Encounter creation problem

[quietfanatic]

Problem

I tried to make a new random encounter, with 'Rebel' brotherhood troopers, but when I met them on my worldmap in game, they had little or no ammunition for their weapons.

here is their entry in campaign.txt

Rebels { "Rebels01_Medium;bad;2;3;true;A",
"entities/Actors/Rebels/rebel_01_trooper.ent;20;100",
"entities/Actors/Rebels/rebel_02_trooper.ent;20;90", },

However, this also happens when I add things to inventories in the entity editor and put the actors in multiplayer maps.

I thought I might as well put this here in case anyone knew how to fix it.

I recreated 'Rebel' entities and saved over the original .ent files and surprisingly got shot at a few times. Yay. However, usually only one entity would carry any ammunition and sometimes none, making for some bizarre game play. Sometimes individuals only had a limited number of shots. It seems to be totally random.

I would assume that others have created their own random encounters with entities that they have armed with ranged weapons. Did you have this problem in that case, and if so, how did you fix it?

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

In the entity editor how much ammo have you given them, and how much is unlootable? When you just use the inventory to make ammo unlootable it will become lootable when loaded, so if they have a weapon with a small magazine only some of it is going to become lootable, and if they are using burst capable weapons they might use up the ammo rather quickly before you can get to kill them.

[quietfanatic]

No, I think that it is just that my computer doesn't like evil Brotherhood. The entities have everything they need to be able to use their weapons but sometimes, they just don't have any ammuntion.

The main entity has a plasma rifle, high stats and 50 microfusion shells. Sometimes they do that is.

I could understand if they consistently didn't work, but the random chance of them being armed doesn't make any sense.

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

Perhaps it is just down to randomisation (like the skin and team colours)?

[quietfanatic]

I think it is most likely a bug. It would be pretty stupid to give people 0-50 shots randomly and anyway, they didn't have many shots. According to probablitiy, it must be a problem.

Even though I have no idea as of yet how to fix it, I just gave them infinite ammo and made their weapons non-lootable. That should do it I hope.

[PaladinHeart]

I hope the player gets good exp and/or money/loot from them. Otherwise most players will just avoid the encounter. In that way, the encounter wouldn't even be necessary. So always make sure its worth fighting the enemies for some reason. Nobody wants to be harrassed by a constant flow of random encounter enemies that have nothing beneficial to offer.

If you put other items (like armor, food, etc..) on an enemy, is it randomized as well? Im going to put loot on animals and stuff so im wondering if they'll actually have it.

[quietfanatic]

I prefer to have fairly dangerous encounters so that you die if you are not tough enough, to stop you aroaming ala Fallout 2. I do not think that it would be very realistic if there is an encounter in an area later, but not initially. Still, I would still give a nice experience bonus.

[quietfanatic]

I prefer to have fairly dangerous encounters so that you die if you are not tough enough, to stop you aroaming ala Fallout 2. I do not think that it would be very realistic if there is an encounter in an area later, but not initially. Still, I would still give a nice experience bonus.

[quietfanatic]

I prefer to have fairly dangerous encounters so that you die if you are not tough enough, to stop you aroaming ala Fallout 2. I do not think that it would be very realistic if there is an encounter in an area later, but not initially. Still, I would still give a nice experience bonus.

[quietfanatic]

me have error but I let people die if they go too far forward but give them good reward

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

I've been playing around with the REs, I made a test campaign and some test entites and I'm now positive that the amount of any item in the inventory (but not the hand slots) and not just ammo is randomly generated.

I think it's partially defined by the level of the entity as set up in the campaign text, the higher the level the more items you're likely to scavenger. I made my test entity with 50 rounds of ammo in the inventory and while I got my fair share of opponents with out any ammo, at level 1 they would be lucky to have the 50 rounds, but at level 17 I was looting 60, 70 and even 80 odd bullets from their corpses.

I also think that it's perhaps done as a percentage of the total that you placed in the entity editor, when increasing the amount to 200 rather than 50, I encountered far less opponents without ammo. So I suggest increasing the base amount of ammo per entity and make most of it unlootable.

Finally I noticed that if you set up the encounter with say, a raider_basic, raider_light and a raider enforcer that sometimes you'd get one of each, but other times you might get 2 or 3 enforcers and none of the other entities. In which case the majority of times you got a multiple of the same actor only one would have ammo. Sometimes none of them would have ammo, and sometimes they would all have ammo, but mostly it would be only the one entity.

[PaladinHeart]

Thanks for researching this RFAS, that will help out in the future. So if I wanted to put around 1 to 10 "loot" items on an enemy, I should put about 15 on them in the editor? Or perhaps more?

Maybe this was done to make some perks, like the ammo finder and money finder (don't recall specific names), more useful? Good to randomize money but its a problem for ammo.

Anyway, thanks for finding out. I had always wondered how it worked.

[quietfanatic]

Thanks, that is useful and very interesting. It is abit annoying though.

If I put the level up to say, 17, wouldn't it greatly increase the experience as well? (I wouldn't want that).
If I give them too many shells, they may be encumbered, but I will give them some, even if they keep the infinite ammo rifles.

[Jimmyjay86]

I'm also wondering if the game difficulty setting has something to do with the amount of ammo?

[PaladinHeart]

Here is an easy fix for experience problems:

After you make your enemy character, simply set their kill experience to whatever is desired (like say.. 1000 for a deathclaw like in FO1/2).

Then all you have to do is set their level experience to 0. This reduces their level to 1, thus negatiting the multiplier, and they get to keep their stats you had previously given them.

If you don't use this method you will inevitably give too much experience, or too little, as the calculations the game uses are hard to determine and it is MUCH easier this way. Using the in-game level/exp calculations you could end up giving 25 exp for a level 1 entity and 75000 exp for a level 20 entity.

[quietfanatic]

Then all you have to do is set their level experience to 0. This reduces their level to 1, thus negatiting the multiplier, and they get to keep their stats you had previously given them.

Do you mean that if I set the level to 18 in campaign.txt, then they will stay at level 1? If so, then they can have their ammuntion without giving too much experience or changing their stats.

Otherwise, one of RFAS's theories would mean that you would get too much experience. At level 1, they usually have no ammunition, so it seems like we will have to either strike a compromise between level and inventory, give them infinite ammo weapons, or completely work out how the system works.

[PaladinHeart]

I was not actually taking random encounters into consideration.

I wonder if the amount of ammo in random encounters is based on the enemy's level, or the player's level?

Hmm.. why not just place several sets of enemies on the random encounter maps, and have the map randomly select a group for the player to fight? I know that's a little more complicated than the game's intended random encounters, but this way we could set up any kind of encounter we wanted.

There are a few ways it could be randomized, including but not limited to waypoints, locations, time, etc.. You could even give money a tagname and have random encounters dependent on how much money the player has. Although that would be hard to determine.

[quietfanatic]

Nah, not worth the trouble. Although it might be useful for specific things like traders. I would still be very interested to see if your theory would work. Has anyone tested that yet?

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

You can turn random encounters on and off, (see the triggers in bunker 4 after newton) so you could set campaign triggers to count the amount of money carried on the exit grid and alter the REs appropriately.

In my test campaign I renamed swift learner to animal skinner, and made two lots of critter encounters, one with no inventory the other set with komodo, wolf or rat skins. So if one of my squad chose the animal skinner perk they would start to find animal skins when they killed the critters.

I don't know if you could change the alignment of a random encounter by triggers, their alignment is set by the campaign text, and you'd probably need to give each encounter entity a tag name, unfortunately you'd probably get the different groups with the same tagnames. Even the max - min number of opponents is approximate. I set mine to 1 - 3 and once got 4 opponents. Plus the spawn points are only guides, the actors actually spawn all over the place.

As for the level in the campaign text that will multiply the experience, so if you did as PaladinHeart suggests you'd get an entity worth 17,000 experience.

Probably the best way to do it is to make a copy of the weapon, under collectable make it unlootable. Change the ammo type to one that's not used much, such as needles (or use BoSEE to create a new ammo type) the create some unlootable needle (or what ever) ammo and set the weight to zero and the amount to 1000. then equip the entity with the original weapon and the unlootable version. Add the unlootable ammo to it's inventory and it should have some ammo to attack you with.

If you want the player to be able to plunder a specific amount of loot, make it a special encounter rather than a RE.

[PaladinHeart]

Hmm.. a few questions.

1A. If you put an entity on the random encounter maps with the map editor, will it always be there (with the same amount of stuff/inventory) when that map is chosen for a random encounter?

1B. Along with any randomly occuring enemies. However, is it possible to have a random encounter without any enemies appearing? What would be involved in that? What would the line look like in the campaign file?

1C. Also, you can have different types of random encounter terrain on the same square right? With different chances of each map occuring, you could, possibly, set up hundreds of various encounters for each spot with preplaced entities.

2A. As for generated random encounters, lets say you have the level in the campaign text always set as 1. Will the randomly encountered enemies ever be higher than level 1?

2B. Plus, isn't there a way to turn random encounters on/off via triggers? This way you could have different level 1 entities at different levels. Or just add more as the goes along.

Uhh.. nevermind, you already answered that:

RFAS wrote: "You can turn random encounters on and off, (see the triggers in bunker 4 after newton) so you could set campaign triggers to count the amount of money carried on the exit grid and alter the REs appropriately. "

Umm.. sorry about all the complicated questions

I numbered them 1 and 2 with subcategories because 1 is concerning Manually Created random encounters, and 2 is about Generated random encounters.

What I was suggesting was leaving all the units level 1, and setting their experience given to the player when they die to an appropriate level (according to their skills/difficulty). Meaning you would never have to raise the entity's level more than 1. If you DID need to, then you could use the entity editor and raise the character's level. I know someone could possibly, more easily figure out the level/experience formula, but nobody has cared to do so yet. It would be easy tho (give them 1 exp and set their level to 50, then kill em and see what you get). Also make the entity levels 1, 15, 20, and maybe 25 so we have something to compare..

I'll try and do that if I have time today. If nobody else does so first. I't'd be good for some random encounters but I really don't think you should get more exp for a guy that has sucky weapons just because he is level 30. Someone without armor would still go down fast with a few shots from a big gun. (if not one shot)