Rebalance / Ammo Effects

[SS941]

I was toying with the idea of eliminating stats from weapons all together and just buffing the ammo.

 

Also, before I do all of that... is there any obvious issue with doing dam/DT this way? I'm hoping it will simplify my rebalance because I can just dump weapon stats every weapon in the game instead of having to retweak EVERY 5.56 rifle every time. My thinking is that the guns should determine nothing more than accuracy/fire rate.

 

I'm also trying to make DT irrelevant to edged weapons and DR irrelevant to blunt weapons.

 

I haven't thought through it yet, but I'd like for shotties to do extra limb damage, and I'd like getting shot by pretty much anything to cripple a limb. Any suggestion on how to accomplish this? Will the extra limb damage

 

[madmongo]

If you are looking for a realistic rebalance, this isn't it. In the real world, the weapon can have a significant effect on the amount of damage that the round does.

 

If one of your 5.56 rifles has a shorter barrel length than the other, then the round will accelerate more in the one with the longer barrel. This gives the round a higher velocity when it leaves the barrel, and more energy when it hits the target (kinetic energy = 1/2 x (mass) x (velocity squared). The gas pressure decreases with barrel length though, so at some point adding more barrel length doesn't really net you much more velocity.

 

If you compare say a real-world AR-15 with a 20 inch barrel vs. an 18 inch barrel, the 5.56 round coming out of the 20 inch barrel will be traveling at roughly 3000 ft/sec, but the round coming out of the 18 inch barrel will only be traveling at about 2900 ft/sec (according to graphs of real-world velocity tests). Since the kinetic energy is proportional to the velocity squared, that minor 2 inch difference in barrel length results in the round coming out of the longer barrel having roughly 7 percent more energy. You'd expect that rifle with the longer barrel to do about 7 percent more damage in your Fallout stats using the same round, but real-world damage isn't quite that simple.

 

An AR-15 with a 16 inch barrel reduces the velocity to about 2800 ft/sec. The rifle with the 20 inch barrel gives the round roughly 15 percent more energy than the rifle with the 16 inch barrel.

 

When you have the same round being fired from both a rifle and a pistol, then the extremely short barrel of the pistol has an even greater effect. That .357 round coming out of the revolver in-game is probably traveling at about half of the velocity as the same .357 round coming out of the cowboy repeater, meaning that it has a wimpy 1/4th the kinetic energy. You'd expect the cowboy repeater to do roughly 4 times the damage.

 

So yeah, the round is important, but so is the weapon. You can't just base your stats on the round.

 

You also can't just compare kinetic energy, though that does give you a good starting point. A Minie Ball from a Civil War era musket has a huge mass but a slower velocity than a modern bullet (the Minie ball was subsonic). The end result is that the Minie ball had less kinetic energy than a 5.56 round fired out of something like an AR-15. But the Civil War Minie ball was the worst standard infantry weapon in all of history to get shot with. Despite having less kinetic energy, the Minie ball imparted worse wounds to the human body than a modern round will do, at least according to ballistic gel studies. For some reason no humans have volunteered to get shot by both for a side by side comparison. :laugh:

 

If you ever have a choice between someone shooting you with a Civil War musket or a modern AR-15, choose the AR-15. Actually, choose none of the above if that's an option, but you know what I mean.

 

The way you come up with accurate dam/dt numbers is to compare the kinetic energy plus wound damage that has been observed in the real world and base your numbers on that.

 

So, with all of that said, this is just a freaking video game. Do what you want. If you like the way your rebalance plays out in your game, then go for it. My only point here is that your round-based rebalance doesn't match what actually happens in the real world. Also in the real world, radiation doesn't turn people into ghouls and giant ants wouldn't have enough muscle strength to be able to move. Reality doesn't necessarily make for a fun game.

[SS941]

Hey thanks for you comment! Totally get where you're coming from in regards to how weapons actually work. But that's a good idea, maybe I could add a damage % modifier to weapons with longer barrels.

 

Unfortunately, we don't really have the technology to accurately simulate real body damage yet, and even if we did it wouldn't be useful. No one would ever be able survive a 1v12 gunfight lol

 

It is an equipment based videogame, so my big concern is making the relative strength of equipment make sense. So, a leather jacket will help you a lot against a knife, only a little against a bat, and not at all against a firearm. Soft armor will defeat most pistol rounds, plate armor defeats most rifle rounds, etc. Given that enemies are just a varying amount of HP points, soft tissue damage is best categorized as a number, to me anyway. I.E. how many shots to the torso could you survive?

 

Speaking of, do you know

A.) is there a way in the GECK to flatten all human char HP's at once?

or if not

B.) is there an average/curve for enemy HP's?

 

I was testing the vanilla HC experience, I could run into Primm and kill everyone in it, but also would sink 6+ head shots at point blank on the NCR dudes and run out of AP before killing them.

I'm going to activate the JIP config for localized head DT/DR

 

Also, do you know of anyway to increase the rate of 'knockdowns'? I'll see NPC's cower and drop their guns, sometimes even fall over. I'm hoping to correlate getting shot while wearing armor with a knockdown effect. I wonder if I could add that quality to body armor?

Edited January 13, 2019 by SS941

[madmongo]

By flattening, do you basically mean non-leveling HP values? There's an unleveling mod for Skyrim but I have never seen one for FNV. If I recall correctly, hit points in FNV are some base value (I think 90) plus an initial bonus for certain stats like endurance and strength, plus 5 points per level, or something like that. You should be able to find the exact forumla on one of the Fallout wikis. If the NPC isn't set to auto-calculate level and hit points though, you can modify the NPC's hit points to whatever value you want. I've done that for certain NPCs that I have made (I made cyborgs that I wanted to be significantly tougher than a normal fleshy human). I'm not sure if any vanilla NPCs use non-default hit point values though.

 

Another approach to use a mod that dramatically slows down leveling, then give your player character enough XP to get them to whatever level you want to be. With slow leveling, the NPCs will spawn at more predictable levels and with more predictable HP values. Note that many NPCs have high minimum level values, so depending on where you set your target level for your player character, you might need to modify those NPCs in the GECK so that they don't completely overpower you.

 

For my own personal use, I just created a simple mod to modify the damage multiplier for firearms. That gets rid of NPCs just shrugging off a point blank shot to the head. I personally think it makes the game more fun as well. Now you have to think twice about charging a dozen Fiends, and finding cover in a firefight all of a sudden becomes much more important. I get that a lot of folks wouldn't like that game mechanic, though. You definitely won't survive a 1 vs 12 combat out in the open!

 

As for knockdowns, there's a generic fKnockdownChance in the GECK settings. I haven't personally played with it, but I believe that you can modify that to increase the rate of knockdowns in general. If you filter the settings for knockdown and knockback you might find something more useful there. If you are going to do it on a per hit basis, then I think you'll end up needing to modify a whole bunch of weapon and NPC scripts, so I'm not sure that's all that practical.