Incline Fallout 2 Mechanics Overhaul Mod Discussion

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I like this, so something like a 10mm would sell for crap in New Reno while a combat shotgun or a 14mm would go well.

Also diminish weapon prices in general, I think they're too high for most weapons (A sold Pancor Jackhammer is like, 5000$). I remember a old mod that did this with scripts too. The only expensive weapons should be top-of-the-shelf stuff - Energy rifles, big guns, gauss, etc. I think a ammo-less weapon would't be so valuable in a post-apocalyptic world. If you spend all your money on a fancy gun you can only use it as a club. I would recommend raising ammo prices across the board as well.

Totally agree, most guns cheaper, ammo a lot more expensive (and sparse).

Also, what stops the player from simply getting the car to another city and unloading his arsenal of crap-guns there in exchange for drugs and hard cash?

That said, won't it come appart once the player comes to San Fran and does the classic unloading the car trunk on San Fran?

What I hope will be the effect is that if you have your classic 10+ collection of Desert Eagles, etc. by the late-mid game, you won't have anything to do with it. San Fran won't want them, they'll want cash or high end goods; so all you can do with the Desert Eagles is go to the Den and talk to Tubby. Of course, all you'll get at Tubby is other crap items (and Jet, but San Fran has more expensive tastes, Mentats, Buffout, not that miner's dope), and maybe enough cash to buy one of your Desert Eagles, so that won't help you. So, hopefully, you'll just end up leaving the Desert Eagles to rust in the end game, and be forced to focus on high end loot. In my head this might end up balancing the economy to some extent.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

SOLD gun price, mind you, leave brought gun price same as it is, players don't need cheaper guns for them.

Don't know about that, (1) don't think it's possible without changing the buy/sell ratio for all items, (2) the ratio is already pretty harsh in FO2. They clearly thought, hey let's fix FO1's economy by bumping buying prices a lot, with the result that, what, you end up selling 3 Desert Eagles for 1 in return? Something like that. Of course that didn't solve anything because it only affects the player in the beginning of the game.

Virtually nothing except battery charge stops the player from making a merry go-around and selling his guns on, say, Vault City (they always have books there, and stims), Broken Hills (stims, ammo), exchanging his guns for cash in Redding with the cashier, then going back south with more jewgold and ammo and items. Melee/Unarmed characters are even worse for this, but then again they don't have much to spend on in the first place (lemme see, weapons, armor, chems, powerfist/ripper cells, that's it).

You might be right, though merry go rounds in general should be discouraged (whether it's through harsher, more frequent encounters, or the radiation stuff, or something else). Problem might be that FO2 isn't as cash starved as you'd want it to be (especially with the Redding cashier)...

1. I think the main source of extra weaponry in Fallout 2 is random encounters, especially those random encounters were pretty much everyone dies, the player picks off the bad guys (or everyone) and then loots the bodies to his heart's content while the merchants or something look on dumbly. Look some pages back for that big post I made with a lot of mods that may interest you and look for something like "NPCs loot bodies". Pretty sure it uses scriptmagickery too so it might be easy for you to understand and adapt to your mod. Essentially, its a mod where NPCs loot bodies after combat, so no more having other people shoot enemies so you can take their stuff for yourself.

It's compatible, so no need for adapting. I have mixed feelings on the mod as I understand it though (haven't tried it): suppose you kill the Den gang, then have junkies steal the loot: can't fight them because the whole town turns hostile, right? The only way I see the system work is if only NPC's who perceive themselves as stronger than your party do any looting, but that'd make the effect, especially on the economy pretty marginal.

2. weapons drop mod may help a bit, sometimes weapons drop off into inacessible places, so we can consider them "broke" or "lost", I say good for balance too.

Meh, then I'd rather just increase the frequency of gun explosions, and other weapon break downs, make it less arbitrary.

3. Really need to find a way to make healing more of a resource issue, but we can't change how First Aid and Doctor skills work, saddly. With the increased number of cripples, I would like the idea of having to fork more jewgold to heal my character. Wonder if you could make a old or new item have a chance of healing a crippled bodypart according to Doctor skill...

Yeah, in general making things a resource issue might be a better idea for fixing the economy. Problem is, I hate the idea of money sinks, it just never results in fun gameplay to keep track of the amount of resources you have to do x. In fallout you keep track of ammo and battery fuel, that's enough for me to be honest.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

The Brazilian Slaughter I think I might have thought of a way to avoid the roundabout exploit (in part): regional inflation. Like you implied, the problem with changing item costs in any way on a map-by-map basis is cash: money never changes value and just fudges everything up. Can't solve the cash-abundance problem by cutting down on cash: that'd be lame. But what if a region (can't do this on a map by map basis, that'd be too exploitable), like the San Fran region, has so much cash that items cost more cash as a result. I got this idea while shooting off economy balancing ideas that would work, but would be awful: mainly scaling prices based on player level. Inflation, if it more or tracks from poor areas (little inflation), to rich areas (lots of inflation), could have a nice balancing effect without becoming lame. I'd just have to do some cash redistribution from places like Redding to places like NCR and San Fran...

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Don't know about that, (1) don't think it's possible without changing the buy/sell ratio for all items, (2) the ratio is already pretty harsh in FO2. They clearly thought, hey let's fix FO1's economy by bumping buying prices a lot, with the result that, what, you end up selling 3 Desert Eagles for 1 in return? Something like that. Of course that didn't solve anything because it only affects the player in the beginning of the game.

I think it can be done be done, if I remember right, they're two different variables because sold item price is always the same and never modified by barter, while brought item price is modified by barter, charisma and (I think) reaction. BTW it would be interesting to have sold item price change with barter, would finally make it a useful or at least semi-useful skill. Fairly sure there was a mod that changed item prices with scripts around the NMA somewhere.

I also think it actually makes sense, because guns from the shop =/ guns looted off the cooling bodies of dead raiders. First one is better maintained and probably ins't being used constantly, while the last one has been used constantly, sometimes by moron raiders who have no proper idea of gun maintenance.

You might be right, though merry go rounds in general should be discouraged (whether it's through harsher, more frequent encounters, or the radiation stuff, or something else). Problem might be that FO2 isn't as cash starved as you'd want it to be (especially with the Redding cashier)...

True dat, and its not just cash, there's a lot of stuff early-game cities sell in good ammounts and that can be quite useful even if you're around New Reno: Flick sells Psycho and buffout, Vault City sells a good ammount of stims, decent ammo and skill books and both have respectable ammounts of cash around.

It's compatible, so no need for adapting. I have mixed feelings on the mod as I understand it though (haven't tried it): suppose you kill the Den gang, then have junkies steal the loot: can't fight them because the whole town turns hostile, right? The only way I see the system work is if only NPC's who perceive themselves as stronger than your party do any looting, but that'd make the effect, especially on the economy pretty marginal.

I think that mod makes the AI go for the lootz after the fight ends, and I don't think it pisses it off unless you start shooting them. I don't see any problem with it, if the player is not fast enough, then he doesn't deserve the loot, and even then it doesn't make sense that the player is the only one greedly taking all loot while other people just watch.

Actually killing junkies doesn't make the town go hostile, probably because the junkies on The Den (never saw the ones in New Reno do that) can randomly go hostile and jump on the player. BTW, this is one of the coolest little features of Fallout 2, because the junkies are actually dangerous at the early game. Wish there was something like that in Reno but with gangbangers, would work well with your mod due to fixed hp.

Yeah, in general making things a resource issue might be a better idea for fixing the economy. Problem is, I hate the idea of money sinks, it just never results in fun gameplay to keep track of the amount of resources you have to do x. In fallout you keep track of ammo and battery fuel, that's enough for me to be honest.

I don't mind tracking resources or money sinks, life is not cheap, especially if you're on the road shooting people all the time. My opinion was because of the fact Doctor and First Aid are essentially "magic hands" skills which heal cripples and stuff without

The Brazilian Slaughter I think I might have thought of a way to avoid the roundabout exploit (in part): regional inflation. Like you implied, the problem with changing item costs in any way on a map-by-map basis is cash: money never changes value and just fudges everything up. Can't solve the cash-abundance problem by cutting down on cash: that'd be lame. But what if a region (can't do this on a map by map basis, that'd be too exploitable), like the San Fran region, has so much cash that items cost more cash as a result. I got this idea while shooting off economy balancing ideas that would work, but would be awful: mainly scaling prices based on player level. Inflation, if it more or tracks from poor areas (little inflation), to rich areas (lots of inflation), could have a nice balancing effect without becoming lame. I'd just have to do some cash redistribution from places like Redding to places like NCR and San Fran...

I like this idea! Makes senses that areas with more money would have different pricings than areas with less money, and if the player goes on rondabouts through the gameworld to sell stuff and goes back to later areas, he will find out his Den shit-money is no good in NCR or San Francisco and his shitty potshoters he got from dead raiders don't sell for a premium either.

What would be inflation rank? Seems something like this:

San Francisco>>>NCR>>>Redding>>>New Reno>>>Vault City>>>Broken Hills>>>Gecko>>>Modoc>>>The Den>>>Klamath.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I think it can be done be done, if I remember right, they're two different variables because sold item price is always the same and never modified by barter, while brought item price is modified by barter, charisma and (I think) reaction. BTW it would be interesting to have sold item price change with barter, would finally make it a useful or at least semi-useful skill. Fairly sure there was a mod that changed item prices with scripts around the NMA somewhere.

Problem is you can change two things: sell/buy price ratio (so the impact barter has), which can only be done for all items on sale, or changing individual item's prices, which doesn't affect the ratio. The mod you're talking about (Nirran's) does the first. So adjusting the ratio only for guns would be impossible.

I also think it actually makes sense, because guns from the shop =/ guns looted off the cooling bodies of dead raiders. First one is better maintained and probably ins't being used constantly, while the last one has been used constantly, sometimes by moron raiders who have no proper idea of gun maintenance.

Except that the gun you sell to the shop instantly and magically becomes well-maintained, and the gun you buy instantly becomes crappy by that rationale. You'd have to have some kind of item decay to make that work, but that's real hard to do in the FO2 engine.

I think that mod makes the AI go for the lootz after the fight ends, and I don't think it pisses it off unless you start shooting them. I don't see any problem with it, if the player is not fast enough, then he doesn't deserve the loot, and even then it doesn't make sense that the player is the only one greedly taking all loot while other people just watch.

Actually killing junkies doesn't make the town go hostile, probably because the junkies on The Den (never saw the ones in New Reno do that) can randomly go hostile and jump on the player. BTW, this is one of the coolest little features of Fallout 2, because the junkies are actually dangerous at the early game. Wish there was something like that in Reno but with gangbangers, would work well with your mod due to fixed hp.

Heh, I personally always hated random town fights (same with the gangsters in PS:T), guess that in towns I like to pick my own fights and leave the surprises to the random encounters.

I don't mind tracking resources or money sinks, life is not cheap, especially if you're on the road shooting people all the time. My opinion was because of the fact Doctor and First Aid are essentially "magic hands" skills which heal cripples and stuff without

Yeah, you're right actually. It'd be great if First Aid and Doctor weren't these magic hands skills, because then I could mess around with them (sfall lets you change what happens when you use an item on someone, but not just a skill).

What would be inflation rank? Seems something like this:

San Francisco>>>NCR>>>Redding>>>New Reno>>>Vault City>>>Broken Hills>>>Gecko>>>Modoc>>>The Den>>>Klamath.

Sounds about right, yeah. Won't be easy to remove money from places for a variety of reasons, so I might just end up giving San Fran and NCR a lot of spare cash.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

This is the economic system I have settled on. Six economic regions replace the map based system of the old simple system I had:

1 for most economically advanced, 6 for least (though in theory at least, this can change throughout the game somewhat). The more economically advanced a region is, means two things: (1) there's more cash, and more inflation: items cost more cash, (2) they crave more advanced items: cheap items become relatively cheaper, expensive items relatively more expensive.

The system will no longer check for (either map-based or region-based) supply: so Gecko pelts are no longer cheaper in Klamath than in Vault City because there's a lot of them in the maps in the former, and none in the latter, but they're cheaper because they're a relative luxury item (humor me) and Klamath doesn't have the economy to accomodate that, while VC does.

edit: edit: one of the advantages of the regions system is that traders you meet in random encounters also get affected based on the region you meet them in.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

DraQ The Brazilian Slaughter

I'm trying to come up with something interesting to do with melee weapons and hth, but I'm not sure whether I'm going in the right direction. I just want to get away from sledgehammers and shivs operating essentially in the same way. So far, this is what I'm thinking:

"Blunt" attacks (sledges, unarmed, clubs, etc.): almost no chance of armor penetration; increasing chance of knockdown or backwash the more attacker strength exceeds that of opponent (should DT also play a role?); causes opponent to become more exhausted on backwash or knockdown; chance and height of damage multiplier increases based on strength.

Knives: low chance of armor penetration (based on to hit chance: depends on how big the chance is at stabbing a guy in the joints of his armor); little chance of knockdown or backwash.

Spears: medium chance of armor penetration (based on strength); little chance of knockdown or backwash.

What I'm generally not sure about is whether I should just scrap the base melee/hth damage stat (it's silly that having 5 more ST results in a shiv doing the exact same extra amount of damage as a sledgehammer), and what to do with the different attack types (swing, thrust, punch, kick), any ideas on this point?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

The vast majority of attacks in the game would be blunt-type, there are not many knives/blades and the amount of spear-type weapons can be counted on one hand (spear, sharpened spear, sharpened pole, plant thorns...). Strong characters will spend most of the time making people fall on their asses over and over which sounds like it could get old fast, hilarious as it may be in the beginning. I'm already wary of using the super sledgehammer because it sentences you to a Sisyphean torment of running halfway across the map to reach all the guys you send flying.

You could attach those properties to the attack types instead. Swing/Kick has a chance of making the enemy fall on his ass (sweep), thrust has a chance of penetrating armor, punches can daze (lose AP), etc.

If you want to make the weapon types more unique, tweak their AP cost and damage values. Blades are easy to wield so they cost little AP, but are not useful against anything above metal armor (make good armor have DT that is on par or higher than the normal damage most bladed weapons cause, unless I'm wrong this should allow particularly awesome blade-users to still be able to do some damage against good armor, but the regular junkie with a shiv is fucked), hammers are good against everything but hard to use efficiently, HtH should be lighting fast but hardier enemies require you to use aimed attacks and secondary punch/kick (snap kick, haymaker and the like - which would cost a lot of AP so you can't easily become a god of death by investing in unarmed), etc

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

The vast majority of attacks in the game would be blunt-type, there are not many knives/blades and the amount of spear-type weapons can be counted on one hand (spear, sharpened spear, sharpened pole, plant thorns...).

True enough; still not that fond of having sledhehammer thrusts and unarmed secondary attacks pierce armor though.

Strong characters will spend most of the time making people fall on their asses over and over which sounds like it could get old fast, hilarious as it may be in the beginning. I'm already wary of using the super sledgehammer because it sentences you to a Sisyphean torment of running halfway across the map to reach all the guys you send flying.

Yeah, whole thing seems premised on large numbers of melee enemies swarming you, which only really happens in the Tanker hold; rest of the time it's a big disadvantage. That's why I thought adding exhaustion hits to backwashes and maybe making them shorter might add a bit of purpose, not sure though.

You could attach those properties to the attack types instead. Swing/Kick has a chance of making the enemy fall on his ass (sweep), thrust has a chance of penetrating armor, punches can daze (lose AP), etc.

But these seem to have more to do with bodyparts than attack types (sweep for legs, daze for head). Is it really less likely to fall on your ass due to a sledgehammer swing or thrust? (wouldn't know really)

If you want to make the weapon types more unique, tweak their AP cost and damage values. Blades are easy to wield so they cost little AP, but are not useful against anything above metal armor (make good armor have DT that is on par or higher than the normal damage most bladed weapons cause, unless I'm wrong this should allow particularly awesome blade-users to still be able to do some damage against good armor, but the regular junkie with a shiv is fucked), hammers are good against everything but hard to use efficiently, HtH should be lighting fast but hardier enemies require you to use aimed attacks and secondary punch/kick (snap kick, haymaker and the like - which would cost a lot of AP so you can't easily become a god of death by investing in unarmed), etc

Problem is I'm not sure how much more I can do with AP costs. Right now the system is base 3 AP with +1 for two handed, +2 for aimed, +2 for burst and +3 for scoped. This puts the range at 3-7, which I like, but once you start dropping, you can go to 2 AP, which is 5 attacks a round, which is insane, and if you start raising you can go up to 8 AP, which means medium AG builds can't do certain attacks (7 AP is already pushing it).

 

[Clockwork Knight]

If you want to make the weapon types more unique, tweak their AP cost and damage values. Blades are easy to wield so they cost little AP, but are not useful against anything above metal armor (make good armor have DT that is on par or higher than the normal damage most bladed weapons cause, unless I'm wrong this should allow particularly awesome blade-users to still be able to do some damage against good armor, but the regular junkie with a shiv is fucked)

Sounds good, but may lead to the sillyness of having 1 AP knife that can stab 12 times per turn, which would become very deadly in the hands of a properly-built character with high luck, high ag and critical hit chance.

Well, I believe such a character deserves to be deadly with knives, it's his selling point. But if there are armored enemies he can't simply poke to death, he'd have to use carefully aimed piercing attacks on them, which cost more AP and thus prevent him from being deadly against everything and everyone.

You could attach those properties to the attack types instead. Swing/Kick has a chance of making the enemy fall on his ass (sweep), thrust has a chance of penetrating armor, punches can daze (lose AP), etc.

But these seem to have more to do with bodyparts than attack types (sweep for legs, daze for head). Is it really less likely to fall on your ass due to a sledgehammer swing or thrust? (wouldn't know really)

Don't think so, . But if it makes weapons more varied, I guess it's not a real problem. We already have armor piercing punches, anyway (do you use your chi, or what?)

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Please always tell when you make modifications to the weapons file, because I have my own tailored modifications (mainly to assaultrifles but I also changed the damage of some energy weapons).

Will do.

Say, can you intentionally script that weird shadowboxing effect on a specific enemy? Would be a cool way to make a few, select foes very interesting opponents. I'm thinking The Masticator, The Dragon/Lo Pan (unless they have humongous skill points by default) and Frank Horrigan, perhaps the strongest Deathclaws.

You do realize that you're effectively asking for level scaling right .

If I remember right, melee weapons all have a extra default critical chance of +5%.

Hmm... don't think so, but I'll check it out.

No reason to scrap melee damage, its a simple mechanic.

Yes, but is it too simple :confucius: ? I could solve the extra strength gives the same bonus to a shiv as a sledgehammer issue by making it a relative bonus for melee (at least): instead of +1, +2, etc. it does +10%, +20%, and so on.

First idea: What about melee and unarmed giving a dodge bonus against each other? A knife-fighter knows a lot more about avoiding punches and kicks and vice-versa than some sniper dude who could't punch his out of a nursery. I'm thinking the bonus is smaller, because while both are close fighters, they're different types of close fighter, say, 50% the bonus that unarmed vs unarmed gets. This theorically makes a unarmed/melee hybrid character more interesting, because if a very strong unarmed combatant comes up, you can switch to a knife or something. Not sure if melee vs melee should get dodge bonuses too, would make sense in a medieval rpg with clashing blades and shit (parry), but would it make sense in a setting where the main melee weapons are knives, hammers and spears? Or am I wrong and the bonus should be the same?

It already more or less works this way: unarmed or melee v. unarmed gets checked against unarmed skill, unarmed or melee vs. melee gets checked against melee skill, and unarmed or melee versus ranged weapons gets checked against melee skill at a -20 penalty. But I think I might replace that last penalty with one for two handed weapons (think it's harder to dodge a blow carrying a big ass sledgehammer than a 10mm pistol). Also, you might have a point (which I'm probably reading into you) that it might be better to have this dodge bonus reflect your knowledge of melee or unarmed fighting, rather than what you yourself are wielding...

Historically, from what I remember, (war)hammers did pretty well against armor because they hurt the armored warriors despite the armor due to the fact not all the force from the blow was stopped by armor. So Slow (5 AP), two-handed, fucks up enemy exaustion and no armor piercing but lotsa raw damage? Perhaps hammers and maybe clubs should get extra strength bonus? Small min-max damage difference so damage is very constant?

Yeah, was thinking along those lines.

Knives are good for cutting soft shit up quickly. I think they should be like the fast-shooting JHP bullet of melee weapons. Swings for shredding unarmored foes and thrust attacks makes it better for fucking up light-armored people but should't work against decent armor (Metal Armor MKII and beyond) unless it CAN penetrate it (Wakizashi/Ripper). So, fast (3 AP), one-handed short-ranged (knives have 1 range yes?), strong against unarmored foes but weak against armor.

Spears are sharp, pointy and made to stab and thrust. Not fast weapons but not as slow as a hammer. So, medium speed (4 AP), armor penetration (penetrate perk), more damage than knife but less than hammer (cuts small point rather than crushing lotsa stuff apart), one-handed (Fallout Spears are short-spears. Wish we had long spears in Fallout, would be rad against deathclaws), weak against unarmored oponents, good against medium armor up to Combat Armor.

Might be better than what I'm proposing. Though remember that one-handedness (unless you switch that feature off) is now no longer a constant but depends on strength.

I can see three melee character types: Fast Melee Guy (high AG guy with 8/9 AP) wielding knife and spear and switching between both as needed, Brute Melee Guy (medium AG guy with = or >>>5 AP, high strength and endurance) wielding a hammer and crushing shit apart, and cattle-prod guy using his eletric damage cattle prod to lol bypass armor and switching to a knife/Lousville Sludger when he needs to unleash lots of fast damage on unarmored targets, last one seems to be a sequence of the first (because there's only a few spears).

Yeah, that's the main reason I want to change stuff around. Right now it's more important to have high AG and (relatively) low ST when sledging because you have to chase people around and the strength bonus is minimal anyway by the time you get the slugger/super sledge.

Secondary unarmed attacks already píerce armor, and its okay because its the only reason they can be useful over the Power Fist.

But should they be? I mean, I'm happy for the guys that they made all these extra unarmed attacks, but not sure why it should remain relevant late game outside of special quests like boxing or martial arts. Only non-cheesy way of keeping unarmed relevant would be an extremely speedy character running circles around a slow opponent, but since changing facing when attacking cost no extra AP, this'd be impossible to implement.

Sounds good, but may lead to the sillyness of having 1 AP knife that can stab 12 times per turn, which would become very deadly in the hands of a properly-built character with high luck, high ag and critical hit chance.

Well, I believe such a character deserves to be deadly with knives, it's his selling point. But if there are armored enemies he can't simply poke to death, he'd have to use carefully aimed piercing attacks on them, which cost more AP and thus prevent him from being deadly against everything and everyone.

Might have a point, though making these types of considerations a part of the AI is almost impossible (right now I've just made it that everybody does 50% aimed and 50% unaimed, which is the highest ratio of aimed I can get to).

You could attach those properties to the attack types instead. Swing/Kick has a chance of making the enemy fall on his ass (sweep), thrust has a chance of penetrating armor, punches can daze (lose AP), etc.

But these seem to have more to do with bodyparts than attack types (sweep for legs, daze for head). Is it really less likely to fall on your ass due to a sledgehammer swing or thrust? (wouldn't know really)

Don't think so, .

Doesn't it depend on the way you stand? If you're standing in a regular way with your legs spread then you'd think of the two objects hitting you at the same momentum, the one from the front'd me more likely to tip you off balance. If you stand one foot in front of the other like a boxer I guess it'd be more or less the same. I think the problem is that you can't imagine someone with a sledgehammer thrusting as hard as swinging, which would also mean they'd do less damage though...

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Might have a point, though making these types of considerations a part of the AI is almost impossible (right now I've just made it that everybody does 50% aimed and 50% unaimed, which is the highest ratio of aimed I can get to).

I was thinking the AI would simply flee or find another target if they can't damage you with a simple attack, which I believe they already do. 50% aimed attacks should be more than enough to convince them to often stay and try to cause some damage, though. (AI that flees all the time is annoying, esp. on turn based games - the yellow pajama junkies from the Den, for example. Imagine that happening several times during the game)

Doesn't it depend on the way you stand? If you're standing in a regular way with your legs spread then you'd think of the two objects hitting you at the same momentum, the one from the front'd me more likely to tip you off balance. If you stand one foot in front of the other like a boxer I guess it'd be more or less the same. I think the problem is that you can't imagine someone with a sledgehammer thrusting as hard as swinging, which would also mean they'd do less damage though...

Well, a simple limp-wristed push can drop you on your ass if you're unprepared (try it yourself on people on the street! Just run away before they get up), but I imagine that in a combat situation everyone is ready and not distracted. Of course, that raises the problem - what if you execute a sneak attack with a sledgehammer thrust?

In the end, I was thinking of it as a gameplay concession - even though the animation shows the sledgehammer being used like a rapier, its "thrust" being more of an overhead chop that grabs enough momentum downwards that it is more likely to penetrate armor.

Say, can you intentionally script that weird shadowboxing effect on a specific enemy? Would be a cool way to make a few, select foes very interesting opponents. I'm thinking The Masticator, The Dragon/Lo Pan (unless they have humongous skill points by default) and Frank Horrigan, perhaps the strongest Deathclaws.

You do realize that you're effectively asking for level scaling right .

OFF WITH HIS HEAD!

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

(AI that flees all the time is annoying, esp. on turn based games - the yellow pajama junkies from the Den, for example. Imagine that happening several times during the game)

Would you prefer the pajama junkies swarming you instead like the hookers in Reno? Ideally they'd just keep out of combat, but bar that I think junkies and hookers running off the map is preferable.

In the end, I was thinking of it as a gameplay concession - even though the animation shows the sledgehammer being used like a rapier, its "thrust" being more of an overhead chop that grabs enough momentum downwards that it is more likely to penetrate armor.

Ah, interesting... works for me.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Clockwork Knight The Brazilian Slaughter

Okay, having gone back to the drawing board, I've come up with this:

The melee damage stat would be ST/3 (tracks decimals), but it'd work differently based on the weapon type. For blunt weapons/unarmed it's a multiplier, for the rest the same flat bonus it always was. So, at ST 12 a sledge or punch gets its damage multiplied by 4, and a knife gets 4 damage added to it. This of course necessitates dropping the damages on most blunt weapons significantly. E.g. super sledges'll probably end up around 5-11 or something (so at ST 12 that'd be 20-44, at ST 1 1-2, instead of the original ranges of 25-43 and 19-37 respectively). Regular punches seem okay enough, though might need to raise them (at ST 12 that'd be 4-12, at ST 1 0-1, instead of the original ranges of 8-10 and 1-3 respectively).

So the net effect'd hopefully be that the difference between a total weakling wielding a sledge and Thor'll no longer be negligible in terms of damage, and that different melee builds might actually make sense now (and the different builds themselves would make sense: high AG for knives, high ST for sledges, instead of high AG for everything).

As to the whole backsliding thing: I'm considering having it only occur when it's "functional", in the sense that it causes either a knockdown (loss of a couple of AP for enemy) or knockout (loss of turn or turns). The regular backslides were, as Clockwork Knight said, almost purely a disadvantage. There should also be a way to avoid backslides altogether: for unarmed blunt attacks that's kicks, for melee "thrusts". All in all, this'd be the difference between blunt and non-blunt melee/hth:

blunt:
-melee damage is multiplier
-causes high exhaustion
-high chance of knockdowns and knockouts
-low chance of damage multipliers (only when causing lots of internal damage)
-low chance of armor penetration (medium with "thrusts").

non-blunt:
-melee damage is flat bonus
-causes low exhaustion
-low chance of knockdowns and knockouts
-high chance of damage multipliers (piercing arteries and squishy organs)
-low chance of armor penetration (medium with thrusts).

Spears could possibly have a middle category, but I don't want to make it too complicated. Does this look better?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Yeah, looks like two completely different characters. Following your template, for spears I'd make it so

-melee damage is flat bonus
-causes medium exhaustion
-medium chance of knockdowns and knockouts [I was thinking you'd use them to sweep and push, not necessarily knock people unconscious]
-high chance of damage multipliers (piercing arteries and squishy organs)
-medium chance of armor penetration (high with thrusts).

Just to have a melee weapon that focuses more on armored enemies. We'd probably need some more spears in the game to make it more than a novelty, though.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Yeah, looks like two completely different characters. Following your template, for spears I'd make it so

-melee damage is flat bonus
-causes medium exhaustion
-medium chance of knockdowns and knockouts [I was thinking you'd use them to sweep and push, not necessarily knock people unconscious]
-high chance of damage multipliers (piercing arteries and squishy organs)
-medium chance of armor penetration (high with thrusts).

Just to have a melee weapon that focuses more on armored enemies. We'd probably need some more spears in the game to make it more than a novelty, though.

True enough; I could ask one of the graphics modders over at NMA if they can come up with some kind of power spear design, might be amusing.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

New Vegas has a bunch of spears, the thermic lance in particular could fit that role.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout:_New_Vegas_weapons

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Lol, New Vegas has cloud's sword apparently.

Thermic lance is pretty cool, but the problem is you'd probably have to end up having to edit one of the existing weapon images to make it fit in with the others, and nothing in the game looks like the thermic lance. A cleaner looking version of the spear with some wires attached is probably more realistic.

IMHO sucessor of spears is probably cattle-prod, because the electric damage bypasses most armor.

Would still be fun to have something with 2 range and throwable in the late game though.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Looks kinda crappy, but then again a modified spear image probably would as well, if I even managed to find someone willing to make one, so might be an idea.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

In the end this is a "wouldn't it be cool if..." idea, so I wouldn't spend much effort on it. I thought you could essentially make a spear version of the Ripper and steal the NV icon to simulate the thermic lance, but I guess it would be a copyright problem.

 

[dunno lah]

Why not just make it look like the real life thermal lance? The plain-ness of it makes it (seem) easy to do.

 

[.Pixote.]

Whatever inventory artwork is used, it would require someone to individually change (build) up to 10000 frames of animation, and that's no easy task, otherwise the player will still be using the same old spear animations. Remember every critter that uses a spear will need adjusting, and thats about every human critter in the game.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Yeah, I obviously wasn't suggesting new animations, that would be the biggest waste of time and effort ever (apart from maybe Wesp's patches for VtmB). It's not like NV's thermic lance would look very different from regular spears from a bird's eye point of view, anyway. What I'd do:

-steal the thermic lance icon form NV like a filthy thief
-make a pimpspear with pimpstats
-make it so it uses energy cells like the ripper

There, intredasting new melee weapon focused on armored opponents that shouldn't take much effort to make, unless I'm missing something

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

.Pixote. I'm the one who suggested simply copying rifle animations to use as big gun animations so that Vic can use plasma and laser rifles; do you honestly think I care that the animations don't look exactly like a thermic lance/piston spear? (like I said in that NMA thread, the animations are as non-generic as they come, yet you never stop and think about why a flamethrower is shooting laserblobsbeams; a piston spear looking like a spear would be a minor suspension of disbelief compared to that)

I was just talking about the inven artwork, which I would like to at least fit somewhat with the rest of the ones and not stick out like a sore thumb. In that respect I'd probably prefer the FoT one, because it at least looks somewhat FO2-y (both in artstyle and the angle at which the spear is put) , but if a certain FO2 graphics modder could make a modified version of the existing spear that looks like a ripper-version of a spear or something that'd be ideal of course

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I was thinking about trade and how weird it is that you can't involve party members' loot in trade and thereby inadvertantly make weightless valuables like cash even more important than they already are, and this came to mind: I could add an option for raising the player's max carry weight to that of himself + his party members (- what they're already carrying). So, if you have 50 max weight, and Sulik joins you with 200 max weight and 30 pounds worth of stuff in his inventory, then your max weight becomes 50+200-30=220, making your pack mule less of an indirect experience.

I guess this feels really cheesy/exploit-prone at first, in the sense that you'd have access to more weighty stuff during combat than you'd normally be, but the vast majority of the stuff you're using during combat is either weightless (consumables) or relatively light weight (ammo), so you'd think it wouldn't really be an advantage, or would it?

I think it could work, finnicking around with party members' inventories is annoying as hell and it makes no sense whatsoever that you can take companions' stuff, but can't involve their stuff in a transaction.