Introduction
Fallout 4 has always had one glaring problem to me late game. After a while even the most powerful Gauss rifle will barely hurt enemies with a sneak attack. So I aimed to change that by taking their survival changes to an extreme. I wanted it close to 1 hit kills, but still having armor be helpful-ish. Turning the game into something of a tactical shooter.
Notes
Roughly 2000 DR is the top end of what you can achieve. I used the value of X-01 Mk VI power armor of 1870 as a metric then doubled it for the simulations.
Weirdly a little over 2000 is also the maximum damage possible without legendaries. However this is with the old sneak attack cap of 6.3x damage. The new cap is 4.8. This was divided so the max damage to consider is 317. 2470 has no significance, it is just where I decided to stop.
I could only change Damage Factor and Armor Damage Reduction in this experiment, Damage Factor essentially “zooms in” the graph, increasing the distance between damage values or decreasing armor's effectiveness at higher damages.
Armor Damage Reduction increases the effectiveness of armor, in terms of the graph is moves all values up. So each point of DR is more effective.
Statistics and Formulas
Fallout 4 no longer uses Damage Threshold, instead everything is worked into the Damage Resistance formula. Which is:
Min(0.99[Damage*DamageFactor/damageResist]^ArmorDamageReduction)
This is to say your weapons damage is multiplied by damageFactor(.15), then divided by the damage resist of all of your armor, which is raised by the power of the ArmorDamageReduction (.365). This is the damage, 1-this number is the damage reduction percentage.
By default this looks like:
1-(Min(0.99[Damage*.15/damageResist]^.365))
And this looks like:
The lines represent an amount of damage. As you can see the curves smooth out and get delayed somewhat the more damage is done. But eventually damage resistance becomes a useless investment. It will also never reach 100%.
Something to make a note of with the default values is how quickly DR falls off. The curve smooths out the higher the damage is, but 400DR is when the maximum damage simmed starts getting decreased. The highest damage possible for a weapon, 320, your damage is reduced by 53.8% at 400 DR, the difference between 400 and 600 DR is 6.3%
600 is about the top end for DR with all armor and all perks you can get without power armor. There are also 2 perks that just reduce damage by a percentage. Lone Wanderer and Pack Alpha can reduce damage by 55%. Meaning no matter what you will take half damage, which would equal an astounding amount of DR, in fact that would equal about 3500DR for 200 damage.
Changes
I download a mod so I could change these values on the fly and test things. I wanted lower damages to still be stopped by armor, but higher damages to be more like armor penetration. So something that does 2k damage would be considered a tank buster round or something. Wearing armor is better than not, but it might only save you from 1-2 shots. I tweaked the values of ArmorDamageReduction and DamageFactor.
I upped the DamageFactor to 7 and ArmorDamageReduction to .8 . This made the graph look like this:
Results
You die a lot. It makes the game a bit more tense, as any bullet can kill you. Something I did not take into account is that scaling of damage with difficulty. On survival, enemies do 4x damage. A pipe gun does 52-76 damage. This sort of worked in my favor however, as this makes leather armor almost worthless at stopping bullets, but it also means if they have a hunting rifle that does 37 damage (148 damage) you need power armor to reduce any of that damage. You can still live though with some endurance. It makes a lot of fights allow for one and only one mistake. These damage multipliers are something I would tweak further, maybe 1x for player and enemy. Removing adrenaline would be somewhat pointless, as sneak attacks already give the player an edge.
I would say these changes make the game into something akin to a tactical shooter. I think VATS lends itself well to this modification, as it can act as heightened awareness and reaction speed. The only issues is that the player has so many advantages for damage that the game, when played with stealth, remains mostly the same. It just decreases the margin for errors, which to me makes it a good difficulty mod, but doesn’t change the experience as intended. Heavier mods may be required.
UPDATE 8/17/2021
I have gone in and changed some armor values, mostly to power armor to some serviceable amounts. Now power armor has greatly increased utility for the the player and enemies, and should be viewed as dangerous.
Tested the values with a set of T-45, unmodified. I was able to take several shots and survive an attack from 10 raiders. The increased damage of weapons and the...not increased health of the armor however, made my armor ablative in nature. I lost a damage arm in the fight. This may be a good balancing trade off, but further testing would be needed.
The updated values for raider power armor equal to a full set being 3000 armor, with each progressive set adding 1000 to the total. So T-45 is 4000, T51 is 5000, and so on.
Here are the mod files, it contains 3 files, NewDamageFormulaValues.esl changes the 2 values for the damage formula. PowerArmorForNewDamageFormula.esl are the changes to power armor. NoSneakAttack removes all damage multipliers, sneak attack, ninja, and adrenaline. However, magazines should still increase damage.
These changes are more in line with what I envisioned for the mod. Planning and being in the right position are key to survival. If that isn't possible, power armor is now a viable alternative, which makes the various suits just sitting around the wasteland into a resource, rather than gamebreakingly powerful, or useless. For instance if you know you will be forced into a fight you cannot stealth, bring power armor. It may get damaged, but then you can use the hoards of junk you have to repair it. Or grab another suit.
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