So i am not sure if anyone but me ever noticed this from FO3 and NV but i will explain just to cover that basis:

A conventional firearm in Fallout (Guns) uses bullets obviously, when you reload you remove a magazine filled with said bullets and replace it with a new one. The ammo counter on your HUD shows exactly how many bullets you have in your magazine as well as in your inventory/reserve

Energy Weapons display the same way except that it doesnt make sense in how they "consume ammo". An Energy Cell is like a battery, a laser pistol uses the power from the Cell to fire it's shots. However you put 1 Cell into the Pistol but your "magazine" contains more than 1 shot, also when you fire you "use up" more than 1 Cell every shot. If you were to have 10 Cells and you dropped each one on the ground you would have 10 separate Cells but if you use them in your laser pistol it would say you have 10 "shots" in a magazine without reloading.

So the point is: Will FO4 finally fix this and make it where 1 Cell has it's own "charge" all contained within that 1 Cell? Seriously this bugs me, i can see how many may have just never noticed it and ignorance is bliss but i think this would be an excellent mechanic to make Energy Weapons further differentiate from their Conventional Firearm counterparts

I would like to see more realism with the ammo but I don't think it'll happen. If they don't do it with a regular gun, then they won't do it with an energy weapon.

I kind of doubt it, if only from an "annoying inventory" point of view. Kind of like most games with slugthrowers don't keep track of each magazine, but just draw from your pool of bullets when you reload.

From both a managing-player-inventory and a managing-game-variables point of view, having your game world full of individually-tracked bullet magazines & energy cells with different amounts of shots left in each one, would be a bit annoying. Loot that group of raiders, end up with five assorted magazines of bullets in different quantities and different calibers, plus four half-to-3/4-filled microfusion cells.

Yes, it's less "realistic", but this feels like one of those cases where gameplay trumps reality.

edit: thinking about the ammo inventory in, say, New Vegas. We had so many different kinds of bullets that the ammo inventory panel went on quite a bit. Now I imagine that same one, but magnified by splitting every type of ammo into:

...and then it occurs to me that you could multiply it even further because, for ex, not all 10mm guns have the same size mags (maybe go with Small Large Medium, rather than "10mm AP Magazine (2 of 7 shots)" and "10mm Magazine (2 of 25 shots)" ) Ditto with energy cells, since not every weapon in FO3/FO:NV loaded the same number of shots.

To clarify i would never expect gamesas to track magazines (since that would require loading every magazine with ammo) but since we had "drained" Cells in NV it seemed slightly less harsh to keep up with them. Just wanted to put it out there that i notice it a bit too much but have never seen anyone else mention it

The issue here is a question of whether or not the devs want to implement an entire alternative ammo system for battery-based weaponry or not. I would certainly love it, but.. there's issues.

When you're using an Energy Weapon in FO3/FONV, your 'ammo' is more like a numerical representation of the cumulative energy you have stored in a particular type of power cell. You have your Electron Charge Packs, your Microfusion Cells and your [Small] Energy Cells.

One would naturally assume that, as they're not directly interchangeable, they operate with different output ratings (as you can convert them by transferring the energy into different cells similar to using AC wall current with a charge dock to charge an array of different DC batteries).

To do this properly as logic would dictate, the game would require some alternative thinking. Either you'd need to:

> Have the shown 'Ammo' number be the amount of fully charged cells at your disposal, in which case the 'traditional' method of ammo counting would be an invisible number in the background process that auto-converts to whatever amount of power denominates a 'Full' cell of whatever given type and resolves the number as, say 334.5 MFC, but which might be in actuality, according to Fallout 3, somewhere near 1000 MFC.

In this case, how does the system acknowledge a partial reload? Does it convert the cell's remaining power into a percentage/decimal and add it to the invisible 'Power' pool? Does it give you a 'Junk' item called 'Partly Discharged Microfusion Cell' that you can consolidate later into full cells? Does it track the percentage of its remaining power and put the partly used cell back in your pack for emergency ammo that won't be fully charged when reloaded?

Do you lose the remaining charge entirely?

If there's a 'Power' pool that tracks this, how do you drop/store/sell all of one type if there's a decimal?

How should this be handled realistically?

- OR -

> Completely do away with SEC, ECP and MFC in favor of different rated Energy Weapons that run off a battery you have to charge at a charging dock. In this case, Energy Weapons would now function like Covenant weapons in Halo, where they need special equipment to be reloaded, but can expend their whole charge without interruption.


See how this gets messy fast? If you have a solid solution, I'd seriously love to hear it. I've been picking at this question for a few months now, actually.

I just hope that energy weapons aren't completely nerfed in comparison to guns like they were in NV.

As much as I love shooting off "That Gun," I also love turning people into puddles of goo with plasma.

Good points. Honestly i cannot think of a simple solution that would fit in gamesas's streamlining approach. Everything i come up with makes it more complicated.

If there's a way to actually resolve the issue here, it'd make for an awesome bit of immersion.

I myself wouldn't mind being left with 'Partly Discharged' cells that can be combined/reloaded at remaining %, but I both doubt other people want to deal with this inventory nightmare or that Bethesda would see a reason to put the effort into making such a system for tracking these partial cells with the obvious end result being annoying the [censored] out of 95% of the people using it.

I guess if you reloaded prematurely and it just "dumped" the remaining energy and gave you drained cells like in FONV people might complain that the same doesnt happen to conventional guns

Yep, and because power 'units' are less easily quantifiable than 'Bullet x1', this leads to shenanigans.

Here's a simple solution that seems to never get tossed out there:

Laser Rifles, Plasma Rifles, and most rifle-like energy weapons run on Micro-Fusion Cells. You stick your MFC in the slot, it charges up the gun's internal capacitors, and you get a Depleted MFC back. Each energy-rifle class weapon can then display a power bar rather than some kind of ammo count. Every shot from 'x' weapon depletes a certain percentage from that power bar, varying from weapon to weapon. High-damage energy weapons would obviously use more per shot. Do the same for all other energy-ammo types.

When you 'reload' an energy weapon before its empty... one of two things can happen.

1.) If your weapon is completely unmodified then the extra charge from your battery is discharged and lost.

2.) If you have a modified capacitor, the excess power 'over-charges' the weapon for a single extremely powerful shot.

There. Problem solved.

I dont hate this idea, it is simple for the most part and makes Energy Weapons stand apart from the ballistic guns. I support it

Can I.. Can I hug you, sir?

This is awesome and I want it to be a thing now.

like i read it the op presume all energy weapons should get their power from a simple battery

why then do they have different kind of energy ammo , since a simple household battery vould do the same thnf

you did not read it...

Energy weapons were as, if not more, powerful than firearms in FNV.

On less than very hard the MF Hyperbreeder Alpha could damn near kill anything in the world and not use any ammo in doing it. At very hard some creatures, such as Zion cazadores, would have enough hit points to eat all ten shots without dying and you'd get stung while waiting for it to recharge.

With high crits the laser rifle was the best weapon to hunt deathclaws.

The only sub par energy weapons were the plasma rifle and the multi-plas and that only if you are not using VATS as they have a low AP cost per shot.

You and I have had drastically different experiences with energy weapons in FNV.

As far as "fixing" energy ammo as suggested I'd hope not. The system works fine as is.

EDIT - The current system is similar to what was described above. A gauss rifle uses four MFC per shot and has to be reloaded after every shot, a laser holds 24 MFC cells and uses one per shot, a tri-laser uses 3 MFC per shot and holds 48.

I will allow it.

For no more than five seconds, including first contact and separation.

The current system works fine as far as ammo is concerned.

The problem that must be fixed for energy weapons is the lack of sufficient ammo compared to projectile weapons. A somewhat lesser problem is the lack of variety of weapons but the new customization could take care of that (as long as they add pulse weapons back in and perhaps a few more types of energy weapons). I think even melee weapons had more options than energy weapons.

Oh, and hopefully they use effects similar to EVE modded visuals. Having almost no effects for criticals was very poor but EGE fixed it nicely.

The issue wasnt whether or not the current system "works", it is that it is unrealistic on a cheap level. Essentially when you fire your energy weapon, Cells in your pocket vanish into thin air before you even reload the one that is actually in your weapon

I'll reword my reply.

The current system works fine for roleplaying a science/energy weapons user as far as ammo is concerned.

You may have a problem. I do not, however, not as far as ammo tracking and usage.

For the far more critical problems, see my prior reply.

Yes, now for magazines is easy to rearrange bullets to top them. If you loot you probably trow away spare magazines.

Energy cells would be harder to rearrange this way, up to impossible for some designs

See, I never pictured a "holds 12 shots" weapon as having 1 cell in the weapon and 11 in your pocket. I just took "cells" to mean "shots", and accepted that you loaded an object into the gun that contained those 12 shots worth of energy. That it just happened to label "cells".

Yes, I can imagine that, if you were looking at it as the rest of the ammo being somewhere not-in-the-gun, you'd find it very unrealstic.