possible solution for damage sponging problems

[tartarsauce2]

there's about 3 ways of dealing with the nature of damage sponging given the no level limit design of the game
I ALSO. want to give armours some CONTEXTUAL superiority to each other, so that even at higher levels there's real choices to be made about what you want to wear based on what you're trying to do or be - even if all the mods are the same etc

to this extent I got mad at the fact that my armour was OP for a while and I wasn't even paying attention to health, with brutality mod, and war of the commonwealth (mark 3 railroad clothing with heavy synth armours combo gives tons of DR/ER)

forgive the disjointed nature of the post, I hope you see each thing as a possible inspiration, and trust me it works best together

1: method - abolish scaling in terms of stats
2: method - scaling damage with levels in tandem with health pools and armour values

3: method - limiting both but allowing them and using the overall situation to morph as you level, to change the nature of the experience as you play through the game
this is the method I've been looking for, I always hold up fallout 1-2 for this

TLDR: limiting health scaling per level (but not eradicating it) .5 1.0 per level, start with like 200 hp... (1.5X base health without perks at "max level" that you'd be at to finish all the stuff, and 2.0x with perks)

30% max damage reduction.
yes. that's right 30% max.
the armour perk adds some light DR, but more importantly.... adds max damage reduction %
so that a perked up person would be at 40% max damage reduction

POWER ARMOUR
make it gives 10-20% extra max damage reduction % - the tradeoff here is the embodiment of the tradeoff in general I'm thinking of here, light vs heavy armours... sneaking in power armour is ridiculous, on the other hand being a walking tank has its own benefits... in dealing with max damage reduction, one can deal with the issue where one is ALREADY a walking tank making PA useless often, without having to jack the values up so much that PA is an Iwin button for the entire game
30-->50%
40-->60%

added side effect of this system: heavy armours might be wasteful against small arms, if you have 200 DR from an armour, but it only takes 100 DR to max to 30/40% damage reduction... well what gives?! however only a few armours actually pull this off typically, or they all do (the scaling between armours is so minimal often, it drives me nuts and I want to fix this, but it'd make some OP and some lame if I differentiated too much)

now, why is this a positive thing to an extent?
for small arms, some lighter armour is fine, 100 DR is perfect
but now what if someone throws out a high calibre sniper rifle or bazooka?
AH. now CONTEXTUALLY the heavy armour is better, it's not just plain "better all the time forever"
which means the sneaky armour wearer (light armour is good for sneak) will get TOTAL'D in the FACE
but heavy clanker person will not by said bazooka bullet

Edited September 12, 2016 by tartarsauce2

[FiftyTifty]

The answer is to set everything to lvl 50, make the armour/weapon tiers + upgrades into incremental improvements, and then set the health & resistances of enemies dependent on their "rank" and race. E.g, raider boss has more health than normal raiders, but much less health than a Yao Guai.

 

I've actually made a wee mod that balances out the armour tiers as described, which was easily done with FO4Edit. Balancing the weapons would need a few lads for testing a bunch of different damage formulas across all the weaponry.

[tartarsauce2]

to be honest, for the purposes of what I'm going at, that's certainly not a bad idea, but is an alternate method to what I'm talking about, because I kinda do like the scaling, and I feel that this represents a minimalist and reasonably easy way to alter things without a lot of effort, what you're talking about would be a major overhaul

for the purposes of what I'm talking about it, I think, would take editing something based on a perk, based on whether you're wearing PA or not, and the baseline standing values
I don't see your method as bad at all, but I think given the rather diverse nature of the many various mods I've seen, it would be useful to bring up max damage reduction as a potential balance tool because people already know about the already existing fallout 3-NV balance system

I admit though that I haven't even played fallout 3 past level 8 or so yet, so I'm still a bit in the dark as to exactly how it's balanced, I came up with this myself because I was particularly annoyed in one situation
coincidentally, the % damage reduction thing gives an interesting situation where lasers, because they're basically never used as slow heavy hitters, could be balanced so as to be inferior to smaller ballistic weapons normally, but be light ammo, and because they're *always* fast firing constant shot things (except muskets but... whatever) their natural balanced state helps them as an anti-heavy armour thing, saving the super powered shot things for, rockets, .50 cal's etc

[TrickyVein]

Damage threshold.

 

KISS

[tartarsauce2]

I'm actually also aware of that one but the problem with it, and I've played with it a LOT... is it doesn't scale at all and is easy to have run wild in your game, to work that one in would require a total overhaul as well or extremely minor amounts to a top of about 10 damage, and even then the weapons would have to be balanced around that


to be quite honest, I wouldn't mind applying a mod where the balance I'm talking about occurs to about the tune of 100 (in a sort of semi copy of fifty's idea) and then modify a few damage thresh-hold values for balancing purposes (a light touch, for flavour, probably would put it on bots and synths) - but DT is definitely not a be all end all for this sort of thing, and should probably be an additive, I think it'd work better for the "no scaling" mods to be honest, where particularly good armours simply reduced damage by more and more instead of you getting extra health (or barely any extra hp)

 

to be sure, some of my absolute most fun times have come about because I had to use mines and guerilla tactics to tankbuster a power armour using enemy, because I didn't have any hard hitting weapons elsewise... but wow is it ever a temperamental thing to be treated cautiously

Edited September 12, 2016 by tartarsauce2

[TrickyVein]

Introduce slag.

[tartarsauce2]

LOADS of ammo already has that for plasma cells, the issue then is just lumping bullet after bullet of plinkers that shouldn't do a thing will eventually overwhelm the target
I edited pipeguns once to shoot nailroad spikes as projectiles, and when they hit they'd do a slight bleed and poison effect - this was so that raiders wouldn't simply run away (another issue of DT when also using unnaked which AFAIK is a really vital mod to have for good balance generally)

besides that though, it might be a good system for things like miniguns and so on, that're supposed to be good against some armour IRL but are balanced ingame as low damage....

Edited September 12, 2016 by tartarsauce2