If you use Project Nevada (and there is little to no reason not to use it) - you can set up your game to achieve higher difficulty (including in the stations), and make the loss of high-quality gear more painful than the loss of stats.
Thats what I did, at least.
Easiest way to make the game brutal is to use both PN and MMM, set PN on one of the harder presets and manually set loot levels to ridiculously low levels and then also set MMM to at least the A preset (B is just nuts unless your system is godlike).
If you don't pick a preset for MMM, the default seems to leave all of the difficulty increasing options turned off completely. If I understand the different settings in MMM right, you can either set individual enemies to scale up in strength faster as you level (soft unleveling) or you can ramp up increased spawns (which can lead to individual spawn points spawning dozens of monsters in 1 spot). Personally I prefer a smaller number of tougher monsters rather than swarms of easy monsters and my lowly 2 year old system does as well :) You can also do both if you're truely a masochist...
Khumak, you truly are a connoisseur of hardcore post-apocalyptic survival. I approve whole-heartedly.
Interesting thread. As mentioned, and it seems to me the most parsimonious way to improve the DC to NV transition via mods is to affect the character rather than try to change the environment so much.
Man up and loose some, or all, of that hard-won uber gear...
To me there are two good RP points, after your business in DC is finished. So the defeat of the Enclave and such. The second is right after you learn your dad went to vault 112 but only if you do it as a five year time skip otherwise its to long.
I prefer to use xp and combat rebalancers. So I can do most of the content found in Fallout 3 and not even hit level 30. I also use the logan's hero trait to ensure I can't pass that level. Then when I reach the mojave with more difficult journey I have temporary stat and skill penalties to keep me weaker
[quote=CrabbitMinger]
One of the best things about TTW for me was that it removed a major issue with Fallout 3; that a wee upstart fresh out the Vault is able to mow down droves upon droves of Enclave, Mutants and Raiders, most of whom have years of battle experience while they've never handled anything more deadly than a BB gun. TTW gives the Lone Wanderer a few years to toughen up, learn the basics of survival and put those skills to good use.[/quote]
I've always thought of Operation Anchorage as a good excuse for that. You can alway head cannon the training sim included weeks of intense boot camp before skipping to the actual mission
[quote=Vukodlak]I've always thought of Operation Anchorage as a good excuse for that. You can alway head cannon the training sim included weeks of intense boot camp before skipping to the actual mission
[/quote]
Actually, I have never ever considered this, and this point is brilliant.
I always thought what an alien experience it probably was, and that it gave the Lone Courier (or Lone Wanderer) a good emotional hardening. But it is also an opportunity for the character to participate in a skirmish war on a battlefield, indistinguishable from a real one, experience war on the scale different than almost anybody in the Capital wasteland, including the brotherhood and enclave (unless the enclave makes use of war sims).
And the game kind of supports what you said even further. After all, the DLC anticipates that you will be able to take on a squad of mutineering Outcasts and survive, and maybe even save the two non-hostile ones. Not only that, but OA gives the character the Power Armor Training, so there must have been some camp training we haven't seen.
All in all, an excellent point I wish I'd come to myself earlier
I think OA would have worked better if they made it longer, staged, and almost the first thing you do coming out of the vault. It would better explain how some Vault Boy with a BB gun could become the savior of DC.
1 - Coming out of the vault, you are met by an Outcast Patrol. They see you have a pip boy and "escort" you to their base.
2 - You do some training sims, starting with fairly easy, but working your way up to tough.
3 - You finish the DLC with the standard OA missions.
4 - You're dumped outside the base, but with some goodies - a few weapons, some ammo, some decent armor, and most importantly, the skills needed to become savior of the Capitol Wasteland.
5 - Megaton is the only marked spot on your pip boy map, so you head back to it and continue FO3's main quest... or not. You now have skills and some stuff, so you can now do whatever you want.
THAT would have been a much better OA.
[quote=jlf65]
THAT would have been a much better OA.
[/quote]
Not sure I can agree with the entirety of that. After all, seems a bit too convinient, together with instantly granting the LW access to Power Armor Training.
Also, it would feel like an overdrawn tutorial, one that stands out of the whole storyline like a sore thumb.
If we were to expand the tutorial, I would much rather we got to see more of our time in the Vault. Adding more scenes to the childhood and adolescence more sense for explaining how the character has the skills that he has, build a stronger bond with Amata, James and the vault itself.
OA should remain a side story, just the way it is. It is a nice cherry on top of the characterization, but not an essential part.
I do feel that the characters childhood in the Vault is an essential part. And it bothers me immensely that it is so short.
I'm not sure how much "training" you can squeeze out of the vault. The LW isn't part of security, his dad's a doctor, and at the time when he leaves the vault, he's got a plain jumpsuit, a BB gun, and a baseball bat. We know there's no training facilities as he needed a part of the reactor room just to practice with a BB gun. It's possible security has a training area, but we've never seen such a thing in any of the vaults. Vault security gets by on having armored jumpsuits along with police batons and 10mm handguns, while everyone else has nothing and no training. I don't see the Vault Overseer allowing more than switchblades, BB guns, and bats as that would allow the possibility of losing his position if a rebellion broke out. You're just the doctor's son who plays baseball and occasionally gets to shoot radroaches with a BB gun. To have training in the vault, you'd need to add a security training area and concoct some excuse for the LW to be part of security.
Well, the GOAT would provide a perfect chance and excuse to be a vault security guard. I wish that the GOAT results actually influenced our growing up in the vault instead of just choosing the tag skills.
If you got a career from the GOAT, you should have another sequence of "vault life" between the GOAT and the "Escape the Vault", where you would be doing your assigned job and had more interactions with the vault residents.
I also would have liked if some of the "careers" would make more sense related to the tag skills. For example, why is a Vault Chaplain the Barter skill? Pedicurist is energy weapons? Waste manager specialist is explosives... they blow up their waste? Fry Cook is melee weapons? Shift Supervisor is sneak? Tattoo Artist is small guns....
Some make no sense to me 
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