i thought survival was suppose to be akin to medicine, where you'd pick between the two (survival using ingredients and survivalist practices to heal in the wild, while medicine using manufactured drugs and medical pratice from settlements). as long as survival still has an anolog to medicine in regards to healing and drugs, then it still has a place.

survival should also have an even greater effect on the demands of hardcoe (hunger/thrist/sleep). low survival skill should make it very cumbersome to be away from a settlement, in that you need a lot more food, water, and resting, whereas a survivalist could get by with a mere fraction of it.

That is a good point.
Another thing that I would like to add to this is the fact that game "inventory" is very detached from realism... How are we carrying 3 stacks of power armor and 5 guns in our pockets? I would like to see an equip-able and drop-able "backpack" preferably with it's own inventory. Of course just like it was mention it would be wise to reduce base carry weight even more to portrait lack of ability to carry large amount of things in your pockets or on your person at all times. I might be getting too anol with the invetory system here but I would personally like having all medical equipment not thrown around in the "Aid" but in one neat "med kit " container just like it would in real life.

rwen, what will version 1.2 have? Is that the one with reduced loot? And also, when will it be available do you think?

id really like backpack/luggage mod, something that perhaps can't be opened in combat but can carry a lot more to allow carry a lot of this kind of heavy non-combat items such as bottles or food

I don't think it'd fit unless it had an agility penalty. Maybe -1 for the smaller one and -2 for the frankly massive slave one?

Id like to try this mod but the aspect of slower leveling really makes me not want to bother. If there was a way to disable slower leveling and ap regeneration separately from the rest of the mod then I'd be all up on it. Especially on my second playthrough, I wont be spending nearly as much time on the sidequests but still want to make it to a high level to see what a max leveled character of a new type can do.

you can change the slower leveling anywhere form fallout default to 20% of the speed of the default game

Version 1.2 will still just include my Realism Core. The new version rebalances a few things in v.1.1, and adds my Armor changes . . . which is actually pretty major, as far as the changes to game play, (I'm tweaking most of the armor, and a LOT of the attached object effects). It may not sound like much, but there is a TON of armor and clothing that I have to go through . . . which takes many, many, many hours to edit/balance.

Once my Realism Core module is semi-finished and I have those changes pretty well balanced, I'll start on my Hard-Core module (which reduces found loot, overhauls Barter, and does a mess of other things).

I'm going to try to get through all (or at least most of) the armor/clothing edits before releasing v.1.2 . . . I'm aiming at late Friday . . . but it might not be ready until Saturday. No matter what, I'll release what I have by late Saturday at the very latest. Version 1.2 improves things quite a bit.

if your fixing up armor (im assuming this contains things like armor carrying 50% (75% with pa) of it's own weight, does this also include weapons, im assuming your messing with things like DT in which case weapons might need adjustment?

Yes, worn weight reductions, some DT changes (along with my global DT Damage Multiplier change) . . . some PA was a bit low, and some other armor needed rebalancing. Also balanced out some of the Values (based on DT and Health), some weight changes . . . to work with my worn weight reductions and a LOT of enchanted effects changes. I've already adjusted the Weapon Skill Damage in my current release . . . and am now balancing out the armor to reflect those changes. But I will be tweaking some of the individual weapons . . . just not in v.1.2. Unless everyone wants to wait an additional 2 to 3 days.

I wonder if we could have some for of OB's detect life shaders in NV. im messing around with a hunter/survivalist character now and couldnt help but think that i should be able to track animals or other living things if i have high enough survival skills. since i dont think footprints or other visual trails can be easily implemented, id be satisfied with detect life effects.

sure there are the perception compass markers but you dont know if what you see is a creature you can easily defeat or something you had better run or hide from, thus making your survival skill actually help you ...well ,survive. so if this somehow gets into the game, a better shader is need that makes the creature's species easier to tell from its outline.

no no, i'd rather have it now, kind of holding off starting a new game till 1.2

Ah thanks

Will this mod conflict with FOOK? Or does it attempt to change anything FOOK does as well?

personally i don't trust fook, it was great for fo3 but in this from what i read its a direct port

i havent taken a more in depth look at fook:NV but in fo3 yes they were incompatible. not in a crash your computer kind of way but their different settings would unbalance your game by making some things too hard and others too easy, for example. goes the same for ART and FWE.

I haven't even looked at FOOK NV yet, but if it is anything like FOOK FO3, it will NOT be at all compatible . . . too many of the same records get modified, often in totally opposite ways. Plus our basic philosophies are very different: I'm trying to make armor, ammo, and weapons less abundant; and FOOK just adds a bunch more of all these items.

I don't believe it's an issue right now. It seems FOOK NV is just bug fixes right now. It does however add "Cheat" items to Doc Mitchells house but I modded those out in my game.

I have a question about late game balancing before I apply this mod,

I am playing a ranged char right now (on hardcoe/ Hard difficulty) and came to the realization that the 'bullet sponge' problem is one that diminishes over time. Eventually you get perks like shotgun surgeon, purifier, and new ammo types as well as energy weapons to overcome that problem. All of my .44 and .357 ammo right now is SWC or JFP, I have plenty of 5mm armor piercing and .50 armor piercing, slug rounds, etc, and I'm finding that killing stuff, whether it's a giant radscorpion or a mutant (both of which I had a ridiculously hard time taking down before) isn't all that much of a task anymore.

It just seems like this is what happened when FNV was being made - Obsidian wanted DT instead of DR, and intended folks to encounter this problem and overcome it through special ammo types and perks. What they did not intend, however, was that DT was not going to work very well with Fallout 3's scaling of Very Easy <-> Very Hard difficulty, which modifies damage dealt and taken and nothing else, leading everyone to say that combat is unbalanced on harder difficulty.

Given all the ways to mitigate protection in Fallout New Vegas available later in the game, doesn't this mod make it easier for someone to build a god character? Because ontop of all of those damage increasing methods, they now get higher damage in general.

Just a thought.

Speaking of FWE, didn't it include some your tweaks, Arwen?

Really hoping the FWE team starts workign on NV.

Anyway, looking forward to trying out the next version of your mod.

Yes,as Arwen has mentioned here, her earlier smarter AI tweaks were made part of early FWE. both have since been developed further and in different ways.

looking forward to FWE as well. its the overhaul my girlfriend uses and im also curious to know how they'll implement skill based accuracy here. much as i love ART, i prefer skill affecting accuracy, not damage. been trying to implement it in my own game with no luck.

Have you had Boone join up as a companion yet? He has a spotter perk, which highlights all enemies in an area if you aim your weapon. I'm not sure if it works through solid objects though, probably not.

@ JPZ1987: My Tweaks will NOT make New Vegas easier. Again, this is a VERY early build of my mod. There are many, many areas that I have not yet even looked at. Give me time. Perhaps I should have just kept my NV Realism Tweaks for myself . . . and not release anything until I had totally completed all four modules. This is NOT a port of my Fallout 3 Tweaks . . . I'm building it from the ground up, one item at a time . . . which takes a LOT of time and effort. Version 1.0 and 1.1 were mostly just my attempts to balanced out the Hp and carrying capacities (making STR and END a greater factor), and make the player's Weapon Skills a greater factor in the amount of damage they will be able to inflict with weapons. I also increased the penalties for not maintaining (repairing) your equipment and made a bunch of other changes that will not be all that apparent until they are tied in with other future changes. Version 1.0 and 1.1 also improve the NPC combat and the way they will hunt you down. So far all I have done is add the core of mod . . . everything else builds on this core and expands it.

Version 1.2 balances out the armor (the DT part of the equation). I guess that I could have done the DT part first, but then that would have made combat really frustrating. Since Weapon Damage increases as the player's Weapon Skills increase, I felt that these changes would be less unbalancing, since most players would remain at fairly low skills while I worked on the DT changes. The problem is that the game makes it way too easy to increase these skills and to gain the use of better weapons and ammo (all of which I will deal with in my Hard-Core module). This is one of the drawbacks of making such an all-encompassing overhaul . . . And I am not a team . . . I am just one person . . . I cannot possibly do this all at once. So I work at once section at a time, then play test my changes, then tweak my changes, then move on to the next section (and I almost always end you fine tuning all my previous changes once I complete the next portion).

@}{ellKnight: The ONLY part of my Realism Tweaks that I ever gave permission to be integrated into FWE was a very early version of my AI module (the part that alters combat and detection). Many users of FWE think that my entire mod was integrated into FWE, which is totally not the case. My Realism Tweaks is very different than FWE . . . which makes your game play totally different, between the two. FWE does not have my Dynamic Stealth, my Barter Overhaul, my Skill Based Weapon Requirements, my Encumbrance Overhaul, or my Injuries/Needs overhaul . . . these are all totally unique to my Realism Tweaks. This is a GOOD thing, as it give players a choice.

@Norbingel: I will be altering the way your skills (or stats) affect accuracy. But that may be a ways off yet.

Good work Arwen. I look forward to future releases.

Are there any plans to play with the spawn rates?

The wasteland seems quite empty at the moment.

In truth, I miss the MMM mod which dealt with all of that.

The fully modded FO3 was a masterpiece of craftsmanship by many fine craftspersons.

I just had one question Arwen, sorry if it's been asked a lot already. Are you planning on altering the amount of food/drink/sleep you need while playing in hardcoe? At present I find these a minor inconvenience in the vanila game and actually want them to mean something.

Thanks in advance.