Duck and Cover

i had this trouble too. All random encounter enemies have a random amount of equipment from thier inventory, apart from equiped stuff, which is certain to appear. I gave them their normal gun in one hand, some normal ammo just in case it did appear, then created a duplicate of thier main weapon which used no ammo at all. This way you will still get shot at, just not by burst weapons.

Level of experience is worked out using the players exp plus the experience number given in the campaign table. The points gained by going up these levels is automattically spent on the entities tag skills, or spread out over all of them.

the only trouble i have with random encounters now, is i want to change what coulors the spawned enemies turn up as, it would be good to set it up so for example, in my campaign, everyone needs green skin. Any ideas?

Replys to questions:

1A. Yes, which is what im having to do in another of my campaigns

1B. yep, just put in a load of crap in the entities list bit of the encounter

1C. yep, also true, a very long winded approach mind. you could also have 8 or so groups on each map, and have it randomly select which group to fight against

2A. see post above

2B. yes

Thanks for the replies. I guess I'll just have to figure out the formula (how much exp is given based on the enemy's level). Otherwise I can go with the long winded approach.. which isn't bad really. Besides, I never enjoyed the random encounters anyway. What is the fun of enemies just walking across the map and maybe or maybe not running into you?

This, when you could make a trigger based map with whatever enemy type you wanted, along with buildings, etc. etc..

I think I might try using the random encounters to generate random loot. Hmm.. nah. I don't like trying to figure out their methods. I'll use my own random generation thingy.

Plus, since im not going to randomly generate enemies. I don't need to figure out how much exp they'll give. So everything works out fine that way.. hmm.. I might figure it out anyway though. Im sure others here would like to know.

Tc63 wrote:the only trouble i have with random encounters now, is i want to change what coulors the spawned enemies turn up as, it would be good to set it up so for example, in my campaign, everyone needs green skin. Any ideas?

Nah the colours is entirely randomised, the only way around it is to make special encounters instead.

Tc63 wrote: I gave them their normal gun in one hand, some normal ammo just in case it did appear, then created a duplicate of thier main weapon which used no ammo at all. This way you will still get shot at, just not by burst weapons.

Why wouldn't you get shot with burst weapons? You can have infinite ammo miniguns, even without a magazine!

Super Mutants would be a bit big as orks, and we pretty much only have the sprites that are already there.

yes you can have infinite ammo miniguns, but to make it infinte amm, you need to change "ammo usage" to 0, which means whenever the minigun fires on "burst" it actually only fires one shot in that burst. I am using the supermutants as orks at the moment, but im hanging on, hoping that a new sprite editor will come out before fallout tactics is completely forgotten about

I could of sworn that when I set ammo useage to 25, three guys were killed in one burst.

EDIT: I was mistaken, with testing, I found that they do only fire one shot. (I mixed up a situation with a radius weapon.

Experience progression using the level editor or campaign text (random encounters), based on a level 0 entity with a base experience of 1 point.

• Level - Experience
  0 - 1 point
  1 - 1 point
  2 - 1 point
  3 - 1 point
  4 - 1 point
  5 - 1 point
  6 - 2 points
  7 - 2 points
  8 - 3 points
  9 - 3 points
  10 - 4 points
  11 - 5 points
  12 - 6 points
  13 - 7 points
  14 - 9 points
  15 - 11 points
  16 - 13 points
  17 - 15 points
  18 - 19 points
  19 - 22 points
  20 - 26 points
  21 - 31 points
  22 - 38 points
  23 - 45 points
  24 - 53 points
  25 - 63 points
  26 - 76 points
  27 - 90 points
  28 - 107 points
  29 - 127 points
  30 - 152 points
  31 - 181 points
  32 - 215 points
  33 - 255 points
  34 - 304 points
  35 - 362 points
  36 - 430 points
  37 - 511 points
  38 - 608 points
  39 - 724 points
  40 - 861 points
  41 - 1023 points
  42 - 1217 points
  43 - 1448 points
  44 - 1722 points
  45 - 2047 points
  46 - 2435 points
  47 - 2896 points
  48 - 3444 points
  49 - 4095 points
  50 - 4870 points

So to work out the approximate experience value of an actor times their base experience points against the value per level. I say approximate as there are some invisible decimal places, for example the giant rat with a base experience of 8 is worth 38967 experience points at level 50. Which actually works out as 8 x 4870.875. I'm not sure, but I think the value after the decimal point either changes per race or not.

Wow, a giant rat worth almost 39,000 experience! Who wouldn't expend a big gun burst on one of those? Which, im sure, would undoubtedly kill it in one hit.

The only way this formula would work for a longer campaign would be setting everything up with 1 experience point. Not much fun, but it would work.

That means a deathclaw would be level 40, which isn't exactly a long stretch of the imagination. Im sure everyone remembers how hard they were to kill in FO1 & 2.

Thanks for the list RFAS, that will definitely come in handy. But up till about level 30, everything is worthless! That's why it was so hard to build up your characters in the default campaign. And expending ammunition, without getting any back, meant that you couldn't keep engaging random encounters.

OK back to tile work for me..

Remember those are the numbers for the lowest experience base, most opponents have a higher base experience value, plus when you've got several opponents the experience is going to add up.

Personally I'm toying with the idea of having the experience for opponents set to 0 and only awarding experience for completing mission objectives.

That would mean that random encounters would be even more useless. There would have to be many difficult objectives which give huge rewards.

My special encounter will be a little tactical mission, where you need to survive an ambush etc. For the RE's I'm trying to set it up that instead of meeting human opponents you stumble into a minefield and then need to find your way out. Otherwise I'm in the opinion that random encounters should be there to make the game more dangerous to your characters not just to provide cheap experience or equipment.

Outdoorsman 100%. Still, it is nice to have a challenge that is interesting and dangerous, not just time wasting.

At least the player could use a highly skilled trapper and get the mines for cash.

I had a bunch of other stuff typed, but I figured it was going off-topic too much. Stuff like.. recommended tag skills for user-made campaigns.

If you wanted to, you could probably put the mines into the random encounter enimies table. Ie, they would spawn like the randomly encountered enemies, so that thier placement is semi random. This could also be done with oil drums/containers etc, then you could say something like "you have come across an enemy supply depot, destroy what you can and then get the hell out".

If it works, it would add some fun little "mini-missions" to a campaign

That's what I'm trying but the placement is very random. The player spawns you put on a landscape map only dictate the numbers spawned not the position, for instance you have a random encounter set for a min-max of 2-3 and then have the entities, one raider basic, one raider heavy and one raider enforcer. If you've only put one spawn point on the map you'll only tend to get one of the entity groups showing up, i.e. 1 raider basic. If you've added three spawn points then you get a mixture of all three types. But the placement of each group will be entirely random.