I'm looking for feedback on the mod I'm currently working on, to see if there's much interest, or any suggestions / direction.

Here's what the mod aims to do:
(1) Unequip armor from the player if it breaks. All armor types are supported, including shields, tail armor, and multi-slot (cuirass+greaves etc.) armor. (complete)
(2) Replace broken armor with the highest value clothing that is in the player's inventory, if it's the right fit. I.E. a highly enchanted shirt might replace a broken cuirass. (completed, currently testing)
--Robes and other multi-slotted clothing would automatically equip too, if their value is > the value of the best shirt+pant combination, but only when the Greaves are broken and no Cuirass is being worn. If the Cuirass breaks after the Greaves, you only get a shirt and pants. I thought I should limit scenarios where a player puts on a pair of pants then has that replaced by a robe later - I figured most people wouldn't mind if a shirt was replaced by a robe though.
(3) Make the strength of enchantments on armor dependent on the armor's health. For example, a Resist Magic 20% enchanted cuirass might only effectively have Resist Magic 5% when it's about to break. (Similarly, armor with 125% health would get a small boost to their enchantments.)
(4) Do the same thing as (3) but on weapons and staves - either the Soul Gem capacity, or strength of the enchantment, would scale with weapon condition. Opinions?
(5) Make all of the above effective on NPCs too. <--I'm going to need help on this one, it's beyond my current coding capability!
(6) Nerf armor and weapon repairing abilities in the field. In wilderness/dungeons, armor & weapons can only be repaired to 50% (75% if you're an expert or master Armorer). An anvil must be close by to repair to the full amount. This effectively means you can only fully repair while you're in a town.
(7) The Dwemer Forge (Battlehorn Castle) allows repairs to 150% if you're an Expert or Master.

Thoughts?

These are great ideas!

Check with Tejon about adding the same effects to NPCs. He will probably know what's what, since some of his mods do similarly.

You might be interested in TheNiceOne's Useful Houses mod. It has repair bonuses/penalties based on being in an owned house.

gothemasticator

Thanks! I haven't checked out Useful Houses or any of Tejon's work...I'll have to take a look.

I like it...go for it.

One of my main concerns in building this mod is that it maintains game balance. Personally I'm not a big fan of mods that unbalance the game or make it very easy, regardless of how impressive they are. I've had feedback in other threads that the penalties I've included in the above schematic are too strong, and am interested in your thoughts.

Equipment enchantment nerfing: the enchantment's strength varies from 20% at 0 health to 140% at 150% health. For a Resist Magic 20 enchantment, this would mean Resist Magic 4 to Resist Magic 28.
Weapon enchantment nerfing: Same scale. A weapon with a Grand Soul gem would go from 320 charges at 0 health to 2240 charges at 150% health.

I've also tossed around the idea of forcing a player to Wait if they do repairs (the length of Waiting dependent on how much repairing they do)...that way you can't repair all of your armor and weapons in effectively no time.

If you're worried about penalties being too harsh, you could make two (or three) versions of the mod - identical except for the penalty or bonus numbers. That would give users a choice. My personal favorite thing to find in mods is a configurable .ini file. If you could figure out how to make the bonuses and penalties manageable from an .ini, I'd think that would be great. You can set the default to what you think is best balanced, but still offer the user a choice.


I'm not a fan of time passing as a necessity. Problem I see is that some quest stages are time dependant. So, if repairing caused me to wait for a period of time that has caused me to miss an appointment, I'll just end up waiting again directly after. That's not fun for me. On the other hand, I don't give a fig newton for immersion, so if people thought the forced waiting was immersive I couldn't argue with them. Once again, if there was a toggle for that feature in the .ini file, all parties could be satisfied.

Having said all that, I think your approach is great. Very rpg-ish to tie one stat into another. It also makes weapon condition matter more. Thus more strategic thinking involved. More stats to roll around in my head when making decisions. That for me is the core of the appeal of rpgs.

gothemasticator

Thanks for the feedback so far! I'll definitely take it all under consideration.

I've posted a VERY early version of this mod on TESNexus - look for BFG_Enhanced_Armory. So far, only the first two items are implemented.
(You would have thought those would have been easy to code, but the multi-slot armor gave me fits!)