Seattleite

Black Mesa had enough money to construct a simply ridiculous amount of unnecessary equipment. I doubt they'd just start suddenly trying to save money on the most critical part of the armor the most important scientists are wearing.

Well, whatever you want to say, none of the scientists that didn't go to Xen have ever been depicted wearing a helmet, or have a helmet on their in-game models.

Hmmm, got any sources for that? I can't seem to find anything on polymer armor plates, or them being standard issue. The CPs don't look like they have any plates, in any case.

1. Yes, I do. Here's a coloumn from 2012 announcing (a bit too gleefully) that NIJ-III standalone plates were now being made out of compressed polymer. Polymer plates meant to be part of a vest, and standalones at lower levels, predate this substantially. http://www.gunsamerica.com/blog/armored-mobility-inc-trauma-plates-shield-police-clipboard/

2. You can't always see the plates in vests.

3. And for the record, my ex-stepfather (worst person I have EVER known) was a police officer and I did indeed take a look at his vests (yes, plural, he used to be a "corrections officer" and still had his old one) and found his newer vest was an NIJ-II with a polymer plate raising it to III-A, and his old armour included a layer of mail, more padding and the same exact plate, and while of course the added mail and padding didn't increase it a whole grade against bullets apparently but would certainly have made it better against knives and done more to diffuse impacts.

Their armor would let them take over a dozen bullets to the chest without significant injury? That's completely regular armor used by every cop?

Not every cop, no, but plenty of cops don't wear armour AT ALL. The armour usually issued by big-city militarized-as-fuck police departments like Seattle (where my ex-stepfather works) and New York (where he was first a corrections officer, then again once he moved out here) DO issue some pretty damned awesome armour.

And for the record, CP armour is thicker and bulkier than regular police armour and should be more protective. Whether it's more kevlar and heavier plates for better ballistic protection or it's mail and padding for more knife and shrapnel protection is unknown, but both would make sense and in fact it's bulky enough to BE both.

The muzzle flash isn't blue, it does the same damage as the 9mm pistol, and it ejects shell casings.

That is strange, since I remember blue muzzle flashes and no casings in Episode 2, but maybe that's just my memory being faulty. Also, her still not using 9mm ammo does lead me to believe at the very least it's not a 9mm. If I must, I'll just adjust her damage to match a handgun. (Something not a 9mm, something that could hold a lot of bullets, and something with a good penetrating power... I'm thinking 7.62x25mm Tokarev. Let me do the math and... That's the same damage as the 9mm, since armour penetration is included in damage. Well, it works.) Be warned that doing so WILL make Alyx a bit underpowered.

They appear to be wearing CP vests, either looted from dead officers or stolen from stocks. They also have the exact same health as the CPs and the Barneys, too. They have 40 hit points, while the Overwatch soldiers/HECU marines have 50.

Then me matching their health to the CPs and HL1 security guards works just fine and I'll stick to it.

Cool, downloading now. Installation instructions?

Thought I already said that. It's a .cfg mod. Remove whatever I have in parenthesis so the title is skill.cfg (HL1, Blue Shift, HL2, Black Mesa), skill_episodic (Episode 1, episode 2), or skillopfor (Opposing Force). Now put it into the folder the file of that name is, after backing up your old one. For HL1 all will be in the "Half Life" folder. The HL1 mod needs to go in the folder named "Valve", Blue shift needs to be in the folder named "BShift", and Opposing Force needs to be in the folder named "Gearbox". For HL2, they all go in the Half Life 2 folder. Find the folder "cfg" in "HL2" for the main file, for EP1 find the folder "cfg" in "episodic" and for EP2 find the folder "cfg" in the folder "ep2". Just drag out old file out of that folder (maybe make a new folder named "backup" for it) and drag my file in. Done.

EDIT:

It seems every time I make a change, I find out something STUPID. Headshot multipliers for zombies don't work in HL2 or at least Black Mesa and are always 2. They seem to work fine on other things, killed a vort in the appropriate number of shots, but NOT for zombies for some reason. So... Back to the slightly lower health value for zombies in Black Mesa and HL2, then.

*SIGH*

It's okay. This just means they'll be a little weaker. They'll take exactly one less shot to the chest, that's all. Oh, and it means they'll always take two shots to the head instead of the ONE they should take. Which sucks. But whatever, it was like this for a long time, it's just back to it now, and at least Half-Life 1 and its expansions have them working right.

Also increased the power of the HL2 crossbow to 80, the HL2 crowbar to 60 and the other versions of the crowbar to 40. This "no locational damage" thing is really pissing me off, and so are the screwy melee hitboxes in HL1 that are likely WHY the crowbar in HL2 doesn't deal locational damage.

So basically, the HL2 crossbow on hard downs a CP in one, overwatch in two and elites in three. On normal and easy, CP in one, overwatch and elites in two. The HL2 crowbar downs a CP in two, overwatch in three and elites in four on hard. On normal and easy, CP in one, overwatch in two, elites in three. You're in HL2, so that's likely all you care about.

For even more stupid, it turns out the .50 I've always been so careful I never get hit by isn't impacted by ANY convars. So I can't change its damage at all, and its damage is totally vanilla. Only the .50 on the tank does the damage it should, and I can't fix it. Just like in HL1, except now it's a slightly better value for damage. So... Yeah. I'm really getting irritated at the limitations of .cfg tweaks.

That doesn't make much sense. Why would ONLY the Xen scientists get helmets? Helmets are really, really important, especially when he's supposed to be wearing a hazmat suit.

Given that the helmet likely has a LOT of features tacked on to it, such as breathing apparati, alternate visual modes and communication devices, it might just be REALLY expensive. If Freeman mostly has to be concerned with handling hazardous materials, maybe those materials are hazardous primarily through contact and not having head protection is fine since he's not using his head to touch them. We don't know how the Xen crystals work, and that's all Gordon, Gina and Colette have to handle.

1. I'm aware of the distinction between soft and hard armor. But you keep bringing up the MP7's ineffectiveness against hard body armor as evidence of why it would take a lot of shots to kill the CPs, who are wearing soft body armor. What plates do you mean? I thought that plates were used for rifle defense, while the MP7 is specifically designed to get through II-A, II, and III-A armor, where anything above would require hard plates to stop high velocity rifle rounds?

There are civilian-issue low quality plates. They're made of some sort of polymer. They feel like cheap pieces of platic, but supposedly they raise an NIJ-II vest toIIIA. And yes, they'll defeat MP7 rounds. Over and over and over and over and over again.

2. And 16 for the 9mm? You're telling me that the average police officer in the 2000s could be shot a dozen times in the torso with a really common military issue type of ammo and be completely fine?

20, not 16. Hard is the difficulty I designed the mod for, and the most realistic of the three. And I didn't say completely fine, I said they'd need that many to stop them because of their armour.

I think "super easy" sums it up pretty well.

 

Look, if you really want I can reduce the health of the CPs a bit. But not much. Just to 75, so they aren't so likely to live through an explosion like they are now. (And they'll take somewhat less punishment through other methods, and always two hits from the crowbar.)

I see. Well, I'm of the opinion that something doesn't always have to be hard to be enjoyable. Let's be honest, HL2 in general is an easy game due to the abundance of health packs and allies, as well as the player being OP, even doing more damage with the same weapons than the enemies.

Like I said, no big problem for me, I can just modify their health via the console if I want to.

So, basically, it's an anti-materiel rifle. And yet, by default, it does 20 damage to Freeman, only slightly more than the regular ol' 7.62x51 from the first game and Opposing Force. Then again, it also does twice as much as the .50 BMG machine gun from those same games.

I presently have it set to do 250 damage (which equates to 50 to Gordon's chest on hard) which is 10 less than the .50 is set to. (NOTE: The HL1 .50 BMG is unable to have its damage changed by a .cfg mod as its damage is tied to the pistol. Only the Black Mesa .50 BMG works properly.)

Pulse pistol?...pretty sure it's just a regular pistol that shoots 9mm rounds.

No. No it is not. It has its own ammo, has a blue muzzle flash, and the projectiles are clearly pulse projectiles.

The Antlions being so overwhelmingly fragile sounds it like it would limit any potential difficult despite their high damage.

Oh, of course. Unless they catch you off guard, then they can take a lot of health in a hurry. Or if there's a lot and you're fighting an antlion guard (which has a TONNE of health) at the same time.

Antlions and rebels must go down quickly then. Luckily, they're unlimited in most cases, so I can just keep throwing fodder at the Overwatch positions until they eventually get overwhelmed. Teamwork: the ultimate sacrifice.

Antlions die in 2 hits from their pulse rifles, 4 from their SMG and 5 pellets from their shotgun (one blast is 7, but all would need to hit). Rebels, however, have 75 hit points. Used to be 100, but I'm matching their health to the CPs. (Improvised/stolen body armour? Wouldn't surprise me. Honestly they just needed some protection to be any use at all.)

I am home now and have just updated all of my mods. Have at it, hoss.

Perhaps. I'll try vanilla HL2 and see how it goes.

 

I was mainly concerned about the Nova Prospekt battle and the Battle of City 17 at the end of HL2. The Synths taking way less rockets to take down balances things out somewhat, but in those instances, it's VERY hard not to get hit, which is bad when they can four-shot you.

I'll say it again. The ONLY fight in the game I found to be difficult (as in, I died while actually using all of my skill more than once or twice) was the Nova Prospekt gunship battle, which killed me five times and I completed it on the sixth, on hard difficulty. That is the only one. The City 17 Strider fight I died a total of once and got through on the second try. There were skirmishes with the overwatch that were harder than that. There were sections in the citadel that were harder than that. The striders are pretty crappy because they fire so much slower than the gunship and are easier to hit.

Also, minor thing, but the Pulse Rifle takes twelve shots to down a Combine Overwatch soldier on Normal, right? 'Cause the damage scale is x1.25?

Yes, as well as 10 on easy. And against a CP, it takes 10 on hard, 8 on normal and 7 on easy.

It'd be really weird if Alyx never mentioned the lack of a helmet. She seems casual about it, when he should be risking near-certain death without a helmet (also, it makes no sense that literally every HEV-suited scientist but Gordon would get a helmet).

Wrong! Gordon was never meant to visit Xen. He, Gina and Colette are the three that never went to Xen, and NONE of them have helmets. The helmets, we can assume, are meant to be extra protection for scientists in Xen.

III-A armor is soft armor... and I'm not saying it should just go right through, but is 20 shots really appropriate?

1. "Soft" isn't a level of resistance. It's a form of resistance. By "soft" armour, I mean kevlar and other ballistic fibres, as opposed to armour plates. There are plates in the armour of all soldiers and police officers, and the MP7 absolutely will not penetrate the plates without a lot of repetition as impacting the plates destroys the bullets with minimal damage to the plates due to the low momentum of the MP7 round.

2. And yes, 25 is an appropriate number for two reasons. One is the lack of hard-armour defeating potential in the MP7, the other is the tiny bore and absolutely abysmal, basically non-existent stopping power of the MP7's punt 4.6x30mm round. (It has, LITERALLY, less stopping power than a .22.)

Any particular reason you don't like the first few levels?

I think "super easy" sums it up pretty well.

Look, if you really want I can reduce the health of the CPs a bit. But not much. Just to 75, so they aren't so likely to live through an explosion like they are now. (And they'll take somewhat less punishment through other methods, and always two hits from the crowbar.)

What are you referring to? Its ability to cut zombies in half?

Cut zombies in half, penetrate objects (only gun in the game that can do so), destroy considerably sized objects in a single hit, that kind of thing.

Oh, that reminds me. How are Alyx, Barney, and the VM Vortigaunt changed in effectiveness by this mod?

They're less effective, but not by that much. Alyx is the least durable of he three, can't adjust her health, but she's also really smart (AI wise), even using cover in some areas, regens pretty well, and her little suped-up pulse pistol is as powerful as a pulse rifle (if WAY less accurate).

Is it possible just to enhance the damage the Combine do against them?

No.

If that's not possible, I'd just recommend boosting their health slightly and making them do more damage.

FINE. I'll do it when I get home tomorrow, along with the crossbow damage increase (just learned it doesn't get locational damage, which is stupid, so it'll be 60 damage) and the CP health decrease (to 75).

Antlion: (Current)

Health 10

Swipe 10

Jump 15

Air 20

Killed by two 9mm bullets, three 4.6mm bullets, four shotgun pellets, and a single hit by the pulse rifle and anything stronger. Deals 2, 3 or 4 damage to the player per hit. Not meant to be a serious threat, and isn't.

Antlion: (New)

Health 15

Swipe 20

Jump 30

Air 40

Killed by three 9mm bullets, four 4.6mm bullets, five shotgun pellets, two pulse rifle shots, two python shots, and one shot by anything stronger. Mostly this just means no more one-shotting them with the pulse rifle or python (even less reason to use those instead of the more common, better suited pistol, SMG and shotgun) and no more one-shot kills if you shoot them in the head with a pistol. Their swipes do 4, jumps do 6 and air attacks do 8. Now a serious threat in the numbers encountered.

Also, increasing the antlion guard's melee damage to:

Charge 50

Shove 25

And the antlion worker... Stays the same, mostly, and just gets boosted to 15 health.

Now I don't want to hear about these areas being too hard.

Another random question: do the Overwatch soldiers do appropriate damage with their enemies? It always bothered me in HL2 that the Overwatch soldiers with Pulse Rifles only did 3 damage, same as the SMG, when Gordon did 8. I just changed their damage value to 8 in the console, which was much better.

Yes, they do. They do full damage to NPCs, just everything does less to Gordon because he has so much armour.

Also:

An issue you never mentioned and I decided to act on was headshot damage. Normally I don't like headshot damage being really high, but many of the in-game enemies either have armour on their body and not their head or have massive weak spots on their heads, and increasing headshot damage will also let me make the zombies reasonably durable but dead in one headshot while making it less likely you'll shoot a guy in his exposed head a silly number of times without killing him without him dying crazy fast to hits on his body armour. Headshot damage will now be 5x instead of 2x. Yes, Gordon will also have his multiplier multiplied by 2.5x and take (overall, with his scaling, on hard) 10x damage to the head. (So a 9mm would do 50, for instance, 38 on normal and 25 on easy.)

Also, I want to rank the games here, in terms of the quality of the mod (not the game itself), as a way of recommending them:

1. Black Mesa (Best features, allows enemy weaknesses, best AI, just overall the most awesome.)

2. Episode 2 (Same as above, but considerably less so.)

3. Half-Life 2 (Good enemy variety, squad tactics in sections and excellent AI)

4. Opposing Force (Same as above, better enemy variety but inferior squad tactics and AI)

5. Blue Shift (Good in most areas, and Barney's weak spots being his arms and legs make cover valuable, but it's the hardest of the eight by a lot and that might turn people who aren't me off.)

6. Half-Life (Still a solid, strong mod. No low points, but no real high points either.)

7. Episode 1 (I didn't like episode 1 much to begin with, especially the evacuation fight, and this mod doesn't alleviate that at all. If anything, the greater enemy health just makes it take longer.)

That's a relief, usually the marines cut me to shreds before the tank even has a chance to be a threat. I'll still probably only download the HL2 version of this mod, though. My only concern, aside from the relatively minor points I already brought up, is tearing my hair out during the Strider and Gunship battles.

Including the episodes, or no?

And there's good cover in the strider/gunship battles. I found the only genuinely difficult fight in the game to be the Nova Prospekt gunship fight.

A hazard suit with no helmet would not protect him from radiation. Fair point on the poison damage, but game < story in this case. Things really don't make any sense if Freeman went into the Citadel core with no helmet.

It protects him a lot better than no suit at all, which was the only alternative. Leaving one section exposed doesn't make the armour worthless.

1.-2. Am I? 20 bullets to the chest to kill one guy seems like a lot for soft armor. Isn't the MP7 actually supposed to be more effective against armor anyway?

"Supposed" to be. And against soft armour, it may be. But it can't penetrate III-A armour or almost any hard armour, and against hard armour inflicts effectively zero damage. (It has the same issue as the 5.56 against hard armour, but way, WAY worse.)

3.-5. I'm aware, they tend to jump in front of the airboat and stand next to explosive barrels and rickety bridges. I wasn't saying that it sounded overly frustrating or difficult. I just wonder why you made them so durable. Just so they wouldn't be TOO non-threatening with Freeman taking less damage from bullets? Or because you didn't think the original health values, which required 6-7 bullets to kill them on Normal mode, were realistic? It always seemed pretty plausible to me.

4. I guess I could see the value of that from a game play perspective, but I like having options. Especially since the whole point of the early chapters is to mow down like two hundred of them with ease, to underline that the police have no chance against Freeman (you're only really in any danger when they bring in the Hunter-Chopper, aside from being scripted to flee a couple of times when an APC shows up). The environment would still be the best way to take them out even if you could just shoot them to death. Takes less bullets.

I don't really like the super-easy first levela, and I really, really don't like human enemies in particular being super easy. And you can just shoot them to death, with precision and speed it isn't even that hard. It's just usually better to use anything that's not a 9mm handgun or a shotgun to deal with them. (And yet, I go through most wildlife encounters pretty much entirely with the handgun and shotgun. Go figure.)

Oh, alright. Still seems like a lot, though. The crowbar two-shotting guys that can absorb over a dozen bullets reminds me of RPG games, where melee weapons do way more damage than most guns, and it's a perfectly viable strategy to discard shooting enemies in favor of just running up to them and smashing their face with a sword/hammer/stick/power fist/whatever.

1. Melee weapons being more damaging is (usually) realistic.

2. The crowbar is an excellent weapon for defeating body armour.

So are all the CPs that durable in this mod? 'Cause in vanilla HL2, the ones in the first few chapters have 26 health, while the ones in the last few get upgraded to 40.

They are all that durable.

I'm not criticizing the game play decision, just disputing your in-universe view that it's not an autocannon equivalent based on in-game damage stats. Mainly because it's scripted to take out enemies that simple anti-personnel weapons can't take out (APCs and Hunter-Choppers). The sniper rifle doing more damage per shot than it is either just game play, or a testament to how strong the sniper rifle is.

It's clearly not like a regular autocannon. It's a giant shotgun. Like that autocannon was loading canister rounds, just in energy form. That's what we're dealing with.

And the combine sniper rifle is enormously powerful, if in-game effects and Alex's statements are to be believed.

They weren't hard in vanilla, but now it seems like you can just point a SMG in their general direction and kill all of them. They're probably just a bit too fragile, having half their base health would be better IMO, but what do I know. Yeah, increased striking power may help a bit, since they're supposed to be glass cannons.

Again, I don't like giving them such low health, I'd prefer to give them a solid 60, but they can one-shot all NPCs. And for the record, half their base health would be 15. You'd still end them in half a second. If I choose to increase their attack power it'd likely be a fairly considerable increase, but I'll decide how much when I get home.

That's possible then. I'm not really too attached to the date. Could be early 2004 instead. Maybe mid 2003. I think I prefer that, as the switch to Interceptor had just begun (so it's very plausible that these guys could still be wearing PASGT), and the build-up of forces in the region in preparation for the war would be significant. Combine that with the ongoing occupation of Afghanistan, and the continued US deployments in Europe and east Asia, and bam, the troops in New Mexico aren't as good or well equipped as they could be. Not to say that the troops sent to Black Mesa in FM were the absolute WORST the US military had (they wouldn't get plates at all in that case, nor would they get stuff like Abrams tanks), but they're definitely not at the top of the stock...

Still not my favourite theory, but it works well enough.

In the test you showed me of the PASGT, we saw the frame behind the vest get f'd up by the impact even when the vest stopped the rounds, and the guys testing it commented on the guy wearing it getting injuries like a broken back.

1. The frame was already bent.

2. They don't know what they're talking about. No firearm has enough power to do that.

In numerous other tests I've seen, when talking about higher caliber pistol rounds, the tester would comment that, even though the PASGT would STOP the round, the impact would probably kill the wearer anyway. Did they not know what they were talking about?

That's shorthand for "I'm a fucking moron and you should dismiss EVERYTHING I say."

In any case, most of them get shot enough times in the same general area to justify them dying or getting taken down. Maybe not as quickly as they are, and maybe not all of them, but generally it works. On top of that, they are in the New Mexico desert, so it's possible their soft armor may have deteriorated to level II-A or II at this time, like in the tests I've seen (e.g. http://www.thehighroad.org/archive/index.php/t-294684.html / http://www.savvysurvivor.com/PASGTarmortest.htm) i.e. enough to stop maybe 2-3 9mm NATO bullets, but wouldn't hold up to the amount of fire Freeman usually slings at them, especially at close range. This is important, as a lot of the times he fires SMG bursts into them at near point blank range (e.g. the three guys at the end of episode 12, the "run around the corner" guys).

Look, I still don't like this theory because I know how a human body performs and even without armour they wouldn't drop like that. And even badly degraded PASGT still usually stops 9mm bullets.

Probably. But the soldiers in general seem to be oddly proportioned compared to the other human NPCs (they look even bulkier thanks to their backpacks), so if you (like me) just want to not be bothered, you can just assume it's another graphical lapse (I'd even say that, if the designers of this game had any armor in mind when making the marine models, which they probably didn't, it was the PASGT; this was '98). Plus, he seldom spends much time focusing on the soldier models for that to be noticeable anyway.

I doubt they had any particular armour in mind when the game was made.

Keep in mind this is my theory for Freeman's Mind, not Half-Life (I'm just assuming the HD pack was canon there). Freeman's Mind obviously changes some things about the base Half-Life universe, including how Freeman's suit functions (for the most part, it's really high quality but otherwise regular plated body armor, rather than powered armor that can oddly both fall to pistol rounds and survive autocannon fire) and how Freeman went through Half-Life (Ross skips some sections, and added in the Uplink teleportation sequence). In Freeman's Mind, I'm assuming these soldiers were just "what's left" as Freeman speculated in episode 59 rather than the well-equipped, top-of-the-line special forces they were in Half-Life itself (or at least Opposing Force).

Well, I don't like to think of the two as overly separate, but that's just me I guess.

His description of them as "literally mentally retarded" is an exaggeration (they're just stupid in a somewhat realistic way), and they're not BADLY equipped by any means (this theory would still have them getting some plates, after all, when most troops wouldn't have those), but the point is they're not the best the military has to offer, so they're not as well equipped or competent as they could be because of that. The military wasn't really expecting a full invasion, just a clean-up operation for the wildlife, scientists/guards (who would be armed with pistols or shotguns, and wearing light II or II-A armor), and some of the humanoid stragglers. So they thought that a bunch of guys with soft PASGT armor, shotguns, and submachine guns, supported by some choppers, would be enough to cover everything up. Few initially had plates, and fewer still chose to wear them (an example of someone who did could be the first soldier Freeman encountered, and who he shot in the face). After things got out of control due to an organized attack by the Xenian military (Vortigaunts/Grunts/Gargantuas/Flyers), the military started rolling in the big guns (howitzers, bombers, tanks, more troops with sniper rifles and .50 cals, etc.). Yet they still couldn't give plates to more than half of the soldiers they sent, simply because they didn't have any on hand, weren't expecting such heavy resistance, and weren't expecting to have to deploy so many troops. As a result, most of the soldiers Freeman encounters throughout the game are only wearing soft II-A/II/III-A armor. Even worse, a lot of the soldiers are dumb, so a lot of the soldiers that got plates just chose not to wear them, bringing the "properly armored" portion of the force closer to a quarter or a third. To make things EVEN WORSE, a bunch of the soldiers didn't even wear helmets (which they should ALL have been issued), even if they wore plates.

That's a lot of overthinking an 8-minute internet show. Sure you aren't willing to just recite the MST3K mantra? Especially since, for the record, even the military isn't THAT incompetent?

Also, in the 2000s, police had already updated to a nice, strong body armour. NIJ-II for most of the body, III-A for the plates. Security guards at a high-priority government facility would have *better* armour than the police, and for the art and in-game model it appears to be plated over the entire torso. That means *at least* III-A protection over the entire torso, and a likely roughly equal helmet. (Although no arm or leg armour. Which is why I made Barney Calhoun's weak spots his arms and legs.)

Video killed the radio star.

Iwuy4hHO3YQ

It has more to do with everything being a damage sponge. Some fights in Black Mesa were ball-bustingly hard (like the fight with the tank and squad of soldiers in the canals) on Hard mode in vanilla, so I can't imagine how tough they'd be here.

That section's main threat is the tank, which can one-shot you if the main gun hits directly (no shit). The marines are only a threat when they have the highground at the start because they land more headshots than usual due to the angle.

Also, about the head: Freeman actually does wear a helmet, despite what some concept art may tell you. Unless Alyx considers a hazard suit without a helmet to be excellent protection from radiation.

1. The helmet is never shown in-game, when you see the suit no helmet is present.

2. A hazard suit with no helmet is better than no hazard suit at all.

3. Freeman still takes radiation damage, poison damage and other things that should not affect him in the full suit.

They probably wouldn't be DIFFICULT, since their puny pistols and SMGs can barely hurt you, but still, why let them take so many shots? It'd take like 25 bullets to the chest from the MP7 to kill them. From an in-game perspective, they're just weak fodder enemies you're supposed to kill by the truckload fairly effortlessly (things only get a bit challenging in those chapters when a helicopter starts spraying autocannon fire at you). From an in-universe perspective, they're cops wearing regular soft body armor.

1. You are underestimating the life-saving abilities of soft body armour against small-arms fire.

2. Real police have inlaid plates over their vital organs, but they're lightweight and I forget what they're made of. I do, however, remember they make the vests IIIA, which *will* stop an MP7.

3. These sections are still very quick because there are SO many environmental kill methods.

4. This actually gives a lot of value to the environment, since "just shoot them" isn't the quickest option.

5. The SMG hits them 25 times in, like, two seconds. And that's pulsing the trigger to maintain accuracy.

Also, I just noticed an error you made in a previous post. The damage scaling is different now, remember? On hard you deal 1x damage and take 0.2x, on normal you deal 1.25x damage and take 0.15x, and on easy you deal 1.5x and take 0.1x. A CP takes twenty chest shots on hard, not normal. On normal they take 16, and on easy they take 14. With the SMG, these numbers are 25, 20 and 17. With the Python, these numbers are 8, 6 and 5. Shotgun does it in 34, 27 and 23 (remembering it fires 7 at a time). The crowbar, first weapon you get and my favourite killing tool for these pigs, does it in 3, 2 and 2. Understood?

I'd just take that as a game play convenience, like how in HL1 the gun on the attack helicopter does less damage than the pistol, or how the M2 Browning does about ten times less damage than the sniper rifle. It seemed pretty clear to me that the Hunter-Chopper's gun was an autocannon equivalent, as unlike regular anti-personnel weapons (like emplacement guns), it could actually destroy APCs and Hunter-Choppers (non-explosive weapons would otherwise do no damage at all no matter how many hits you landed).

1. It's still presently 2.5x the power of the pulse rifle.

2. You're forgetting that it's basically an energy shotgun, as it fires out a whole lot of pellets with each shot.

Yeah, but that's what I mean- the pistol, SMG, and shotgun are all pretty inaccurate as-is, so having to land so many hits to take down one soldier seems like it'd be frustrating if you ever ran out of Pulse Rifle ammo (which happens a lot). On a related note, does the crossbow still one-shot them?

They're not frustrating to fight, but they are difficult. If I run out of pulse rifle ammunition, I use the SMG and it works very well. And it really isn't that inaccurate, but it has recoil and you need to compensate for that. Same with the pistol. I find that with the SMG, the combine soldiers can each be killed within a single magazine as long as they're not too far away. The shotgun and pistol really don't work, but they work wonders on almost everything else.

And no, the crossbow isn't a one-shot anymore. It currently does 30 damage. That's supposed to be 40, but I can't fix it until I get home and I missed it the first time.

M'kay, that makes more sense. You can't have them being too durable, or else they'd slaughter the Combine easily like they do in vanilla (I like to simply increase Combine weapon damage with the console to get around that slightly). Still, it seems like giving the Antlions such garbage stats would impact the chapters where they're the main enemies.

Not as much as you'd think. The antlions ARE easy now since their health sucks and they are melee enemies, at least if it's only the regular ones, but if they catch you off guard they hit quite hard and they're pretty fast. If it matters, I can increase their striking power a bit.

[Also did you forget about the FM durability thread, or get tired of the conversation? It's totally cool if you don't want to continue that anymore, I just wanted to know since you said you'd respond a couple days ago]

I forgot about the post I was supposed to respond to. I'll get to it now.

The HL and HL2 modifications look interesting. I was thinking about downloading this for Black Mesa, but upon replaying it on Hard recently, I remember that it's so freaking difficult even in vanilla that these changes would probably just make me tear my hair out.

Maybe I'm a bit too far in to say this, but it's really not that hard. Keep in mind Freeman takes very little damage from small-arms fire, except on his unarmoured and extremely vulnerable head, so there's no section of the game that is really that hard... Other than Blast Pit, but Blast Pit drove me mad in vanilla Black Mesa and the original Half-Life so that's no surprise.

I know the point is to make the game more difficult, but that seems really, really damage-spongey for regular, fodder, early-game enemies. With this much health, the pistol take twenty shots to the chest to kill them on NORMAL difficulty.

Twenty to the chest or ten to the head, but there are so many quick ways to kill them it's a rarity you have to actually do that and when you do it's not that big of a deal. I just played through Half-Life 2, or at least the first half of it, on thursday and I never found the CPs difficult to kill at all. Especially since their offensive power is shit and they can't melee worth a damn so I just ambush them at corners with my crowbar and bash their brains in like one would a real poli... Nevermind, forget I said anything.

So the APC can pretty much one-shot you now?

You're forgetting the 0.2x damage scale for Gordon, it's only 100. That number is also for its rockets, and doesn't seem to work, but those rockets can be shot down or dodged quite easily and you have no reason to ever actually be hit by them. If you get hit by one of those absurdly avoidable rockets you deserve to lose half your health.

Random question: the gun on the Hunter-Chopper seems to be the Combine equivalent to a helicopter-mounted autocannon. Can one of those taken down an APC/IFV in real life?

An autocannon, yes. But the anti-personnel weapon on the hunter-chopper is weaker than some of the overwatch rifles. (It's stronger than the pulse rifle, but weaker than the sniper rifle, per shot. Obviously it rains energy balls like no tomorrow, though.) In-game it takes 400 hits to kill an APC, and 300 hits to kill the hunter-chopper. I think this is a fairly reasonable compromise between the required in-game result (you kill them in a reasonable amount of time not to get slaughtered) and the realistic result you'd actually get (you don't do a damned thing to them).

I always thought the Overwatch soldiers were kinda underpowered in the vanilla game, so that's good. Only problem is this would pretty much make every gun except the Pulse Rifle (which, assuming it's the assault rifle equivalent, would take a roughly-realistic 15 chest shots to kill, assuming the soldiers are wearing high quality armor) useless. Unless that part about head shots being x20 in HL2 wasn't a typo.

No, no. The HL2/Black Mesa multipliers line is for GORDON. Gordon has no armour on his head, he takes massive damage there.

Assuming chest/head shots, each gun kills the overwatch troopers in:

Pulse rifle: 15/8, a reasonable number that makes it far and away the best gun for killing them.

SMG: 38/19, a larger number but it fires fast enough to accomplish this fairly quick. The SMG is the go-to backup weapon against them.

Pistol: 30/15, not really doable with the semi-auto, but it can be used on them to finish them off. The pistol is very much not a main combat weapon in this mod, I wouldn't use it on them, but it works on most other enemies very well.

Shotgun: 50/25, since it fires seven at a time that's not as hard as it sounds, but the shotgun is (like the pistol) best used on any enemy that's not the combine. Of course, against enemies that aren't the combine the shotgun is excellent and along with the pistol will be a primary weapon.

Python: 11/6, doable once more but less than ideal. I like the python, it's my go-to sidearm for military engagements since the USP hardly works, but it's still a pistol and it acts like one.

It's not that you use the OSIPR or nothing. It's that the OSIPR makes it much easier if you have ammo for it. The other weapons are all for when the OSIPR is out of ammo, and while not nearly as effective they do the job just fine.

This one really bothers me, honestly. I agree that the Antlions were overpowered compared to the Combine soldiers in the vanilla game, due to them being scripted to kill Overwatch soldiers in one hit, but I think this is going too far in the opposite direction. One of the most fun parts about HL2, in my opinion, was having a variety of allies to help you out in battle. From a story perspective, Antlions are also supposed to be a huge threat, so huge that they effectively overrun the Combine when the rebels can't. If these stats are accurate, then the Antlions are completely useless at even taking down lone Combine soldiers in the regular groups of five, and the sections of the game where you fight them would be laughably easy. Their health and damage should have been higher IMO. I would have just decreased their stats ony slightly, removed whatever makes them kill Combine soldiers in one hit, modify the Combine so they do proper damage with their weapons (for some reason, the Combine soldiers do way less damage than Freeman does with the same weapons), and just have them do increased damage to Combine soldiers (maybe three-shotting instead of one-shotting?).

Except, here's the issue: I CAN'T remove their ability to one-shot NPCs. That's why their stats are so low. If I COULD remove their ability to one-shot combine their health at least would be much higher.

Okay, so yesterday I went to work with a hangover and got myself all fucked up. Today my girlfriend went to work with a hangover and got herself all fucked up. I'm starting to think that work and hangovers don't mix and we should just go home until we can get our shit together.

I would be most amused. Care to try that for a day?

If you had to endure every "what if" you had ever written for this thread?

Wait for the law to come down on them hard. See, I had sex before I was 18. Waaaaaaaaay before, and did so many, many times. Many of those times are moments I would consider my most private, personal memories. So if somebody extracted those and plastered them all over the internet, I would likely only have to wait as their actions would qualify as child pornography. Just like they would with most people's memories, as most people lost their virginity long before the legal age of majority, or even the legal age of consent. (Kind-of a self-defeating scheme, isn't it?)

If you had to sleep outdoors, on bare ground, from here on out?

Because then you'd be happy. And humans can't be allowed to be happy for long, so then you'd want more. (No, really, that's how it works.) Can't have you wanting more, now can we?

(No, no, BTG. Choosing one means you can't have the other. So you can either be able to stand up straight but not see as far as your toes, or be able to see as far as your toes but not stand up straight. And you knew full well that's what I meant.)

I'm content with the former, that's like 20% of my time already.

Sleeping half as much, or sleeping twice as much? (Remember, you have to live with ALL the consequences of either.)

Well, BTG seems to be coping well, so... BTG? Which did you take? The slow easing in or the quick thrust?

The ability to stand up straight or the ability to see as far as your toes?

Who said I didn't? Or has that only been the last two days...

If you couldn't remember a time you weren't dizzy?

Well, I already feel like that, so I'd treat them with the same aggression I'm treating them with now.

If you hit your head a couple times (like I just did) and felt absolutely tanked for a couple hours?

Banned because what, do you think you're better than BTG? Oh, wait, nevermind. Of course you do. Okay. I'll take it out on him. Or nobody. BTG is better than nobody, right? Right. So FUCK nobody, I'll take it out on him.

Banned because I need somebody to take it out on. Like a lot of mods do and don't know how to deal with.

I AM OKAY NOW. The hit to my head just triggered a slight freakout. I am going to delete all the posts I have made since I hit my head, and forget this ever happened.

THIS POST DIDN'T HAPPEN.

For the record, claustrophobia is also a rational fear.

Banned for criticizing me for a: what I can't afford and b: the contents of somebody else's computer. (And it does have integrated spellcheck, but no dictionaries so that's worthless. Seriously, 0 dictionaries.)

Banned for thinking I can AFFORD that.

Banned for missing that I'm out in the sticks and couldn't bring my DESKTOP with me.

To add to the list of things that piss me off, people who don't believe in phobias. Like my jerkass uncle who had me doing that shit job to begin with. He didn't believe me when I told him I was claustrophobic, because he doesn't think claustrophobia is real. And now he's probably going to make me pay for the things I broke trying to get out. You know, while I was having a panic attack. Like I knew would happen but he didn't fucking believe me. I'm just a little bit, you know, FUCKING LIVID about that right now.