As we all now informed, the all important HP value of dweller is accumulated according to Endurance on level up. What do you think about such system?


I know that some action RPG games use such accumulative HP progression on level up, But such games have only small number of character that player should track and manage their level progression and they clearly shows current numerical HP value of the character or enemies in question.


Is such accumulative HP system applicable to this non-RPG game (construction/management/ simulation/tycoon genre) of game with many dwellers and no numerical HP display?


We cannot tell HP value of individual dweller. And it is near impossible to track all individual dweller and their level up history and HP.


All we see is current level and value of SPECIAL. So I think that it is reasonable that either current max HP value of dwellers is displayed numerically or HP is not accumulative but proportional to current value of displayed level and Endurance or whatever attribute.


Using accumulative HP progression on level up system and not displaying its current HP value is example of very contradictory and bad game design. It is hiding essential game information from player , driving player intentionally to wander in the dark, vast wasteland without provisioning weapon, outfit and without food, water and compass. IMHO, it is very bad game design that should be abolished.

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I really like the current HP system. But as already mentioned: It is the worst method of implementation you can imagine.

• A dweller's details view with all S.P.E.C.I.A.L. values


• Some information in the Survival Guide Help about the importance of training before levelling up


• Prevent calculating additional attribute points based on the outfit

Yeah, something that Bethesda underestimated is that players want several things from any game they like:

1-. Information

2-. Inner workings and calculations made

3-. Ease of use

Most players are info-holics. They whant to know exactly how the game works to min-max to their hearth's content. Data, numbers, formulae... all is welcome and players will find any mean to to obtain this info if the game doesn't provide it easily. Players want to know HP numbers, damage dealt, chances to succeed on a wasteland event depending on they SPECIAL value, how resource room timers are calculated... there's a lot of data that's missing from this game, and people wants that data.

Max HP value is THE most important info of the dweller. Overseer can manage Vault better with only knowing HP value of dwellers, but without knowing their level or SPECIAL info, than other way around.


HP value of the dweller is single the most important info that vault overseer should know and always aware about the given dweller. Hiding such essential and critical info from overseer is almost deceiving player of this game. Player will play this game without knowing the most relevant and essential game playing info. It is exemplarily bad game design.


Just imagine playing Diablo ARPG game (from Blizzard) without displaying max HP value of player character and enemies. (only show relative current health percent (the red orb)) And you have 100-200 of such player characters to manage in a game.

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I disagree. Most people on these forums sure. Most fallout(actual games) players sure.

This casual game? Not so much.

Casual players came out of the woodwork for this one. When I complained about some aspect of the game on facebook church ladies started agreeing with me and telling me about their little dwellers and how cute they look in formal wear.

My fiance told me about her co-workers playing it and they aren't what I'd consider gamers at all either.

In short my jaw dropped to the random assortment of people this game appealed to.

I don't think the game is quite suited to them in the endurance-hp dept.

The min-maxers would love to just see a readout of the hp values numerically.

The casual crowd would likely just get lost in that information. For them it would just be better if the hp upgraded when endurance raised.

I don't have a problem with the system as is though. I just wish it were explained from the get go.

It does not take geek to want to know essential infos like the HP value of dweller. Even the church lady who plays FOS will feel like knowing the HP value of the dwellers. For such casual crowd like the lady, accumulative HP progession is too much geeky concept to swallow easily.


So, I suggest dev should do:


1) Display numerical value of HP of dweller in plain and obvious manner.


2) Optionally, remove accumaltion on level up mechanism for HP calculation. HP will be scaled depending on current level and Endurance value only. It may be non-linear, though.

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I think you're assuming your own common knowledge is common even in casual players.

The church lady likely doesn't even know what the acronym HP means. I doubt she'd know what it was if you called it a health point.

Well, while there will be a limit on how much info each player wants, salmost ALL players will want some information to be content.

Casual players will not like all data?. Most true, of course, but they'll probably want numeric HP values; and, once they get those numeric HP values, they'll want to see damage numbers. and, if possible, they'll also want to see success rates for wasteland events... and maybe nothing more, but even casuals will want info up to a certain amount.

And this only if they stay casual; if they actually like the game, then they'll want to start digging into the game, they'll want to optimize their vaults... and then they'll want more info so they can perform those steps.

Since this game is actually an AFK game, that requires some degree of continuity, most casuals will get bored after some time and move along. The players actually liking the game and wanting to load it day after day are the ones that will most probably stay. Thus, every player will want a certain amount of info, and the more they play, the more they'll want.

Talk about projecting your own knowledge set and mindset...

Do you really think casuals understand that checks are being made in the wasteland? Or that they just go out there and find stuff before coming back. That entire concept is lost on them.

My fiance told me the girl she talked to was cycling every dweller through her diner so that they could all eat before going to work in the water and power plants. She then left the diner empty while they worked for the day. All her dwellers were at 50% health and unhappy as heck.

That's the kind of player I'm talking about. Damage values and acronyms like HP are completely foreign concepts.

I also reject the notion that casual players drop off like flies. Did they for Farmville? Candy Crush? Those games are still plowing on and successful. And do you see large strategy communities centering around them as they "thirst for knowledge" on the game that they spend time on?

I don't think you're quite in the mindset of a casual player. You're still promoting your own mindset or projecting it on them thinking that it's an inevitable outcome of playing a game. Which is a bad place to be when designing a game for casuals.

I dont think so. Even casual games like The Sims ( from EA/Maxis ) that such lady will like to play has some vague idea like hunger, thirst, sanitary, toilet values. Health value is generic-enough concept univesal to most casual games involving death of playing character. The concept of health or score of desirable goodness of character state is so generic that even such lady will have no problem to understand it.


Health point is much simpler and easier to understand concept than S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat or weapon damage range concept of FOS.

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http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/34300000/The-Sims-3-screenshot-the-sims-3-34378860-1600-1200.jpg

You see any gaming acronyms or fractional numbers on this user interface?

Anything like 110/250 HP?

Thanks for providing the example to refute your point though.

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The sims has no concept of character level. All character has same health (even baby) so no need of such fractionsl number. If health point is not need to FOS, the very concept of level should be abolished from dweller stat.

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And what do you think about that girl you talk about?.

- She will get bored and move along to another... "easier to play" game?

- She will stay playing the game with her dwellers dying, suffering continuous losses?

- ...or maybe she will want to understand what happened, so she doesn't make the same mistakes again?

In the first case, she's not even a casual. She tries a game, she doesn't like it and she moves along extremely fast.

In the second case, she may be called a casual, but, after several failures, she'll either move along or start gathering info. Maybe not checking forums... but she'll at least read the

in-game manual ("Oh, so I must actually leave dwellers in a room so they generate resources"). Then, once she learns the basics, she'll might stay at that level, or , if she likes the game, move to "case 3".

In case 3. She'll start by reading the manual by herself. And later on, she'll find that she misses some thata that could help her undertand the game better... and will most probably try to gather that info on these forus, reddit, gamefaqs or any webpage that contains a small tutorial or helpful hints. And she'll learn about HP and damage values (after Deathclaws destroy her initially successful vault a couple of times, of course).

And there you go again projecting your knowledge and mindset and making a bunch of assumptions of someone very different than you.

Do you think a casual gamer even knows bethesda has forums?

That there is a subreddit for fallout shelter? Do they even know of the site reddit?

Or gamefaqs for that matter?

You're still assuming that casuals will seek out information in the same way you will, and on top of that they have the same knowledge of resources available that you do.

It's far more likely a google search will land them on someone's Top 10 Fallout shelter tips video on youtube. Which I have watched my fiance actually do and the info there doesn't delve into endurance training and hp tests that's for sure.

I think you're ignoring the already existing casual market that's staring you in the face. Think flappy bird and angry birds. Y'know what'd make angry birds a lot better? An angle and force indicator showing the degrees you are aiming at and the force currently. Know why you don't see it? It's a casual game that doesn't inundate their players with statistics. The focus is theme over thinking hard.

The FOS is not same degree of casual game like Angry Bird or Candy Crush Saga. It is more like Hay Day or FarmVille or The Sims freeplay degree of casual game. To play Hay Day or Sims properly, player need to understand some basic concept of such games. Such casual games usually comes with somewhat lengthy tutorial missions, to introduce some specific concept of the game, just like FOS.


Tutorial mission of FOS ontroduces concept of SPECIAL, that are somewhat dufficult to understand to people without pririor experirnce of Fallout series. But understanding these concept is so essential to play FOS properly that they are introduced in tutorial mission.


The very existence of concept of level and SPECIAL of dweller justifies the introduction of health point concept, which is much easier to understand than rather hard-to-understand SPECIAL attributes.


Those casual gamers who can understand how SPECIAL works in FOS game will have no problem to understand how health point works.

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Nope... I'm EXACTLY expectig that. That she will go to google, Bing, DDG, and type "Fallout Shelter..." and probably , like "deathclaws kill me".

And she may end on a Youtube tutorial, or the forums, or gamefaqs or whatever... but she started digging for information. And in the middle of that video, suddenly the magic phrase may appear: "build your dwellers healthy", or "build your vault like a maze".

The more specific the question, the more chances it' will lead to a specific answer. And the more specific the answer to "Deathclaws kill me", the more chances the page/video will say "train Endurance at level 1 so your dwellers health drops at a slower pace".

Best comparison ever... a click game and a grab and release one vs a resource management one.

Angry Birds is purely casual, take your brains off, then just drag and release to your hearts content. And I won't even talk about Flappy...

FoS, while can be played, "somewhat" casually, is NOT a casual game; it requires macro/micromanagement, planing, optimization and control over your vault and it's dwellers; and requires you to load it in a regular basis to make progress.

Angry Birds doesn't kill your birds at level #XX before you didn't connect for 5 days. In FoS you'll have a pretty bunch of dead wanderers (and maybe ruined your vault) because you forgot you sent them to the wastes or you didn't optimize resource generation well enough.

Probably your next "casual" comparison will be Pong vs Simcity, or something like that.

Back to topic

I dislike the current setting. Getting a fixed amount of HP per level based on endurance could have been ok. But it takes the clothing into account as well. Together it should have been a no-go.

If i want something efficient i'll have to kill my oldest dwellers to make place for new ones with better HP stats. Teamkilling should never be a source of progress.

Also, no other stat is working like that. It doesn't matter when you level Luck or Strength. Only Endurance is special. Having one stat functioning so different is what i would call bad game design.

This is actually true, since, while FoS uses a common RPG mechanic for HP gains, it's not a RPG game itself but a resource management one. Still, making HP retroactive is also not the solution. Maybe Beth should make HP less essential, and instead add damage reduction to gear, so it's not just a stat-granting attire like it's now.

Attires could give more + stats but lower damage reduction, while actual "armors" could grant less stat values but more dmg reduction (so it's more suited for actual "guards" and wastelanders).

It should be left as it is. Everyone was fine playing the game before the discovery, now it's not good enough to have dwellers with 250-450HP, so the game mechanic has to be rewritten to address their new desire. I trashed all of my dwellers except for the legendaries, and those will get swapped in the future. The game plays just fine without super god elite dwellers. Find out who works best in guarding and exploring, and put the rest to work. Get rid of some of them. They aren't real people. You're not a bad person for sending a collection of pixels to its demise.

So what if it's soon discovered that rare and legendary children are born with 2x or 3x the base HP (210 or 315 instead of 105)? Well then I'd hazard a guess that the game should then be rewritten so that every child is born as legendary and automatically levelled up to automatically replace other dwellers. Oh, and then you should get a free lunchbox each time you start the game, and miniguns outside the vault to kill anything that comes near, automatically of course. After that, sprinkler systems and roach and rat traps that function... you guessed it - automatically. Then an armored truck should show up every 5 minutes with a random amount of caps from 50,000 to 250,000. Yeah! Everything should auto-heal and auto-collect so you can just sit there and watch it like a movie. How fun.

Just go watch other people play on YouTube.

-JadedGamer

AFAIK there is no game that uses accumulative HP and hiding the HP value from player. Is there? It is not unreasonable feature improvement request to display true HP value of dweller. It does not change game play radically. It just let gamer to play this game more rationally and more informed, not by obscure hunch and out of guesswork.


Current accumulative and hidden HP system is too problematic to both casual gamers and dedicated gamers to keep as it is now. It serves no purpose to increase game fun or artistic merit. It just make gaming more complicated needlessly without any purpose or merit. Such needless complexity should be abolished as much as possible from casual game.

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Minguns to drop some HP on Deathclaws sound like a nice upgrade to have.

I'm currently killing all my high dwellers dwellers and replace them with level 1 ones. The games is punishing me with disasters scaling up by average level. So leveling up makes the game harder instead of easier. The HP gains are just an added annoyance.

Now if they could add an option to exile dwellers. I wouldn't have to kill them in death rooms or send them into the wasteland to die. I could simply delete them. That would be nice.

I concur on mini gun. Currently vault has no defensive facility other than small firearms carried by individual dwellers. It is too unrealistic that vault has no room for defense.


And not level up dweller at all make sense. Current FOS put disadvantage on level up. HP increase of level up is offset by stronger enemies. It should be fixed.

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