Fallout 2 mod Fairer game experience

The issue with lack of AP would potentially be easier by simply editing the weapons themselves to use less AP. Although this would make ranged combat further beyond melee combat...

As for STR requirements for weapons, giving firearms a logical STR requirement must also give consideration to the gun's theoretical recoil. Big bullets kick harder and are only comfortable to shoot through a heavy weapon.

 

I like the overall idea and I hope that sometime in the future I'll release a mod which does something in a vaguely similar direction (don't expect much though, its scope is small initially). In Fallout modding, it's more productive to start with a vague list of things you want to do where everything is flexible and optional, and adapted around what can be done easily and hopefully without modifying the game engine, otherwise you will implmement 1 feature in the time you can implement 10 features.

For Agility I would prefer if it provided roughly the same amount of benefit for every point (rather than every 2 points), but I don't have any specific ideas. Your idea is okay, though I would hope to stumble upon a better idea.

I agree that Intelligence is too strong, and reducing the SP it gives is an easy fix which seems good. Would 1 SP/IN be too little though? Would require playtesting. But even if not, could do something like flat 10 + 1.3 SP per IN - if you have 7 IN then you earn 10 + 1.3 * 6 = 17.8 SP, so you gain 17 SP, and the remainder of 0.8 is stored in a variable, then on your next level up you earn 0.8 + 10 + 1.3 * 6 = 18.6 SP, so you gain 18 SP and you store 0.6.

For all exploits, I don't mind this too much because the player can choose not to do them.

For books, I don't know what to do, but giving fixed skill seems too powerful. I don't mind what they do currently. Trading skill for money (or exploration), but only up to limited skill. Adding new skillbooks could be interesting, for some skills more so than others. Or removing some skillbooks, e.g. Repair, because now you choose between skipping some quest rewards vs spending the skill points in Repair. But both of those ideas are about how to make the game more interesting rather than how to fix the game.

Re ST requirement: in fact the highest is 7, for Minigun and Avenger Minigun, other than those the highest is 6 and it does sound low. But with power armor this means that you either sacrifice SPECIAL to get high ST and use them before Power Armor, after which it's a waste of points; or you allocate more reasonable ST, then struggle until you get the Power Armor. I hate both options. So I'm thinking about removing the ST bonus from Power Armor, or at least lowering it to 1.

Overall I agree that both Fallout 1 and 2 are full of unintuitive mechanics and poor explanation of the UI (unless you read the manual, which most people don't). Unfortunately changing the engine is extremely hard, however it might be helpful to get a specific list of all of those things, and maybe some of them (the easier ones) could get fixed by a mod some day.

 

Very cool idea about Agility. If you left the formula untouched and only added +0.5 AP for odd numbers then I think that is a pure improvement to the game; changing the formula to make low-AG characters viable is going to be a further improvement. The only problem I see is the user interface: will there be a way to display something sensible in the Character screen, and how about in the combat UI? Even if not, I still like the idea.

Since you're doing something vaguely similar, I'll post my list of ideas. The list starts with my plan on adding big guns and energy weapons in Fallout 2 from the very start of the game and also making Throwing usable, I'll omit those parts because they seem offtopic and also they take up half of the list. I originally wrote it for myself only, so there might be ambiguities, but hopefully not.

There's also a Laser DR tweak, which changes the laser DR of all critters and armors to be no higher than its second highest DR, which in practice means that laser weapons become usable against all foes instead of doing next to nothing against many foes. (This was especially needed because I introduce a few laser weapons in the earlygame)

Unarmed:
- Implement the WR melee damage buff to make it stronger - maybe add it at level 4? Playtest
- Reduce AP costs for special attacks
? Make some special attacks do something interesting, for example a guaranteed crit, or a guaranteed knockdown, knockout, etc
? Do something to make it substantially different from Melee weapons - also give a reason to raise it to high levels?
Melee weapons:
- Implement the WR melee damage buff to make it stronger - maybe add it at level 4? Playtest
? Slightly increase the stats of the late game weapons
Remove (or reduce) power armor strength bonus:
- Change the armor perks instead of the armors, this increases mod compatibility
- Note: should provide bonus carry weight / Melee Damage, because multiple sources of lore mention that Power Armor provides hydraulics.
- Provide an installation option to leave power armors unaltered, because there's a Fallout Bible quote which says that soldiers wore Power Armors in order to use big guns, so removing the bonus is slightly lore-breaking.
To steal from the WR (Weapons Redone) mod:
- AP ammo tweaks
- Apply melee damage to minimum damage in addition to maximum
- Apply melee damage to most thrown weapons
- Reduce AP costs for special unarmed attacks
? Psycho nerf
(...)
? Fix other imbalances / add more options?
- Useless skills:
- First Aid - Grant (fast & free) healing during combat, including fixing limbs? Make stimpaks more powerful? Note: you can beat most stronger enemies with enough stimpaks, so this is very useful.
- Doctor - Craft healing items & drugs with it? some might grant permanent improvements?
- Doctor and First Aid: get Healer perk for free above certain levels; get more ranks at higher levels (if that works with the game engine); alternatively, outright increase healed amount without granting a perk. Note: ideally, raising either skill shouldn't increase the healing from the other - so adding Healer is not ideal.
- Sneak - Fix sneak chance formula? Also add sneak attack criticals (might be stronger if the attack is closer or with more sneak)? Bonus to Repair on robots to disable them? (What about NPCs? Wouldn't they get spotted? Can I program them to hold their position while the PC is sneaking?) (Stealth boys should be useful)
? Get Silent Running for free at some level of Sneak?
- Steal
? Idea 1: add deterministic but limited-budget stealing: it costs X points to steal an item, if you don't have them you can't steal it, but this comes back when you level up or time passes. This would work much better if on hovering an item we can show its point cost.
- Idea 2: have a sharp formula for stealing success chance, so it's very often at 0% or 100%. This would work much better if on hovering an item we can show its probability of stealing. Stealing becomes more difficult the more you steal from the same person.
- In the inventory menu, display the chance to steal plus the penalty from previously stealing from that NPC. In order to find out the currently hovered inventory item, use this: 0x821c - int get_mouse_x() 0x821d - int get_mouse_y() -- and figure out the order in which the inventory items appear, and try to make it work with scrolling too?
- Also: in combination with Sneak, should be possible to steal from enemies. If a skill check is passed, the NPC's off-hand weapon temporarily moves to their inventory so that it's stealable?
- Traps - Add placeable traps, like this mod? https://www.moddb.com/mods/ecco-gameplay-overhaul-for-restoration-project
- Science - Buff Skynet? have a few science-based crafting options?
- Repair - No vanilla game benefit for raising it above 90%; add high-skill bonuses such as:
- Repair robot NPCs during combat for low AP cost (using it while your skill is too low should give the message of "you're not skilled enough to repair during combat, you're too slow")
- Crafting
- Barter:
- Bugfix: Make it impossible to be so good at barter that you can sell something for higher than you buy it for and rob the merchant
- One option to make Barter viable is to remake the whole game economy
- Make players naturally much worse at bartering, or add more rewards for having a lot of tradeable money
- Gambling - Do what New Vegas does: add rewards at casinos, and at some point they kick you out, and maybe increase the types of different games in casinos (especially add fun games, at least Blackjack or Poker?):
- Some of the rewards are unique items
- Need to be able to buy something with the caps - need to add more purchasable items, just like with Barter
- Later casinos will require more Gambling, but you'll get a message about whether your Gambling is good enough ("you feel lucky" kind of thing)
- Also do something with Tragic the gathering cards
- If Luck plays a big role in gambling then its role in Sniper / Slayer should be diminished. Maybe those perks can merely increase crit chance by 10-20%? Or 2x?
- Outdoorsman:
- Skin more animals in addition to silver & golden geckos
- Crafting options
- "The knowledge of plants and animals" - cultivate plants or animals? Make your animal companions stronger?
- Traits - replace bad ones with better ones; do something with Gifted
- New trait: reduce Melee Damage by 3 (capped at 1), but increase Throwing range by the equivalent of +2 ST. (For Throwing characters who use it casually, yet have invested enough skill points to throw at far range)
? The opposite of the above trait: increase Melee Damage by 2 only for Throwing purposes, decrease ST for throwing purposes by 3, but not below 1 ST. (Having low range isn't that bad!)
- Remove extra 1 AP cost for targeted shots; penalty?
- Look at traits in already existing mods and in Fallout Tactics
- Perks:
- Sniper, Slayer, and the -1 AP cost per level perks are all overpowered
- SPECIAL:
- Low AP is too weak (can agility grant no AP instead?)
- Non-high intelligence is too weak; Int < 4 is too weak as well
- High strength is too weak for non-melee chars (and also for melee?) - can Strength grant 2 hp per point instead?
- Companion level-ups - when a PC levels up, companions currently in the party roll a chance to level-up on some levels, but that roll might fail. Any companions not currently in the party permanently miss out on this level-up opportunity. Feature: pay (with caps?) to train a companion in order to make up for missed level-ups. (Activated by companion dialogue?)
- Burst fire bad implementation - 2/3 of bullets can't hit your target unless in point blank range. Replace with a more intuitive formula, while maintaining burst fire at roughly the same strength. Display a lower hit % chance. Higher investment in the weapon skill is demanded, just like it is for aimed shots, which are unavailable for burst-fire. Point-blank shouldn't be a boolean check, and vanilla point-blank burst is too strong, however decreasing the range should increase the power a lot.


Comment: the Steal idea is one of my favorites, but might require fiddling with the engine, so it might never happen unfortunately. (Not that anything else in this list will definitely happen. I plan to just do the much less ambitious mod of adding small guns & energy weapons in the earlygame, anything else is lower priority.)

 

Because increasing your SPECIAL stat is not as easy as increasing your skill levels. Usually the lowered skills are barely noticeable and easy enough to get up to speed again.

 

Yeah, you can just raise your INT to compensate and still have good stats everywhere else.

One thing I'd like to see is for melee bonus damage from STR or the Bonus HtH Damage perk to also enhance minimum damage. Because it's only maximum damage, you need a ridiculously high bonus to push the average up in any meaningful way.

 

Bonus HtH Damage is already applied to the minimum damage if you enable BonusHtHDamageFix in ddraw.ini.

 

Oops, I just now saw that my list's formatting got lost because the forum ate all the indentation. Oh well, it looks like it was readable enough this way.

Apparently the EcCo mod does a lot more than I thought? I'll have to check it out before I do anything from this list.

I like the idea of a combat message every time you end your turn: "You ended your turn and accummulated 0.X action points". This way you can also tell when you end your turns from looking at the combat log.

https://github.com/phobos2077/sfall/blob/master/artifacts/config_files/Perks.ini#L78
It should be trivial, just change both power armor perks to have STR=0 or STR=1.

My motivation behind balancing skills, perks, traits, and SPECIAL is to empower very weak choices, so that there are many different strong builds, and that the player has a lot more choice. Character building is much richer if you have to choose between more options. Obviously you would ignore the totally crap options.

The other problem with crap options is that the game doesn't tell you that they suck. So if you're less experienced then you can accidentally pick them, which is frustrating.

It gives you 7 SPECIAL points, you can allocate them to IN to compensate for its decreased skill points per level. The fact that it decreases all of your starting skill points isn't such a big deal, because with the extra IN you can make up for that in a few levels.
Even if you were already going to play a high-IN character without Gifted, then you'll be swimming in skill points. Especially later in the game. At the same time, SPECIAL points are scarce and always valuable.
Without Gifted, you have to make many sacrifices to your SPECIAL allocation; with Gifted, you get everything - both a diplomat and a fighter.

Yes, I want to make it 0 AP with a trait. This is for 2 reasons:
1) During earlier game, you can't use aimed shots because you're too inaccurate and it's not worth trading further accuracy even if extra AP cost was 0. Especially if you're fighting with guns, then even in the midgame your chance to hit is often below 95% because you're shooting from a distance.
2) Even after you're accurate, aimed shots aren't that great. They give some boost to crit and give you a little control of the type of crit you get. Lategame if you can shoot the eyes every turn then that WILL be very powerful, but this trait should have a drawback to make up for that. Maybe the drawback should matter a lot more in the lategame...

I wrote this before I saw your formula, and I haven't thought about your formula very much, but fractional AP sounds great and I'll add it to that section of the list.

My annoyance with it is that:
1) The player doesn't know about it, so the player must guess the mechanic from playing the game, but it's next to impossible to guess! Why would even someone with 300% Small Guns always miss 2/3 (rounded down) of their shots at 2 tiles away, but get a chance to hit for every bullet at 1 tile away? Why 2/3 (rounded down)? This means that a burst of 5 bullets at any range which isn't point blank is going to be the same as a single shot!
I played through the game multiple times and when I found out about this mechanic from the NMA forums, I was shocked!
2) The reason why it's so hard to guess is because it uses a bunch of discrete cut-offs, so I just want to replace them with a smooth transition. The difference between 1 tile away and 2 tiles shouldn't be abrupt, but relatively small.
I don't want to make burst fire stronger. Ideally it would have the same overall power.

Edit: thinking about this further, I came up with some new ideas and it makes me realize that before I implement anything, it's worth thinking a lot and going through many ideas, rather than implementing a good idea and missing the chance to do a better one. And asking other people for their ideas, because it turns out that there are pretty good ones out there.

 

I'd have to see the formula for that.

I was indeed dealing damage beyond my inventory rating of "mix-max 1-11" (max STR and Heavy Handed) while punching rats in Et tu.

However, the melee damage rating doesn't seem to apply equally on the minimum and maximum value...


Also looked at that tidbit on Burst Fire. From what I've seen of YouTube demonstrations, it is possible to get a full mag dump (with popular firearms, such as the M16 or the AK-47) within a chest-sized area out to 15 yards.

And as it turns out, 1 hex in-game scales pretty accurately to 1 yard in real life. With the reduced burst lengths in Fallout, getting all the rounds on target is definitely possible. I will concede, however, that some weapons would be harder to control than others, influencing the burst's maximum range.

As for potential damage, well, it's already been mentioned that eye shots are extremely powerful. With enough skill, they can be done at will. They also provide not only a 4x damage multiplier but a straight-out chance of auto-kill as well. All for only one bullet and no particular range restrictions.

Burst Fire, even if all the bullets hit, still checks DR/DT for individual bullets. It's why the Minigun barely deals any damage to armored target despite the volume of fire. If there weren't critical hits, the Minigun would be utterly useless.

 

It's just the inventory display not matching the real damage range, it's fixed in sfall 4.3.1 or newer.
The "formula" for display was fairly simple: min = 1, max = (2 + Melee Damage). When it comes to real damage calculation, it's min = (1 + bonus from special unarmed attacks), max = (2 + Melee Damage + bonus from special unarmed attacks).
BonusHtHDamageFix adds the bonus from the perk to min when calculating damage.

 

You're saying that some of my ideas are adding stuff rather than fixing stuff.

That is correct. When I think about it, I prefer changes which fix stuff without adding much.

However, adding some stuff seems inevitable for my goals at least. For some skills like Outdoorsman and Traps, there is almost no content in the game; in order to make them usable, they need to be made to do something. Which must be something new. They do almost nothing right now.

Though it would be also cool if they were removed from the skills menu altogether, so that the player can't tag them, level them, or see them.

 

Good stuff, keep it up. What is your approach on shotguns? Will you be changing their formula as well? Like for example, less damage the farther the target is (accounting for less pallets hitting)