New version (0.95b) now features many improvements and 3 all new optional add-ons!

* Balanced Creature Helth Add-On
* Ammo Scarcity Add-On
* Improved Durability Add-On

These add-ons are recommended but are OPTIONAL!! The base mod will still run great without them.

We're still in beta...but getting closer to final. Check out the updates below.


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Onehitter's Combat Realism Mod - Version 0.95b

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2711
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1. What it Does
2. Features Overview
3. Known Issues
4. Installation Notes
5. Installation
6. Feature Details
7. Suggested Add-Ons
8. Conflicts


1. What it does
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This mod is intended to bring a realistic balance to combat in of Fallout 3. Adjustments were made to nearly all standard and unique weapons in the game as well as to various gameplay settings that will make combat feel much more realistic than in vanilla Fo3. Skirmishes are now much more deadly. This mod will enforce good combat tactics and will make winning a fight feel that much more rewarding.


Standard Features:
* Increases weapon Damage values
* NPCs now consume ammunition
* Makes changes to Damage Formula settings
* Lowers dismembered limb velocity
* Alters leveled NPC health settings
* Misc. other realism and balance changes

Version 0.95 Updates:
* Added Unarmed Weapons to list of items affected
* Adjusted nearly all weapon damage levels
* Restored all critical values to default levels
* Restored weapon durability to default levels
* Added 3 new Add-ons!!
* Balanced Creature Health
* Increased Weapon and Armor Durability
* Ammo Scarcity (Reduced Ammo)
* Misc bug fixes


Version 0.9 Updates:
* Added bus and trucks to modified destructible items list
* Added Protectron's Gaze to modified weapons list (it was using stock settings)
* Finalized leveled NPC health settings

Version 0.7 Updates:
* Updated ammunition settings (reduced amount of ammo NPCs carry by a little)
* Fixed assault rifle and laser pistol (were using incorrect settings)
* Fixed sneak attack multiplier (it was actually reducing damage value)
* Fixed Ripper damage settings (it was using stock settings)
* Included Shishkebab on the list of weapons changed
* Re-adjusted leveled NPC health settings
* Removed changes to BoS melee characters

Version 0.5: Initial Release


This mod was tweaked, tested and geared towards playing on the "Normal" difficulty setting. Playing on other difficulty settings will result in a loss of balance where the player is either too powerful or too weak, depending on the setting. But if a real nightmare difficulty is what you want, then "Very Hard" might be right for you.


2. Features Overview
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This mod is not for the faint of heart. It makes combat much more challenging and, in the author's opinion, much more realistic. This mod does not contain random changes to the game, but rather a series of changes which work together to make combat feel more exciting, more challenging and more realistic.

Please read the Installation Notes before loading this mod with an existing savegame. Existing weapons in your inventory and owned containers will deteriorate by 50-75% because of the settings (increase) in maximum health values for just about all weapons. Despite their lowered condition, your weapons will undoubtedly still cause more damage right out of the box.


Weapons now deal realistic damage - Most human NPCs can now be killed with just a few bursts from an assault rifle. Creatures are easier to kill as well. A vicious dog can be brought down with one or two rounds with a 10MM pistol or a solid whack with a baseball bat. Giant Radscorpions no longer require an entire clip's worth of ammunition to kill. Low level super mutants can be brought down with two good hits with a hunting rifle.

NPCs are now more accurate and even consume ammunition - Watch with glee as you dodge enemy fire until the enemy runs out of ammo and has to start using his fists or melee weapon and you close in with an SMG and finish the job!

This is not a 'cheat' mod - In fact, this mod actually makes the game much more difficult. Walk around a corner and get a face full of shotgun from a raider, and you probably won't survive! This mod will help enforce good combat tactics because you can literally die in an instant if you're not careful.

The NPC actually gains the greater advantage in the end because of the way the gameplay settings were changed (details explained below). In some ways, however, this mod does make the game 'quicker' to play. If you are used to combat-heavy gameplay, this should reduce your battle times quite a bit because quite frankly, you'll either kill the enemy or be killed much more quickly than before. No more long drawn out battles, where the enemy plunks away with under-powered weapons while you laugh in your well-repaired battle armor taking little damage.

To aid in balance, NPC health has been increased in some areas and reduced in others in order to make NPCs more consistent. No more weak, low-level NPCs. The overall range of health values for leveled NPCs has been reduced.

Things I did not change:

* A few Big Weapons (although effectiveness of these could be affected by changes to the damage formula settings)
* Misc weapons that were OK as-is (Slasher knife, Alien Blaster)
* Anything not mentioned here! I was pretty meticulous about documenting my changes. I could have missed something though, but what you see is what you get.


3. Known Issues
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Weapon Condition on Existing Savegames - When loading up an existing savegame, all of your weapons in your inventory and/or any weapons that you have in containers (owned or otherwise) will have reduced in condition. None of the weapons will be broken (they will all still be greater than 0%, assuming that they were before the mod was activated). You can easily repair the item back to original levels or even up to 100% assuming you have the skill or caps. And the weapon will still be much more powerful than it was before, it will just appear weaker because when the game was saved, it had 120 out of 300 (40%) health for example. Now, when loading that same save with this mod active, the item will have 120 out of 600 (20%). The game saves only the current amount of health of the item, not the baseline health which it assumes stays constant.

NPCs and Loose Ammo - NPCs will pick up weapons and ammo from the ground or in containers. However, when they pick up ammo from the ground (e.g. a single 'box' of ammo, with one or more rounds in it), they seem to only use 1 round of the ammo and then run out. If the ammo is in a container (metal box, ammo box, dumpster or corpse for example), they will pick up and can consume multiple rounds.


4. Installation Notes
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Since this mod contains strictly 'settings changes' to the game, you should be able to enable/disable the mod at your leisure with any given savegame.

Disclaimer: Loading this mod from an existing savegame will cause the condition of your existing weapons to drop slightly. This is related to the adjustments to weapon health that were made. Please see Known Bugs for more information. I haven't really thought of a way to solve this, but it is really a minor issue at best.

As a result of all that, it is recommended to use this mod with a new character, or even with a 'sandbox' save from your high level character. A sandbox save would be one that is isolated from your other saves and allows you to go crazy and try new things without affecting your other saves. The best way to do this is to implement savegame 'Profiles' (either manually or using a third party tool) and create a new profile just to test this mod.

5. Installation
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* Copy the mod file into your Fallout 3 Data directory (eg: C:\Program Files\Fallout 3\Data\). Replace any existing version you may have.
* Launch the game using the standard menu.
* Click on Data Files.
* Double-click to select the mod file in the list and make sure it's checked.
* Click OK and start the game.

You'll know the mod is loaded if all of your weapons are in poor condition (see Known Issues) and if your weapons do a lot more damage (about 3-6x normal).


6. Feature Details
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I have taken the time to explain my changes in detail. Feel free to skip by this lengthy section if you aren't concerned with how the changes were made.


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Increased Weapon Damage
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This mod increases damage dealt for all weapons except the following. I've documented my reasoning for leaving these alone. Perhaps they will need some tweaking in the future to ensure realism.

* BB Gun and Black Bart's Bane - The BB Gun needed to just be a nuisance weapon and typically isn't used for actual combat (for me anyway).
* Alien Blaster - It's unique and powerful enough so I left it alone.
* Mesmetron, Railway Rifle, Dart Gun
* Missile Launcher, Fatman, Flamer - I think I'd like to make the Missile Launcher a bit more powerful, but I just haven't thought about it much.
* All Explosives - Explosives were OK as-is, I felt.
* All robot/NPC (e.g. Mr. Gutsy) weapons - I needed to make sure that as a result of increased weapons damage, that robots did not become too powerful. Fortunately they carry 'special' weapons that I was able to leave unchanged. This may need testing...as some robots seem to have very powerful weapons still.
* Sonora Cruz's 10mm Pistol - this was already very powerful to begin with, but quite fragile.
* (Pint-sized) Slasher Knife - this was already more powerful than the new standard kitchen knife, so I left it alone.


Here's are the details of the changes made to the weapons:

All Energy Weapons
- 2x more damage dealt

Pistols* (non-energy)
- 5x more damage dealt

Small Guns (non-energy)
- 2x more damage dealt

Melee weapons
- 6x more damage dealt

Unarmed weapons
- 2x more damage dealt

*Pistols includes 10MM, Silenced 10MM, .32 Cal, Chinese pistol and all unique variants of these. All other pistol-like weapons were included in either Energy Weapons or Small Guns (e.g. 10MM SMG and .44 Magnum).

All 'follower weapon' damage, health and critical values were updated as well, according to the numbers above. All "Unique Weapons" damage and health values were updated according to the numbers above too, but their criticals were left alone.

I focused initially on non-VATs Small Guns combat and ended up including laser and melee weapon adjustments as well. VATs combat seems to be unaffected, other than the weapons being more powerful which results in consuming fewer AP to dispatch of foes.

My goal was to make the weapons behave as closely as possible to what I felt the real life version of that weapon would do. I started with a weapon that I felt comfortable with. For small guns, I chose the assault rifle. I tweaked it's settings and tested until I reached a place where I felt like it was realistic. In the real world (from what I can gather), a 5.56 round into unarmored flesh is going to do some damage. If hit in a critical area (head), a person could easily die from one shot. So, a quick burst of three rounds should take down the average human.

I tweaked the damage and played around with various NPCs and skill levels and found a place where the damage was close to what I felt was accurate. I then took the original damage value and the new damage value and found a percentage increase and applied that same value across weapons of the same type. The same process was repeated for melee and pistol weapons.

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Changes to Weapon Health
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Along with the additional increase in damage, an increase in Health of the item was required as well or else the items would break too quickly. The increase in health has been updated as of version 0.95 to be consistent with the original values. This means that this mod no longer has any affect on durability.

Please see my "Weapon and Armor Durability Add-On"!


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Changes to Damage Formula Settings
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This mod adjusta a few game settings to balance weapon damage across both the Player and NPC and how it relates to weapon skill. This effectively means that weapons now do the same amount of damage regardless of skill level in the corresponding weapon skill.

This was actually done to help level the field for a high level character. Due to the concept of encounter zones and other situations, a high level character was more likely to encounter a low level character who had a low weapons skill. This in turn made their weapons weaker. Removing this skill restriction made NPCs more difficult (capable of dealing more damage), but also aids the player at early levels because they are more powerful early on than they normally would be.

Overall though, this is more of a realism setting. A gun does not get more powerful as you become better at using it. The power of a weapon should be determined by its condition alone. And even that, should only affect it to a certain degree. Well, this doesn't apply to melee weapons as much, because their condition can greatly affect the amount of damage dealt. Thankfully, there were two different settings. One for 'guns' and one for 'melee'. Melee settings were left alone.

A note about Spread:
Removing skill from the Damage formula placed a higher burden on Spread. Although investigated, no changes were made to Spread settings during this release. But just bear in mind that spread will be more important now, as the number of rounds hitting their mark (both shot by you and at you) most certainly will make the difference between winning and losing.

Changed fDamageSkillBase to 1
Changed fDamageSkillMult to 0
[Resulting in weapon damage being no longer affected by skill in that weapon category]

Changed fDamageGunWeapCondMult from 0.34 to 0.25
Changed fDamageGunWeapCondBase from 0.66 to 0.75
[Resulting in weapons damage being slightly less affected by condition]


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Reduced Sneak Attack Multiplier
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The ability to land a sneak attack with a weapon would cause some degree of extra damage, since it implies that you are able to take your time and get off a well-aimed shot. However, the difference in damage between that type of shot and one placed in the heat of battle is not that signifigant. Therefore the sneak attack bonus multiplier for guns was lowered by a bit. Additionally, with melee weapons a sneak attack versus a regular attack in battle just really won't vary by much. The melee sneak attack bonus multiplier was reduced by over half. Besides, it had to be reduced or else you would insta-kill just about anything with a sneak attack.

Updated Sneak Attack Gun Multiplier (fCombatDamageBonusSneakingMult) from 2.0 to 1.25.
[Resulting in less of a bonus for a sneak attack with a gun]

Updated Sneak Attack Melee Multiplier (fCombatDamageBonusMeleeSneakingMult) from 5.0 to 2.0.
[Resulting in less of a bonus for a sneak attack with a melee weapon]


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Increased NPC Health
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The default settings allow leveled NPCs to have a tremendous range of health, depending on their level. A level 1 Raider for example would have a health of 30. That felt too weak compared to the new damage that these weapons do. My goal was targeting 100 health for the average NPC, as a way of providing a solid anchor to which to target and tailor the power and damage of these weapons.

Original Settings (assumes END 5)

Level 1 - 30
Level 10 - 75
Level 20 - 125


New Settings (assumes END 5)
Level 1 - 82
Level 10 - 100
Level 20 - 120


There could be some non-standard NPCs who are except from this rule. Any NPC who is set to a specific level or has a higher base health value will have a different value accordingly. Generally this change was done to help with Raiders, but it also applies to Wastelanders, Settlers, Outcasts, BoS, Enclave, Talon Company, Regulators, etc. One thing to note is that factions like the Talon Company have a higher base health value than standard NPCs. This simply results in them having that much more health in the end (and are therefore that much tougher), regardless of level.


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Changes to Destructible Items
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With the new higher powered weapons, it was too easy to blow the following up, so their health has been increased.

All trucks increased by 2.5x (to 1125)
Bus increased by 2.5x (to 1050)
Vertibird increased by 2.5x (to 1875).
Cars by increased 2.5x (various)
Motorcycle increased 2.5x (to 500)


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Changes to Item Repair Cost
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The cost to repair an item is based off a multiplier value which is set at 2. I figured since in general, most weapons received a 2x increase in health, an equal reduction in this multiplier would be appropriate.

fItemRepairCostMult was changed from (2.0) to (1.0)
[To offset the increase in overall total health of the affected guns]


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Lowered Dismembered Limb Velocity
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As fun and cool as it was with bloody mess, gib was just exploding too quickly with the powerful weapons. I shot you in the hand with a pistol and you just exploded like you swallowed some C-4.

fCombatDismemberedLimbVelocity was changed from 10.0 to 1.0.
[Gib and body parts now don't fly so terribly fast when you explode an enemy.]


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All NPCs Use Ammunition*
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NPCs now use ammunition (in most situations). This was actually a setting on the weapons themselves, not a global setting. I don't know of the side effects of this yet, but it seems to work out fairly well. The idea is that if you can dodge their fire long enough and get them to run out of ammo (which they will), you can then come in with a melee attack. This could have consequences for followers, however the followers who have 'special weapons', should still continue to not consume ammo, when using that weapon. This may need some tweaking, but for the most part seems to work well.

The followers have 'default' weapons which will NOT consume ammunition:
-Charon's Shotgun
-Clover's Shotgun
-Cross' Laser Pistol
-Fawkes Gatling Laser
-Jericho's Chinese Assault Rifle


Please note that if you give any of these followers a normal weapon (or any other NPC who is following you, but not listed) and instruct them to use it, they will consume ammunition, so you'll need to make sure you keep them in good supply.

*This does not apply to Robots as of now.

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NPCs Carry More Ammunition
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Since they actually consume the ammunition they carry now, and many NPCs originally only carried a few rounds, I had to make adjustments to the various weapon lists to make everyone carry more ammo out of the box and didn't run out quicker than they should.

I tried to keep the change in line with their class, but that can be tricky. I figured most people who carry a gun, would keep it loaded (meaning they have 1 clip of ammo). Depending on the weapon, they could also carry additional clips or additional loose rounds.

In general, the number of rounds allocated for a pistol is less in general than the number of rounds allocated for a rifle.

* Standard NPCs (should) now carry one full 'clip' of ammo, plus a chance for up to several additional rounds at a minimum.

* Raiders keep one or two clips at a minimum, plus a chance for additional clips and additional loose rounds. The idea here is that while they are scavengers, they are probably fairly well armed. I don't imagine they'd walk into battle with only a handful of rounds.

* Mutants are fairly well supplied as well, similar to raiders.

* BoS, Outcast, Enclave and Talon Company factions are better supplied than any others.

Note: This can cause there to be an over-abundance of ammo in the game, especially if you insist upon looting every corpse and raiding every ammo box. But if you are able to find a balance where you loot the corpses/containers that you need to and leave the rest alone, you'll probably have the best luck. "Take what you need and leave the rest. It will be there when you need it later", is probably the best way to think.

Please see my companion mod: Onehitter's Ammo Scarcity Mod for a good solution!!


7. Suggested Add-Ons
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I have included the following Add-ons. Each is optional, but recommended and has a separate Readme.

* Onehitter's Creature Health Balance Add-On
* Onehitter's Increased Durability Add-On
* Onehitter's Ammo Scarcity Add-On

And for more realism:

* Onehitter's Realistic Carry Weight (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3300)
* Realistic Sneak (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=705)
* Remove Compass (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27)
* Mods that increase/adjust item and ammo weight
* and turning music OFF!


8. Conflicts
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I certainly don't know of anything specific, but I have not tested with other mods. Sorry!

However, for what it's worth, this probably won't work too well with any other mods that affect:

- Weapon damage, weapon health, NPC health or sneak settings.
- Or mods that change what weapons and ammo NPCs carry.
- Or any mods that add weapons to the game...since their damage will probably end up being too weak.

Your best bet in this case is to customize this mod to include your custom weapon and manually adjust the damage, health and critical values to what you think 'feels' right based on the values of the other weapons.


This mod should work OK with mods that:

- Add locations, quests, NPCs
- Add clothing / armor
- Change XP and leveling speed
- Change ammo weight through script