6 items
About this mod
Enhances the gimped Chinese Stealth Armor and/or the Stealth Suit Mk II with a new, more balanced stealth field, that retains the gameplay fun while adding a few drawbacks to keep it from being a god item.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
FYI: I don't watch comments as much as I should, but it's not my intention to abandon my mods. I *do*, however, watch PMs. If you come across any issues and I don't respond to a comment on the comments page (which is actually pretty likely) PLEASE feel free to PM me! I don't bite and a PM sends me an email notification that a comment doesn't send.
Note: You must have NVSE installed for this mod to work!
Change history:
Version 1.1:
-Removed sound alerting enemies when cloak turns on and off as it made it almost impossible to successfully sneak attack with a melee or unarmed weapon.
Background:
In Fallout 3, the Chinese Stealth Armor was a bit different from its appearance in Fallout New Vegas. Rather than simply adding a sneak bonus, the stealth suit also added a very useful (very, very useful... probably *too* useful) stealth field while it was worn, which proved to make the wearer almost entirely invisible.
Overall it seems there were two responses to this stealth field:
1) "Awesome!"
2) "Oh my god, that's overpowered."
Most likely as a response to the second group, in New Vegas this stealth field was removed. Unfortunately for the first group, however, there was a lot of truth to what the second group said: the stealth field granted by the suit was ridiculously effective, making it possible to essentially stand in front of an enemy and shoot them in the face repeatedly to get repeated sneak attack criticals.
But the first group was also correct: the stealth field *is* awesome. So what I've done is attempt to find a middle ground - something that gives the awesomeness of the stealth field while not granting the player complete immunity to everything.
What this mod does:
The stealth field granted by the Chinese Stealth Armor with this mod (and, optionally, by the Stealth Suit Mk. II/Aural Stealth Suit) is different from the stealth field granted by the Project Anchorage stealth armor in several respects.
Most notably, the stealth field is not a constant effect. Like the original stealth suit, it's only active when you're sneaking, but a vast majority of actions will also temporarily deactivate the stealth field. These actions include:
-Changing weapons
-Drawing/holstering your weapon
-*using* your weapon
These actions (as well as some others) will cause your stealth field to temporarily deactivate. It will reactivate shortly after, so as long as it's done outside of enemy sight you can do these actions without issue.
When you cloak or decloak, you'll have the same noise and visual effect that's applied to Lily when she does the same. This noise is not audible to your enemies, so changing weapons or attacking makes you visible, but doesn't necessarily alert your target mid-strike.
You'll also lose your cloak any time you take more than 5 points of damage from any source. When this happens your cloak will have a different sound an effect, because the damage is causing it to malfunction. If you are within line of sight of an enemy at this time, you will no longer be able to recloak - in order to get your cloak back, you'll either have to kill them, lose them (return to [hidden] status), or break line of sight with them for 10 seconds straight.
Additionally, your suit has a chance to glitch on you. The better the condition of your armor, the lower the chance of a glitch, so if you keep your armor repaired this won't be an issue. If you let your armor take a lot of damage, though, it'll start getting less and less effective. The glitch will cause your cloak to disappear for anywhere from 1.5 to 6 seconds - the worse the condition, the more likely you'll have longer cloak losses, and the more often the glitches will occur. At 0.01% you'll be spending more time glitching than not glitching. At 0% condition your cloak will cease to work entirely.
The glitching *does* makes a sound, and its sound, albeit a fairly quiet one, but audible to your enemies nonetheless. Which means if your armor is in poor condition, you will actually become more detectable while wearing it.
Additionally, to try and bring a little more balance to the stealth field itself, the magnitude of the effect has been reduced from 5 to 1. In practice this doesn't seem to make much difference, but I have definitley been spotted and shot at a few times while wearing the new suit.
Obviously, most of this has been done for the purposes of gameplay more than story. There's no realistic reason for a suit to require you to break line of sight before you can reactivate its cloak. So I'm not going to try and come up with one. But if it makes you feel better about it you can just write it all off as this cloak field being a prototype version of the final model that's found in Project Anchorage.
Note: You must have NVSE installed for this mod to work!
Change history:
Version 1.1:
-Removed sound alerting enemies when cloak turns on and off as it made it almost impossible to successfully sneak attack with a melee or unarmed weapon.
Background:
In Fallout 3, the Chinese Stealth Armor was a bit different from its appearance in Fallout New Vegas. Rather than simply adding a sneak bonus, the stealth suit also added a very useful (very, very useful... probably *too* useful) stealth field while it was worn, which proved to make the wearer almost entirely invisible.
Overall it seems there were two responses to this stealth field:
1) "Awesome!"
2) "Oh my god, that's overpowered."
Most likely as a response to the second group, in New Vegas this stealth field was removed. Unfortunately for the first group, however, there was a lot of truth to what the second group said: the stealth field granted by the suit was ridiculously effective, making it possible to essentially stand in front of an enemy and shoot them in the face repeatedly to get repeated sneak attack criticals.
But the first group was also correct: the stealth field *is* awesome. So what I've done is attempt to find a middle ground - something that gives the awesomeness of the stealth field while not granting the player complete immunity to everything.
What this mod does:
The stealth field granted by the Chinese Stealth Armor with this mod (and, optionally, by the Stealth Suit Mk. II/Aural Stealth Suit) is different from the stealth field granted by the Project Anchorage stealth armor in several respects.
Most notably, the stealth field is not a constant effect. Like the original stealth suit, it's only active when you're sneaking, but a vast majority of actions will also temporarily deactivate the stealth field. These actions include:
-Changing weapons
-Drawing/holstering your weapon
-*using* your weapon
These actions (as well as some others) will cause your stealth field to temporarily deactivate. It will reactivate shortly after, so as long as it's done outside of enemy sight you can do these actions without issue.
When you cloak or decloak, you'll have the same noise and visual effect that's applied to Lily when she does the same. This noise is not audible to your enemies, so changing weapons or attacking makes you visible, but doesn't necessarily alert your target mid-strike.
You'll also lose your cloak any time you take more than 5 points of damage from any source. When this happens your cloak will have a different sound an effect, because the damage is causing it to malfunction. If you are within line of sight of an enemy at this time, you will no longer be able to recloak - in order to get your cloak back, you'll either have to kill them, lose them (return to [hidden] status), or break line of sight with them for 10 seconds straight.
Additionally, your suit has a chance to glitch on you. The better the condition of your armor, the lower the chance of a glitch, so if you keep your armor repaired this won't be an issue. If you let your armor take a lot of damage, though, it'll start getting less and less effective. The glitch will cause your cloak to disappear for anywhere from 1.5 to 6 seconds - the worse the condition, the more likely you'll have longer cloak losses, and the more often the glitches will occur. At 0.01% you'll be spending more time glitching than not glitching. At 0% condition your cloak will cease to work entirely.
The glitching *does* makes a sound, and its sound, albeit a fairly quiet one, but audible to your enemies nonetheless. Which means if your armor is in poor condition, you will actually become more detectable while wearing it.
Additionally, to try and bring a little more balance to the stealth field itself, the magnitude of the effect has been reduced from 5 to 1. In practice this doesn't seem to make much difference, but I have definitley been spotted and shot at a few times while wearing the new suit.
Obviously, most of this has been done for the purposes of gameplay more than story. There's no realistic reason for a suit to require you to break line of sight before you can reactivate its cloak. So I'm not going to try and come up with one. But if it makes you feel better about it you can just write it all off as this cloak field being a prototype version of the final model that's found in Project Anchorage.