My take on AP/JHP dilemma

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phobos2077
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Re: My take on AP/JHP dilemma

Post by phobos2077 »

phooey wrote: Mon Mar 27, 2023 8:29 pm Hello, I made a rough spreadsheet of FO2tweaks weapon damage mod here. Only some of the weapon though, not all. Maybe later.

Anyway, I hope this is useful and let me know if I miss something.

Cheers,

phooey

I just came here to ask if anyone made some spreadsheet and here you are... That's helpful, thanks.

Also, after playing New Vegas, I thought - it also has DR & DT and different ammo types. And their system is very simple and somewhat easy to understand. I wonder why nobody tried to port it over to FO2? It still has 2 parameters that affect damage (DT subtract or multiplier and damage multiplier) instead of 1 (combined DR & dmg mult). The notable difference is that, in New Vegas, high DR armor is extremely rare and almost not used (without mods) and no ammo types have any DR mod.

After reading through the first post again, I still struggle to understand why the author felt so strongly about "juggling several stats". With just one value that controls the "penetration vs damage tradeoff", you are limited in how you can make different ammo calibers behave differently between ammo types. It an attempt to make the formula "simpler" than all others, I think it ends up still being a bit convoluted. The reason is that the game still has these separate stats (DR and DT), the fact that you don't like this level of complexity doesn't make them disappear (unless you hide them in UI or something). So the extra complexity of this formula comes from having this extra layer of indirection between one "penetration" parameter and actual DR & DT mechanics. YAAM has the same problem.

And the only way to not have this extra layer is to use all the modifiers separately (DR, DT, AC and DMG). You would still need to decide between multiplication and addition for DR and DT multipliers, but I think this would be the only true vanilla friendly way. Because, IMO, communicating how calculation works to the player is as important as achieving "good" damage numbers. Making decisions between weapon and ammo types is essential part of the gameplay. Maybe some players would just "has armor = AP, else = JHP" but I think it's interesting to actually look at stats of armor in game, look at what the enemy is wearing (they mostly wear stats based on armor, at least I tried to make sure of that in EcCo) and think if your weapon/ammo will work or not.

So I guess this approach might be worth pursuing, as I don't think anyone actually tried that. You can never have enough Ammo Mods in Fallout 2)))
sfall contributor, author of EcCo mod
phobos2077
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Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2022 8:28 pm

Re: My take on AP/JHP dilemma

Post by phobos2077 »

After more careful investigation, I have to say the thing you did with how criticals work with burst is spot on. For long time I wanted to experiment with burst bullet distribution, so some guns can actually be fairly accurate in burst. But to balance this out, fixing criticals is one of the required steps.

The amount of work you did writing that script - is really appreciated. I would be too lazy to go through all that myself.
sfall contributor, author of EcCo mod
phobos2077
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Re: My take on AP/JHP dilemma

Post by phobos2077 »

Ok so I picked apart your formula and tried to represent it as best as I can in my damage calculation spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

You can check the "Burn's formula" tab, the top section "Normal damage". You can ignore the EcCo stuff and find a 10mm Pistol or Assault Rifle. There I used the DR Adjust values from your script. This is how Assault Rifle damage scales from low to high armor (first row in JHP, second AP, absolute values don't matter here, only scale):

17.6    15.2    12.8    9.2    8.3    8.3    6.1    5.4    5.4    3.0    2.6    1.2    0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0
 8.5     7.9     7.4    6.4    6.1    6.1    5.4    5.2    5.2    4.4    4.2    3.6    2.9    2.3    1.5    1.4    0.0


As you can see, the point at which AP ammo "breaks even" is where absolute damage values are so low, it don't matter much. You wouldn't be using weapon doing 3dmg against these opponents, you want something badder like Plasma Rifle or Gauss Rifle. But these don't have AP/FMJ.. And even if they had, it wouldn't change the fact how JHP ammo manages to be so much better against everything up to Combat Armor, which I can't wrap my head around.

So, unless my calculations are wrong somehow, I don't see how this coupling of Damage Mult to DR Mod can effectively solve the issue of AP ammo behaving as you would expect, especially against early game stuff like Metal Armor.

In that regard, Glovz damage formula (which I don't like because of it's hard-coded bonuses) actually works slightly better where AP is at least on par with JHP against early armor and gives a nice (albeit hard-coded) damage boost against targets with 0 armor.
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Re: My take on AP/JHP dilemma

Post by Magus »

You arrived at the same conclusion that's already written in the first post, breaking point is somewhere at around metal armor/ma mk2.
Effectively though, it doesn't matter much whether to use AP or JHP against metal armors, they are approximately the same. Which makes sense, metal armor is certainly not a full body armor like combat one.

Your other point about heavier weapons not having AP/FMJ is also addressed there. The tweak in deliberately limited in scope, for multiple reasons. The main product is the formula. If someone else wants to add other types of ammo, it's easy enough to do in another mod.

Probably can also tweak coefficients for some ammo. I've been meaning to do that, but I'd like to make some graphs first, and don't have time for that currently.
 
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