In the order of your comments, Kai
-For what it's worth, I'm not askng for any changes to be made to anything, including damage. I'm not sure if you thought I was, but it seems so. I was trying to explain something I changed so that people could better understand my perspective.
-I'm certainly surprised to hear they hit less than in vanilla, considering it seems like they're not missing at all. But if you say it's so, I'll try to wrap my mind around it.
-The end result of most of my combats is not crippling, it's death. I don't see much crippling. =/ Perhaps I should start thinking in terms of crits instead of headshots. All I'm trying to do is understand the "lots of damage" part. Both would explain it.
-Regarding my followers shooting compared to mine: I cannot hit with every one of my shots. I'm probably hitting with half or so (I'm not sure how to be more specific). This includes me crouching and pointing my gun at a dot on a wall. I'm not scared, I'm not crippled, I'm not moving. My shots will hit NEARISH the spot on the wall. My followers go bang/bang/bang and enemies fall down.
-For what it's worth, enemies most often see me before I see them, at least outdoors. If I turned the red marker off on my compass that indicates enemies I can't imagine what I would do. Also, my followers tend to spot enemies before I do. Maybe I should get a soundcard and turn ON my monitor?

I can't conceive, at all, the differences between our play experiences.
You're barely armored and using a pistol. I'm power armored and using whatever hi-powered automatic I have the most ammo for at the moment.
You rarely die. I rarely die unless there's ANY shooting enemies around. Then I'm a save/restore fanatic.
You kill enemies before your followers fire. My followers kill enemies before I can see them. If there are multiples I'm still looking around for where they're coming from while hopefully dogmeat and the Paladin help me figure out where they are. If any of them choose me over my followers, I probably die.

Unanswered question: In FWE, does the AI deal with weapon skill and weapon spread modifiers?

Thanks so much for the response. If it helps, I'll pay my respects: I love FWE. There is clearly a phenomenal amount of work involved already PLUS you guys respond so often and so thoroughly in these forums, giving better tech support than is usually received for nearly all purchased products. I have great appreciatioin for what you do for free that helps so many people.

Hello again. (*bleep*!)

I just thought I should post back to thank you, again. It was just the Scope HUD model that I had forgot and now everything's working wonderfully. So, thank you, again. :3

Oh, and in an attempt to contribute; I find myself with concussion rather often, but then my head is the only part of me poking out from behind a rock often enough, or I forget to stand up again, when things find me and start shooting, and naturally their fire is drawn with their eyes to my spectacular hair style. *nod nods*

RE: Combat Balance

I recently went through Broken Steel's communication relay station part of the DLC, where you have to fight lots of enclave powered armored troops in a pretty tight corridor. I went through it wearing the chinese stealth suit (somewhat a mistake), and had 2 brotherhood guys following me for mosy of the way (until they were killed). Other than the stealth suit, I was carrying a mod'd chinese assault rifle, A3-21's plasma rifle, a pulse rifle, and my trusty 14mm pistol. I was level 17 at the time.

In general, I found that with the stealth armor I could take 1-3 hits (depending on location) before dying, and this from plasma rifle fire. Not even all the headshots I took were an automatic death (but close!). I did die maybe 2-3 times, but I was hit and reduced to very low health (requiring me to stims back to close to full health) closer to a dozen times. I wasn't being very sneaky at all either.

Overall, as long as I was paying close attention to what was going on and kept the initiative in fights, there was definetly a good amount of "back and forth" to the combat. Sometimes I would sprint away around the corner to use stims or chems to keep me going (gotta love morphine) while the enclave was chasing after me. The fight was only ever "binary" if I did something really stupid (like running full speed around a corner) or I got a lucky line of sight on a lone enclave trooper. Otherwise, I felt there was a fair amount of back-and-forth envolved in combat.

Regarding non-player accuracy: Min accuracy of most weapons has been reduced from the vanilla game. The accuracy gamesettings have been tweaked to that skill is more important than determining accuracy. The changes are such that with low skill / weapon condition, you're accruacy is considerably worse than in vanilla fallout (so I'd say guys like raiders are probably worse off). At the highest skills / weapon condition, the accuracy is nearly the same as vanilla fallout (might be a little higher or lower, can't remember). In addition, I've tweaked an AI gun wobble value so that the AI is slightly less accurate even than normal, to partially make up for the fact that there is 1) more enemies than you, 2) weapons do considerably more damage, 3) the enemy isn't limited in their ammo supply.

But, in direct answer to your question, I don't have any verification of what the formulas are for AI accuracy. They are most likely something a little different from how the player's accuracy is handled. All I really have to go on is playtesting, and in my experience the above paragraph corroborates with the in-game experience for me.

Anyway, this is a good discussion, so please share your thoughts!

Actually Mez, this just made me think of something. Due to the way tagged skills work, NPCs all have a good deal higher skills in FWE(a T3 Raider for example has 80ish small guns instead of 60ish).
I tested and verified this, their tagged skills are much higher than in vanilla.

coooooooooooooll beans.

To be honest neither Kai's or Celt's gameplay experience ring true with me, but Mez's description seems about right.

My hunting rifle is modified with a scope and silencer. The scope works but the silencer doesn't (the gun makes the normal loud unsilenced sound and attracts attention). I have a sniper rifle modified with a silencer and it makes a nice quite sound. I'm playing with all DLC, FWE, WMK, MMM, and EVE. I'm using a merged patch. I checked the weapons records with FO3Edit, there are only two occurances of the WMKWeapHuntingRifleSCSI record (I think that's the correct Editor ID) and they both show the sound being silent. I even tried giving my player a scoped and silenced hunting rifle with the console Additem command but that gun makes the same loud gun shot sound. I'm not sure exactly when I noticed this problem, it was sometime after the 4.1 upgrade. What I find strange is that the modified sniper rifle work properly but the modified hunting rifle doesn't. I know that I should post my load order my I don't have that available at this time.

Thanks for that Jigun, I'll take a look at the WMK foip patch when I get home. With nearly a thousand weapon records to work with, there is bound to be a minor slip up or two

Let me start by just saying that I really like this mod and that it's been generally very smooth for me so far. However, I've had one issue with the Primary Needs part, for which hopefully someone can offer a solution.

I started out letting the default settings go, but at the defaults I thought that eating didn't reduce the 'hunger' enough so I changed the Hunger Condition Multiplier to a lower value. From what I understood, this would just mean that when something was eaten it would reduce the hunger level shown on screen by a greater amount. But there were two results: one, my hunger number took an immediate jump (about a second after exiting the menu); two, the number started to increase at a faster rate. I then ate some food, but the hunger value didn't drop by the greater proportion I anticipated from the change in the variable mentioned above. I tried then setting all the multipliers to one, as mentioned in the readme, in order to see what the PN defaults were like, but again got some screwy jumping around in the values on my HUD. I have no other food, hunger, etc. mods running. Anyway, it seems to be rather finicky and doesn't respond in a straightforward way to sliding the modifying variables. I disabled the mod for now, but actually would prefer to keep it running if I were only able to reign it in.

Anyone have any ideas? Have I overlooked something?

Jigun, could you maybe check in your fallout folder for fx\wpn\wmk\wpn_subsonicrifle_fire_3d.wav? That's the sound the hunting rifle uses, which is different from the sniper rifle(it uses the standard silenced 10mm fire). It should actually be a fairly quiet sound, maybe you have a sound replacer installed that changed that?

EDIT: Here's a http://rapidshare.com/files/314891757/wpn_SubsonicRifle_fire_3d.wav.html how it should sound like.

Kai,

I'll check when I get back home and post my findings. I listened to the wave file that you uploaded and it doesn't sound at all like what I'm hearing.

Actually Jigun scratch that. I just checked and what I uploaded there was a sound from the sound replacer I am using. I just listened to the regular WMK silenced rifle .wav and it actually is really effing loud in comparison. So not really an FWE issue but one from WMK...
There are only two weapons that use this, the lever action and the hunting rifle. In light of this I think I'll just switch them over to the default 10mm silenced sound in some future version.

Also in case you want to know, the sound replacer I'm using is http://fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=627 and is quite amazing, liked it A LOT better than Realistic Gunshot Sounds.

please dont nerf the damage......im the opposite...........i think the weapons should be TWICE as powerful.

i havent noticed the instant dying at the beginning and i play on hard and very hard difficulty. although to be honest i only play on low leels for abit before i up my character via console to level 30 (i dont believe in levelling, but thats a whole nother argument).

Hi... I'm on my first playthrough with FWE and I have to say that it's the best Fallout experience I got so far. This mod really makes you think about what you do. You have to develop tactics, use cover and lay traps to have a chance against a group of raiders and it's real fun! Tank you for that!

I also have a small bug to report. The first thing I wanted to have was a small player home in the wasteland, so I created a small ranch on top of a hill in Springvale. Not much, but it has some containers, a bed and a workbench. All I need. Yesterday I noticed the following bug: The workbench in my house is placed very close to an exit door. When I exit the cell with the automatic Workbench Bonus (Repair +10) enabled, I still have the bonus when I travel out in the wastes. This way I can get a permanent boost of +10 points to my repair skills, what really feels like cheating to me.

Besides of that.. great mod! :goodjob:

Hello,

I have an issue with my companion (Charon, to be exact): he is WASTING ammo.

An example to consider: we meet a lone ghoul stalker in some metro station, one shot = one kill. And then some 3-4 shots JUST TO BE SURE, that it is really dead... I mean - COME ON... what kind of idiot wastes ammo like that? On a wimpy smelly DEAD ghoul... Is there a way or some FWE compatible mod to fix such excessive ammo usage? Or should companions use melee weapons?

This is no bug(and not related to FWE really). It simply takes a moment for NPCs to register your dead. Ever noticed how NPCs dont stop firing immidiatly after they killed you? Same thing.

I've just recently come back to the game and after putting together FWE with most of the recommended mods I noticed today when I leveled up that I could take my Energy Weapons skill (obviously using energy weaps this run through) past 100. Now, I thought that was odd and started looking through the readme's as I couldn't recall seeing any mention of skills having a higher cap and I cannot find any mention of this. I'm assuming this is normal then but brings me to the question: what's the new cap? 200?

I'm new to FWE too. But in the descriptions of perks that increase skills it says they will allow increase by the amount of the perk above 100. For examle, Gun Nut gives you a +5 in small guns, so you can level up small Guns to 105, as I understand it. You probably took an energy weapon related perk, like Cyborg.

Yeah, I know it's not a FWE bug and I know this behavior was present before I even tried FWE The reason because I'm writing here is that FWE modifies companions (I'm not sure if "a lot" is appropriate), so this mod I am/was seeking must to be compatible with FWE

Anyway - this moment, can it be made shorter? Or is that built in and unmodifiable behavior?

I just double checked and I have no perks that increase Energy Weapons other than having tagged it when I created the character. I re-loaded a save right before levelling up and after allocating every single point it let me skill up EW to 124 (all I had the points for).

EDIT: Ok, just loaded up the game and used the console to advance my level a few times and now I definitely suspect something has gone awry... I allocated every point I could into Energy Weapons every time I advanced my level and after taking it as far as level 17 I was able to take my EW's to 450'ish.

Here's my load order in case something stands out:

Fallout3.esmUnofficial Fallout 3 Patch.esmAnchorage.esmThePitt.esmBrokenSteel.esmPointLookout.esmZeta.esmCALIBR.esmCRAFT.esmFO3 Wanderers Edition - Main File.esmMart's Mutant Mod.esmUnofficial Fallout 3 Patch - Operation Anchorage.espUnofficial Fallout 3 Patch - The Pitt.espUnofficial Fallout 3 Patch - Broken Steel.espUnofficial Fallout 3 Patch - Point Lookout.espUnofficial Fallout 3 Patch - Mothership Zeta.espDarNifiedUIF3.espDarNifiedUIF3_FWE.espGalaxyNewsRadio100[M].espCALIBRxMerchant.espCRAFT - Activation Perk.espStealthboy Recon Armor - CRAFT.espFO3 Wanderers Edition - Main File.espFO3 Wanderers Edition - DLC Anchorage.espFO3 Wanderers Edition - DLC The Pitt.espFO3 Wanderers Edition - DLC Broken Steel.espFO3 Wanderers Edition - DLC Point Lookout.espFO3 Wanderers Edition - DLC Mothership Zeta.espFO3 Wanderers Edition - Followers Enhanced (BrokenSteel).espFO3 Wanderers Edition - Optional Worn Weapons.espFO3 Wanderers Edition - UFP Support.espWeaponModKits.espWMKAA12Shotgun.espWeaponModKits - FWE Master Release.espWeaponModKits - FWE Optional Worn Weapons.espWeaponModKits - OperationAnchorage.espWeaponModKits - ThePitt.espWeaponModKits - BrokenSteel.espWeaponModKits - PointLookout.espWeaponModKits - Zeta.espMart's Mutant Mod.espMart's Mutant Mod - Increased Spawns.espMart's Mutant Mod - Feral Ghoul Rampage.espMart's Mutant Mod - Natural Selection.espMart's Mutant Mod - No Wanamingos.espMart's Mutant Mod - DLC Anchorage.espMart's Mutant Mod - DLC The Pitt.espMart's Mutant Mod - DLC Broken Steel.espMart's Mutant Mod - DLC Point Lookout.espMart's Mutant Mod - DLC Zeta.espMart's Mutant Mod - FWE Master Release.espOwned!.espFellout-SOTD.espFellout-Anchorage.espFellout-BrokenSteel.espFellout-PointLookout.espMerged Patch.espTotal active plugins: 57Total plugins: 57

This is no bug, and is also not related to FWE at all.
This is simply a feature built into Darn's UI latest version. However note that many skills actually don't have an affect when you level them past 100, unless you install a mod like Wasteland Mastery. Weapon skills might be an exception in that case, as they are a multiplicator for a few things (like spread and damage), but I'm not entirely sure on that. So either way, just get Wasteland Master from Nexus.

That would explain it then. Thanks very much for clearing that up for me Kai Hohiro!

I've started a new game with the latest version and I'm experiencing an odd bug with the explosives skill. The damage from grenades increases normally from a skill level of 0 to 19, but then at 20 it increases by an irregular amount (double what it was at 19 when examining frag grenades). Damage increases at a normal rate from 20 until a skill level of 89 where it decreases by a large amount. Going from 89 to 100 increases damage at a normal rate, but at 100 the damage is less than it would be at 88. Not really sure what is causing this or if anyone else is having the problem.

Despite this, the latest version is fantastic! Nice job to everyone involved! :foodndrink:

In the original game followers had unlimited ammo so extra shots didn't make a difference. Unfornuately, the game's AI hasn't changed with regards to ammo use and I don't know if that aspect can be tweaked. Certainly you can have them just use melee weapons but then they'll take a lot more damage and require more stimpak. Either way followers are a drain on your resources.

I personally never use followers, you are after all the Lone Wanderer.

another little thing, surely a question already answered but I didn't find where. a mod that changes NPC faces, hair, eyes etc how much does it conflict with FWE(+ MMM and WMK)?
A. no conflict at all
B. insignificant conflicts
C. game-breaking conflicts
D. ctd

a single letter answer is enough for me