[WIP] Weapon Addition and Replacement Suite (WARS)

[antistar]

I think during testing you'll quickly back out of the NPCs use ammo idea. It just doesn't work with Fo4's combat IMO, especially since there's lots of urban warfare with roofs etc if you'd storm a place like corvega all the raiders will run out of ammo before you get to go upstairs. Unless you plan on buffing their accuracy highly so its like Stalker MISERY balance or something, but even then they have a tendency to waste ammo. I guess if you give them like full loadout ammo loot it could work to a degree.. say 210 rounds for assault rifles.. but then you can grab a 5.56 rifle with a scope of some kind and proceed to drop enemies like flies with little effort early-game. Are you planning on tweaking the AI values? Personally I have them set so they engage you from quite realistic distances.. often scenarios where I get shot at without being able to pinpoint direction of enemy fire. The drawback to that is that some quests in the game can become kinda funny - i.e the railroad quest where you overlook corvega territory from the bridge, that'd just be a gunfight instead. Doesn't break the game in any way but it'd feel odd to play like that for people who never played vanilla before I guess.

 

Great idea about the magazines. I always hated the idea of alt-tabbing for a guide so I never bothered collecting most of them.

I don't think I will change my mind on the NPCs use ammo feature, but yeah; I'll have to see how it goes in extended testing.

 

I did overhaul the way NPCs spawn with weapons and ammo, giving them "loadouts". NPCs with faster-firing weapons get more ammo, and higher-level NPCs spawn with an amount of ammo comparable to real-world infantry.

 

I do expect this to change how some encounters play out, and for all I know some of them may end up feeling a bit weird... but I think it will feel less weird than NPCs being able to fire a weapon all day long and never, ever run out of ammo. ;)

 

I have tweaked some AI values a bit - but not a whole lot yet. I'm not terribly au fait when it comes to those.

[CanyonRunner69]

After all if you're going for an approach where ammo is easy to get, but carrying it is a problem - akin to classic Fallouts - that will work fine I guess. Regarding the AI settings, one thing you may want to do is make weapon classes for NPCs like gunners then set i.e sniper AI to not use cover at all - they have a nasty habit of emptying a bolt-action in full-auto while blindfiring from cover, haha.

 

One thing I did back when I tried reaching a similar goal on my modded game, was the division of .308 and 7.62x51mm NATO between sniper rifles and typical battle rifles. I know it doesn't make much sense but I had it made so that you couldn't chamber 7.62x51mm into sniper rifles for balance, that way if I killed someone who had a FAL and 160 rounds it wasn't an instant meta of having large supply of rounds for a sniper rifle. I guess if you wanted to keep stuff balanced but go for realism, you could just debuff accuracy heavily instead when 7.62x51mm is used - the sniper rifles are too pinpoint accurate as it is anyway.

[antistar]

I don't remember if I noticed behaviour like that with NPCs firing bolt-actions in full-auto from cover, so thanks; I'll keep that in mind.

 

I'm doing kind of a similar thing with .308/7.62x51mm ammo in WARS, changing 5mm to be a lower power "surplus" 7.62x51mm round. It does a hell of a lot more damage than vanilla 5mm, but still less than .308. So if you come across a minigun with dozens or hundreds of surplus rounds in tow, you can use those in battle/sniper rifles, but they'll do a lot less damage (and probably be less accurate and gunk the weapon up faster).

 

Likewise you can use the better non-surplus ammo in a minigun if you feel like burning through some much more valuable ammo insanely quickly.

 

 

Anyway, yeah, like you said, I expect ammo management in WARS/PEACE to be less about scarcity (not that ammo is at all scarce in vanilla FO4) and more about the logistics of carrying it. I have done a lot with encumbrance systems in PEACE in particular.

 

Speaking of PEACE (for a general update), for the last few days I've been doing a bit of work on that since I had a spark of inspiration for how I could do a simple (and it is simple) food spoilage system.

 

I'll do a bigger post on it in the PEACE WIP thread once it's a bit further along, but it's something I've wanted in the game since release. (And it's even more important considering the butchery system in PEACE.)

 

There's always been technical barriers, though; you can't add and track info like a "spoilage time" on individual instances of stackable items that can go into inventories/containers, frustratingly. Instead you're limited to things like periodically swapping food that happens to be in the player's inventory for Moldy Food when an arbitrary timer goes off.

 

There's been a couple of mods that do it that way, I think - but as far as I know they don't account for food that's not in the player's inventory; e.g. stashed in a container back at home. The script I came up with still operates on an arbitrary timer, but it does handle food in containers - at the point when the player goes to take/store that food. So it's still pretty simplistic, but it is lightweight, and is meant to evoke those times when you open a bag of cheese or whatever and go "crap, it's mouldy!". It's not like we can tell ahead of time that something is going to spoil in exactly 45 hours, just from looking at it. ;)

 

To support that I've also added powered refrigerators that keep food from spoiling, but have an item limit (set to 100 items, at the moment), and I'm expanding the Food Processor from Contraptions into two machines: One that processes all the raw meat/fruit/vegetables/etc into intermediate ingredients like Processed Meat, Processed Vegetables, Processed Flour, etc, and another that uses those ingredients to produce preserved/packaged food that won't spoil.

 

The first of those is done already - its script is almost identical to the Ammo Scrapper machine script for WARS that I posted about a little while ago. I'm working on the processed food items at the moment.

[Radsweeper]

>I'm doing kind of a similar thing with .308/7.62x51mm ammo in WARS, changing 5mm to be a lower power "surplus" 7.62x51mm round. It does a hell of a lot more damage than vanilla 5mm, but still less than .308. So if you come across a minigun with dozens or hundreds of surplus rounds in tow, you can use those in battle/sniper rifles, but they'll do a lot less damage (and probably be less accurate and gunk the weapon up faster).

 

Then, it goes without saying that you also add some 7.62x51mm that is more powerful than the regular type, that happens to make more damage and gunk up the gun slower. More expensive -sure and rarer too.

 

Seems only balanced to me.

[antistar]

I don't think that'd necessarily have to be the case, but there'll probably be a "Match" sub-type that fits the bill there, yeah.

[spookydano]

Neat!

[antistar]

For a small update:

 

I'm working on the ammo-crafting-via-factory-machines systems at the moment. I've had a minor breakthrough with the Ammo Scrapper machine. A little while ago (here) I said this about it:

These all take specific recipes, as you might expect - basically I'm matching an ammo record to an input quantity and a levelled list for output - so anything that isn't specifically supported by the machine as something that can be scrapped will instead just pass through the machine.

This includes any leftover scrappable ammo that doesn't neatly divide by ten; that will pass out the front because otherwise it ends up essentially "jamming" the machine; stopping it from processing any more ammo or outputting anything else. That's down to the vagaries of how the script works (specifically the DropFirstObject function), and I actually don't mind so much. You could scoop up the leftover ammo with a sorter placed after the Ammo Scrapper in the line, and then re-insert it in the machine or whatever else you wanted. (Or only input ammo in multiples of ten to begin with, I guess.) It makes for more interesting factories, which is actually exactly what I'm after here. I suspect the alternative would be a completely overhauled script that would be much heavier on the script engine.

Despite what I said about not minding the "overflow" ammo passing out the front of the machine, it is kind of messy, so when a way around that occurred to me recently, I went for it.

 

The issue was that crafting ammo requires very small amounts of lead/copper/steel/etc - maybe even only one for ten rounds of ammo. So what do you do when the machine needs to scrap less than ten rounds? After the script changes I just made, it now stores fractions of those components. E.g. 0.7 Lead for seven .380 ACP rounds. Once at least a full unit of whatever component is stored up, it pops out of the machine.

 

I'd been thinking about storing fractions like that for a while, but previously thought the number of components to track would make the script (and data entry in the CK) unwieldy - not to mention the concern that having dozens/hundreds of individual primers and casings moving around on conveyor belts (on top of everything else) would make processing everything take a long time.

 

So I've actually got a hybrid system: if there's more than ten rounds of something, it'll output one box of ten casings, one tray of ten primers, plus whatever amount of lead, copper, powder, etc - and it'll keep doing that until there's less than ten rounds left. Then it will output individual casings and primers, and store fractions of components.

 

Now, everything is processed - and it also won't bog down the machines and conveyors with hundreds of individual casings and primers.

 

 

It's satisfying to make that improvement, but now I've got a bunch of grunt work to do in the CK to set up all the machines and recipes for all the ammo types and sub-types - so I'll be working on that for a while. ;)

[lincolnshooter]

I suppose an easy way to "lore" the lower powered ammo is poor storage and powder degradation, and while that tends to have the opposite effect irl perhaps the powders used in the fallout universe degrade in a different fashion, after all it is probable that it the resource wars alternative powders were at least experimented with if not used for large volume of fire weapons like miniguns

[antistar]

I'm working on this stuff right now - working out what sub-types each calibre will have, and what their crafting components are. Both those things are subject to change, but for now I'm giving a number of calibres a "Surplus" sub-type which will most likely do less damage as a balance thing more than a strict realism thing.

 

There's also less resources involved in crafting/scrapping them (and they cost less), again as a balance consideration.

[Winterworld19]

Hey there Antisar! How are you doing today? I hope that you have a great time and even WARS's work in progress so far. My question to you is related to Tatical Reload mod. You did heard about this mod before, but the question ism it is possible that this WARS will get an optional patch to make it compatible for the Tactical Reload in future time after the full version release of WARS?