Duck and Cover

Remember having to disable all those nodes at the same time in that later robot mission? How do you feel about stuff like that? If you've played adventure games where you have to switch between characters to move on, same question.

on using every character's skills as long as you make it clear in the breifing or make sure it is towards the begining of the mission. Fallout tactics missions tend to be really long, and I'd hate to play through half an hour of mission only to find out I can't beat it because my science speacilist got killed in the first firefight.

but for splitting up your guys I'm all for that. like you have to use a couple guys to create a distraction while the rest of your squad escorts a hostage to safety, or if you had to take out two guard postions at the same time to stop an alarm from going off. That sort of thing would add greatly to the tactical aspect of the game. Of course, it would work a lot better if you are designing around turn based than real time though.

In the original game there was most of the time no reason to split of your squad, and you could get in real trouble if you did. I remember back in x-com it was always good to split your squad into fire teams. since you have a lot less guys in tactics than in x-com, you could try to set something up where you would split up your squad into two or three man teams. I think that would be pretty neat.

bertgoldstein wrote:on using every character's skills as long as you make it clear in the breifing or make sure it is towards the begining of the mission. Fallout tactics missions tend to be really long, and I'd hate to play through half an hour of mission only to find out I can't beat it because my science speacilist got killed in the first firefight.

I agree, and this is a very good point.

One of the things I didn't like about FoT was that the way the 'cruit pool was structured it really encouraged you to SFL through situations until you made it through w/o loosing anyone. If you want to encourage non-SFL gaming you end up hamstringing the use of non-combat skills, since -- as you said -- it can quickly make it impossible to complete a mission due to someone w/a mission-critical skill getting bumped off.

While someone might argue that what this does is to encourage cross-training members of your squad, FoT really doesn't support that very well since you either end up making things so easy that anyone w/a few points lumped in a particular non-combat skill can succeed, or you end up making very unbelievable situations like the main door that the squad has to get through being easy to pick, but in trying to reward the player who has a high Lock Pick skill you have some ramshackle door on some out-of-the-way shed that has some super-lock designed by a secret panel at Vault Tek, but leaves the player wondering why such an advanced lock was used on such a POS door.

Of course, you could simply have mission critical skills and encourage the player to SFL his way to zero-fatalities, but that's not satisfactory in my book. There has to be an element of tragedy in any story set in the FO universe, and getting through unscathed is not tragic.

Speaking of the "robot node thingy"...that's actually not a bad example of how to do things. After all, you could use multiple characters to resolve it with either combat or non-combat skills*, or take the easier route and use the Remote Det. Traps.

OTB

*Science can be used to disable the nodes, and a penalty/bonus can be set to the skill roll.

In my campaign the player won't be able to directly lose any party members. It would have been better if they could just "swoon" until the player could revive them with a medical kit as in final fantasy type games, but since this isn't possible I'll have to end the mission every time any party member dies.

This will require some tricky balancing later on in my campaign. I don't want it to be either too easy or too hard. But I also don't want the player to get frustated because Squad Member X keeps dying. I guess forcing the player to bring extra healing items on all their characters will factor in. One of the characters is a medic/doctor but they won't always be available. I'll just have to wait and see how the, hopefully frantic, combat turns out.

I guess the best way of explaining it is, for example, you have one character sniping, while another engages in melee combat, while another heals the melee character. Factor in more characters with different weapon skills and you've got some complicated stuff going on. Not to mention friendly fire, "I don't care if its friendly fire, I don't want any!". I wish I could disable friendly fire for my entire campaign as it is going to cause some issues.

I'm in two minds about ending a mission if a squad member dies, it's fine in a standalone mission but in a campaign it could get rather annoying. Plus you'd have to limit your recruits so that you can be sure the player would have the appropriate team members at the right point in the game. As bertgoldstein says if it's going to be a show stopper when someone dies you need to make that clear in the mission briefing.

I've always treated the recruit pool as a team of specialists, taking the person I need for a particular mission and returning them afterwards, personally I'd prefer having the option of brute forcing my way through the remainder of the mission if my expert kicks the bucket. Again with penalties and rewards for completing the mission in different ways. I usually only reload if my main guy dies or if someone gets killed because of my out of game stupidity i.e. playing in the dark and hitting the quick key to stand instead of go prone and getting my squad killed or being distracted by the totty on the telly taking their bra off just as I'm manuvering my guys through a minefield and so not pressing w to stop them from stepping on a mine.

Well my campaign is geared more towards the RPG genre than the tactical genre. While I want it to be challenging, its not going to be challenging to the point of getting your squaddies killed if you make a simple mistake in combat. Sure, your guys are going to be weak early on and might get killed by rushing into situations but it will be different later on.

To reflect the emphasis on the importance of your characters, they all start out with 100 bonus life points. I did this for several reasons. And it doesn't necessarily make the game much easier since healing items don't heal according to how many hit points you have (actually they heal according the amount they heal along with your healing rate as some factor involved). You also won't get characters from a recruit pool, but rather directly by directly meeting them. They will all have their own individual personality.

Maybe I should just sum it up. You won't want to take "Tough Guy" mode. Sure the towns are going to be bunkers where you could save if you decided to take tough guy mode, but if you were playing FO1 would you want to go destroy the mutant vats without saving until you get back to town? I think not.

I'll include a readme with advice on several issues for the player to read before even starting up the game. Including but not limited to not letting any of your characters die, having several save games (preferably one at the last place you wer at, one as you started a map, and one right before you try something dangerous).

I guess im hoping that when im done with it, it won't really be Fallout Tactics anymore.

[TBC]-PaladinHeart wrote:In my campaign the player won't be able to directly lose any party members. It would have been better if they could just "swoon" until the player could revive them with a medical kit as in final fantasy type games, but since this isn't possible I'll have to end the mission every time any party member dies.

Well all I can say is, unless you make one hell of a kickass campaign I wont play it much. I mean.. you cant have a battle without blood?

Edit: Second thoughts about that last comment.

If your campaign was to be similar to the game progression and story of Planescape: Torment and have as good NPC personality I wouldnt mind your idea. I have a hard time seeing a FOT mod being that immersive in such a way though. My campaign will have RPG elements, but combat will be my primary concern.