Thanks for the feedback guys, I appreciate it.
That’s exactly what I’m trying to fix. Most of the endgame armors are just boring for how difficult they are to get.
The general consensus seems to be that power armor and RM13 are both already powerful enough, and reducing their power consumption will make them overpowered. That’s fair enough, so, new plan:
All three power armor variants get their unpowered encumbrance bumped up to 100 or so. That should (more or less) stop finding a suit of PA from being an “I WIN” button on your first day. Also should slow you down if you decide to toss on a suit and rampage your way through a city with a butter knife, and will make it really dangerous to run out of power mid-combat. I might even look at giving it the electronic handcuffs effect so it practically immobilizes you, but I don’t know if that’s possible.
Probably also increase powered encumbrance by 5-10 points.
Basic power armor will get it’s power usage dropped a bit, to the point where you can just about power it from a Torsion Ratchet. It won’t get all the extra bonuses, and it will lose full radiation, environmental, and electrical protection. Might get partial radiation protection?
Basically just a thick suit of armor that holds itself up, intended to be kind of a patrol model for extended use without heavy combat or dangers. Since it’s no longer an invincibility button, it shouldn’t be OP with reduced power usage. Should be moderately useful for midgame to early lategame, but not endgame.
Light/Heavy variants will get various bonuses, but also have their power usage upped significantly. More for endgame, they’ll be for really heavy combat, radioactive areas, or anyone willing to run a metabolic interchange indefinitely for invulnerability.
The fusion powered variant will still work the same way, but again, it’ll have very high skill and material costs. May also only be available for the heavy variant. Ideally I’d like it to require specialized parts from a number of locations, but that sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.
The improv carrier can have significant encumbrance, and I’ll probably add a little bit to the hauling frame, so “kitting out” your PA has a downside.
RM13 is difficult because I really want it to be cool and useful, but I just can’t bring myself to use it when it uses a nonrenewable power source. That said, raising power consumption of the powered modes substantially (twice the consumption of heavy/light PA, for example) should help keep it in line, and each mode will have disadvantages as well as advantages. The unpowered version will be fairly nondescript, basically just a survivor suit.
I think encumbrance should be a fair bit higher, since I see it as a full armor outfit for spec ops or whatever, so that should prevent it from being the obvious best choice. I’d like to make it power armor as well so you can’t wear anything else with it, but then it could have the enhanced servos, fireball launcher, etc, and that doesn’t make sense.
Superalloy Survivor Plate Armor should definitely be a thing. I’ll add that to the list.
I’d like to make things balanced without being useless, so if anyone has any suggestions for that, go ahead.