually 19-34 damage per bullet, plus any Perks you might have that increase that (Living Anatomy, Bonus Ranged Damage, and so on).

.223 FMJ has a Damage Mod of only 1/1, because of its inherent armor-piercing qualities.

 

[utunnels]

Talking about Demolition Expert, I found plastic dynamite doesn't do enough damage to a living target, while in real life they should be very deadly. I know grenades do high damage because their fragments or plasma particles or whatever, but that still doesn't explain why Plastic dynamite can't kill a person even if you place it in his pocket.

 

[Aqui]

I'd very much like to see the laser issue being addressed in future releases of this mod. So far it sounds promising although I haven't tried it out myself.

 

[Haenlomal]

I'd very much like to see the laser issue being addressed in future releases of this mod. So far it sounds promising although I haven't tried it out myself.

What "laser issue"? YAAM didn't have change the damage profile for energy weapons, so there should be no laser issues associated with YAAM.

-- The Haen.

 

[Aqui]

What I had in mind was the low laser efficiency present in the original game. Your mod, if I understand right, hasn't made any changes (unless, of course, the new damage formula fixes it per se) to making laser weapons more useful.

Please, correct me if I am wrong.

 

[Not Lost Hope]

Fixing that would require changing either the armor or weapon files, since laser suckage is caused by non-leather armors resisting laser damage too much. So far this mod doesn't touch those files, but it could be a nice addition.

Laser's weakness as a damage type is most noticable with Salvatores in Reno. Wearing metal armor makes their feared lightbringers a complete joke. They would be far more dangerous enemies with regular pistols like desert eagles or magnum 44s.

 

[Haenlomal]

What I had in mind was the low laser efficiency present in the original game. Your mod, if I understand right, hasn't made any changes (unless, of course, the new damage formula fixes it per se) to making laser weapons more useful.

Technically speaking, the new damage formula affects everything but damage caused by explosives. However, I've structured it in such a way that all Energy Weapons caused the exact same amount of damage.

Fixing that would require changing either the armor or weapon files, since laser suckage is caused by non-leather armors resisting laser damage too much. So far this mod doesn't touch those files, but it could be a nice addition.

Laser's weakness as a damage type is most noticable with Salvatores in Reno. Wearing metal armor makes their feared lightbringers a complete joke. They would be far more dangerous enemies with regular pistols like desert eagles or magnum 44s.

I think I understand what you mean now by laser weakness, and thanks to Not Lost Hope for further clarifying the issue. Having said that, though, I'm not quite sure if anything should be done about it.

Firstly, consider that Lasers are the first energy weapons that the player comes across in a typical play-through. To me, therefore, it makes sense that they are designed to be the weakest of all energy weapons. If you intend to play through the entire game using Laser weapons, then you may need to rethink your strategy.

Secondly, random encounters and a crazy all-out attack on Vault City's finest aside, Salvatore's men are the first enemies that the player would face that are wearing Metal Armor. (Yes, Tyler's and Lara's gangs also wear metal armor, but unless the player goes lone wolf, he or she would have plenty of NPC help regardless of who he or she decides to support.) This means that Laser weapons are plenty effective against all other opponents when you first meet them. By the time you run up against Metal and Combat armored opponents (or their equivalents), you already have access to Plasma Weapons.

Thirdly, damage output isn't the end-all and be-all of judging weapon effectiveness. Lasers may do less damage, but it is the only energy weapon with a burst mode (Gatling Laser), and its range almost doubles that of Plasma and Electrical weapons. The Weapons Long Range special perk assigned to most Laser weapons also ensure that they're more accurate, making those critical hits easier to score. Off the top of my head, I also believe that their cost-per-shot is lower, compared to the small and large guns with similar range. I'll have to double check ammo costs to verify this, though.

I think it boils down to fighting style. If you're the type to fight under 20 or less paces (i.e. about 2/3 of the screen), then Laser weapons are probably not for you. However, if you like to snipe targets that are off screen, then Laser Weapons are very effective, especially if you're sneaking -- the enemy just stands there and allows themselves to be sniped, since they can't tell where the attacks are coming from.

-- The Haen.