Duck and Cover

Posted: **Wed Sep 18, 2002 2:59 am**

Magic? 8O

Posted: **Wed Sep 18, 2002 4:00 am**

Meths wrote:Magic? 8O

No, Power armor isn't magical.

Posted: **Wed Sep 18, 2002 10:09 pm**

Here's all of the info on PA that's actually in the game:

Power Armor Specs Disc wrote: The T-51b Powered Infantry Armor is designed with the latest passive defense features for both civilian and military disturbances. The back-mounted TX-28 MicroFusion Pack generates 60,000 Watts to power the HiFlo hydraulic systems built into the frame of the suit. Made of the latest poly-laminate composite, the T-51b shell is lightweight and capable of absorbing over 2500 Joules of kinetic impact. The 10 micron silver ablative coating can reflect laser and radiation emissions without damage to the composite subsurface.

Now, since there's nothing in there about exactly how it's controlled, let's look at a decent source for the FO milieu, Starship Troopers:

Robert A. Heinlein wrote: The "muscles," the pseudo-musculature, get all the publicity, but its the control of that power that merits it. The real genius of the suit is that you don't have to control the suit; you just wear it, like clothes, like your skin. Any sort of ship you have to learn to pilot; it takes a long time and a new full set of reflexes, a differenet and artificial way of thinking. Even riding a bicycle demands an acquired skill, very different from walking, whereas a spaceship -- oh, brother! I won't live that long. Space ships are for acrobats who are also mathematicians.

But a suit you just wear.

Two thousand pounds of it, maybe, in full kit -- yet the very first time you are fitted into one you can immediately walk, run, jump, lie down, pick up an egg without breaking it (takes a bit of practice, but anything improves with practice), dance a jig (if you can dance a jig, that is, without a suit) -- and jump right over the house next door and come down to a feather landing.

The secret lies in negative feedback and amplification.

[...]

But here is how it works, minus the diagrams. The inside of the suit is a mass of pressure receptors, hundreds of them. You push with the heel of your hand; the suit feels it, amplifies it, pushes with you to take the pressure off the receptors that gave the order to push. That's confusing, but negative feedback is always confusing the first time, even though your body has been doing is since you quit kicking helplessly as a baby. Young children are still learning it; that's why they are clumsy. Adolescents and adults do it without ever realizing that they learned it -- and a man with Parkinson's disease has damaged his circuits for it.

The suit has feedback which causes it to match any motion you make, exactly -- but with great force.

Controlled force...force controlled without your having to think about it. [...]

And that is the beauty of a powered suit: you don't have to think about it. You don't have to drive it, fly it, conn it, operate it; you just wear it and it just takes orders directly from your muscles and does for you what your muscles are trying to do. This leaves you with your whole mind free to handle your weapons and notice what is going on around you...which is supremely important to an infantryman who wants to die in bed. If you load a mudfoot down with a whole lot of gadgets that he has to watch somebody a lot more simply equipped -- say with a stone ax -- will sneak up on him and bash his head in while he is trying to read a vernier.

The above is taken from Starship Troopers, which was first published in 1959 and therefore presents us with a view very much appropriate to the FO universe, even though R. A. Heinlein's model of the Mobile Infantry suit wasn't quite what T-51b PA represents. (There was a section on Jump Jets that I left out, because it wasn't relevant.)

However, this does fit the T-51b in that it increase ST, but not AG. In other words, if you can't dance a jig w/o PA on, you won't be doing it w/PA on.

OTB

Posted: **Thu Sep 19, 2002 12:51 am**

That would be acceptable. Very complex and costy however. I actually doubt if the US army could afford them.

Power armors should be even more scarce then.

Posted: **Thu Sep 19, 2002 1:47 am**

Meths wrote:That would be acceptable. Very complex and costy however. I actually doubt if the US army could afford them.

Power armors should be even more scarce then.

Sure they can. They an afford millions of pounds worth of tanks, but trained men aren't replaceable. What good is a tank if you have no men? And with power armour on your body is more or less a tank.

The user could be more agile, as now he has the strength to pull off things like flips and jumps. Atheletes and dancers usually train their bodys to carry their own body-weight. with power armour you could give yourself a little extra boost with a jump, and with the added strength pull your body around. If you had the strength you could probably pull your own body weight around and land on your feet...

The problem I see though is with endurance. It's all fine and dandy able to climb up the side of dams with your finger-tips and punching a hole through people, but I imagine covering large distances is a chore. The body would react to your movements, so your still sprinting so it would tiring still. Therefore they still would need transport, but I'm struggling to think what could caryy about 1000lbs worth of troops, not including equipment and other stuff.

Posted: **Thu Sep 19, 2002 1:58 am**

Pyro wrote:The user could be more agile, as now he has the strength to pull off things like flips and jumps. Atheletes and dancers usually train their bodys to carry their own body-weight. with power armour you could give yourself a little extra boost with a jump, and with the added strength pull your body around. If you had the strength you could probably pull your own body weight around and land on your feet...

Remember game balance, Pyro. PA is already an extremely powerful item in the game in that it increases your ST by 3 (4 in the case of APA types), makes you considerably harder to hit, and then there's all that protection. If you add to a player's AG on top of it (and hence most likely give them more APs) you're looking at making a player well-nigh unbeatable.

An option -- and I've brought this up before -- would be to have a sort of "Scout Suit" that has less of a ST bonus and lower DT/DR (although perhaps higher AC) and also provides an AG bonus (which, IMHO, shouldn't be more than 1 point).

OTB

Posted: **Thu Sep 19, 2002 2:06 am**

What do you think about that kinda simple situation: You have strenth of 10 and PA on. Should you have 13 of st then?

Otherwise it would be a waste of char points to have a st more of 7.

Posted: **Thu Sep 19, 2002 2:21 am**

Meths wrote:What do you think about that kinda simple situation: You have strenth of 10 and PA on. Should you have 13 of st then?

Otherwise it would be a waste of char points to have a st more of 7.

This is what happens when you play Fallout.
But you don't start the game with PA, therefor those points are not wasted.

Posted: **Thu Sep 19, 2002 2:30 am**

Meths wrote:What do you think about that kinda simple situation: You have strenth of 10 and PA on. Should you have 13 of st then?

Otherwise it would be a waste of char points to have a st more of 7.

Dan wrote:This is what happens when you play Fallout.
But you don't start the game with PA, therefor those points are not wasted.

I have to agree w/Dan that starting w/10 ST isn't a waste of Stat Points since you don't start w/PA. However, I do think that ability points should be able to go higher than 10 temporarily. By that I mean that using items, to include chems. You should not be able to permanently increase your Stats to >10 using Perks or other enhancements (e.g. Operations).

OTB

Posted: **Thu Sep 19, 2002 2:37 am**

Dan wrote:
Meths wrote:What do you think about that kinda simple situation: You have strenth of 10 and PA on. Should you have 13 of st then?

Otherwise it would be a waste of char points to have a st more of 7.
This is what happens when you play Fallout.
But you don't start the game with PA, therefor those points are not wasted.

And they're not as valuable either. You create your character haveing in mind that there is a PA available later in the game, so haveing exaggerated strength isn't the best idea since char points are very valuable.

edit: those operations are quite similar problem. Creating a character is very difficult to someone that has never played this game. He doesn't know that there are some improvements available later, and when he encounters some, he may get pissed not being able to use them.

Posted: **Thu Sep 19, 2002 12:38 pm**

OnTheBounce wrote: Remember game balance, Pyro. PA is already an extremely powerful item in the game in that it increases your ST by 3 (4 in the case of APA types), makes you considerably harder to hit, and then there's all that protection. If you add to a player's AG on top of it (and hence most likely give them more APs) you're looking at making a player well-nigh unbeatable.

I was thinking about if power-armour was real, but in game, yes, it couldn't increase your agility. If it did, super-mutants would end up having a high Ag to, to balance it out. And you probably couldn't do a majority of flips and twists because the suit probably couldn't take the strain at the joints (It's not like it's a lycra suit)

Posted: **Thu Sep 19, 2002 5:45 pm**

In Fallout, it was not really worth setting your strength above 5 or 6, unless you were a melee/Hth character. If you had NPCs, you didn't have to carry many items, you could use drugs to temporarily raise them and when you got PA, it didn't really matter anymore. Items like Power Armor are a bit problematic, because they can possibly unbalance the different attributes, in this case lowering the importance of STR, unless you wanna kick ass in Hth right from the beginning, but that's why we've got skills too. But on the other hand, it makes the PA so friggin cool.
I don't think PA should give the player an AG bonus. Sure, the PA is powered and eases movement, but it's a huge and heavy armor. The electrification makes it possible to you to even move around in that armor, it does not allow you to perform acrobatic stunts. Other armors should only affect AC and different resistances, I don't want BG-style 'BoS battle-gloves +1' in Fallout 3. Certain armors should have a special use too, like the purple robes you used to wander around in certain locations.

Posted: **Sat Sep 21, 2002 4:21 am**

A possibility to have a st more than 10 would make hth characters more atractive. It was very difficult to kick Enclave asses in hth combat in Fo2, st of 13 would make it easier. So the game balance would be kept, and even better than in Fo2.

Haveing certain stats increased up to 11 after some artifitial operation wouldn't affect the balance either. You couldn't have more than 12 AP anyway, and there is very little use to have any other stat increased to that high level.

Posted: **Sat Sep 21, 2002 5:04 pm**

I would like to see power armor that gives you only +1 to your str.
That would elimante any stats waste problems, and make the armor less powerful.

I didn't like the idea of taking a charecter with a bit over the avg str (6) and ending up with a charecter that has 9.

Posted: **Sat Sep 21, 2002 6:19 pm**

Attributes should be balanced to fit in the 1-10 scale. That's not easy to be done and needs a lot of tweaking and balancing, but it's the strict and rough scale that makes character developing more challenging(and more interesting). I'm generally against attribute raising items(CHR +1 shades, lucky amulets etc.) but Power Armor should give you a STR bonus, because it's a kick-ass armor. Maybe +3 or +4 is too much but I'd say +2 is fine. It should be found near the end of game, for game balancing reasons. But on the other hand, It's not my decision. :roll:

Posted: **Sun Sep 22, 2002 1:18 am**

I think that PA should be able to rise your ST above 10. But it shouldn't be possible with perks / in the character creation...

The system from Fo:T works well IMO. Super Muties could have STR of 14 and stuff...

Posted: **Sun Sep 22, 2002 4:44 am**

Kashluk wrote:The system from Fo:T works well IMO. Super Muties could have STR of 14 and stuff...

As far as i remember there were some human recruits that had some of their single stats increased up to 11 somehow. I also ALMOST liked that FoT special system.

The PA st bonus should be +3 anyway. Keep in mind that this it's a very heavy thingie.

Posted: **Mon Sep 23, 2002 8:39 pm**

I think it's interesting to see how this works in Lionheart. They allow some attributes to go above 10, right? I remember last time I saw a question on this they said they were 'considering it'.

But personally I think the scale should be strictly 1-10. It's probably the best choice for balanced gameplay.

Posted: **Mon Sep 23, 2002 9:16 pm**

VasikkA wrote:I think it's interesting to see how this works in Lionheart...But personally I think the scale should be strictly 1-10. It's probably the best choice for balanced gameplay.

So -- using your example of Lionheart -- you wouldn't allow something like AD&D's Girdle of Giant Strength which raised a character's STR to levels above that which a normal human could attain, but you would allow Gauntlets of Ogre Power which simply raised a character's STR to 18/00, which was the highest level that a human could have?

OTB

Posted: **Mon Sep 23, 2002 10:07 pm**

OnTheBounce wrote:So -- using your example of Lionheart -- you wouldn't allow something like AD&D's Girdle of Giant Strength which raised a character's STR to levels above that which a normal human could attain, but you would allow Gauntlets of Ogre Power which simply raised a character's STR to 18/00, which was the highest level that a human could have?

OTB

Umm.. Yeah, if you want to put it that way.

But I don't like attribute raising items(PA is an exception), other bonuses are OK.

Duck and Cover

Armour ideas