According to the party creation page I linked to earlier enemies do more damage. I’ve seen it implied you also get less loot, but I can’t say anything first hand. I’m playing on the standard difficulty (i.e. the one that isn’t rookie or ranger or supreme jerk) and have found it for the most part not too difficult with the exception of certain fights being a bit more involved. (Slicerdicers come to mind here. I was fortunately able to hack one of them which is likely why I didn’t have any party members fall. I haven’t actually been having many problems with honeybadgers.)
I’m playing a new game on Ranger, but as compared to Seasoned it’s really hard to tell the difference since I have a better build and I’m better at the game. One really obvious thing, though, is that you no longer get a full heal on level up.
I also didn’t know about the “Z” button on my entire first playthough, so I’m finding lots more scavenged stuff this time around :).
I’m not having problems in general with getting through combats. I’m getting through pretty reasonably on ammo even though I now have four characters needing .45. The hit points from the relatively low strength have been enough. I only regret not having enough carrying capacity. I’ve gotten to where I really don’t have much left I want my geniuses to put skill points into, so they may diversify into shotguns, though it’s harder to maintain carrying two types of weapons and ammo.
Ammo diversity is a good strategy, and honestly makes management easier (auto-distribute works great). My current party uses 30-06, 5.68, 9 mm, .38, and 12-gauge simultaneously. I almost never have to buy ammo since the drops come in fairly equal proportions and get divided up automatically. 9 mm seems to run out the fastest, but at least it’s cheap.
You’ll probably want to get into energy weapons eventually. My shotgun character honestly doesn’t get much action.
I think you misunderstand the initiative system - you keep getting extra actions for high sequence. A character with enough of a bonus can get two complete actions. There aren’t really any turns in this game, so a high initiative will continue to rack up the opportunities.
Charisma doesn’t appear too useful, but it’s unclear exactly what all it does right now or where the most important break-points are. It’s also unclear if it’s used as a total or average across the party and how NPC’s affect it. Int is overpriced for what it gives.
Luck may actually be less cost-effective, and you can easily get through the game with none. In fact, having 1 luck actually let’s you make good use of a couple charms.
Str 4 is a very useful for mitigating armor penalties to speed. The Speed attribute may be the most balanced and useful across the board, however, as it gives you immense utility: initiative, movement, AP, and dodge.
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IIRC this gives 8 AP and 12 initiative–both pretty reasonable.
Reasonable but not necessarily optimal. Being able to shoot twice (or shoot, reserve AP and then shoot twice) is a huge advantage.
You only want to buy the breakpoints for INT. As a stat, it gives you nothing else. However, Int 4 is honestly going to be enough to get you through. Only go higher if you desperately want a skillmonkey. By mid-game you can end up with more points than you can really use anyway.
To be honest, I haven’t seen any clear explanation of how initiative works. I saw a lot of talk about early betas that initiative gave characters turns more frequently, but that this was eventually reworked. My first build didn’t have particularly high initiatives (9-10), while for this build I ensured everyone was 12. I haven’t seen any noticeable difference in turn count; only that I get to shoot first more often.
I misremembered; I get 9 AP from that build. 3 base AP, +2 from (Coord/2), and +4 from ((Str+Int+Speed)/4). Two shots from sniper/assault characters by the second round. When I get lvl 20 I’ll have 10 AP from the start (two more points in coord) and get two shots every round.
By mid-game I started dumping excess points into giving everybody energy weapons skill. And it turned out to be really valuable since there were a number of endgame encounters against super-armored targets.
Hmm, I don’t remember selling all my pants, but my entire team is running around the wilderness bare-ass. Wierd bug?
Were you anywhere near a mad monk who blew himself up? The blast will incinerate your clothes.
That might explain it. Something similar happened to me, and I wrote it off as a bug. I worried that the game was corrupt, but I didn’t want to go back, so I just re-pantsed everybody and carried on. We all ended up dressed up as Amigos.
Ahh thanks, yep that’s it.
I wandered into the wrong neighborhood, realized I needed to do some other quest hooks first.
Yeah that happened to me! And I was really disappointed because I made up very specific outfits for everyone at the start that I’ve been unable to recreate using clothing I’ve looted. Right now my team looks like a mariachi band.
It happened to me as well, at the first raider outpost in Titan Canyon (i.e. the one north of the First Monk checkpoint).
A few amusing things from that:
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While a few of my party were close, none were close enough to take any damage (at least, I don’t think they did–if they did it wasn’t much regardless).
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The same can’t be said for on of the raiders. I had whittled him down but the monk indirectly finished him off.
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The same also can’t be said for these party members clothes. Everyone of them had been burned off.
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However, there were only 3 party members in the clothing incineration radius. 2 of them are NPCs. NPCs always have the same outfit and that outfit cannot be changed. So the only actually naked party member was my now clad in only a loincloth assault rifle guy PC. I guess the NPCs must walk around with spare outfits that are all exactly alike and are stored in fireproof containers.
Having had quest lead me back to the ag center I now realize I made it 5 times the ordeal it should have thanks to missed dig spots because of my chars crappy perception, and missed crates due to my personal crappy perception, and not having discovered the wonders of the “Z” key yet.
Just wanted to correct myself here:
I have a sense that I’m really close to the end and I’m pretty sure you never go back. So finish everything you can in Arizona before you get on the helicopter.
Well I think I’ve killed every last living thing in Arizona. Is there anything I should do before I head to California?
I have some dismissed friendly NPCs that don’t seem to be hanging around the cafeteria. Where else might they be?
Will my locker contents transfer over to California or can I only take what I can hold? Will I get a new locker in California so at least I can offload some of the stuff when I get there?
I’m roughly levels 25-28 at this point. Is that normal for heading over there?
Your existing locker and its contents transfers over to CA. And I was at about the same level range when I flew over.
Make sure you get the toast out of the toaster at the Citadel, and hang on to it. You’ll need it later (well, you don’t need it, but it makes acquiring a certain item much easier).
Oh and before I go - do requisitions carry over? Or should I just cash in all my requisitions now?
Use them now. There’s nowhere to cash them in on the other side, AFAIK.
Create a save point before you hit Hollywood. Things from that point can get very buggy. I have multiple quests that I can’t seem to finish up.