Fallout New Vegas Advanced Version 1.0
public release
Russell "Castle" Meakim Jr
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This is a Fallout New Vegas game play overhaul with a greater focus on game play over realism. Every module is optional at this point in time but playing with all of them active should give the full effect. Its still in somewhat early stages right now and I do want to do quite a bit more. This version should cover most of the more important issues I have with the game. I am open for all requests, comments, feedback so feel free to let me know what you think.

Stable, simple, and mod friendly!
Get the mod http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=36832

FONVAOOCHPR.esp
====>*hardcoe Mode* Needed!<====
Out of Combat hp auto-regen. This plugin is best used in combination with FO3AFoodDrinks.
When out of combat your hp will begin to refill automatically however the effect will cause hunger, dehydration, and sleep deprivation to increase at a faster rate.

FONVAFoodDrinks.esp
====>*hardcoe Mode* Needed!<====
Removes health regen from food.
Adjusts effects of Nuka Cola and sugary drinks.
Drinkable water sources, Hydra and cocktails are nerfed to a more balanced state.
Adjustments made to make cooked foods more useful than more common foods. Increased rads on all foods.

FONVASixHands.esp
====>*NVSE* Needed!<====
Special thanks to Behippo for writing half the mod with a simple example script >.>

In Fallout New Vegas there are one and two handed weapons.
With this mod active you are allowed to carry 6 hands worth of weapons before your max carry weight is reduced by 15wg for every hand over the 6 hand limit.

*Known issue, max carry weight does not update properly when in menu mode. Small issue that does not effect game play but it is worth noting.

FONVAChemsBooks.esp
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Chems, books, magazines and stimpaks now have weight.

FONVARareItems.esp
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Ammo, food, chems and stimpaks are much more rare.

FONVAHeavyAmmo.esp
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All ammo is twice as heavy baring missiles and energy weapon ammo.

FONVAHeavyMoney.esp
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Bottle caps, pre war money and faction currency now have a weight value. 10000 bottle caps will equal 10wg.

FONVARepairBarter.esp
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Cost of repair with NPCs is cheaper. ( This causes you to be more likely to spend money on repairs causing you to have less overall caps )
NPCs sell items for more.
NPCs buy items for less.

FONVADamage.esp ( This module is the one I feel is the weakest. In the future I think it should be replaced with a more robust damage overhaul )
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All weapon damage increased by 25%. ( Everything dies a little faster )
Head shots on human NPCs do more damage and are harder to obtain through vats.
Damage to the torso on human targets is reduced by 25% while also are easier to hit.

Enjoy!

I gotta say - giving things weight really changes the way I play the game! My first playthrough ended up with my character carrying around a bunch of drugs he never bothered selling because they weighed nothing - now, things are different!

Your "six-hands" mod seems like a pretty neat idea. However, it reminded me of http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=7531 - different concept, but surprisingly relevant to yours! How so? Think about it! If you only allow the player to have the weapons on their person before incurring a weight penalty, it'll add both realism and look good! Perhaps even with one-handed weapons, too - left and right holsters!

The main problem with this mod, however, is that it seems to work by turning weapons into apparel - which would likely account for the filesize! Furthermore, it would be rather incompatible with non-included weapons - rather worrying, to be sure! While Oblivion had plugins for changing NIF files around (NifScript, anyone?), they've yet to be posted - if that's even a possibility - to Fallout 3. Again, that's no good.

Naturally, I realise that my ideas may be more than a little far-fetched, but hey! I figure it was worth mentioning.

Haven't had a chance to actually play test this yet, but loaded it up in FNVEdit just to peruse things. A few initial thoughts...

-- You have a conflict between chems/books, and fooddrinks: both have hydra listed as an override

-- Totally personal opinion here, but 1.0 as a generic weight for almost all chems seems... "not quite right" to me. RadAway makes sense it would be heavy (basically an IV bag full of liquid), but in contrast Rad-X is just a pill - makes no sense for it to weigh so much. While "sense" isn't always the final determining factor in what works well with a game, IMO those weights are just "too much" on average. (Beyond just how many drugs you can carry, it also really shatters the "value per weight" ratio for drugs - obviously any weight added is going to change that a lot, but IMO drugs should still be pretty high value per weight... but an average of 20 per lb? That's what Cigarettes go for...) Again, just my opinion.

-- Suggestion for a future update to this mod: An activator item that brings up a menu, that allows you to set a multiplier on the food/h2o/sleep values added by OOCHPR. Again I haven't played with this yet, but just reading through the script to understand how you're doing this, I can see a common request you'll get over time will be people wanting to tweak those values up or down. Easiest way to do that IMO would be by adding a variable for each (food/h20/sleep) and multiplying each of the actual values by that - then set the variable with the menu. I would avoid doing a single variable, since I'm guessing that many people will view food/h20 rates in comparison with sleep to be quite different - seeing as how two of them essentially "cost you in resources" while the other "costs you in time/convenience".

-- I already use my own barter settings, so I probably won't put much time into repairbarter... but at a glance I'll say that I was very surprised at how extreme you change to repair costs was.


Overall good work though. I look forward to being able to actually play around with these some.

- DU

A mod that made you slower as you became heavier would be cool. So, like at a certain weight you were 100% speed, and as you carried more you became increasingly slower until you were 75% speed. The range could be even smaller, like 100 - 85, so as not to be punitive, but rather just to supply a sense of weight to player mobility beyond the existing framework of top speed/rifle speed/encumbrance speed. Instead it would be a spectrum of speeds instead of a three-speed framework.

Its definitely worth mentioning because it is a good idea. Though at this time I am unsure if I have the time or resources to do something along those lines.
This is especially true if I attempt to tackle the Overseer module in the near future. Dynamic difficulty system with random encounter support will take everything I have to attempt to pull off.




Ah ill fix that conflict right away, thanks for the heads up.

Also I will think about the weight values on drugs some more. They may actually be too heavy right now for what they are but I still need to make sure that other aspects of the game are not trivialized as a result of making rad away and radx too light weight. Ill look into it.

Ill have to keep the idea of allowing people to customize how expensive auto-regen is in mind. That is a very good suggestion.

On the repair barter note I have a strategy when it comes to finding the sweet spot with repairs. My goal is to find the point where repairs are just cheap enough where people will use npcs to repair far more often. With the way the game is currently balanced the number of repairs with more expensive items a repair will almost never happen unless its out of pure desperation. But if I can find a reasonable price and people use the repair npcs fairly often then it will have a greater effect on reducing the number of overall caps they have. Over the coarse of 100 hours of play time with cheaper repairs I think that you will be more likely to spend a larger number of caps on repairs than you would if you were to leave repair cost at default value. repair multiplier value will most likely be adjusted a little at a time until it reaches that point.

That is an interesting idea. It would encourage people to pack light rather than ride their encumbrance level all the time.

I see where you are coming from on that, but I somewhat disagree.

I admit, I might be odd, but I find myself going back to the Mojave Outpost to pay to have things repaired to 100% all of the time - even with the current pricing, and my own barter changes (more agressive than what you have even). But here is the thing -- I'm doing that even for my expensive energy weapons, because I'd rather pick up other copies of those weapons and hold onto them as vendor kibble - because they are worth more that way.

With sixhands... I'm not going to be picking up guns as vendor kibble anymore. So I am actually more likely than ever to use the equipment I find for repair... which actually means I'm less likely to use vendor repair at ANY price to be honest.


Still, I personally do not agree with the mentality that current repair prices are so high that I'd only use them out of pure desperation - but then again, even with aggressive barter settings, aggressive carry weight settings, etc... I'm still finding myself swimming in money (currently on playthrough #4, level 14, have purchased all of the implants I can get, upgraded all of my equipment to the max I can, spend over 10,000 caps on a "repair all" last night, and still have over 25,000 - without even turning in my alternate currencies) Reducing the price of repairs THAT drastically wouldn't have me spending more money on repairs, it would have me spending less money on repairs and keeping everything at 100% all the time anyhow. Using high wear-and-tear ammo would suddenly be a non-concern with the repairs being so cheap. (I forget what it was... but what, you changed the value from 2.0 to 0.1 or something like that? I haven't looked at how that works out in game, but does that translate to "in order to spend more money on repairs, I'd need to repair more than 20 times as often?)

Of course, the in-game economy will continue to be broken as long as there are vendors who will gamble (Caravan) away their entire store's worth of caps...

ohhh!
That is a damn good point! My opinion on the repair topic is officially swayed due to a plethora of good points.

On the comments section for the mod it was mentioned that a much more interesting way to go about this would be to make self repair harder to do. So in order to repair weapons the task could be a little more involved in some way thus making the prospect of paying full price for repairs a bit more likely. This seems like a better angle on this aspect of the game.

Heh... I'm glad my wall of text was more useful than annoying.


It is a challenging thing, IMO - as there are a lot of balance issues to take into account. Not the least of which being that you don't want to make the repair skill "too important" such that people feel that they are too gimped by not investing heavily in the skill.

That having been said, I very much like what was done in NV, making it so that you can repair all the way up to 100% without needing to have 100% repair skill to do so -- that does a wonderful job of relieving some of the stress of repair being such a "critical skill".

In this instance, trying to push more towards paying for repairs as a money sink... I'd say that reducing the amount repaired by using another item for parts would be the best way to focus IMO. Ie, if right now you repair 15% max with a repair skill of 50, change it so that you only repair 5% with a skill of 50 --- so the same end result is still possible, but unless you're finding tons of the same weapon, you're not going to keep your primary weapons in good working order etc.


...that having been said, as much as I appreciate the aspect of spending money on repairs... the economy in the game is so fundamentally broken that encouraging another money sink like that is really only going to go so far... *shrug*

(Of course I say that, and promptly go back to the design work on my own mod, which will be adding an additional sizeable money sink as well) *grin*

I really appreciate the feedback btw
So here is what I am looking at right now as solutions for repair and chem weights. Following some really good suggestions.

Repair:
A repair skill of 50 allows for roughly 6% repair down from 16%
Cost of repairing at npcs is 0.90 up from 0.10
Repair kits now repair for less and are more Valuable ( Careful to make sure kits are more efficient than repairing with multiple weapons )

Notes: I am still on the fence with making repair costs go above the value of the item so I went with 10% less than buying a new item. What do you think about that because too me it seems kind of strange. Am I just thinking about this wrong?

Chem weight:
I am going to take a good look at weight values in FWE for most things and use that as a base for FONVA.

On that note I realize gambling is kind of broken right now. Its possible I can make a FONVAGamble.esp to try and bring gambling mini games and such down to a less game breaking state.

Glad they are appreciated. I know my opinions can sometimes come across a bit "strong", which some misinterpret as my trying to be overbearing -- not the case. This is your mod, I'm just voicing my thoughts and opinions on it. In the end, if I didn't think you had some awesome ideas to begin with, I wouldn't bother.


I would suggest not dropping the amount that repair kits do by as much - maybe only a 33% reduction or so, combined with the increase in value.


*shrug* In a game sense, you might be right. In a real world sense, there are all sorts of things that cost more to repair to brand new than it would to just "buy a new one" - it is after all a world full of disposable products that we live in, right? Keeping in mind that a new item might not always be available to purchase for caps anyhow...

Besides: What is your real goal here? A money sink? If so, I don't see a problem with repairs being a bit more expensive, such that a player ends up discarding/selling his weapon that is down to 5%, and just buying a brand new one - the caps are still being spent...


It should be a starting point at least. I've never been one for the big alteration mods, as many things like this I just tweak on my own. (In the end, I still plan on using my own - I just point out that 1lb for all seems 'wrong' just as my own $0.02 for your own benefit, as opposed to it being something I plan on using)


Personally I think the biggest thing is to simply get the vendors who play Caravan (three that I am aware of) to not bet out of their store. Too easy to exploit (buy their whole inventory, gamble back all of your caps, then keep what you want of their inventory and sell the rest off to a non-gambling vendor). Making the other caravan players have gambling funds that don't renew would also help (ie, No-bark has a ton of money that you can gamble off of him every three days...)


In other news: I had the chance to play around with OOCHPR some. So far it looks pretty groovy, but IMO the healing on it is WAY to fast -- like at least two to three times as fast as it should be, if not more. For my own playing with it right now, I'm probably just going to encapsulate the whole meat of the script with something along the lines of...

if timer==5  (main meat of your script)  set timer to 0else  set timer to timer + 1

...and then see how 5 works, vs other numbers. In the end, you might want to consider adding something like that to the list of "things that would be groovy to give the user control over" with a user configurable parameter. Either way as it stands right now, the healing just feels far too fast for me. Doing it the way I outline above won't change the ratio of 'regenerated HP' vs 'fod/h20/slp values added', so I should still be able to get a feel for how you intended it on that side of things... just a bit slower.

(As it is right now, the only reason to use a stimpack is to avoid the food/water/sleep need - since the healing is so fast, you're almost certain to be healed by the next time you get into a fight anyhow - unless you're in a really target dense area. By slowing it down, you reintroduce the possibility of taking a stimpack because not only do you not want to have to take a nap soon, but also because you just flat out can't wait around that long for you to heal)

Ill have to try with slower regen in place. The inspiration for this system came from modern first person shooters like COD where your hp regens very quickly. ( On that note YaY I placed some props and terrain for at least one Black Ops mp map and the games out today! lol ) So anyway I think you have a really good point in that slowing the regen down by about 2x might add a little more depth to the system. Whats the rush, this game isn't THAT fast paced...

Imo the best way to slow it down might be to simply reduce the speed that the script is cycled in the quest menu. its set to 3 seconds but it takes two cycles before the regen effect begins to kick in. Raising that to 6 from 3 should make it so you have a 12 second delay for the first regen tic and 2 more seconds every additional tic. Ill try with that set and see if it slows things enough then maybe give 8 a shot and see how that feels.

As far as repairs I think I am willing to give 1.5 repair mult a try now that self repair is much harder to do. I kind of like the idea that upkeep on gear and weapons being high enough that I wont always want to use my best weapons and gear for everything.

edit: On that note I wish I could figure out a good way increase damage and get some increased spawns into the game. :/

Version 1.1 will be up sometime today with various fixes and updates.

Awesome, I'll be waiting for the new version for my next game play.

Ah, I hadn't bothered to look at the quest side of it for timing.

What I did last night seemed to work fairly well, at least for me: I made three main changes.

1) I put in the wrap around If statement that I mentioned, executing on a value of 2 -- which essentially slows it to 1/3rd normal pace (first run: 0, so add 1... second run: 1, so add 1... third run: 2, so run the main script and reset to 0)

2) I changed the regen acceleration... at one point you have something like "set regen to regen + acceleration / 2"... I changed that "/ 2" to "/ 5" to slow down the acceleration even more.

3) I pulled down the max regen rate from 60, down to 10 (also changed the single line that healed 20 final points once the actor's hp% came back as 1).

The end result gave me slow but noticable healing -- making me want to pop a stimpak not just to avoid being overly hungry/thirsty/tired, but also to restore more health sooner just so that I wasn't walking around (in Cazador territory) with such low health.


While I certainly understand the appeal of a healing system that works like CoD... IMO that is more appropriate in a game like CoD - without the same roleplaying aspects, not to mention resource management. Also remember that you don't want to completely steamroll the "Solar Powered" perk, or the regenerating implant you can get from the clinic --- with really fast healing, neither of those really do anything at all. I could notice the regenerating implant as I was testing last night, on top of the healing from FNVA - didn't test with Solar Powered, but I'm guessing it would be much the same.



I haven't looked on nexus since the other day - have you released a version with the new repair numbers that you mentioned? I'd like to give that a whirl myself as well...



For increased damage... that's a tough nut to crack, since all the aspects of DT makes the balance issues a lot more complex than they were in FO3.

For increased spawns... I'd say the best thing to do is focus on the items already on your plate, and wait for Martigen's $dayjob to stop monopolizing his life.

I see, what you did with the regen speed though reducing the max per tic down to 10 might also need a reduction in how quickly hunger/thirst/sleep are increased per tic. On paper that sounds pretty brutal in its current state. But I definitely see how it was too fast before and it needs to be slowed down.

So far updating the quest speed from 3 to 6 seems about right and 8 seems too slow. ( Seems to do the same thing as adding the If statement if I am not mistaken )
Slowing regen acceleration seems valid
Capping max regen per tic to 10 might be too brutal without reducing hunger/thirst/sleep per tic ( Ill give it a shot before I make up my mind on that. Maybe its just fine )

I want to try and get a new version with these tweaks up tonight if possible and see how that goes. Six Hands has a couple bugs I want to address this week, mainly the fact that it does not account for multiple of the same weapon and it counts detonators when it should ignore them.

With these changes combined with a good damage overhaul, improved followers and MMM in the mix this could end up being a pretty good mini overhaul.

It is brutal on the "needs" counters... but it kinda depends on how brutal you do or do not want to be. At the slower heal rate, you have plenty of time to use a stimpak or two, or pop some healing powder etc.

Think of it this way: a vanilla purified water heals what... 10 hp total? So one tick worth... yet it gets rid of a lot more than one tick worth of extra thirst.

True that same tick is also making you more hungry and tired... but look at a bighorner steak: it would heal you for 20 hp I think? Yet feed a LOT more than two ticks worth of healing/hunger...


Obviously it is up to you how you want to do it. I recognize that I like my game particularly harsh in some ways. *shrug*

Actually I have been testing your suggestions and I feel like the values feel pretty good. It doesn't discount other forms of hp regeneration and causes you to pay more attention to your hp more. The choice to pop a stimpak is very relevant now especially when you consider that how much hunger/thirst/sleep is lost per tic accelerates at lower hp values. I made some adjustments to reduce the overall brutality by giving the largest penalty a smaller piece of the hp percentage pie. If you are below 40% hp I strongly suggest a stimpak and if your damage is above 85% then the cost is relatively low.

I am going to do a bit more testing for a couple hours and tweak settings then I should have a new version up shortly after that baring catastrophe.

edit: On that note I want the game to be harsh as well. Just harsh enough where all existing game mechanics require reasonable amounts of attention to survive.