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[Oxality]

Hey, this probably could've made its way into a different thread but I wanted to make sure it was seen. Right now, Im using the newest patch of alpha 5, ive played part (3-4 hours) of one game so far as the mutants, and i have every intention of playing many many more

I just downloaded this mod, and after playing for a few hours and reading most of these threads I feel like I could give you some first impressions. I've modded a few games in minor ways, but I've never done anything like this so take my input with a grain of salt.

Let me say first that I love the idea for this mod. I love it so much I made this account just to give feedback. Fallout is probably my favorite game series, and Fallout 3 is definitely my favorite game. I've also played Civ 3 to BE way more often than a normal human being. So putting the two together....well its a good idea.

Before I get started, please fix the workers buttons layout! for some reason they are all pushed to the left side and you have to scroll to see most of the buttons

First, the whole game is VERY overwhelming. For example, compared to other Civ games your treasury and bonuses are huge, the populations got huge, the civics have SOOOOO many pros and cons, some of the old Civ still comes through the game (espionage, that guy reading technology excerpts, some descriptions for converting production to science and things, spies). All of the buildings, technology, landscape, worker improvements, units, safety, races (i had (have?) no idea which race did what) are completely new. I would just keep this in mind.

Second, and this ties in with the first, I felt like my economy was seriously struggling. Like I said, my borders were being crushed, my income was like zilch and my workers couldnt improve the land. This was very frustrating, especially coming from civ where your country grew based on improvements. Now once I changed my civics (i had no idea what civic did what, even after reading the effects twice) my economy, science, safety all shot up, so Im pretty sure I was just floundering in the beginning. Still, that first part was painfully dull. This could have also been a problem with my game speed, which i will adjust later today.

Third, my initial mutant units could move before i settled the first city. Which meant I could have attacked and easily defeated my ghoul neighbors (althoug im not sure they can capture cities?). Im not sure if this was intended since i didnt see any other non barb units out in the wastes.

Fourth, I think I got like halfway done the tech tree( I could be wrong, but I made serious progress) and at the end of my session, I was sitting there thinking, so what. Nothing happened. I had four or five cities (because my units got every goody hut since no one was out there) and no roads (paths cost 1000 gold each?!?....and they dont do much since improvements cost 100+!) and my buildings would take like 50 turns to finish. Ouch.

Fifth, Diplomacy was a pain. they kept asking for technology. butttttttttttttt I blame the civ ai for that

Sixth, the terrain is very dull (duh its a wasteland). I would still try to add more color or something at one point (i know its not a priority). Maybe later in the game the improvements will help more.

Ok now what I liked
One, all of this is very creative. Id rather have it be new and overwhelming than less than fresh

Two, I like the different factions against each other. I have a feeling that later in the game itl feel a lot more like fallout as a universe rather than fallout as a rpg

Three, custom units are awesome. ive only seen the super mutants but the fact that mutants are one unit and im guessing things like ghouls or bos are another is completely amazing.

four, although frustrating, the cost of improvements is a good touch. It really adds to the feeling of a wasteland and the fact that the land has to be reworked (although if they could build roads and camps in ancient times....why are my mutant workers so dumb ). On the same note, the massive amount of bonuses and and building perks is great. I havnt had much of a chance to use them but i like the idea of people becoming much happier because they found a constant source of iguanas

five, the vaults are pretty neat too. I like the idea that you originally have to settle in them and eventually form your own settlements. You may want to rework the starting positions though, or at least look into it. Im right next to those filthy ghouls and theyre cramping my style (like literally right next to them).

Overall i'd say that its a really good mod. and id recommend it. Very interesting, very creative. Ill write more as I play but so far

 

[Lib.Spi't]

Hi oxal,

thanks for joining in the conversation, it is always a great motivator.

I will try to address some of your points, and also help you figure out the way some things work, as well as the way somethings are heading.

First of all, what screen resolution do you play?
The HUD is a brand new WIP concept and only really 'works' on certain resolutions as I need to figure out how to get it to scale 'just right' or fix certain resolutions on request.
There is an alternate resolution file available in the download section, but if your res is different again it might not help much.

First Point:
Yes the game is very different and hopefully will get even more so as we move forward. A lot of stuff is still being balanced and worked to get just right, this obviously takes a lot of play time to test, and is only made faster by having more guys post up their experiences.

That being said here is the aim:
Yields:
These will be much higher than civ, one because I think it is fun, and two I am working towards the goal of 'bigger=smaller' what I mean by this is that 100 gold in regular civ might be quite a lot because it is representing a massive amount, in fallout, 100 gold is a couple of gardens.
Same with pop. 10 pop. is about (in my head) 100 people (or perhaps 10 family groups) (so not that much).

This way it is more like counting every head in town or every bottlecap in the bank.
Also pop. are consumed by unit production as well.

This bigger/smaller economy still needs properly balancing and getting 'just right' but I feel like it is moving in a good direction.

Civics are a left over product from my first 'experiment' with modding civics, so I just pretty much played with every tag there was .

The Civic overhaul will be in A6(hopefully) they will get better design and a whole new system with them, I will also hopefully include a rudimentary pedia entry for them to help break down the pros and cons of a civic as well. The whole civic system is going to get a lot deeper and more interesting, but once properly documented it should be easier to 'digest' what each does, and you will hopefully start to get a swense of the pattern emerging in each.

Nothing has really been pediaed yet, as nothing is really 'finished' yet and will (hopefully is we can pull it off) be subject to major changes.

There are bits left in from 'civ' that need removing/replacing, mostly cosmetic stuff so low priority at this point.

A lot of the concept/systems are brand new to this build and I myself am still getting used to the new layout, and finding out whether we need more pop up information coding and such.

For example the races used to be promotions(with all the attendant pop up info) now race is a system unto itself, and I don't know how much information is readily available, etc.

The goal really is to make a game that feels 'brand new' and will feel distantly related to cIV.
You will know where the buttons are and some of the basic concepts, but everything else will hopefully feel like a brand new game, where 'civ strategies' don't really work and you have to approach the game from a fresh perspective.

Second paragraph:
Mutant is possibly the worst faction at the moment (I introduced a few things that make them 'not great' because the things I introduced as 'tests' are not really balanced out and won't be till I finish the base game and get onto making the 'Faction Specific Content'.

If you want to play a Vault Civ, Bos and Enclave are better for now.
(You can find descriptions of the difference between Vault and Non Vault civs in the sticky threads.)

The early part of the game is being designed to play out in a way that feels like you are a small band, struggling to survive and working your way to the birth of a real town and the earliest roots of a nation.
We will be introducing much more to the early game (Like my story event system which I have a first prototype in at the moment, but getting the latter parts of the story to trigger is proving difficult.)
This will lead to you being faced with all manner of seemingly minor, unimportant and weird decisions, that will grow to have lasting and recurring consequences for you and your empire, long after those early days of survival are a distant memory. For Better or Worse.

This part of the game is still empty but is getting better. (This is also the reason for the close start positions but more on that later).

There then comes a moment after the 'Ancient' era, where the struggling stops and you begin to expand and start to face the broader issues of forging an empire, you still need to prioritise your moves.
(like money for improvements or research? Which improvement should I buy and for which towns? etc.)

Third:
The close start position is still not quite right and occasional leads to 'game breaking' positioning, like two factions starting a square a part so one faction won't found it's initial settlement. We want to get this fixed, but close starts are an essential part of the future plans. If you don't see any monsters by about turn 10, then the map is pants and you need to restart because one (or more) civs haven't founded. (part of the problem is pangaea map script wastes so much map on ocean tiles...tried to solve this many times, really not easy....)

You cannot capture cities until the 'conquest' tech is researched, this is important, because there are a lot fewer factions and they (should) all start 'next door' to each other, so I don't wnat any crush rushing wiping out half the players in the first turns because they got an above average start site.
You can almost immediately start causing trouble for each other by pillaging and kidnapping workers etc.
(pillaging is much bigger in FTTW and will continue to grow. For some faction like the Raiders will be a major contributor to their economy. You have units that can do it without declaring war as well as being invisible to most units. Security is used to spot and eliminate these plagues against society.)

Fourth:
Chances are you had a bad map placement, so after that a civ was 'lost' and barbs never 'activated'. Also make sure you play 'Noble' difficulty and a Huge Pangaea Map
(this reduces the chance of bad maps and pangaea is the only script that is 'good' for FTTW, I am trying to improve it and make it more suitable, but it is not very easy to do...)
The game speeds are VERY slow.
(I have made quick and normal faster in the next patch I am releasing soon, that will be more in keeping with vanilla speeds (300ish and 500ish), but overall I play grand strategy style games that you play for weeks/months in short bursts, rather than in an evening or two. So that is where my development will be focussed moving forward)
I still need to properly 'populate' the game with events and other fun content to help fill some of the current 'voids' in activity, so that eventually it should feel much more interesting and 'busy'.
We are still very much working on the mechanics of the game right now, getting the individual concepts to work the way they should, then we can replcate/duplicate and generally populate all these mechanics.

Improvements are intentionally expensive and you really have to 'work' to get them, cutting research and saving up, as well as deciding what things to build.
Do you save up to get that bonus resource early?
or
Do you populate more of the landscape with general improvements to slowly beef up your growth and economy.

Routes are also expensive, because connecting up bonus resources is a major boost to your buildings (this will continue to grow in future versions too) I think route cost was a typo that I have now fixed in the up coming patch 2.

Fifth:
Diplomacy and leaderhead AI is currently untouched. It's one of those things I haven't got round to yet. Leaderhead AI will be worked on at the faction specific stage, then I will try to model the AI to behave more like their fallout characters.
(Or I am waiting for someone to volunteer to do it as it is mostly just changing numbers! I had someone once upon a time who said they would, I wrote out loads of information and design work for them, then never saw them again... good use of my time! )

Sixth:
I quite like the desolate nature of the base terrain, Having improvements certainly helps liven the place up later.
I have also converted the Fury Road map script to FTTW recently, this seeks to try and replicate 'dead' cities and old decaying highways, the Map work for FTTW has a long way to go, and map scripting is very complicated (especially for me as I am thick).
I also want to try and populate the world with more special features and the like as development continues. Like I say I think you probably also had a busted map on that play through. (unlucky math for you!)

Onto the likes!
One.
Exactly, I don't see the point in putting all this time and effort into something that is just a fallout paint job for Civ. I want to make a new game, that plays like it's own monster. Early days, but if you say A1.... A5 is a million times better, especially since I have had so much help from people who actually know what they are doing!!

Two
Right now the factions are not really distinct, but when I get to that point I want every faction to be a real experience in it's own right, with no two factions playing th same and you really feeling the weight and identities of the fallout factions pulling at your styles of gameplay.
With Units, Buildings, Techs and even Civics being diverse and different.
(There will obviously be a lot of cross over, but also a lot of individuality in them.)

Three
Yeah clanky, and all the other art work contributors did a brilliant job with the units, there will still be a lot more to do before we are finished, but even now I think the unit diversity is great, with different weapons and armours and races being represented brilliantly.

Four
No one said Taming the Wastes would be easy, and if everyone could do it we would have no need of Vault Dwellers, Chosen Ones, Couriers, or Tandi's!

Even basic improvements and buildings need tools and labour and organisation!

The long term goal is that the more bonuses (including multiples of the same) you have the better your buildings will be, as well as the decision making process that makes you have to choose onething or another, you can't always have it all. This also extends to concepts like defence, with improvements costing so much, you have to think hard about what your priorities are and what you will choose to defend. Unlike civ your borders are not safe, even in peace time!

Five:
Vaults were one of the first ideas I had when embarking on the idea to make a fallout mod, the idea of vault and non-vault factions, and how the strengths and weaknesses of both would play out. As a V civ your sites are stronger, but you are limited to only settling vaults. As an N-V Civ you can settle anywhere but miss out on the power of Vault life.
Factions are played to be butting up against each other, to encourage raiding and in the future culture/safety warfare.
Vaults are much weaker at this, as they are far more self-contained and unadventurous.

There's a long way to go before the mod is what I want it to be, (half the battle is turing what I have in my head into actual concepts, then putting it all into the code is so...... ugh!) we are always looking for new helpers!

 

[Oxality]

Thanks for the reply! Before I forget, Im playing res 1024 x 768. I'm getting close to the end of my second game, and as you said I believe my first game had a bad map. Ive noticed the colors are much more noticeable (i think the worst areas are the wasteland to urban wasteland stretches, but on this new map they arent terribly common). Im also playing as BoS, which is a lot more user friendly than the mutants. I'm playing on the quick setting, and im around 600 turns and not yet at the end of the tech tree (although pretty close).

I had some space between me and the other players, which was nice. My cities got huge, but it was managable. I think my first reaction was, oh my god i have 30 pop my economy is going to crash, but youve done a good job balancing health and happiness I think. Im glad you briefly explained the vault vs non vault factions. I thought a late game tech allowed you to settle outside vaults....

Some more things ive noticed:

first, some goods are spread evenly across the world. Others seem to be regional (specifically geckos, fire geckos, golden geckos). If that's intentional, very cool.

second, combat was pretty interesting. I tried attacking with my siege units (RPGs) and some melee, but the AI could just bombard my stack all the way through with his city defenders. And then those same defenders could engage me in melee the next turn (i think he used RPGs too). I wound up using a stack of snipers, which were perfect. I mean, with about 5 of them i could take out one or two of his units from two squares away. And they were quicker to train than the other units....at the moment i say they might need re balancing. Who knows what illl think in an hour. but until then im going to have fun wiping my enemies out before they get close
on a related note theres a lot of units. It may be just because im not familiar with all of them, but I feel like some can be wrapped together. Or they should become obsolete (why would i want some wimp in combat armor guarding my city when i could have a paladin with a Gatling gun ). But it definitely feels fresh, and definitely focuses less on unit spamming than vanilla civ.

Third and I promise finally, i noticed theres still crabs in the game. you could rename them mirelurks, since Im pretty sure people hunted them in the wastes

edit: Ok so i was playing a map with continents and there were three different land masses. as far as I could tell two land masses had factions, and the third was did not. The third land mass (ie the one without people) was the only one with fusion cells on it....which means that nobody can build vertibirds...which means no one can cross the ocean. Probably a rare occurrence but still...

I would offer to help, but Im pretty busy at the moment. I will however stick around here for the next month or so and offer when my schedule dies down

 

[Lib.Spi't]

Grab the alternate resolution file from the download section, that should solve your problem.

Health and happiness and all that balance still need a lot of work, the goal is to try and create a much closer knife edge between growth and collapse, I found everyone was too happy for a post apocalyptic wasteland, but again that is just lots of playing, tweaking and adding stuff.

The map script still needs a lot of work, along with thinking more about what bonuses go on what terrain, and basically getting everything to feel just right. It is a long road but we rumble forward.

Right now I class it as 'passable' but eventually i want something that is really awesome. Mapscripting is really complex though and I don't really understand it!

Combat (and units) is already pretty unique (I hope) but it still needs a lot of work (I am glad to here the AI was shooting at you though). AI needs to be able to 'fight smart' and all the units still need some balancing and blah blah blah.

The eventual goal for combat is to break the habit of unit stacks, big stacks get punished by stuff like rpgs and miniguns because of collateral damage and such.
My hope is to eventually include a system from ROM:AND called surround and destroy (If we can get the AI to fight smart) where every tile you occupy around an enemy, gives you a strength boost when attacking so it simulates flanking and surrounding.
This way having your units spread out in small stacks, negates a lot of the power of rapid fire units (like miniguns), while increasing your attack strength, but with the risk of your enemy overrunning one spot and breaking out of your surround.

Then of course we also have the differences between melee and ranged units and getting that balanced and awesome.

With the snipers, the idea with them is that if you they get caught in melee they are dead (they have a strength of one) So you need to get a big quick stack and ram into them to cut them down. (Costs are still not 'finished' so you may well be right)

Many things still need getting 'just right' but in general I think everything is mostly balancing out, every strength more or less has a weakness.

With obselete/better/worse units, eventually the best units are going to become much harder to make, so if you want a power armour gattling gun army, you will be understaffed and facing hordes of enemies. We still need to design the mechanics to effectively do this, we have some ideas, I just need the time of my clever peoples to be able to make it happen.

One thing I do need to do with the 'best of the best' is increase there min population requirement even higher to make them rarer. at the moment the highest tier is about pop. 30, I have since learned that cities are capable of getting to triple that size, so for the best of the world of power armour we will probably be looking at minimums of 80-90 pop.
That should see you begging for a few combat armoured guards!

Also I need to go through the AI for unit choices as it seems to make some really poor choices, building metal armoured fighters instead of power armour... I don't know why yet. Porobably some numbers need tweaking!

Mirelurks, I forgot about them, that could be a good move. Eventually water (oceans particularly) will be gotten rid of, as they won't play much if any role in the game. I just haven't got on to removing/repurposing whales, fish and crab or figuring out how to fix the mapscripts to not waste space with all the ocean.

Make sure you only use Pangaea map (or the fury road when the patch is released) as the game is designed around the US, so only one landmass.

I am trying to figure out how to isolate the maps so it only displays the ones I want. All the others are no good clutter. I did it once upon a time but forgot how!

Feedback is always helpful, and helps me motivate myself to do more, as silence just makes me thing nno one is playing and thus why bother to continue to make, beyond my own dream of having the game I want to play. It also helps me to think more clearly and lay out goals.

All help henever is very welcome!

 

[Oxality]

so things really slowed down for me a lot sooner than expected. I can help if youd like; if you give me some things to work on i can start after this weekend (like i said earlier, i have some experience changing the xmls but im no pro.

I just finished up another game as the NCR. I can see why you dont want a lot of ocean tiles (or continents) in the map. It was pretty good overall, some things need balancing but you probably know what needs what better than I do One thing i did notice though was that the barbs were increasingly aggressive. They started out as just regular animals, but then as i starting expanding they started pushing back. the first few waves/stacks were pretty fun. I mean you piss of the barbs they come after you....but then they got serious. Every turn there was some human/mutant units coming after me. It got to the point where the ghouls and BoS were wiped out multiple times (i brought them back in the editor with some extra units, tech ect). The mutants were wiped out as well, although they lasted about 700 turns (i know you said they were broken, and boy did they look it. one city, barely 45 pop, no economy). I alos noticed that the barbs set up A LOT of cities around the map where I wasnt. I think the ai didnt expand fast enough?

Other than that, the reno families did very well (they lost a city or two to the barbs as well). They expanded quite some bit, i think 3 or 4 cities. I have a feeling the ghouls wouldve done better if I hadnt boxed them in originally

 

[Lib.Spi't]

I have a tedious but simple job for you here I would have bundled up another tedious (and slightly more complicated) job in with this too, but I already did it! Rats! hehe.

Last post #4
there is also the latest WIP Version of the patch that you will need.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

On your feedback.

Right now the barbs and units balance needs some tweaking, mostly the problem is that some things like robots get unlocked really early in the tech tree, but need multiple resources to build, but the barbs spawning doesn't have that restriction, so you get some powerful enemies early.

Barb spawning (including cities) is massively increased compared to civ, so lots more barb activity. I do hope to tweak this further in the future with more lairs and less 'random spawning'.
This way we should get more 'regional' barbs, so the terrain will inform the barb content more than just random chance.
(not entirely sure how the computer pics what barbs to spawn randomly at the moment)

AI Choice and expansion is still not great (The WIP patch hopefully solves the expansion problem time and feedback will tell).
Often I see the AI picking units over buildings.
(not properly upgrading it's economy first and so stagnating, this is the worst with the SM's because they have expensive early units, left around from my Mutant experiments)
They Also make strange Unit Choices, often picking weaker units to build instead of stronger ones, often when they will take the same number of turns to build...not sure why it may be due to AI number weights or Leaderhead AIs. (Really no idea yet it requires some pattern observation between AI weight numbers, such as asset and power, etc. in the building, leader and unit files.

I am hoping someone who likes fiddling and cross referencing numbers (or who can at least do it without getting a nasty headache) will volunteer to do it if I just ignore it for long enough!

 

[Oxality]

I have a tedious but simple job for you here I would have bundled up another tedious (and slightly more complicated) job in with this too, but I already did it! Rats! hehe.

Last post #4
there is also the latest WIP Version of the patch that you will need.

I started, and you werent kidding about tedious can you tell me what the difference between commerce changes in gold and yield changes in coin are

 

[Lib.Spi't]

commerce gold is your 'tax rate' and goes straight into your bank account.

Yield gold is 'raw income' that gets split up into the commerces, depending on your tax slider settings.

You really just have to get into a rythm with the xml work, then it goes by easier, but there really is jut no fun way to do it!

The results are more enjoyable though!

 

[Oxality]

I'm getting an error when I try to run the mod (with the updated xmls). I don't think its me, because I havnt gotten that far with my edits and I tried with a copy straight from the update and it didnt work.

I had an error around line 6000 that i fixed pretty easily, but theres one at line 8980 and I have no idea what the problem is. Ill keep making changes, but i thought you should know. I attached a pic of the message

 

[Lib.Spi't]

it might be an error I neglected to find and address before uploading that update.

It is something to do with the tag order.

Look for bonusproductionmodifiers in the example at the bottom of the file, then look at line 8930(or whatever the line number was in the error.) then you just have to move the tag that is on that line to the right place within that building entry.

If ya can't figure it out, don't worry as whatever it was I have since fixed it, so I can just merge your work back into mine and the problem will be solved.

It is a good exercise in tag order placement and error solving though

 

[Lib.Spi't]

unlike vanilla civ, FTTW xml has been fixed so you don't ned all the tags in, unfortunately they still need to be in the same order, which can get confusing with chopped down entries!

 

[Lib.Spi't]

If you get really stuck and want to work through the problem, post up the building entry that contains the error line and we can see if we can figure it out together.

 

[Oxality]

wanted to let you know i havnt abandoned the task, unfortunately ive just been a bit busy. However this week i should finish up. As for the error, i should be able to fix it now that youve told me what it means, but if i run into any serious snags ill make sure to post

 

[Lib.Spi't]

Brilliant, thanks for letting me know, and thanks for your help!

I think we are down to the last two tasks now, 1 for me and 1 for you!

I was beginning to dread the thought of having to take back and do this task myself!

 

[Oxality]

As promised, here it is. I included the resource XML because i added some comments which made it easier for me to tell which resource goes with which name when everything is collapsed in notepad ++. You probably dont need it at this point though

I also have a java code that goes through the xml and copies changes (right now it does yield and commerce ) from the vanilla building, and pastes it in the vault building. It cut my time in half....but im not sure how useful it is going forward (its also a bit of a mess). But if your interested i can upload it.

cant wait to see the update. let me know if you need anything else going forward

 

[Lib.Spi't]

AAAARGH....

I judt lost the post I wrote!! IDIOT!!

Ok short version...

Thanks for the work.
Script sounds clever, but chances are now when we make a new building we will copy the whole village version to vault version then change the details. So unless we could have one that would auto copy a Vault version to the three relevant files adding the 'V' parts at the touch of a button, we probably won't get much use out of it. It will be worth keeping around though just incase that changes!

There will be lots of tedious XML work to go around anyone foolish enough to volunteer when I get to implementing A6. I explained a bit about it in the post I lost, but I will explain again when I get A5 finished! which will hopefully be no later than the end of the week!