Disable Powder Ganger respawning

[MattyDienhoff]

A pretty big immersion breaker for me comes up whenever I return to the area around Goodsprings and Primm later on in the game. No matter how long ago it was that I wiped out NCRCF and every other little camp around it, I find those pesky powder gangers swarming all over the area again. Though the number of convicts who escaped is never explicitly stated, they are nonetheless unique among the game's factions in that their numbers are finite. They have only one base and no means of reinforcements.

 

Admittedly, this same argument could be aimed at fiends and the other raider groups, but at least those have somewhat plausible means of replenishing their numbers. In particular, it's easy to explain away the Fiends' numbers recovering (if not at the speed they do). Their numbers swell as the drug addicted and destitute of Vegas turn to raiding for a living. The powder gangers have no such growth.

 

Their relentless numbers also become a balance issue to some extent, because they're the weakest human enemies in the game, and they don't level with the player, so as the player levels up, they soon end up posing so little threat that they're essentially free XP and loot (so much dynamite!). In a typical playthrough I kill hundreds of powder gangers, far more than the prison possibly could've held before the outbreak.

 

Two concepts:

 

1.) Disable all powder ganger respawning after the player wipes out their leadership at NCRCF (specifically Eddie), with or without the NCR's cooperation in the quest "I Fought The Law". Since this is likely to be done fairly early in the game, this should tidily cap the total number of powder gangers encountered, and reward the player's effort in clearing the prison with a tangible change to the surrounding area.

 

2.) Disable all powder ganger respawning outright. There are a lot of convicts in and around NCRCF at the start of the game, and that's even after two large groups already splintered off (to that vault to the north and to Primm to the south). Add them all together and their numbers might well be around 100. That's a lot of convicts for the size of the prison, even without any additional ones respawning, so perhaps no respawning at all is the way to go. WIpe out a powder ganger camp and it stays that way. If difficulty is an issue, buffing their stats somehow would go well with this change.

 

I tried to do this myself some months ago, but my attempts failed so I gave up. But now that I'm back into FNV, it's on my mind again and I'm hoping to find someone who knows what they're doing to help. It's a bit fuzzy now, but my attempts involved adding lines to the script that checks for Eddie's death, disabling various powder ganger spawners one by one at that time. I have no idea why, but it simply didn't work.

[trilioth]

I will look into this when I get a chance. Thanks for the input.