Duck and Cover

In the stock campaign the characters need not take any sustinance.

What would be the best way to force the characters to need a periodical dose of the wet stuff? The addiction rout?

As far as I know, that's the only way to make a character NEED something.

But creating a water addiction is a little messed up.

It is an interesting concept though. But you would need to make it 100% addictive, but more importently you would need to have the starting charcter already addicated to water

I was thinking of making some prefabs that are pre-addicted to water of course you wont be able to overdose on water and the duration of the waters effect should be say 24 hours

Without a slug of water the player would suffer only slight stat reductions, say one point each in:

perception
endurance
strength

Now what will the effect on the player be while traversing the world map? I think the player will show up needing water to be at his/her best on the next mission. I wonder if the whole thing would really be worth it , would it add an interesting dimension to force the player to find and carry around a load of water or just be a pain in the ass?

xbow wrote:Now what will the effect on the player be while traversing the world map? I think the player will show up needing water to be at his/her best on the next mission. I wonder if the whole thing would really be worth it , would it add an interesting dimension to force the player to find and carry around a load of water or just be a pain in the ass?

Alternately to making water as a just have a water container and some campaign triggers to check if any of the squad are carrying water, if not then use the triggers to turn on some random encounters where if the player hits the encounter they spawn near a trap (not sure if that's possible or not will have a look at it at the weekend) which will do dehydration damage. Which if it works will be the closest to Wasteland and Fallout when you were travelling on the world map with out a canteen.

requiem_for_a_starfury wrote:Alternately to making water as a just have a water container and some campaign triggers to check if any of the squad are carrying water, if not then use the triggers to turn on some random encounters where if the player hits the encounter they spawn near a trap (not sure if that's possible or not will have a look at it at the weekend) which will do dehydration damage. Which if it works will be the closest to Wasteland and Fallout when you were travelling on the world map with out a canteen.

Now thats a damn good idea. I know that in fallout2 at least they intended to implement a food/water system to make the play a bit more realistic. I have always felt that some of a PC's carry weight should be devoted to consumables that must be carried in order to make a successfull trek across the wasteland. Thanks for the insight and please tell us what you discover. Your method would make FOT feel a bit more like an RPG.

or you could have a minus heal rate

That sounds good too. Would it be possible to "recharge" your canteen by using it on a well? If you made the canteen hold enough uses to last for a couple of days it wouldn't be annoying.

Is is possible to make the water be automaticaly used up? say for example every six hours it uses the canteent and reduces it level by one. This would be better than having to stop every day and use your canteen

Tc63 wrote:or you could have a minus heal rate

It would have to be a very small value like -.01. The game doesn't seem to like it when the main character dies on the world map either.

It would probably be more of a burden. Stuff like that usually isn't something you want to focus on in a game like this. Survival stuff is best left to games such as The Sims. Fallout Tactics is all about strategy, so I think you might want to focus more on that aspect.

If you were making a single character RPG, maybe you could have it a viable option then, but I don't think it would be worth the effort. Just have water as a healing item, and people will use it often. Especially if other healing items are scarce.

ive made water and food items give you a plus to your heal rate or made it so they heal about 1 hit point every minute for about 10 minutes

[TBC]-PaladinHeart wrote:Just have water as a healing item, and people will use it often. Especially if other healing items are scarce.

That is probably the best solution of all. By drying up the supply of stim paks water /food become important items. Giving a can of Pure Water or a meal that weights a pound the capacity to restore say 5 hpoints will do two things.

1)Eat up a bit of that bloated carry weight
2)force the player to use a little more G2

good call PaladinHeart

Its too bad most of the food items in the original fallout games were not used to recover life. I usually ended up bartering them off as fast as possible, or keeping a couple of each in my car/storage spot if I thought they might be needed for a quest later on.

I always loathe useless junk/items you can pick up and never have a good use for. Money is OK, but other stuff should always have a use, quest or otherwise, or be a good barter item. Or a combination of two or more useful aspects.

[TBC]-PaladinHeart wrote:I always loathe useless junk/items you can pick up and never have a good use for. Money is OK, but other stuff should always have a use, quest or otherwise, or be a good barter item. Or a combination of two or more useful aspects.

I couldn't agree more it would seem obvious especially in FOT that BOS script, or ring Pulls are worthless . You should be able to barter with items that have real value like ammo, guns, food/water, armor etc . Every item has a base value and so a good trade might be 50 rounds of 9mm ammo for 10 canteens of water or whatever. Useless items are a waste.

Having a random encounter with a trap doesn't seem to work, whether that's because the placement of entities in a RE is totally random and the trap is not spawning near the characters or because DTs need a trigger to fire them and REs strip tagnames or not I don't know.

What you can do is add the trap to your landscape maps, i.e. any desert areas, on top of the player's spawn point. Then have the trigger set to fire if the campaign variable carrying water is set to false. This will cause your squad damage whenever you stop in the middle of the desert without any water. Also you can add a RE by having something small and valueless appear (I suggest the brokenbottle entity), then the trap will fire in the RE.

While playing with this I realised you can have REs with radiation entities spawning, which opens up possabilities if you want to emulate the world map of Wasteland with it's radioactive areas.

As to usless items, while I prefer items to have some intrinsic or monetary value junk items can add colour and depth to a game, as long as they aren't too numerous and don't appear in totaly inappropriate places. Besides useless items add a certain mystery to the game, as you can spend ages wondering what they might be used for, especially if inventory space/carry weight is limited.

edit Correction to what I said above, you can have a randomly spawing trap in an RE, but you need to put a local trigger in the landscape map i.e. condition player has less than 1 item tagged water, action set object script state trap ticked.

Apparently campaign variables will affect entities that are all ready on a landscape map when that map is encountered via the RE engine but won't affect entities spawned by the RE through the campaign.txt.

So if you've added a trap to your landscape maps it will fire with a campaign variable but if you've added traps to the random encounters in the campaign.txt you'll need to use a local trigger to fire the DT. Plus randomly spawning DTs might not spawn near your squad (spawn points for entities in REs affect numbers not location) so it might not be suitable to for dehydration but useful for other hazardous encounters.

Which if it works will be the closest to Wasteland and Fallout when you were travelling on the world map with out a canteen.

This was in Fallout? If so I've been completely oblivious to it all these years.

Burnov wrote:This was in Fallout? If so I've been completely oblivious to it all these years.

You get stopped and it says something like:

You spend two hours looking for water
or
You manage to avoid dehydration due to your water supplies.

fallout ranger wrote:

Burnov wrote:This was in Fallout? If so I've been completely oblivious to it all these years.

You get stopped and it says something like:

You spend two hours looking for water
or
You manage to avoid dehydration due to your water supplies.

I think it happens when you have a low outdoorsman skill, or are a low-level character.

Now that you mention it. I do recall seeing something resembling that description.


Anyhow... I think it's a really great concept.

I just watched 28 days later last night and I'd never seen it before. While It think the movie it self was rather cheesy at parts. I really do like how they attempted to put a decidedly human perspective on their situation by illustrating a need for proper sustenance.

If any of you have seen it. The main characters early in the film are subsisting on sugary soda pop and junk food. At one point the guy complains of feeling lethargic and having a headache. "Crashing", as it were from the quickly metabolized sweets.

I think that would be an interesting element too. Having to have something to eat every day or so to keep your stats from falling.

It's a pity that something like that needs to be classified as an addiction to work. Assuming you could properly implement it.

28 days was a pretty good film as it was but it had the potential to be a great Post APOC flick. The film took a wrong turn when it turned out that all the Army dudes wanted was to lure some women into their lair and knock off a piece of ass, (that was really lame).

I think that the flick would have been better if it had focused more on the survival of the four main characters on their journey to the rescue station. It also would have been more interesting if they had managed to hunt up a few shotguns and a small precious supply of ammo stripped off of dead cops enrout to their objective.

Once at the objective they could have found a number of interesting situations that would have opened the way for a final conflict and ending.