SU ADDON - AMMO AND NPC ARMOR REBALANCE

Description

Makes specialized ammo actually specialized but ONLY in its niche without significantly changing the FMJ baseline. YES to sabot shotguns for mono exos, YES to HP absolutely shredding soft targets. Also YES to heavy armor and helmets bouncing your FMJ pistols as well, this should create an early understanding of importance of the correct ammo type. Beneficial if you are pre-SIRCAA as it patches newly spawned NPCs directly.

Installation instructions

Use Vortex or drop the file anywhere in ~mods folder

Main features

Remember how ammo types always behaved weirdly in s2 and SU as well? . 45 HP being much better than FMJ against monolith exos; HP in general be on par with FMJ for ARs against most armored enemies; AP and SS being "just a better version of FMJ" across the board. I spent recent days researching how we can change that and I got the first results! This targets not only the weapons but ALL THE NPCs as well. I've split all human NPCs in 5 distinct categories and changed both their armor and projectile coefficients. Now we have separate: Soft, Standard, Reinforced, Heavy, Extream "bands" of armors and our specialized ammo interact with these bands nicely! It's a SU specific patch which targets not only the base vanilla systems NPCs but changes inf_solv did with the "protected ranks". Most importantly I didn't make a straight buff or straight nerf to the weapon and ammo balance - Hollow Point (Expansive) got slightly buffed against soft, but heavily nerfed against the heaviest armor. In contrast Special ammo is now actual Sabot extreme penetrator. Both Special/Sabot/Supersonic and AP perform slightly better against heavily armored foes but get worse against soft targets emulating overpenetration. 12ga, . 45, and 9x39 get additional love and attention to preserve their unique characteristics. Thanks to inf_solv the overall weapon performance is now very clearly moved to ammo, that allowed me to balance the ammo, not the weapons. Individual SU specific weapon upgrades are applied on top of this balancing!

Requirements

Built against S2 v2. 0. 6 and Stalker Unlimited mod v2. 4. 1. No other combinations have been tested and not explicitly supported.

Shout outs

Support inf_solv the author and sole maintainer of the Stalker Unlimited mod. The add-on existence wouldn't be possible without his amazing work. Check the GAMMA discord Stalker Unlimited thread.