And they’re spiral bound! How can you not love a spiral bound manual!
With recipes at the end!
I’d say the one necessity of the manuals is that they let you plan your character so you can qualify for the perks that you want. Perks are a big part of making your character kick ass, and they have various stat requirements. Other than that, most stuff can be picked up in-game from the help. Of course like others have said, all the perk information is available online along with the rest of the manual.
But if you aren’t getting the awesome, spiral-bound physical manual with the game, I would recommend just skipping ebay altogether and going for a legal download. You can get Fallout 1 and 2 (and even Tactics) from gog.com for $6 each: http://www.gog.com/en/search/sort/search/fallout
The only caveat is that they’re the European versions (or at least FO1 was – not sure about 2), so you’ll need a patch to add children back in.
HEATHEN! BARBARIAN!
May you die the death of a thousand itches and paper cuts!
No true gamer would prefer real time. I cast you into the Pit!
Much like Anaamika, I tried to start playing this game several months ago after hearing glowing recommendations for it. However, I do enjoy turn based games so this seems like it should be my kind of game.
But…I was totally lost. I played F2 through gametap, which unfortunately doesn’t have a lot of documentation for the game. I tried reading several online character creation guides to make sure that I was creating a character that would work for my play style, but that only left me more confused.
So, I would really like to try this game again. F2 sounds just like a game that I would really like. Can anyone here give me recommendations or hints for character creation? I want to create a character that has high intelligence because I like being able to persuade people to do things, but I also want to be able to carry big guns and blow stuff up!
Any input would be appreciated.
why is everyone still insisting on playing F2 first? Graphically, the two (F1 and F2) are pretty much identical, they run on the same engine. F1 is a far better introduction to the series. F2 is more of a gigantic expansion pack.
:dubious: The definition of “true gamer”, IMO, is “someone who games”. I am willing to try lots of stuff; doesn’t mean I have to like every damn thing out there. If I want turn based stuff I’ll go back to Heroes of Might & Magic.
Besides, this sentiment has been expressed a lot in this thread! What the heck is wrong with real time? I thought we all liked gritty reality in our games (or so it seems!); turn-based is as unreal as you can get, I think. I can’t really remember a single game I liked turn-based, to be honest.
YamatoTwinkie, two reasons - someone promised me F1 free, so I went ahead and bought F2 first because it was easy to find on Ebay, and it took me so long to run F2 on Wn XP that when I finally got F1 I was a little afraid to try to run it - I didn’t want a ton of installing different patches, trying different modes to run it in, etc., like I did with F2.
So I tried playing it again last night. I even downloaded a trainer, thinking maybe I might enjoy it a little more if everything wasn’t so tedious, but I was just as bored and was clicking for the sake of clicking. I gave it up for a bad job and went off and played Army of Two with my SO.
I recently started replaying FO1 using patches available from No Mutants Allowed, and the instructions for manual install. (The installer from the CD doesn’t work very well on modern systems.)
Now in FO1, charisma didn’t have a whole lot of effect if you tagged speech. Unlike FO2 where charisma actually determines your number of NPC followers.
I took Gifted and Finnesse as my Traits, tagged, small guns, lockpick, and speech, and chose for my stats:
STR: 5
PER: 9
END: 4
CHR: 2
INT: 9
AGI: 9
LUCK: 9
Basically I’m shooting (ha, hah) for a sniper type. Endurance actually doesn’t mean a whole lot beyond the beginning of the game, so if you’re careful, it doesn’t have to be that high. (And HP are based on every 2 points, so odd points are kind of useless unless you want a slightly better drug/rad resistance.) With Power Armor, your strength goes up dramatically, and your NPC’s can be treated as pack rats so you don’t have to worry too much about your carrying capacity overall.
Now, in FO2, if you like followers, you’ll want to bump your CHR, since for every two points of CHR, you get 1 follower. But there are more options for raising stats in the long term anyway.
But really for character creation, check out gamefaqs or somesuch for ideas. The games were designed to work with pretty much any balanced character you can think of.
Chill, love. He was joking.
Anyway, Turn-based has a lot more potential for thought than real-time. It’s the nature of the system. You can’t effectively control more than one character in most games in real-time. You start to lose something, and things spiral off into death much faster.
Turn based lets you stop more easily, think about your next move, and consider your options. It’s much more appropriate for games with lots of cool options. It’s usually better for party-based-play. And real-time tends to be nightmarish if you have to keep NPC’s alive, or do anything special.
My daughter and her friends (as it seems to be with all feebleminded youth 
) seem to prefer real time games. When they are playing all fast and furious I will sometimes exclaim
“PUSH THE BUTTONS FASTER FASTER! COME ON!!! FASTER! FASTER! FASTER!!!”
They just roll their eyes because they’ve heard it before.
I prefer turn based or ‘slow’ realtime (Like Europa Universalis series) but I do play some RT games. I like Fallout 3. It’s fun. However, it is not as ‘serious’ (for lack of a better word) than Fallout 2. IMO (oh heck…it’s just plain fact) that RT games do not require the level of thought or depth that turn-based are capable of. The level of detail, RPG elelments, character development and story of Fallout 2 dwarfs Fallout 3 all to hell and back.
So, even a great game like Fallout 3 which is basically RT falls way short of Fallout 2. However, most RT games fall into what my daughter and friends play…and I’ve played them as well…basically require you to press the buttons really fast. Sure, there are some elements of strategy…but to compare it to a turn-based? Not even close.
Would that be something I should do? Add children back in? Why?
Joe
Turn-based systems let you time to think and plan. As I said, I don’t like my success to depend on my ability to click quickly on a mouse, or push the right key at the right instant. I also don’t like feeling rushed when I play. It’s stressful, not fun. For instance, I hate RTS games.
While i also generally prefer real-time games to turn-based, there’s an aspect of drawn-out tension found in TB games that’s lacking in RT.
Example: monster pops out of a closet during his turn and is *one tile away *from my character in and ready to attack. Another monster is down the corridor, blocking my escape.
Me: Oh crap! what am I going to do! what am I going to do! The monster is right there! My guy is toast! Please get a headshot! please get a headshot!
selects aimed shot for the eyes
presses “end turn button”
BAM! Headshot! (monster slumps to floor) YESS!!!
If that scenario had been in real-time, the encounter would have been over in half a second. Much less finger-biting that way.
Double post
One aspect of RT vs TB that you haven’t thought of:
It is much easier to hide ‘crap’ in RT. In Turnbased, if you’re programming is crap it will be VERY obvious. In RT…all you have to do is make the enemies move faster.
I bet if you look at the AI of RT vs TB games…I bet a zillion dollars that the AI of RT is much inferior.
You want to do that because at some point of the plot (relatively early) you need a specific and quite uncommon item to progress, and only a specific child can tell you where to find it (and you can’t find it there without first speaking with the child).
In the Euro version without kids, it results in a long delay, because you need to find a similar item in another part of the world. If you haven’t played the game and don’t know where to find one, it might take a while. And even if you know, there’s still the problem of it being in a place where you’re expected to be more powerful than you are at this point in the game. IIRC there are some alternatives to finding this item, but not very practical (having a minimal intelligence works, if I’m not mistaken).
There are also a couple secondary quests where the lack of kids is an annoyance (In particular the one where you’re searching for a lost kid!).
Real-time is not realistic. A commander on the battlefield, for example, might have had hours (if not days) to make the kind of decisions that they’re required to do in split seconds in real-time strategy games.
And in real-time strategy you’re giving up a lot of control. Planning has to be done in broad strokes rather than through finesse. The ability to click your units around faster than the other player becomes more important than thinking out your strategy.
And that doesn’t even get into how you break systems designed for turns by shoving them into real-time (I’m looking at you Bioware).
In short, real-time “strategy” is an abomination unto the lord that must be rooted out and burned.
You have never played the Total War games then I take it. 
By and large I agree with you…I’m not a big fan of RTS (though I’m totally looking forward to Dawn of War II), but there are exceptions. Take Sins of a Solar Empire for example. Strategy is certainly very important in that game, and it runs entirely in real time.
-XT
HERE HERE! Huzzah!
I have, but let me have my bitter rantings.
Certainly.
-XT