If I Wanted a Tougher Game, What Mods Would Do the Job?

[Aeradom]

I'm looking to jump back into playing Fallout 4 but want to change things up in terms of the difficulty of the combat. I really hate how the game by default handles it where they make the enemies into bullet sponges as that's not so much making the game harder but more tedious. However, I'm not exactly sure what mod I should get to resolve the issue. I first thought about the current weapon overhaul/balancing mods out there but am not sure which one I should use (especially with many of them not being updated in a while). I also thought about using the mod "Rebalance Your Own Game", but there I'm not entirely sure the settings that should be used.

Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.

[Mavkiel]

Balance is very much subjective. First you have to take in account what exactly the difficulty levels do. Survival giving the player .5 of normal damage, and enemies receiving a buff of 2x damage. (Going from memory)

 

Then you need to take in account perks, with the right perks, you totally negate that nerf, plus gain side benefits from whatever damage perk you got. So, a balance that is annoying at the beginning, might shine later.

 

All that being said, there are spawn increase mods, war of the commonwealth and endless war, spring to mind.

[tartarsauce2]

brutality, or... a new dawn
(they both handle balancing in a different fashion, one eliminates scaling of everyone's health pools as you level while the other catches your damage up to it as best as it can, kinda mutually exclusive in that respect)
better locational damage
less loot and ammo

terrible wasteland here is an option
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/7255/?
and there's another mod that removes tonnnnssssssss of loot

I've also kind of finally snapped and started playing through the game myself, I keep telling myself I'll make a mod when I've finished, and now I've decided to push to finish no matter what bugs me and just write down my gripes as a mod idea (well I already did that but I mean into something that is a comprehensive and organized collection of things I can actually pull off with my skills so that when I'm done the game I'll actually go make it)
https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/4875795-the-fallout-mod-i-intend-to-make-mfga/

war of the commonwealth, arbitration, raiders overhaul, supermutant redux also help
note that those ones add a lot of functionality to the game that didn't previously exist, they don't just make it harder, they add new and exciting things, like nightkin! (invisible melee super mutants) and glowing mutant hounds! and the forged pop up a lot more often and are a lot tougher (thanks to the combination of the mods)

truestorms HD actually spawns ghoul packs now, kudos to the creator for that one, that makes life harder I think
DECAY is a nice mod, doesn't necessarily make it harder but I swear by it all the same - better looking ghouls + blowout zombie spawns is always nice
yeah, those last 4 are huge, even if they don't entirely just make life harder, put them with brutality and you got yourself a something or other
I use LOADS of ammo to make life easier and interesting, but I'm also using some easy access weapons mods
if you can get it to work weaponsmith extended will be the best one basically
but for ease of access, wasteland arsenal (lots of deadly weapons) wasteland ordnance, doombased merged weapons collection, skibadaa's merged weapon collection, LZinstitute are good, you'll have to manually install from the downloaded file for LZ institute because the name is too big for NMM to download and install automatically on its own lol but it's a nice one (power armour using synths! definitely makes life harder)
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/11302/?

enjoy, and yes, the weapons when combined with arbitration's gameplay changes do really start to impact things, arbitration makes them stay in a location and shoot more often instead of running around as much in the open, when you combine that with some pretty powerful weapons, well, if enemies are using powerful weapons more often and from cover more, you're not gonna wanna be running around out of cover all the time anymore either

Edited September 21, 2016 by tartarsauce2

[Aeradom]

brutality, or... a new dawn......

Brutality + Arbitration sounds like a neat combination to overhaul the AI and adjust weapon damage. I was already going to install Raider Overhaul, maybe Superhuman redux as well. The one thing I'm not looking to do is hurt performance though, which is why though War for the Commonwealth looks fun, it's just not something I want tanking my frame rate you know?

 

Something I'm learning though is how dead the fallout 4 modding scene seems to be. With both of these I'm going to need to learn to work FO4 Edit and make some adjustments to account for new NPCs. Any suggestions on that as you are working on a balancing mod yourself?

Edited September 21, 2016 by Aeradom

[bill8872]

I would not call the modding dead. You have to remember this game has only been out for a year, and Bethesda released the last DLC not long ago. Patch after patch has not helped as well.

Many are still learning how things work, and waiting for this game to be more stable than it is right now.

 

If I look at Skyrim as an example, it took years for the modding community to come out with very good mods. Some of the best I have seen have only been released a few months ago.

[tartarsauce2]

modding's not dead it's just a combination of 3 factors
1: fallout is less popular than elder scrolls
2: all the mods that are quick and dirty fixes are already out basically
3: the mods that're coming out now are generally tougher to do, things like quest mods take time due to the nature of stories and the complexity of quest chain logic and so on yaddaydadda
anyways, tanking the frame-rate being a potential issue, there's older variants of WoTC that aren't script based, the thing is if you want more spawns that's kinda how you do it, granted increased combat range will yield larger firefights (NPC's will notice each other more easily resulting in, things the normal boost is insane) which will also harm performance on its own, so there's something to look out for, take the smaller boost to combat range or disable that plugin if you need to

Edited September 23, 2016 by tartarsauce2