Combat Surrender System
Last Updated: February 9th, 2020
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The combat surrender system within CAP is a revamping of my Combat Surrender and Abductions system from the RSE family of mods. With it, you can force enemies to surrender in battle, as well as surrendering to your enemies yourself, either by manually triggering it via hotkey or by using auto-surrender, which is based on a percentage of your health remaining.

The system is not as wide-spread as its antecedent, in that the available list of NPC actor types that you can surrender to is smaller and doesn't support surrender to machines or creatures.

Note: As of CAP update v1.01, you will be able to lower your weapon while in a fight, holding the key in for 2 seconds and then releasing it, in order to signal your surrender to enemies. This originating in RSE a while back, but was removed for simplicity in CAP. However, to accommodate players using controllers, I have re-added it into the mod. No matter, which method you prefer, both are available to you at any time, be it hotkey or lowering your weapon.

Player Surrender:

Within the surrender system, there are consequences. You don't just surrender for nothing and there is a cost! You may simply be beaten and crippled. You may be robbed. You and/or your companions may be kidnapped (kidnappings have their own article). You may even be left somewhere for dead and have to recuperate and hunt down the person who left you for dead.

All of the available outcomes can be fine tuned in the MCM and they will stack, so in theory, you could be beaten, crippled, knocked out, robbed blind and then kidnapped, all from one point of surrender!

Robbery has a few layers to it. You can make it so you lose everything forever or you can make it so that you can recover your items.

Being knocked out has three possible outcomes. One, you wake up some time later, in the same location and will have 'x' amount of seconds to get away from those you surrendered to. Two, you will teleport to the last bed you slept in. Note that if you slept in a temporary bed, like a sleeping bag from Advanced Needs 2's camping system or a tent from Campsite mod, anything where the bed you slept in is removed from the game after using it, you will teleport nowhere and wake up where the surrender happened, having 'x' amount of seconds to get away. The third available option is to have the player teleported to nearest owned settlement. Regardless of the option used, any quests that activate as a result of surrendering will still be active, such as hunting down someone who robbed you.

If you try to surrender to someone who is not supported, you will see a message onscreen that you may not surrender at this time. If you are wearing power armor, you may not surrender, simply because you cannot animate while in the power armor and forcing you out of the PA sometimes causes NPC pathing to you for the purposes of dialogue to not function properly when the PA is in between yourself and the spokesperson for the surrender dialogue.

There are also certain conditions where you will not be able to surrender to enemies, such as when you are kidnapped and trying to escape. If you have triggered captor hostility, they will have no interest in your surrender, so you will not be able to do it.

Enemy Surrender:

If you enable enemy surrender, humans and non-feral ghouls may surrender to you, based on settings used in the MCM. When they surrender, they are made non-hostile, and will get into a hands-up pose. Your companions will ignore them as combat targets. Enemies will stay in this position for a couple minutes, so you will have time to approach them, to engage in dialogue with them. If you don't get to them in time however, they will simply rejoin the fight against you.

There are options in the MCM to increase or decrease their resistance (odds of surrendering), whether distance to them is a consideration or if they will look at their total numbers before surrender would be an option for them. On the last one, if you use this option, during a fight with say, four raiders, the odds of them surrendering would be none while they were four. But if you kill three of them, the last man standing would likely not want to die and may surrender once their health gets too low.

Once they have surrendered and you have entered into dialogue with them, you will have a few choices of things you can do, like rob them, set them free, execute them or to turn them into prisoner settlers, assigned to any of your owned settlements. See the article on the Prisoner Settlement System for more information about this.

NOTE: The surrender system is not, strictly speaking, an alt-death function. You can still die. Take one bullet too many or a bullet that does more damage than you have health to cover, you might possibly die before auto-surrender could kick in. And also, the NPCs you surrender to may just decide to kill you rather than do any of the other outcomes.

FAQs:

Everything Is Running Fine But When I Surrender, Everything Appears To Stall - Help?

The mod is coded to allow you to reset the entire combat surrender system whenever you feel it make have "hung up" - where you cannot orbit the camera or no NPCs appear to be approaching you. Note that sometimes, the game is going to possibly select an NPC to be the one to talk to you but they may not have an actual path to you - like if they are on a second floor fire escape that has no stairs to the ground. In such cases, the mod will wait 30 seconds for them to enter into dialogue with you. If they haven't, the mod will force move them to your location so that the dialogue can begin. But what if the NPC is there and noone is talking? Or the camera is not allowing you to rotate? Simple. Hold in the key (or joypad button) that you have designated as ACTIVATE for five seconds and then release it. You will see a message popup on screen telling you that the surrender system is reset and that combat will begin as soon as you close the window.

Some Of My Gear Is Not Being Stolen When Surrendering Or Being Kidnapped. Why?

The theft functions in CAP rely on standardized vanilla keyword in order to know what it can and cannot remove from you. If gear, such as clothing, armor or weapons are not being removed by this process, it is a function of the originating mod for those items not having the appropriate keyword on their items. You can either ask the mod author to
correct that or do it yourself in xEdit. For clothing and armor, add keyword "Armor_NoFirstTimeLoot" and for weapons, add keyword "ObjectTypeWeapon"