I had a few ideas. Thoughts?

Bear with me if any of these are on the to-do list, or already exist in some form and I just haven’t noticed.

  • First, EMP effects, grenades and the bionic. It should have a chance of shutting down robotic enemies on death, killing them without making them explode. Less collateral damage this way, for the player and surrounding items.

  • The ability to unbind bionics. I figure this one is probably on the list, but in the meantime, would it be possible to implement the option to disable the automatic assignment of letters to passive bionics? I think this would be a good “band-aid” for the problem of having more bionics than we have keys to assign them to.

  • A “hold breath” key. It would rapidly drain stamina and cause temporary severe mouth encumbrance, so you couldn’t (or wouldn’t want to) sustain it for more than a few turns at a time. But you would be able to minimize or eliminate momentary some smoke and gas damage. Like, you’re fighting enemies in a doorway and a bloated zombie sneaks up behind you. You’d hold your breath for the three or four tiles so you could get out of the gas without damage. You wouldn’t be able to just hold your breath and keep fighting.

Since strength sort of doubles as the “endurance” stat, perhaps a high strength could allow you to hold your breath longer.

  • The ability to “attach” your Power Armor Interface bionic to a suit of power armor, so they activate and deactivate at the same time, or at least within a turn of each other.

  • The ability to convert power armors to the other weights of power armor through the recipe menu, using a very high mechanics and electronics skill (at least ten). Converting lighter to heavier would require some superalloy plating, electronic scraps, copper wires, et cetera. Going from heavy to light would produce these as by-products. This could actually be a mod, if anyone cared to make it. It sounds pretty easy.

  • Last, and most complicated. Modular power armor. Remove the electric insulation, climate control, and rad protection from power armor by default, and make them optional modules that you could find and install yourself, similar to gun modification. (You would be able to find pre-modded suits with one or more modules already installed.) Other modules would be found in military bunkers and bank vaults.

Example modules: (Stat)+1, Speed+5%, a module that enables a melee style similar to the Close-Quarters Combat CBM, night vision/infrared vision, air filtration (for gas or water), a configurable auto-injection module for morphine, RX11 stimulants or RX12 ampoules, headlamps, integrated blades, sealant for underwater movement. Using the armor with the ‘a’ key would bring up its context menu with a list of its modules, allowing the player to toggle them or activate them.

Some would be considered “head” modules, like headlamps, gas filters, and alternate vision modes, and would be installed into helmets. Others would be “body” modules, like radiation shielding or electrical insulation, and be installed into suits themselves.

Some would require power, others would be always-on (like filtration and insulation).

On a last note, each one would increase the weight of the suit a little or increase its power drain when active.

On a similar note, I’d like to get the ability to reassign letters to bionics by selecting them via arrow keys.

- A "hold breath" key. It would rapidly drain stamina and cause temporary severe mouth encumbrance, so you couldn't (or wouldn't want to) sustain it for more than a few turns at a time. But you would be able to minimize or eliminate momentary some smoke and gas damage. Like, you're fighting enemies in a doorway and a bloated zombie sneaks up behind you. You'd hold your breath for the three or four tiles so you could get out of the gas without damage. You wouldn't be able to just hold your breath and keep fighting.
That would seem kinda dumb. Average human being can hold his breath for a minute or so, that's about 10 turns in game or 1000 moves.

What part of it is dumb? That you can’t hold it very long, comparatively? I figured that would be a decent balancing factor.

makes sense to me. If you just got done doing a bunch of sprinting you would have basically no ability to hold your breath.

Allowing holding breath would require redesigning bloated zombies, which rely on that 1 turn effect. Though they do kind of suck already.

Power armor module could just be changed to a passive one that only drains power when needed. Activating/deactivating a bionic takes no moves, so there is no reason to have it drain power when unused but active.

The worst part of bloated zombies is the glowing effect right? That makes you into a human flare for all the others to find at night.

Actually i don’t believe bloaters cause glow-in-the-dark. They do explode and draw attention though. Plus if you are lacking a mask, you will be coughing and draw even more attention for a while.

which zom was it that caused glow in the dark when it explodes then?

Boomer.

Oh. Right, derp.

This DOES happen sometimes. For example, turrets don’t explode 100% of the time if you toss EMP grenades at them, but instead they shut down and you can salvage the turret.

But you’d be out of stamina afterwards. Holding breath would be very penalizing, worse than using a gas mask, but still less worse than breathing the gasses.

But then you’d be forcing the player to use their bionic power for their power armor from that point on, after the CBM has been installed, with no possibility of disabling it if desired, effectively forbidding all the other power sources (namely UPS). Whether anyone uses UPSes to power their power armor at that point is not so much the point, but limiting the freedom of choice is what I’m getting at. Also, what if you’re low on, or out of, bionic power? Alternatively, we could have two versions of the interface - the current active type and the new passive type, mutually exclusive, so you could have only one installed. But… I don’t think we have mutually exclusive (incompatible) CBMs yet?

maybe make it some sort of passive/ active toggle, or upgrade/downgrade?