A few observations on combatstyles and combat

[Malikin]

I often find myself acting in the game using my military background. When I go into a building, I look into the rooms, sweeping. I Know there are no enemies sneaking just inside the door, but I check anyways.

 

Explosives, I cannot imagine why an enemy would just run one over. I do try to set them as I would as a Combat Engineer. I do not want the enemy to see this or that. Granted I was trained to deal with explosives that needed to be disarmed or disposed of. So I often thin in the reverse. If I was in the wasteland, and I had a mine, how would I lay it? I would want the enemy to be surprised.

 

Of course if an enemy were to stop suddenly, squat down, and pick up my mine, I think I would be floored. Then again, that just gives me more time to shoot them. But it would surprise the heck out of me.

 

Vats vs Aiming. I was a pretty good marksman in my day. Nothing to get an ego about, but I did well enough Not to get yelled at by a sarge. (Of course being an officer can be funny... Sarge: blah blah you suck blah blah.. Sir! Me: ???) But when I can, using Vats, take out 9 raiders one shot each.. that is a stretch. I am right out of the vault and after a short period of time I am an expert sniper? well I am not knocking it. But I would think that after the first shot, even if I was sneaking, the rest would run for cover. Just me.

 

~Mal

[csgators]

I think the idea is that the pipboy uses its connection to you to control the gun...its not you its the VATS system built into the pipboy so to speak.

[GrandsonOfSam]

About needing FOOK2 and WMK: The mod is in its first public beta stage (only for Fookunity site members), and having multiple versions would be a huge waste of my time. I would like to make versions for FOOK2 only, WMK only and also for vanilla though. The real problem is, that I have edited the sniper weapons (and most unique weapons too) quite heavily among other things, so it's not just deleting entries from the mod. :)

 

About the way enemies act: I am still working on getting the enemies tweaked up so they would act realistically in alert and combat situations, but there are still some huge obstacles in the game engine itself I will have to circumvent with heavy scripting. The game just wasn't made to be realistic to begin with. I already have circumvented some "hardcoded" stuff in the mod, and in my own test versions, so doing it on other things is a possibility. If it was easy, it would have been done already in numerous mods ;)

 

About Combat Styles and Actors (Edit): The only easy way to affect the behavior of the enemies and Actors in general is thru editing their Combat Styles and the Game Settings. The possibilities are very limited in there, as the Settings and Styles only give the game engine the general idea of how it should handle the AI for the Actor. I sadly don't have the luxury of getting my ideas hardcoded into the Game Engine, so I will have to make do with the Settings and Styles. The hard way to do this would be to script the Enemy Behavior completely, so their hardcoded AI wouldn't have a chance to come in and mess things up. At the moment my scripting skills are far from the level needed to accomplish that well enough, so I will have to fiddle with the Settings and Styles. :)

 

Edit 2 (grr!): Using Combat Styles and Game Settings is like trying to lead a squad of soldiers. You tell them what they should be doing, and they do it the way the situation and their training commands (that is the hardcoded AI at work).

[sortitus]

I don't know if you've tried Arwen's Realism Tweaks Combat/AI module, but it's a lot better than Vanilla. That said, I'm very interested in switching to yours after following this thread.

 

I was running WMK+FOOK, but traced down a chronic CTD to FOOK, so I'm just using WMK now. If you'd allow me to, I would be able to maintain a WMK-only branch (and possibly Vanilla, depending on time).

[GrandsonOfSam]

I have tried every one of the combat and sneak mods before I took the challenge and started mine :)

 

For the other versions, when the mod comes out of it's beta stage, I am planning on versions for FOOK2+WMK, FOOK2, WMK and vanilla. In that order.

 

Maintaining separate files would be way too hard for anybody else than me myself, as all the documentation of what does what and what all I have changed is in my head :D It's easy for others to check what changes there are, but figuring out what all affects other things is the hard part. If I had separate versions of the beta I am working on every day (I just tried the last tweaks for the day 15 minutes ago), it would be impossible for me to keep track of all the changes. Thus only one beta version. :)

 

Thank you for the offer though :)

 

Back to the original subject: The more I test the changes ingame, the more I wonder if there really even IS an AI for the Enemies. :D Mostly they like to charge head on at me, whatever their Styles tell them to do... And on top of that, a little change to one number can cause the Enemies to just stand around doing nothing, or another to cause them to suddenly become pro Special Forces... :) I'm getting results though, bit by bit, so I do think the Enemies can be made to act intelligently, even though some things are either impossible, or extremely hard to do without the access to the AI itself.

[ladyhawke]

This is just my opinion on the default combat styles for the bos and enclave you mentioned earlier in your posts. I think giving these factions their own combat styles is a good thing. Compatibility patches are not hard to do for this sort of thing for mods like MMM.

 

With your saying the there was a big improvement in the Talon Company after you had changed their combat packages I'd really like to see what you could do with the bos and enclave.

[GrandsonOfSam]

This is just my opinion on the default combat styles for the bos and enclave you mentioned earlier in your posts. I think giving these factions their own combat styles is a good thing. Compatibility patches are not hard to do for this sort of thing for mods like MMM.

 

With your saying the there was a big improvement in the Talon Company after you had changed their combat packages I'd really like to see what you could do with the bos and enclave.

 

The real problem in giving BoS and Enclave their own packages is, that there are a lot of actors that would need changing, and at this point (the mod still is a beta) I am going with the Default packages that they already use. The real problem is, that if the FOOK2 team makes a change to an Actor (in their upcoming 1.1 patch), I need to go and change it's package back. I would want to give them their own packages though.

 

About the talons with their current hugely toned down package: Last night when testing the alerting triggers (and finding a huge bug that made about everything around hostile against everything) I ran into a Talon team (Combat Armors, Small Guns) fighting an Enclave Epsilon Squad (Advanced Power Armors, Plasma Weapons and Minigun). The Talons completely obliterated the Enclave, with only one casualty on the Talons, and three Enclave dead... And that is after the huge toning down... Phew :D I might have to tone them down more...

[GrandsonOfSam]

After some (read: a lot) more digging and testing of the Combat Styles, I really think that the Styles were added as a feature which Bethesda never got to incorporating into the game as planned. The missed potential of tweaking them actually makes me a bit sad, as there's a lot one can do by just tweaking some values there.

 

The reason I think it was "cut out", is that actually nearly every human Actor is using the Default Style. There are separate styles for Raiders and Talons, but the Talon Style is actually used only by a few Actors. Raiders on the other hand mostly use their own Style. The difference between "vanilla" and tweaked style is huge. It is very possible to tweak one Actor it's own style, with which he/she/it can singlehandedly kill 5 or more opponents using the Default unedited style. Then again, also tweaking the Game Settings in GECK can make a huge difference in combat flow and difficulty. These two combined can make the feel of the game completely different, as I have noticed when testing my own mod (over 300 hours of testing now and counting. Well, not even counting the hours anymore).