What trick was that? I didn’t have particularly high charisma and it all seemed pretty straightforward.IIRC, I just mentioned to Casey that I defused a bomb his daughter was playing around. He got the hint agreed to end the war.
I found Highpool a little easier to get through than Ag Center (though you’ll still have to fight your way through just the main level of Ag Center and clear the three infected areas). The NPC you can get here (Vulture’s Cry) is better than Rose.
I don’t know if those qualify as “good reasons.” I’ve done them both, and I think they’re both worth doing.
I never got that option (because I saved Ralphy at the beginning instead, I think. Only one of them will be in peril at a time?).
I’m referring to the “The Golden Spike is non-negotiable” bit, which requires(?) you to infer the keyword “both” and type it in (it’s not on the dialog options bar) to both leaders. (Both leaders say something like “we can’t both have it.”) It might be offered as an option with high Charisma, but otherwise any other option seems to lead to one side slaughtering the other and a non-peaceful solution. Getting them to the table isn’t the problem, it’s having them survive the table.
Ah. I had actually stumbled on that later in the play-through, possibly after talking to the man. So, it looks like the good solution is accessible just through having used Perception at the right time.
You don’t generally have to use perception – the button just makes the radius of observation show. It’s on, regardless (and even if you’ve got another character selected). I usually select my perceptive char to lead the group when wandering around just so she sees traps before someone in front blunders into them, though. Even when another player “examines” something like a door, chest, or safe, they seem to get the benefit of any perceptive character in range of the observed item.
Not really.
As a sniper, she has low awareness and her AP aren’t all that good considering she only comes with an 8 intelligence. My PC sniper has similar AP, but has 10 intelligence and a higher awareness rating. And I’ve found I don’t need another sniper in the group. Outdoorsman is a meh skill, and perception is already on my sniper character, so that’s redundant as well.
But Rose comes with a high surgery skill and a higher intelligence (one more survival point per level). Surgery shouldn’t really be needed before this point–I managed to get all the way to Ag Center without anyone falling in combat–so you can leave it to her and leave another slot open for a different skill in your PC’s. (You might want to consider 2 surgeons in the party if the main surgeon falls in combat, but still, Vulture’s Cry lacks surgeon regardless.) Her computer science skill is wasted, though, since you need to use that skill before you get her.
What I’ve done with her is build her in Surgery, Animal Whisperer, Pistols, and Energy Weapons. No one else in my party has any of those skills.
That being said, Vulture’s Cry is a solid choice and far improved from the beta version. (As is Rose, one of the Beta versions gave her only 3 int. Really? 3 Intelligence for a research scientist!!!??) But I’d say the tilt goes to Rose here. (And they’re both judgmental in their own ways personality-wise, so you can’t even consider that.)
So given that I think the NPC is better, Ag Center actually likes the Rangers (even if the assistant director comes across as being a jerk), and you can extract water from food (whereas you can’t just have food magically become water), I think Ag Center is the better choice. (Granted, there is no real long-term in-game consequence between the choice as far as I can tell.)
Nope, I saved both. I think the girl was actually waiting around for Ralphy.[spoiler]She didn’t know she was in peril; I just happened to notice the bomb in the tire swing. My character did have reasonably high perception.
As for the meeting, I don’t recall when I got them to agree to pounding the spike in the joining rails, but I definitely didn’t have to type in anything manually. Not sure if this was before or after Kekkebah decided he wanted Casey to lose an arm.[/spoiler]I’ll probably wait a while before my next playthrough but I definitely could have done better on my character creation (I avoided any kind of guides or even gameplay videos to keep things as spoiler-free as possible). I never had enough points in the *-Ass skills to use them for anything on my first playthrough. It ultimately worked out pretty well but I’ll have to optimize more if I want to bump up the difficulty.
BTW, regarding the ending:Anyone else have Lexicanum on their team for the ending? Whoops! Well, the final battle still wasn’t too hard with all the energy weapons I had, but still, it would have been nice to have saved him.
It all depends on how you’ve built your party. Specifically, if you already have a proficient medic, Rose is completely useless. You get her at like level 4, and my whole team was in double digits by the time we got to Ag Center, and she never caught up before getting killed in The Canyon. Pistols are useless. I need riflemen, not someone to hang back and try not to get killed with a shooting range of like 10 feet.
I found them pretty handy. Way too often I’d end up with a bunch of mobs that had only a few hitpoints left. No use in wasting an expensive (in terms of AP) sniper shot on them (not to mention that they might be too close to hit). At times I could clean off 3 or 4 enemies with the pistol guy.
My main party was sniper, pistols, heavy weapons, and submachine guns. I’m not sure I’d pick that again but it certainly had an advantage in splitting ammo drops and it worked well enough.
One thing worth mentioning about the choice of Ag Center vs. Highpool - people give you less shit about letting Highpool get destroyed.
I didn’t find Rose useless. She’s taken over as the party’s hacker, and I have her doing surgery instead of the character I planed to have as a doctor in case Rose didn’t leave the Ag Center with me. I also like Pizepi, however that’s spelled, and again if I could have been certain she’d join the party (I read somewhere that there’s a high total-party chriz requirement, but it might be lowered if you did certain quests just right) I wouldn’t have bothered to give anybody Smart Ass this time around. Other than that, I find Father Thomas is the next favorite. No NPC is as good as a hand-crafted PC, but you can get along pretty well with what they give you, at least in Normal mode.
I saved Highpool rather than Ag Center - I’m working fairly blind in terms of knowing what NPC’s I’ll be able to pick up down the road. I was able to get into the Citadel after completing the major stuff in Highpool - the election and getting the radio set up. Not sure which specifically got me access to the Citadel, but after that I was in.
EDIT: about voting - I found the guy’s soul mate, but I have not located the dowry yet. So that might give you some help.
I picked up Angela Deth as an NPC, also Vulture’s Cry, and a miner dude from somewhere I can’t remember. My initial party was a leader type w/Kiss Ass and shotgun skills (later picking up energy weapons skills); a techie/thief w/ a pistol and safecracking, lockpicking, etc; a melee/strength type who lately has started getting better w/assault rifles; and a medic who died pretty early on, forcing me to give my leader some medic skills, and to make Vulture’s Cry a surgeon. I also picked up a second sniper I picked up at the Citadel (with back up heavy weapons and submachine gun skills).
I don’t have too much trouble with my snipers getting melee’d; I try to station another PC near them initially to help draw off attacks, and both have slow enough guns that they rarely get second sniper shots off so I have no problem moving and shooting most turns. My leader and hacker tend to hang back, while my melee/assault weapon types move up and clear out enemies. My melee only guy tends to hold onto some dynamite or grenades and if things look really dicey or if there is a really good opportunity will blow some stuff up real good.
Also, f*cking honey badgers. Met them early on when I was still pretty poor and depleted of ammo, and had to go buy some grenades just to deal with them. I’m much better at that now.
Enemy & NPC AI is pretty poor, just run straight at you and fire at point blank range is the way pistol-guys do things. Its also a little annoying when you can walk all the way into the middle of a mob before they trigger the encounter; I’ve taken to holding most of the party back and letting the melee guy go in and make first contact (and then run for his life after the guns come out).
Successfully attaching the first repeater (wherever that ends up being, including Rail Nomads if you let both Ag Center and Highpool bite it) is what gives you access to the Citadel.
You can trigger combat yourself by taking a shot at one of the enemies.
True, and if I know for sure combat is going to the outcome of meeting a group this is what I do, but sometimes that’s not clear, and you end up walking into the middle of a crowd to talk to their leader only to have the combat start without any warning.
At which point I often reload the last save point, and snipe one of the enemies from a distance. But really, I’m trying to play this like I’m not just killing everything that moves - I don’t want to start every combat with an assassination attempt.
And if your party is moving as a group and you take a shot, everyone will fire, which is helpful if there is one enemy with much higher hit points than others. You can take out the toughest enemy right from the git.
And yeah, fuck honey badgers!
Say what you like, but Honey Badger don’t give a shit.
Thank you for the explanation. I had wondered a lot about how it worked, and was wasting time using it all the time, having my perception guy check every safe or crate himself, etc…
I’m finding her useful, but I got her much earlier than you. I assume you had explored a bit, while I ended up in the Ag center at a very low level. I found her advanced computer science and surgery skills very useful, and could quit raising them in my main characters.
I find pistols useful to finish off creatures with few hit points left or kill weak adversaries, their fire rate is very high (2 AP/attack), and the ammunition used is the only one I never lack, so I use them every time they’re sufficient to spare rarer ammos. And the range is quickly not an issue since most opponents close up. Since I’ve no character (not even her, I raised other skills) with a good pistol skill, I can’t tell with certainty, but I imagine they probably become lethal too if you raise the skill.
At the point I am in the game, riflemen are nice, but I just never have enough ammos for them, so they’re more of a luxury. And anyway, it’s not like you’re wasting much by abandoning her low pistol skill and giving her another weapon skill if you really want to.
I’m not sure how you accumulated enough xp to get to Ag center around level 10. Even now that I explored quite a bit, I didn’t find much opportunities to gain any significant experience in the early game outside of the main quest.
I agree with your dislike of the AI, but I use a sniper or assault weapon guy to start fights. Using a melee guy seems a strange tactic.
ETA : you may not have realized that you can start an encounter by opening fire on the critters.