Conqueror Fans- Looking for input from you!

[CrimsonDrake]

The thing I found annoying that others might not have a problem with was 1. that was how long it took before you could even set up your gang. 2. was that there wasn't an option to capture the gang leaders or there raiders to have them as starting slaves for your gang. Might of just been me that wanted them as a trophy to display as the power of the gang.
I kinda feel that the quest should of started with you helping jammer and his raiders to take over the museum of freedom and building that as a raider HQ, the option of what to do with Preston and crew would of marked out what type of gang you wanted to make as Kill them would of been normal raiders, let them go would of be more merc based and enslave them would of been slavery.

 

[WetRats]

From the beginning, my favorite aspect of Conqueror was the prebuilt settlements. They brought new life to the Commonwealth, and could provide some nice surprises in the eleventy-seventh playthrough.

My Nothin' Fancy mod was an attempt to take advantage of that function without overwhelming my system.

Would it be possible to somehow rank settlements by complexity, and then choose a complexity level for the settlements in place in a new game? I'm not talking limiting them to a particular level, somehow being able to choose them by their intensity.

 

[WetRats]

My other immediate thought is that it would be nice to be able to start building your personal guard as early as possible in the game.

It would be a lot of fun to have some around during the early exploration phase.

 

[XxA1xX]

From the beginning, my favorite aspect of Conqueror was the prebuilt settlements. They brought new life to the Commonwealth, and could provide some nice surprises in the eleventy-seventh playthrough.

My Nothin' Fancy mod was an attempt to take advantage of that function without overwhelming my system.

Would it be possible to somehow rank settlements by complexity, and then choose a complexity level for the settlements in place in a new game? I'm not talking limiting them to a particular level, somehow being able to choose them by their intensity.

Yes please it’s hard to remember what all settlements play well in areas I would normally do only the single level plans as they are normally easier on the system when running through an area with settlements close together.

 

[Vylmort]

I am a bit scary with ROTC settlements as i find them atm a bit unstable and so. though it would be cool to have pre build settlements

 

[Tortolian]

Please do away with the concept of 'civilian' vs settler. Having both types really screwed up assigning them to work. Just make them all settlers.

 

[wanderer762]

Please do away with the concept of 'civilian' vs settler. Having both types really screwed up assigning them to work. Just make them all settlers.

I tend to agree with this, although I would be equally happy if they were all civilians as long as the mechanics worked. I more generally felt like a major benefit of Sim Settlements is that it makes the entire settlement system better. When playing Conqueror, there were times when it seemed like the mod went out of its way to preserve everything vanilla alongside with the added functionality of the mod. I like the idea of Conqueror just replacing vanilla entirely, and
doing away with anything redundant, unless it's in a vanilla settlement (ie not vassal or outpost).

 

[spacefiddle]

I'm not sure what to suggest, since so many of the issues I found are probably left behind with the old version of the framework and won't follow us into SSC2.

I will say this, tho: there needs to be a hard look at Prebuilt plans, as monumental an undertaking as that could be. Because, aside from the bugs and instability, the RotC plans were a mess that absolutely destroyed any attempt at a non-easymode Conqueror run.

Lemme explain. Most of the plans are cool, i like some of them a lot. But at the time, we were all "ooo look at the toys we have to play with!" in SS1 and I was no exception, and everyone was making stuff in the mindset of what seemed cool or fun. And lots of them are cool and fun. But they are also glitchy, buggy, and imbalanced. No sanity checks were made with the WRE system in mind; most of the settlements are not self sufficient. This means that conquering a place immediately gives you a net loss, and you're in the weird place of being Raiders who, instead of sponging off farmers, are instead struggling to provide food to a bunch of lazy gits who can't fend for themselves and if i wanted that i'd just go talk to another settlement that needs my help

More seriously - the result is most people realized WRE was broken and either took on the task of manually fixing it, or just shrugged, turned the system off, and forgot about it, which is kind of a shame.

On top of that, many of the plans don't use their space efficiently - or consistently. To make up for the shortfalls, most advice was to of course control vassals and built your own plots manually (but again, that makes you the farmer servant for your slaves...), but that requires free space. I use a border extender because there's just no other way... but then i'm making plots outside the walls. Other decisions were... odd. The "swimming pool" at Starlight was funny when I saw it, but quickly got old when it became a trap for my NPCs who couldn't figure out pathing with that fence in the way for the life of them, not to mention a huge chunk of my own space walled off with no doors.... then there was the "player room" that contained blank space and "Your Bed." OK, cool! Here's my own space to decorate! Except that for some inexplicable reason the level 2 plan's bed was not in the same place as the level 1's bed meaning the unmovable Your Bed just teleported into whatever the player built in their space.

It goes on.

So, now that we're all calmed down somewhat from the new toys we got to play with , what's needed is the less exciting but vital work of balancing the plans for all the mod's features, allowing some room for customization for those who wish to do so but also as a failsafe so the player can fix issues, and a general QA pass or two. That would be what IMO will most enhance the game more than any new feature I could dream up.

That, and the return of Jam-Jams and 'lia

Oh - and yes, the dynamic decorations were a perfect example of a great theory that just doesn't work in practice. The silly things have no logic to where they spawn - inside buildings, in doorways (sigh), on dogmeat's head, and every 3 feet you're tripping over them. Even after turning the system off, i spent waaay too much time walking around deleting them. Way too many of them too close and in bad places to boot. And, sadly, most of the faction pack creators did not seem to have checked the results or consider what they were adding, resulting - in one hilarious example - power armor suits spawning every 5 feet all over the landscape, on roofs, in doorways... it looked liked a Fallout-themed Terra Cotta Army had been left by some madman xD

 

[yaugie]

most of the settlements are not self sufficient. This means that conquering a place immediately gives you a net loss, and you're in the weird place of being Raiders who, instead of sponging off farmers, are instead struggling to provide food to a bunch of lazy gits who can't fend for themselves

I was actually pondering this very issue the other day myself. I imagine that with SS2's "default settings" that won't be as much of a concern unless you play on the hardest of hardcore settings - since City Plans have that "involvement" setting now and all, and that defaults to "they literally ignore requirements for upgrading" in most cases.
Now, another side of that is with Caravans auto-distributing food/water production, you could well still end up having a newly conquered Prebuilt Settlement providing a net loss to your network due to them not having enough on their own and automagically taking it from the other producers. This is tougher to solve, although for me personally I can't see it being an issue - I'll only ever be Prebuilding the "Basics" plans anyway. I guess it provides more incentive for you to scout targets and pick the ones that actually give you what you want?

... there might be a market for someone releasing a City Plan Pack specifically to provide good Prebuilt Vassal Targets...

 

[spacefiddle]

I was actually pondering this very issue the other day myself. I imagine that with SS2's "default settings" that won't be as much of a concern unless you play on the hardest of hardcore settings - since City Plans have that "involvement" setting now and all, and that defaults to "they literally ignore requirements for upgrading" in most cases.

That's kind of my point tho - most people who encounter an issue will, if the option exists to bypass it, silently do so and move on and forget about it. So this huge and complex system, which the devs put time and effort into, is simply ignored. Which is kind of a shame, because i think it adds a lot to the game - if it's supported correctly. But if the recommended solution is to ignore a major mechanic, that's not good and either the mechanic should be removed, or fixed.

Also the caravans don't matter, they aren't the cause of a loss. The point of the pre-buil;t settlements, and you taking them over as a Conqueror, is that they have already been around, are established, that's why you're attacking them after all. So it makes no sense for them to start out at shortfalls - how have they survived until now if they have 12 people and 4 food? No, the plans need to make sense, at all three levels.

On that note - you have no idea what you're attacking. When you "scout" a target, it should really provide you with a report on exactly what that settlement is producing. It's not much of a "scouting" trip if you have no idea what you're looking at, right? The point of scouting is to gather intel, right? So if I "scout" a location, i should get a note in inv (so i can refer to it later) that gives the precise WRE of that location, like the Desk reports do for my own places. Right now, i can't tell what the locations i scout will actually give me.

Because otherwise it's a crapshoot and the player doens't know what they're conquering or why. With such a report, they can see that oh, this city is set up to mostly produce food but I have a lot of that already, my wages are lacking, I need to look for a commercial town. Then they can scout other locations until they find one that's mostly caps-producing, etc.

The upgrading is a separate thing. I'm talking more about plot balance of the plans so they don't surprise the player with "i took this place over to get more resources, and now i have less resources."

 

[yaugie]

You're right, I was thinking of it the wrong way round. Most of the ROTC plans especially make little sense from an "in universe" perspective if they aren't getting trade goods of some kind in from somewhere already.

On that note - you have no idea what you're attacking. When you "scout" a target, it should really provide you with a report on exactly what that settlement is producing. It's not much of a "scouting" trip if you have no idea what you're looking at, right? The point of scouting is to gather intel, right? So if I "scout" a location, i should get a note in inv (so i can refer to it later) that gives the precise WRE of that location, like the Desk reports do for my own places. Right now, i can't tell what the locations i scout will actually give me.

That's a good point - relying purely on visual inspection from a distance would not do the trick there, even if you had memorised the visual design of every single plot in the mod. Perhaps some kind of "scouting binoculars" "uses the Weapon slot" item (like the Vitomatic, Clipboard, etc) could be added to do that?

 

[Antoine Soverie]

That's kind of my point tho - most people who encounter an issue will, if the option exists to bypass it, silently do so and move on and forget about it. So this huge and complex system, which the devs put time and effort into, is simply ignored. Which is kind of a shame, because i think it adds a lot to the game - if it's supported correctly. But if the recommended solution is to ignore a major mechanic, that's not good and either the mechanic should be removed, or fixed.

Also the caravans don't matter, they aren't the cause of a loss. The point of the pre-buil;t settlements, and you taking them over as a Conqueror, is that they have already been around, are established, that's why you're attacking them after all. So it makes no sense for them to start out at shortfalls - how have they survived until now if they have 12 people and 4 food? No, the plans need to make sense, at all three levels.

On that note - you have no idea what you're attacking. When you "scout" a target, it should really provide you with a report on exactly what that settlement is producing. It's not much of a "scouting" trip if you have no idea what you're looking at, right? The point of scouting is to gather intel, right? So if I "scout" a location, i should get a note in inv (so i can refer to it later) that gives the precise WRE of that location, like the Desk reports do for my own places. Right now, i can't tell what the locations i scout will actually give me.

Because otherwise it's a crapshoot and the player doens't know what they're conquering or why. With such a report, they can see that oh, this city is set up to mostly produce food but I have a lot of that already, my wages are lacking, I need to look for a commercial town. Then they can scout other locations until they find one that's mostly caps-producing, etc.

The upgrading is a separate thing. I'm talking more about plot balance of the plans so they don't surprise the player with "i took this place over to get more resources, and now i have less resources."

At some point I started reading your posts in Archon's voice, mission accomplished? :D All great points though.

 

[spacefiddle]

You're right, I was thinking of it the wrong way round. Most of the ROTC plans especially make little sense from an "in universe" perspective if they aren't getting trade goods of some kind in from somewhere already.


That's a good point - relying purely on visual inspection from a distance would not do the trick there, even if you had memorised the visual design of every single plot in the mod. Perhaps some kind of "scouting binoculars" "uses the Weapon slot" item (like the Vitomatic, Clipboard, etc) could be added to do that?

That's a great idea - two great ideas, in fact. I wonder if there'd be any way for the settlements to be organized into "sectors," where any pre-builts in a given sector have established workshop links with each other before the player attacks them? This would do a number of interesting things imo:

• Then it WOULD make sense that not every place has to be self-sufficient because you'd have Agri settlements, Industrial settlements, and commercial towns, and supporting / trading with each other
• The Conqueror taking one of these would then disrupt the supply lines of the NPC towns, just like losing a settlement (or a vanilla provisioner) disrupts yours
• You could get crazy and have debuffs applied to sectors with shortfalls due to player action, similar to the WRE requirements: shortfall of W causes less defenders on future attacks, R causes defenders to have less health or other combat debuff, short on E nerfs their gear (could fudge that in a relatively simple way with other combat debuffs like -DR or -Damage). (Or have like, a virtual Armory for NPC towns and short on E sets their "armory" to a special tier that has crap equipment lol)

As for the latter, yeah, an item like that would be pretty awesome and fit the theme perfectly

 

[spacefiddle]

... there might be a market for someone releasing a City Plan Pack specifically to provide good Prebuilt Vassal Targets...

Actually, one of the reasons I am brushing up on all things Conq and SS is to prepare for this very thing. Because really, the best plans for Conqueror go beyond just the WRE balancing: ideally each settlement would have to be built with a large battle in mind. That means making sure there's no broken navmesh, the defenses get steadily better as 1/2/3, providing interesting chokepoints and sightlines for defenders whilst making sure traffic areas are clear and free of obstacles, etc. because let's face it, the Creation engine gets.... confused, sometimes, and the pathing especially needs all the help it can get. Nothing kills immersion faster than having all your attackers endlessly running into a wall or all the defenders in one small clustertruck under a building or something.

And..... also.... what with all the improvements to the SS2 "engine" as well as PANPC... you may be interested to note I have been testing removing some of the blocking keywords from attackers and defenders and letting PANPC run the AI of both your troops as well as the guards, assigning faction-specific AI to each group.

and it's working

 

[spacefiddle]

Another suggestion actually, but i may be wrong so bear with me heh:

it SEEMS like the custom Conq flags don't unlock until you're done playing o.O If I'm reading this right, you have to take over literally all the settlements and then [redacted] and THEN you're presented with a flag that matches the name you picked, as a rewards.

Cool idea, but.... that means you don't get your faction flag until you have nothing left to do, which explains why I and so many others never saw them? And the whole time you're playing, the outposts and HQ for jammer's raiders are flying the American flag, which seems odd...?

I just found and fixed, with llamaRCA's help, the issue that was inconsistently preventing a name choice (for some it worked early on, for others it would never happen at all and there's no indication to the player they're missing anything). However, I thought it was a bug that the flag didn't unlock - i think that part is not, it seems stage 1500 sets the global that shows the flag.
ERGO,

TL;DR I would set the "raider flag," with the emblem that matches the Conq icon, as the immediate start-of-game default for Jammer's Raiders and switch it to the specific named flags as soon as the player picks a name, tbh. Otherwise you don't get much use out of it and the ol' stars and stripes doesn't seem Jammer's style lol. Something else should be the final reward for [redacted].

EDIT:

last suggestion for now i swear lol. Well, this is why i wanted to play Conq again and remind myself....

It would be awesome if the Armory Upgrade option, instead of ON/OFF, could be fine-grained for each category. That is, say I have a Level 2 Armory, which provides both armor and weapons. If I give a soldier a good weapon manually, i want to turn Armory Weapons OFF so it isn't lost, but keep Armory Armor/Outfit ON. That kinda thing.

 

[msalaba]

These are all some good points. I think the bigger question is "what mechanics will chapter 3 introduce." Will it use a Conqueror style WRE or just be an extension of existing SS2 mechanics? Only time will tell.

It would be awesome if the Armory Upgrade option, instead of ON/OFF, could be fine-grained for each category. That is, say I have a Level 2 Armory, which provides both armor and weapons. If I give a soldier a good weapon manually, i want to turn Armory Weapons OFF so it isn't lost, but keep Armory Armor/Outfit ON. That kinda thing.

I remember this being an issue that bugged me as well. Sadly, without F4SE, there is really no good way to tell what an NPC has equipped. So there is not a good way to do "if autoequip weapon/armor is better than current equipped, swap them". I can say that with my experience creating an outfit cloning mod, that you have to unequip an NPC to grab the Weapon/Armor refs. (inventory items do not have a RefID) This means you briefly have a naked NPC while they are unequipped/re-equipped. Depending on script lag, this can be a while.

If an auto equip system like this is added to C3, I hope we have the ability to specify which NPCs should or should not be auto equipped. This could be accomplished by adding/removing a "DoNotAutoEquip" keyword. It would be pretty simple to implement.

 

[spacefiddle]

These are all some good points. I think the bigger question is "what mechanics will chapter 3 introduce." Will it use a Conqueror style WRE or just be an extension of existing SS2 mechanics? Only time will tell.

I remember this being an issue that bugged me as well. Sadly, without F4SE, there is really no good way to tell what an NPC has equipped. So there is not a good way to do "if autoequip weapon/armor is better than current equipped, swap them". I can say that with my experience creating an outfit cloning mod, that you have to unequip an NPC to grab the Weapon/Armor refs. (inventory items do not have a RefID) This means you briefly have a naked NPC while they are unequipped/re-equipped. Depending on script lag, this can be a while.

If an auto equip system like this is added to C3, I hope we have the ability to specify which NPCs should or should not be auto equipped. This could be accomplished by adding/removing a "DoNotAutoEquip" keyword. It would be pretty simple to implement.

Oh i didn't mean any kind of automatic checking - rather the opposite actually - i mean a manual switch like Conqueror had, only insread of the one "turn Armory off for this soldier" command they had in the original, it would be great if we had the option to turn off just weapons or just armor. Frex, if i find a good extra weapon or three and give them to some soldiers, it would reduce a lot of hassle if i could turn off Armory Weapons for those three but keep Armory Armor on. Otherwise it's a hassle to make sure those items aren't overwritten later when my armory upgrades, major PITA. Same goes the other way, get some decent armor sets going and try to keep these poor dumb bastards alive long enough to level up so i don't want their armor overwritten by low level defaults, but it would be great to leave the "give them a weapon" system on.

ultimately the system was designed to automate and reduce micro but if you help your guys out at all, the system as it stood in the original Conq could create more busy work for the player - i guess that's my intent to solve.