Alright so I am making Icons for FWE, and I'd like to let you know of the progress.

Completed so far;

1HandPistol:

.223 Pistol
Desert Eagle
Grease Gun
Needler Pistol
P90
Pulse Pistol

2HandAutomatic:

G11 & G11e
H&K CAWS
Light Support Weapon
M60 Machine Gun
Pancor Jackhammer
Tommy Gun

1HandMelee:

Cattle Prod
Syringe Weapon
Wakizashi Blade

oh sorry, thought I had read EVE.

Yes EWE will conflict with FWE and there is no FOIP patch for this currently.

I just started a new game using FWE (along with MMM, FOOK, and WMK and a couple of others), and feel like I am either having some functionality issues or completely missing the point of this mod. The scenario is something like this:

After exiting the Vault, I went straight to Megaton, where I acquired Mr. Burke's silenced pistol and Lucas Simms's gear along with some extra ammo for each. I decided to head to the Springvale School to hopefully find some new weapons some junk to sell.

I always play stealthy characters, so I started my raid by creeping through the door on the left, sneaking behind a raider who was exiting the room across the hall and assassinating her with the silenced 10mm. I picked up her hunting rifle and did the same to the raider sitting at the table in the room that she walked out of.

On exiting the room, I saw a raider at the end of the hall who was coming toward me and would certainly see me, so I switched to the hunting rifle and took advantage of the sneak attack critical. In the unmodded game I would have expected this to bring at least one more raider down on me, and I figured that it would be a couple more with the increased spawns that come withe the FOIP-FWE-MMM patch, so I took cover in a dead-end room with my assault rifle.

But instead of a couple more enemies to take down, EVERY RAIDER left on the floor (at least 8 and possibly more) came after me.

Between the increased spawns, increased damage, and damage taken during VATS (which was basically suicide in this situation), I found this fight to be nearly (but not quite, at least after a few tries) un-winable, even on Easy, and was afterwards left with a disappointing, empty building to explore.

And so now I'm asking, is this supposed to happen? Is this mod really supposed to be that challenging? Is an entire area supposed to react this way to a single unsilenced shot?

Short answer: yes.

Slightly longer answer: You should probably spend some time with the various readmes included with FWE. First and foremost what springs to mind is the phrase "harsh and unforgiving" which I'm pretty sure features prominently in the readmes.

Specifically, you should probably read up on the sections pertaining to Arwen's integrated mod which changes sneak and enemy AI.

And, don't bother turning the difficulty down to Easy. It's much more fun and rewarding to leave it at default and just learn to play the game in a new way. That's what FWE provides after all.

gothemasticator

Well, thanks for letting me know.

I actually did read a great deal of the readmes that were included. I missed that one, though. It's just not what I expected, i guess. I was envisioning harsh and unforgiving combat, but on the same scale as it was before. You know, where I would need to take cover and be tactical when fighting two or three enemies. All that seems to happen is that I get swarmed by more enemies than I can deal with. Is there a way to disable the increased spawns, maybe?

This brings to mind a tactical assessment that might help you...and the opportunity to make a wish for something

MINES, baby...MINES. Mines are your best friend. Steal the one Moira has, Steal the two in Rivet city (these are bottlecap, of course)...go to minefield before going to Super Duper Mart...collect every mine you can.

Tactics: Besides liberally dispersing them in ineresting patterns around a hallway (I once set up a pattern that bounced a body up and down the hall), you can drop multiple mines on the same spot for a single huge kaboom.

You can ALSO drop mines while walking backwards or running away.

Now, for that wish list. Several things I'd like to see changed or added in either for fun or for stability/compatibility:

Kai, Mez, could you do something about the 'toss' range on mines to increase it? It's all well and good to drop them at your feet, but I'd like to be able to pitch one at least a good 6 to 10 feet from me. Mines like these wouldn't go off from being pitched around, unless you threw them down a building, or bashed them with a rock...they are proximity mines, which means high tech sensors, and also equipped with FoF, apparently.

I'm not even asking for a full 10 feet...just a little extra distance would be awesome and add to their tactical use.

There is also a mod out there that would add to the FWE tactics and toss the player a bone: A mod to make either all mines, or a new class of mines (not sure which) into remote detonation mines, complete with detonator control in your inventory!

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Also, I may have found two special purpose guns you might want to look at. I can't find the links just now because the Nexus is down, but here is what they are:

1 is a 9mm or 10mm pistol with a real world style 15 round clip, and is available in semi and full auto, if I'm remembering the mod right...

the other is the .700 express rifle (elephant gun baby!), guaranteed to blow anything it hits to kingdom come, but I think it has no scope, which would tend to balance it.

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Two other mods I would like to ask about whether you would consider getting permission to add are NPC's sleep tighter, and Stealth Kills Allowed (and its Pitt compatibility addon).

I've noticed issues with these mods if they aren't loaded in just the right place, and that place changes from mod list to mod list, so adding them to your main file would assure compatibility.

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Lastly, some info: I know you guys said that mastering FWE was not a good idea, but I ran Masterupdate on my entire modlist which includes FWE+MMM+WMK, and a bunch of modlets, and left out the Mez patch....and I ran for 3 hours without a crash...would still be running, but I stopped to relax and read the forums.

I'm not sure if this is easily doable without creating new animations. You could probably give it the grenade throw animation and thus be able to charge it, but it'll probably look wonky.
I might look into this sometime in the future.


Well you already have guns like the 10mm and Deagle that you can give bigger magazines or makes them automatic with mods. So no reason for a new semi automatic pistol at the moment, I think we got most bases covered, since the 10mm and Deagle are very versatile when it comes to upgrades. There are also some weapon mods out there that let you change the fire rates, but I found the implementation of all of them fairly wonky, required new hotkeys, or going into the the menu to change it etc...
I think it's just too much hassle when all a player has to do is either tap the mouse button once or hold the mousebutton...

And as Mez said, we're not implementing new ammo, and we're not looking to implement new regular weapons. The closest to what you want with your Elefant gun are the Lever rifles. They pack a whole lot of punch, especially the Lincoln Rifle.
Maybe I'll check in the future if there's some unique rifle that we could make a more powerful bolt action rifle(something like a scopeless sniper), but no promises.


I think Mez said somewhere that Stealth Kills Allowed touches factions in some wierd ways that makes compatbility very difficult.
NPC's tighter sleep is not compatible with FWE since we already have that change implemented in FWE.


We didn't say it's not necessarily a good idea. It's just that masterupdating FWE, MMM and WMK is completely irrelevant and doesn't actually do anything. But it also doesn't hurt(except for Juri station, which isn't accessable if you MasterUpdate FWE)


Just to clarify again what 5.0 is about:
This is the version where we tie up loose ends, give player more settings to customize and in general add some final polishes.
But gameplay featurewise there are no huge changes from 4.11. We are REALLY happy with 4.11, it's incredibly stable, has pretty much all major features we want implemented and is really balanced. FWE currently only has 6(!) known bugs and they are all incredibly minor.
The biggest thing about 5.0 is simply the menu, so players will be able to customize many settings to their own liking.
Everything else is mostly polish, polish and polish. Polish the menu icons, the models, the gamesettings, the installation, the readme, etc...
Might seem like minor things now, but all of it definitly adds up, to give FWE a nice fresh breeze.

Thanks Mez for this great mod and Happy b-day! I decided to mod the game several weeks ago and after some research, decided FWE sounded like a great 'base' mod (along with its companion mods like mmm). A whole new experience and very addictive. No issues so far. In vanilla, I would see a group of super mutants and say to myself 'Charge!'. Not so much now. One or two make me stop and think about tactics.

One suggestion if I may. I have found chucksteel's DC Interiors Project very immersive and was wondering if you had any plans on perhaps incorporating this into FWE? There are a few others that I would like to see bundled (like 'Return to Shady Sands', VERY impressive it was, but the advlt content probably rules it out) but the DC interiors seems like a great immersive fit.

Thanks again.

Last night I got my character to level 14.

I noticed the Olympian perk was grey'ed out (not available). My character has 9 Endurance, and like I say level 14, so I would think the requirements were met.

Am I missing something? For example, is Track Star required first? The only two listed requirements are level 9 and 7 endurance.

I wasn't going to take that perk at his level anyway but might at a future level, so thought I'd check.

It's a mod I like myself, but there's really no reason to include it in FWE. DC interiors(and Shady Sands or other such content mods) are all perfectly compatible with FWE.
We don't integrate any mod we like into FWE, we only integrate for very specific reasons, like compatibility or gameplay balance.

We're also not big on majorly changing or adding content in the world, as those can easily conflict with other mods out there.



Exactly Track Star is required(same like with the bullet time perks). This prevents lower tier perks to become obsolete, this is intended.

I'm back with another question!

I've searched for the information, and I swear I've read it somewhere before, but it isn't in any of the mods included readmes:

What are the bonuses garnered for each skill? The one I'm most interested in is melee weapons. While XFO removed the damage completely from skill increases (at least one of his plugins, he had another which only adjusted the damage and accuracy values to be less rpgish) I'm unsure where FWE stands. It seems to me damage has been removed entirely from skill increases, which is fine for most other guns, since accuracy is still incredibly important. However, I'm finding no inclination to waste my points in the melee weapons skill for a melee character if this is the case. Accuracy isn't exactly useful since your weapon doesn't appear to divert from its normal course. Unarmed has the unarmored skill tied in with it, so points in that are still useful. Is there some other bonus that isn't noted that would provide reason to actually tag it or take it?

if I mastered all my mods except FWE itself, would jury street work then?

And when you say cant get in...does the door not work...or does it crash you?

Okay use some common sense here
Why should we make an entire skill worthless?
So to answer your question no, Melee skill and unarmed skill both factor in greatly into the damage of their respective weapons and are anything but worthless.


I don't recommend this. You can't just "not" masterupdate FWE, because all non-updated mods will load deadlast, no matter where you put them in your load order.
So if you don't MasterUpdate FWE, you may also not update WMK, MMM, all FOIP patches and your merged patches.
Unless your'e savy with this, either update all your mods, or none of them.

And Jury street station crashes when you enter the subway, if you MasterUpdate FWE.

Yes, this should be fixed in the next version as well.

Oh I used common sense. Hence why I came asking the question.

I've tested the damage on a variety of melee weapons, and they are not affected in the least by my melee weapons skill. The only thing I can assume is that critical strike is increased, but I have no way to test that without logging a bundle of data. However, testing 30 melee weapons and 10 str vs. 60 melee weapons and 10 str there was not a single point of damage difference while wielding the police baton, knife, combat knife, cattle prod, or bat.

The issue came to my attention when equipping + melee weapons gear and not seeing any increase in the displayed weapon damage.

Sorry that's not caused by FWE then. You should see a difference already in the damage display in your inventory when you increase your skill(10-20 points should already be easily visible).

Were you looking at the displayed damage using the weapon scanner? Because that won't show a difference it's just reading the base damage from the weapon itself, and doesn't factor in skill or anything. We'll look into this more (Kai . . .see the dev log)

No, just the displayed damage in the inventory. It shows the strength factor so I assumed it would account for skills as well... Perhaps not? :confused:

I use Darn UI. Am fairly sure it's the same display for item stats shown in vanilla though.

As I said above, skill increases visibly change the damage of your melee weapons in the inventory. Doesn't matter if you use DarnUI or not.
You have another mod that is conflicting with our settings.

Decided to run a couple more tests, actually recording the stats this time straight from character creation. I'm seeing a difference, though it appears percentile based, hence more pronounced with higher damage weapons. Makes sense anyway since STR currently benefits faster weapons.

Small guns 33 vs. Small guns 43 had a 1 point damage difference with a 10 mm pistol.

Str 1 Melee Weapons 6 was 13 damage with baseball bat and 9 damage with the baton.
Str 9 Melee Weapons 40 was baseball bat 35 and baton 29.

Unless strength is percentile based, this shows there's an effect - 25 pounds leading to about half that in % increased damage. It appears my first conclusion was wrong, or perhaps I had some bugs that were related to previous saves that I have since wiped. I'll keep my eye on it, but ignore my comments for now please .

Cheers

And you're correct, weapon skill bonus damage, no matter if ranged or melee, is always percentile based.

I just got done with the flare, rock, and molotov icons yesterday. So woo for that!

Ok, FO3/FWE noob here from top of page 7 is back with different questions.

Realistic hunger/thirst is owning me. I have a house in megaton, but the purified water you get there is good for like 1 day supply and doesn't restock for a week. Do I just drink Nuke Cola and then have to pay the doctor to clear my RADs later? Does rad resistance help with food/drink radiation (and if not, why not)? I can see spending a lot of $ on food, since you don't want to eat stuff that gives you a lot of RADs like radroach meat. I can't seem to find anything to drink but Nuke Cola. Do I need to refill empty bottles with water from sinks and then buy a water purifier? If I active a sink will I get rads from it even if I don't drink?

I take a lot of damage in combat. Clearing out springvale school, for example, is really hard for a L3 character. Do you all usually sleep to heal (I have partial sleep healing enabled), or do you just spend a ton of $$ on stimpaks and the doctor? It seems like you'd run out of caps real quickly. Speaking of $, I fully loot all raiders so I can sell their gear. Is there any way to break down gear 'in the field' so I can get parts from it that are still valuable but weight less? I mean, sometimes it takes like 3 trips from battle site to vendor and back just to pick up everything and sell it. Also, at what point of repair/barter skill in FWE does it become cost effective to save spare weapons/armor and use them to repair your armor rather than just sell them and have someone else repair? My repair is ~40 but in limited experience I found it's better just to sell items for caps and then have Moira repair. Combining, say, two hunting rifles for repair hasn't repaired my gear very much.

Lastly... are quests/random mobs player-level adjusted or fixed level? Like, when I'm level 15 will the wasteland have things that hit much harder compared to when I'm level 3? I know this was a big mess in Oblivion, and mods such as OOO/FCOM changed things to fixed level. No idea how FO3 or its mods like FWE handle this.

Thanks for any replies and sorry for the rambling. I am really enjoying FWE so far.

EDIT: for the real reply:

I find that I need to use 1 Radaway about every two days to clear mysefl of rads from drinking/eating, and I've never had to purchase radaway for this purpose, there is enough lying around in loot, etc. Also, you can get the sanitizer from Moira's quest that signigicantly reduces the rads taken from food/drink. You can also purchase the water purifier, that can be used successivly to clearn your water . . . you can't "purify" it completely, but in conjunction with the sanitizer you only take somewhere like 5-7 rads.

We've also corrected a bug with the lead belly perk for the next version, which futher halves rads taken from food/drink.

If you don't want to run piles of gear around, I'd suggest trying out the Alternative Travel optional module, as you cna saddlebags for your motorcycle that let you ferry a ton of stuff around. Picking up a companion or two to help hump gear back home can also be useful. In FWE, you can repair items to exactly the condition of your repais skill. I don't know what the cut-off is for repairing on your own versus having someone else repair your gear. I've always gradually put points into repair and tend to avoid using the vendors, because I'd rather spend money on other things, like stimpaks and ammo.

The spawning isn't as bad as oblivion as a long-shot, and the default system works pretty well. As you get to higher levels, stronger enemies show up more and more, but the weaker enemies continue to have a chance to spawn. In addition, there are more hand-placed spawns and defined levels, making some areas harder / tougher regardless of your level. So FWE doesn't really touch the spawning mechanics too much (other than adding some diversity), because it works reasonably well as is.

And a visit to the outcast's a day keeps the rad-away... uh... coming to you... christ.