Incline Fallout 2 Mechanics Overhaul Mod Discussion

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I have a question for you all: did you like the the system of critical hit chance being drastically influenced by the bodypart hit?

Right now, the system works like this: if you hit the torso, the critical hit chance equals your luck (plus perks, etc.), but once you hit a harder to hit bodypart, the critical chance rises (up to a base bonus of 60% for the eyes). I never really liked the idea of this because (1) a critical should in my opinion always be rare and (2) it creates this strange situation where if you're aiming for a hard to hit boydpart, you effectively get two rolls you need to be beat for it to be the right choice, the first being fair (the to hit roll governed by skill), the second not (strictly random, with only a relatively small aspect of Luck involved). I also found it odd that if you miraculously managed to pierce an opponent's armor and hit him in the eyes (okay, not so miraculous in the old system) that there was a 30% or so chance that the damage would be the same as if the bullet had hit his shoulder.

Wouldn't a more sensible system involve leaving the critical hit chance for what it is and just raise the base damage per bodypart? The only downside I see to this approach would be that crippling would take place even less, but I suppose you could introduce a crippling system outside of the critical hit system... Not too sure about how you would do that though.

How are planning to do all that stuff anyway?

I don't know. Maybe it represents for example hitting lower face instead of the eyes.
Personally, in my Fallout 1 mod, I decreased the hit chance for the eyes more and made criticals extremely brutal - for example head crits start with 4x modifiers which goes up with every step.
Torso crit is 3x going up with every step.
And arms and legs are mostly 1x with some multipliers on more extreme results.

Though I agree that damage multipliers and for example damage-based critical effects would be better. It would need locations like for example vitals for torso, brain for head, etc. though.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

How are planning to do all that stuff anyway?

Won't be too hard; my mod already does critical hit/failure calculations for the game (in these I've still kept the old bodypart chances), so it's just a question of also doing the damage calculations for it. If you're interested in seeing how I do things, check out the NMA thread linked in the first post; I use lots of examples there and you can also download the mod itself with all the source scripts included.

 

[Glovz]

Give weapons different critical rate. Swing. Thrust, what difference does it make? It's both 3 AP, anyone knows?

Which weapons should have a higher/lower critical rate then?

I think the difference between swing and thrust is more or less the same as between non-AP and AP ammo (either that, or modders made it like that).

Edit: From the looks of it, nobody ever actually got around to changing it, so yeah, swing and thrust don't do anything different. I'll see what I can do.

Edit2: There was a mod that did change the swing/thrust effects, but I'm not sure if it can be downloaded anywhere anymore.

I believe the mod can still be downloaded from here - http://falloutmods.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Cubik/FO2_Combat_Tweaks_Mod

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

My first level character with 30 HP gets shot in the head at point blank range for 31 damage and dies. My second level character with 32 HP gets the exact same shot in the head and survives. What is this mystical experience you're talking about that lets the second level character shift part of his brain mass momentarily so that it doesn't get blown away?

Of course you're right that experienced soldiers are less likely to die from the same wounds as less experienced ones, but HP works terribly at simulating this fact.

No. The problem isn't on HP but in weapon damage and critical hit tables. If you have a bullet splattering guys brain around, you should have an overkilling brain hit damage.
That way both the experienced dude that would otherwise soak up a lot of unaimed shots and less experienced dude that would go down faster would die.

How does having "overkilling" damage address the example I used? Either you're saying that the damage of the head shot should have been 81, or whatever, instead of 31 and then you'd have the exact same problem only with a level 30 character with 80 HP and a level 31 character with 82 HP instead. Or, you're suggesting instakill criticals, in which case you could just change the example to a regular torso shot of 31 damage with a Plasma Rifle.

The basic problem you don't address is that what makes a more experienced soldier in level-based RPG's is ironically not his experience level, but his skill. After all, a level 30 diplomat who spent all his skill points on speech is usually a less experienced soldier than a 2nd level gunslinger; this is a difference which level-by-level HP-increases ignores.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I'm planning on changing the way the relationship between DT and DR works, and was wondering about the Codex's opinion on this:

The theory behind the two values as far as I can tell is that DT simulates how sturdy armor stops lesser damage from getting through, while DR simulates the reduction of the damage that is strong enough to punch through. But if this is the case, then why do they work in combination when calculating damage?

What I mean is that, if, for instance, a bullet punches through Advanced Power Armor (i.e. passes the DT by dealing at least 19 damage), why is this damage further reduced by another 60% through the DR? After all, if the damage is already reduced by an often huge percentage by the DT, then what explains the second damage reduction? I've read some silly rationalization about "multiple layers" of each type of armor, with DT representing the outer one, and DR the one below that, but that's of course quite silly (after all, even if it has multiple layers, why would one have an absolute damage reduction and the other a relative one?). It is clear that the devs (rightly) wanted both an absolute and a relative damage mod, but the reason for having them operate simultaneously simply escapes me.

So, the alternative I'm thinking of is this: DT does what it says it does: it's a threshold; but once this threshold gets passed, it stops playing a role and the DR kicks in to decide how much damage has been reduced by the armor. The result would be that a round dealing 18 damage against APA still does 0 damage (doesn't pass the DT), 19 damage on the other hand does 8 (19*0.4) damage, instead of 1 in the old system. I personally like this outcome, because to me it makes sense that a round which punches through armor does at least some damage as it connects with soft pink flesh.

Edit: I'm starting to doubt this a bit: should an attack that is 10% more forceful should do 10% more damage if both attacks pierce the armor (i.e. should only relative values play a part in damage reduction)? I'm not sure.

Edit2: Forget about this, the original system makes perfect sense actually. DT represents armor lowering the absolute amount of momentum of the attack, while DR represents the fact that the damage caused by an attack doesn't drop in a linear way as the momentum decreases, but exponentially.

 

[baturinsky]

In theory, DT protects from multiple small hits, DR - from single strong ones. I'd rise DT for low tier armor, so they are relevant against weak enemies.

 

[DraQ]

Yeah, glancing was always the only reasonable justification for AC as a fourth factor besides dodge, DT and DR. I didn't really bother trying to think of a way of incorporating it (I always imagined that hits exceeding the armor's DT weren't that likely to glance anyway), but your "off-centre" idea is an interesting one. Combining info on how off-centre an attack is, how glance-prone armor is (I imagine metal armor being more so than leather armor), and the anti-glancing of ammo (I imagine that this would be the same value as their Armor Piercing value?), you'd get the outcome on whether the attack would glance.

The problem is that I have only the vaguest idea of what all these values would have to be. If somebody who knows something about weapons could help me out, that would be great.

My idea is - calculate offset as difference between actual and "perfect" roll result for given bodypart.

Assuming round (spherical or cylindrical) bodyaprts the angle between normal vector and actual hit vector is arcsin of offset divided by difference betwen perfect and threshold roll values for hitting this bodypart.

Sounds good, but besides some of these being, as far as I know, impossible to accomplish (empty hex targeting), the biggest problem would probably be the AI, which wouldn't have the slightest clue how to do all these things.

Bah.

I assume you mean then that all the serious damage has to be healed through active use of medical skills? Because that's just the problem, these active skills work terribly; the system as I outlined it is just a placeholder until the First Aid/Doctor skills can be fixed so the amount they heal is based on the skill level (You'd also need NPC's automatically trying to heal themselves, not just because you tell them, and maybe Lenny running around like Virgil healing people).

Well, I assumed little to no healing in combat and more recruitable NPCs having at least some medical skill.

Okay, but how would this not reduce the use of an item you find throughout the game to one very brief period?

Well, but it isn't going to be the same for different characters and they may still be useless if stas are insufficient. You can take off the upper limit if you want, the main idea is preventing morons from becoming geniuses anyway.

Also, gun rags should definitely be exempt for that rule (because you're not going to use them as reference in combat), but some instance ID mechanics could be used to tag individual instances as read, but prevent your character from just eating them.

Like I said before, I'm planning on making the gun rags "unlock" weapon upgrades (i.e. you go to an upgrader and show him the picture and specs of a turbo plasma rifle, and he can make it for you). I'm mainly thinking is this direction because that guy who does upgrades for free in New Reno is just way too much of an exploit right now.

Hey, that's actually a much better idea.

I'm planning on changing the way the relationship between DT and DR works, and was wondering about the Codex's opinion on this:

The theory behind the two values as far as I can tell is that DT simulates how sturdy armor stops lesser damage from getting through, while DR simulates the reduction of the damage that is strong enough to punch through. But if this is the case, then why do they work in combination when calculating damage?

What I mean is that, if, for instance, a bullet punches through Advanced Power Armor (i.e. passes the DT by dealing at least 19 damage), why is this damage further reduced by another 60% through the DR? After all, if the damage is already reduced by an often huge percentage by the DT, then what explains the second damage reduction? I've read some silly rationalization about "multiple layers" of each type of armor, with DT representing the outer one, and DR the one below that, but that's of course quite silly (after all, even if it has multiple layers, why would one have an absolute damage reduction and the other a relative one?). It is clear that the devs (rightly) wanted both an absolute and a relative damage mod, but the reason for having them operate simultaneously simply escapes me.

So, the alternative I'm thinking of is this: DT does what it says it does: it's a threshold; but once this threshold gets passed, it stops playing a role and the DR kicks in to decide how much damage has been reduced by the armor. The result would be that a round dealing 18 damage against APA still does 0 damage (doesn't pass the DT), 19 damage on the other hand does 8 (19*0.4) damage, instead of 1 in the old system. I personally like this outcome, because to me it makes sense that a round which punches through armor does at least some damage as it connects with soft pink flesh.

Edit: I'm starting to doubt this a bit: should an attack that is 10% more forceful should do 10% more damage if both attacks pierce the armor (i.e. should only relative values play a part in damage reduction)? I'm not sure.

Edit2: Forget about this, the original system makes perfect sense actually. DT represents armor lowering the absolute amount of momentum of the attack, while DR represents the fact that the damage caused by an attack doesn't drop in a linear way as the momentum decreases, but exponentially.

Ideally you'd have DT (shot bounces off armour), AC as DT bonus (shot glances off armour at oblique angle), DR (shot doesn't exactly penetrate, but still inflicts trauma via spallation, deformation or concussion) and second threshold (shot penetrates armour, value over second threshold is no longer reduced in any manner) - maybe even check for DT second time to determine bullet bouncing inside of your armour mincing your delicate organs - if damage (reduced by some value due to body penetration) doesn't exceed DT then you get damaged again (DT isn't subtracted because then it would be 0 damage, but you may use DR).

 

[ghostdog]

I hope you'll make all those tweaks optional, so players can choose to leave out a tweak they don't like.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Well, I finally finished the weapon randomization thing (I don't think I'll do armor randomization as well; too much of a hassle). You can download it here and find more details here.

Long story short is that besides going for the whole obvious variety/replayability factor, I've also tried addressing the ammo overabundance problem. I've done so in a way that's modeled a bit on the final part of this comment by VD:

You didn't really have to survive in Fallout (which deserves a special topic), but what bugged me the most was the overabundance of ammo.

So, if I was designing a Fallout-like game, I'd make melee a pretty much mandatory skill, as melee weapons are the easiest to make, find, and use. I'd make widely available guns clearly superior to melee but unreliable (high chance of misfire due to wear, tear, and poor maintenance). 30-40% chance of misfire maybe.

Then you'd have rare "mothballed" guns in mint condition and special weapons, found in pre-war facilities, sort of like +2 weapons in fantasy dungeons. Ammo is rare, so running out should be a frequent occasion. Ammo for special weapons should be extremely rare. Burst mode should be the last resort option.

In the end, a well to-do post-apoc warrior would have a mint condition magnum with 2 rounds, an old glock with 12 rounds, a well maintained hunting rifle with 5 rounds, and an assortment of melee weapons.

I wouldn't like most of the other parts from a gameplay perspective in FO, but I like that last part. You'd imagine procuring a gun/melee weapon in a post-apoc setting would be less of a problem than finding ammo for it (and maintaining it, but that's a different problem); for some reason this is totally inverted in Fallout. So what I've tried to do is that a lot of ranged combat critters will now have a half empty rifle and a 3/4 empty pistol and a small melee weapon on them.

I hope you'll make all those tweaks optional, so players can choose to leave out a tweak they don't like.

As many as possible, but the revamped combat system (changes to to hit/localization/criticals/exhaustion, etc.) can only come in one piece.

 

[tuluse]

I always assumed by Fallout 2 that people had figured out how to make bullets, it's not really that hard of a thing to do, and the 3 major factions are implied to have some kind of industrial capability.

 

[DraQ]

Well, I finally finished the weapon randomization thing (I don't think I'll do armor randomization as well; too much of a hassle). You can download it here and find more details here.

Long story short is that besides going for the whole obvious variety/replayability factor, I've also tried addressing the ammo overabundance problem. I've done so in a way that's modeled a bit on the final part of this comment by VD:

You didn't really have to survive in Fallout (which deserves a special topic), but what bugged me the most was the overabundance of ammo.

So, if I was designing a Fallout-like game, I'd make melee a pretty much mandatory skill, as melee weapons are the easiest to make, find, and use. I'd make widely available guns clearly superior to melee but unreliable (high chance of misfire due to wear, tear, and poor maintenance). 30-40% chance of misfire maybe.

Then you'd have rare "mothballed" guns in mint condition and special weapons, found in pre-war facilities, sort of like +2 weapons in fantasy dungeons. Ammo is rare, so running out should be a frequent occasion. Ammo for special weapons should be extremely rare. Burst mode should be the last resort option.

In the end, a well to-do post-apoc warrior would have a mint condition magnum with 2 rounds, an old glock with 12 rounds, a well maintained hunting rifle with 5 rounds, and an assortment of melee weapons.

I wouldn't like most of the other parts from a gameplay perspective in FO, but I like that last part. You'd imagine procuring a gun/melee weapon in a post-apoc setting would be less of a problem than finding ammo for it (and maintaining it, but that's a different problem); for some reason this is totally inverted in Fallout. So what I've tried to do is that a lot of ranged combat critters will now have a half empty rifle and a 3/4 empty pistol and a small melee weapon on them.

I hope you'll make all those tweaks optional, so players can choose to leave out a tweak they don't like.

As many as possible, but the revamped combat system (changes to to hit/localization/criticals/exhaustion, etc.) can only come in one piece.

I wouldn't make melee strictly mandatory, but for any sort of combat build? Definitely. Noncombat build might work well enough just shooting whatever they fail to bypass using other means in the face, but there wouldn't be enough ammo to make that defeault way of handling threats.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I wouldn't make melee strictly mandatory, but for any sort of combat build? Definitely. Noncombat build might work well enough just shooting whatever they fail to bypass using other means in the face, but there wouldn't be enough ammo to make that defeault way of handling threats.

Sorry chief, but I'm not sure what it is that you're saying. Are you saying that not every critter in the game should get a melee sidearm? Right now in the script 70% of ranged critters get a (weak, so in the early-mid game a lot of shivs and the like) melee weapon as a last resort weapon. The second part about the noncombat build I really didn't understand.

 

[DraQ]

I wouldn't make melee strictly mandatory, but for any sort of combat build? Definitely. Noncombat build might work well enough just shooting whatever they fail to bypass using other means in the face, but there wouldn't be enough ammo to make that defeault way of handling threats.

Sorry chief, but I'm not sure what it is that you're saying. Are you saying that not every critter in the game should get a melee sidearm? Right now in the script 70% of ranged critters get a (weak, so in the early-mid game a lot of shivs and the like) melee weapon as a last resort weapon. The second part about the noncombat build I really didn't understand.

I was talking about player builds.

If you plan to avoid combat but build up a weapon skill just in case, it should be perfectly workable without melee. If you play to murder everything that's hostile and gets in your way, then you'd better polish that spear.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I wouldn't make melee strictly mandatory, but for any sort of combat build? Definitely. Noncombat build might work well enough just shooting whatever they fail to bypass using other means in the face, but there wouldn't be enough ammo to make that defeault way of handling threats.

Sorry chief, but I'm not sure what it is that you're saying. Are you saying that not every critter in the game should get a melee sidearm? Right now in the script 70% of ranged critters get a (weak, so in the early-mid game a lot of shivs and the like) melee weapon as a last resort weapon. The second part about the noncombat build I really didn't understand.

I was talking about player builds.

If you plan to avoid combat but build up a weapon skill just in case, it should be perfectly workable without melee. If you play to murder everything that's hostile and gets in your way, then you'd better polish that spear.

Oh right, sorry; but yeah, sure, realistically this would be the case. But something tells me that the changes I've made up to now (smaller ammo stacks, hopefully fewer ammo drops) won't be enough to keep you from amassing enough ammo to not need a melee weapon at all. Not sure if that would make the game more fun either; I mean, melee is pretty fun once in a while (weeeee, slide), but Fallout is a pretty ranged weapon centric game. For instance, would it makes sense to almost completely banish bursts? Sure, but I don't think it'd make the game more fun.

 

[DraQ]

For instance, would it makes sense to almost completely banish bursts?

Banish? No, but you can have bursts without making them used often - see STALKER:SoC or System Shock 2.

 

[baturinsky]

Make aimed shots very hard, but very deadly. And make ammo scarce. This way, if you have just 100% or so Small Arms, you will not be able to do aimed shots reliably, so will have to spend a lot of ammo and switch to melee often. But if you have ~200% Small Arms, you'll be able just headshot 6 enemies with 6 bullets in drum.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Wouldn't that make it more or less impossible for the NPCs to take aimed shots at you, thus making combat easier overall? I imagine few if any characters other than the PC have more than 70% in anything.

(I assume the NPCs are subject to the same mechanics as the player)

 

[baturinsky]

Wouldn't that make it more or less impossible for the NPCs to take aimed shots at you? I imagine few if any characters other than the PC have more than 70% in anything.

Do they actually use aimed shot in vanilla? And I think player NOT being one-shotted on regular basis is a good thing.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I remember being hit in parts of the body other than the torso (otherwise there wouldn't be much point in having a "crippled limbs" section in the character sheet), but I'm not sure if they actually aimed or just went for the chest and ended up hitting legs and ass by chance. And aimed shots aren't necessarily one-hit kills, unless it hits the head or eyes. Sure, if you make aimed shots more deadly then it would lead to the PC being one-shotted more often.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I remember being hit in parts of the body other than the torso (otherwise there wouldn't be much point in having a "crippled limbs" section in the character sheet), but I'm not sure if they actually aimed or just went for the chest and ended up hitting legs and ass by chance.

They make aimed shots sometimes, about 10% of the time usually IIRC (depends on the AI packet). Before my localization changes it was impossible to aim for one bodypart and hit another, so that last thing couldn't have happened.

Wouldn't that make it more or less impossible for the NPCs to take aimed shots at you, thus making combat easier overall? I imagine few if any characters other than the PC have more than 70% in anything.

NPC combat skills go from 60-70% in the early game (Metzger's guards, etc.), to 140% or so for Enclave Guards. But of course the player will have probably reached 150+ well before that, so he's always more than a step ahead in practice. In my system this difference in skill is a bit less important because higher percentages to hit become progressively harder to attain (depending on the bodypart aimed for).

 

[CappenVarra]

Banish? No, but you can have bursts without making them used often - see STALKER:SoC or System Shock 2.

Thanks for reminding me of that oh so precious moment in SS2 when I finally had enough bullets to be able to afford Assault Rifle burst mode (for about 30 seconds or so). Funny how I still remember that, but most of the game faded away with brain cell decay...

 

[Clockwork Knight]

They make aimed shots sometimes, about 10% of the time usually IIRC (depends on the AI packet). Before my localization changes it was impossible to aim for one bodypart and hit another, so that last thing couldn't have happened.

Yeah, I was probably thinking of how sometimes you or a NPC will miss a shot and hit someone behind the target.

 

[Cassidy]

You should seriously ditch "carrying books give temporary buffs to skill" from your mod. As in, seriously.

Because that is just one notch away from the full derpity of Oblivion with Guns with its magical "scientist"/etc clothes of making character creation pointless. If carrying a book negates the trade-off of not developing a skill all the time and/or the time and money investment in learning it by purchasing and reading skill books, it shoves character creation into something like:

 

[baturinsky]

Books of +10 to repair still seems more legit than necklace of +10 to smithing.
But I think that vanilla F2 way is ok too. Just replace disintegration of books by reading with changing them into "Book of X (read)"

 

[DraQ]

You should seriously ditch "carrying books give temporary buffs to skill" from your mod. As in, seriously.

Because that is just one notch away from the full derpity of Oblivion with Guns with its magical "scientist"/etc clothes of making character creation pointless. If carrying a book negates the trade-off of not developing a skill all the time and/or the time and money investment in learning it by purchasing and reading skill books, it shoves character creation into something like:

You can always check for stat requirements when deciding if the effect should be applied - for instance, you'd need to be sufficiently intelligent and already have some repair skill for repair manual to provide any bonus.

Or you may have (modest) bonuses from possessed books sum into multiplier (instead of flat bonus) to your base skill, maybe multiply them by int as well (10 INT - full bonus).
+20% of base skill of 10 will give you measly 2 point bonus and 12 points total, but +20% to 100 skill will give you hefty 20 point bonus and 120 total.

Books of +10 to repair still seems more legit than necklace of +10 to smithing.

Ever heard of magic?

Well, Fallout doesn't have it.

Just replace disintegration of books by reading with changing them into "Book of X (read)"

Ban baturinsky.