DevBlog - PA and Damage

Damage in FO4 is Weird. Especially in Power Armor. The base equation is simple enough...

Times the locational modifier based on what body part you're shooting from the BDPT record for the race. Fallout 4 uses the standard RPG convention of all your armor adds up, and no matter what body part you're shooting, the damage is calculated against the full armor. Shoot someone in the leg, the DR from their helmet matters. Not the most sensical thing from a realism perspective, but for RPG balance it actually works pretty well to avoid the tactical headshot-everything-before-it-headshots-you of tactical gameplay. More realistic doesn't always equal more fun. I know a lot of people want to turn fallout 4 into a modern tactical shooter, but honestly that isn't gameplay I particularly enjoy.

Adding Power Armor to the equation is where things start getting interesting.

When you enter power armor, the engine removes the base armor that you're wearing. The model for it still renders on the character, but you lose the bonuses for it. When you take damage, two things now happen- first, your armor takes damage, which is calculated against the PA's AR/ER values, and multiplied by the game setting fPowerArmorNPCArmorDamageMultiplier (or fPowerArmorPCArmorDamageMultiplier for the player). Then, your character's damage is calculated, and for this the DR/ER values from your PA are ignored. Yes, that's right, that 500+ Armor from your PA does nothing to decrease the amount of damage the wearer takes (however Armor from Perks like toughness still counts). PA instead has a buff to the actor value "PADamageMult" which reduces incoming damage by a flat percent, so the thing that changes how much damage your character takes is strictly how many pieces of PA you're wearing. A T51 will last longer, but it has exactly the same damage reduction for the player on a per-shot basis as raider PA. And it is entirely possible that you will actually take more damage per-shot in power armor than you would out of it, especially if you're only wearing one or two pieces but have a full set of heavy regular armor.

For a long time, my solution to this was basically to just add a large reduction on incoming damage, and balance it by increasing the armor damage via the game setting. I paired this with a damage threshold mechanic, which meant that low damage weapons effectively dealt zero damage to power armor.

The other piece of the equation here, is hit location. I've been on the fence for a while about locational damage. And in 6.4 and earlier, the modlist actually had a slight locational damage effect with PA- hits on body parts covered with PA actually did about 50% less damage than hits on non-covered body parts, but it didn't work in VATS. The base game adds a perk to the player while in PA, I just added a percentage damage reduction if the hit was on a bodypart that was armored. The catch is that when using VATS this condition ALWAYS returns Torso, no matter where you're aiming. Yes, really, good job bethesda. The hit location condition literally doesn't work work with the game's primary aiming mechanic. In an attempt to fix this, I was looking at both Direct Hit and Bastion, which both work by changing how the damage calculation works at an engine level with a DLL injector. This fixed the issue with locational damage, but in the end, I'm not sure it's better gameplay. Because, you don't get your base-armor while in PA, NPCs are invincible walking tanks right up until a single piece of their armor breaks, after which they can be one-shot almost as easily as a naked settler.

So, having now fixed the locational damage component, I'm not sure it's such a good idea after all. More realistic doesn't always equal more fun. As far as what this means for LitR, I'm probably either going to go back to the old system and just remove the locational component, or I may have a go at a workaround for the removal of base armor when in PA.

One of these days I really should stop fighting the engine...

EDIT: After fighting with the engine some more, I've come to the following conclusion. PA DR works just like you'd expect it to, the problem is simply that given the range of DR and damage values, you're never going to get more than about 20% reduced damage from even a full set of power armor. And because most PA has way more health than you do, that 20% damage kills you long before it does your PA.