With Rose’s 10 Int, I could have her suddenly become an expert on some other weapon right now with the extra skill points she’s holding on to. You could probably have done so from the beginning, since you don’t grow your need for surgery very fast. But I’ve found she’s nice to have with a low-AP pistol – better than the Doc I actually built at the beginning of the game.
I think I focused on getting surgery up to 6 or 7 ranks way too fast. There’s not much advantage to a high surgery skill, right? Does it improve the HP you revive people with? I know you need higher surgery for more advanced kits, but you can easily keep pace with them with a modest skill investment.
Yeah, I got Rose up to 10 just because not using the +1 skill book for the max points bugged me. But at least in the LA area I have yet to come across anything that requires a heavy investment, and there you can pick up a guy who starts with 6 in it.
I found that the random surgery skill checks (“hey, can you save my buddy here, he’s dying.”) tended to be on the high side. Other than that, though, not a whole lot of use.
On the subject of Rodia:
Is anybody actually going through and trying to deal with the town peaceably? There seem to be some quests available that require I don’t shoot every one of the motherfuckers as soon as I see them, but it’s not like there’s any moral ambiguity. Every encounter with the Leather Jerks proves they’re exactly what the Rangers are promising to protect people from. I tried just exploring and talking, and I got as far as they mayor’s office, talked to Dengler, and I didn’t see anything less than a bullet in his face would answer. Frankly, I still feel guilty about the peaceful accord I reached in The Prison, since they were after all resorting to murder, rape, slavery. Are all those peaceful quests just for your playthrough as evil?
Stupid Sciatica. Haven’t able to play in 10 days or so 
I wanna save the southwest so bad.
Heh. I didn’t even find out until much later thatit was possible to handle the Prison peaceably. I recall when I first went there they tried to charge me passage and I guess I didn’t have the skills to avoid that. So I slaughtered them all without hesitation. My RPG style is usually that I’ll never attack an innocent but if someone charges me even one credit for something I shouldn’t have to pay for I’ll kill them and the rest of their village.
By the time I got to those motherfuckers, it was already clear that it was an absolutely going to have to kill everybody. Maybe on another playthrough I’ll hold off on spraying bullets in all faces until I’ve talked to everyone, but actually I don’t think it affects the ‘making peace’ ending.
I got to Damonta and placed the last radio beacon, and got orders to come back to base. They say I can finish up the robots in Damonta, but then to get right back to base.
Do I actually have to get back to base promptly? Are they going to shuttle me off to california? Will I get a chance to finish up the rest of the place before I go? Still gotta take care of the prison and railyards and various little stuff.
Also, is there some vendor who will pay extra for junk robot parts? They weigh a lot and are barely worth anything, and I’m going to run out of ammo and medkits if I have to keep killing robots without much reward.
Killing robots is its own reward.
Haven’t used energy weapons until I was running out of ammo. Energy weapons work by doing more damage to higher armor targets, right?
The tooltip reads something like:
Armor Threshold 3
Above Threshold 0.4x
At Threshold 0.9x
Below Threshold 2.2x
But it doesn’t seem to actually work that way. It seems like the tooltip is reversed. That is - above the threshold (greater than threshold armor value) is the high 2.2x multiplayer, and below the armor threshold value (low armor) is low damage.
Just making sure I’m right and the tooltip is wrong.
Your interpretation is correct. The difference is enough that you should really watch out for enemy armor levels and switch weapons for squishy targets. Some of the high-powered energy weapons have really high thresholds; I ended up not even using the top-tier energy weapons (partly) because the threshold was too high to be useful.
No. Take as long as you like. Explore Arizona as thoroughly as you can now, because you’re not going back for a while and it’s going to be a different place later.
Not that I ever found. But if you come across a robot track that is NOT an Octotron track, you will want to hold on to it to help you at The Prison. It’s a unique item you get via a random drop from on of the robots at Damonta, Silo 7, or the Abandoned Railway.You can use this track to fix the broken robot at the gate of the Prison to get past the turrets and mines
I will say that Senor Beef isn’t quite accurate in his contention that conversation choices don’t matter. There are certain things you can say in conversation that will close other paths, typically by pissing someone off.
And did anyone else do the following in Titan Canyon?
So after taking the raiders out near checkpoint 1 and being scolded for “breaking the peace” (hey, they attacked me first!) I was given the mission to collect the radioactive sludge and was given a brotherhood guy as a guide/guarantee of peace among other groups. First thing I do is enter the locked gate before the post and get the first batch of sludge. (After taking on honey badgers where Mr. “oh-so-useful” monk stand around with his thumb up his ass. He’s not even one of the suicidal ones so he’s really got no excuse.) After getting the sludge, I return to post 1 and save. I then take a right turn up the hill immediately past the checkpost and the diamond militia instantly attacks me. (Apparently, the Diamond militia will always attack if you have a monk with you.) I took them out, but the monk got hit with friendly fire and apparently attacked me. So I took him out as well. Realizing that maybe I need him, I reloaded and decided not to go tangle with the militia up there. So I go straight instead, and there are three militia waiting to ambush me. So I take them out and do a little poking around online to discover that with a monk in your party, the raiders leave you alone and the militia attacks. Without a monk, the raiders and monks attack, but the militia leaves you alone. Seeing as how I can’t stand raiders, have no reason to take issue with the militia yet, and think the mushroom cloud guys are certifiably batshit, I decide to reload to checkpost 1 again. This time I go halfway up the original hill, and just execute the monk flat out. If he wasn’t useless in combat, but I might have considered keeping him around, but without him I can take out raiders to my heart’s content and the militia leave me alone. (Actually, the militia don’t really even show up except for certain fixed areas. The second militia combat I mentioned past the hill where the guys always are didn’t happen at all. They were gone.) Funny thing was, the guys up the hill, which are always there regardless, didn’t attack me this time. Until I tried to talk to them a few times. Apparently they got annoyed by me so they attacked anyway. I ended up making them see the error of their ways, at least for the fraction of a second they went from realizing they are going to die to actually being dead. But no other militia have attacked since.
Another question about energy weapons.
I’m using a meson cannon currently which is listed as a tier 3 energy weapon on the wiki sites. Stats are:
30-38 damage
6 AP
5.7 damage per AP
Armor Threshold 3
Then I can upgrade (?) to an Ion Cannon which is a tier 4 energy weapon. Stats on that one are
15-20 damage
4ap
4.4 damage per AP
Armor Threshold: 4
That seems like a worse weapon, even at a higher tier. The armor threshold 4 seems to mean that it doesn’t kick in with bonus damage until you face enemies with 5 armor, rather than the 4 that the Meson canon does.
But then it made me wonder back to the way the tooltip says “Below: 2.2x”
Is there some reversal of the stats where Armor Threshold 4 is actually lower (ie will affect enemies with lower armor rating with the bonus) than Threshold 3? In other words, will the Ion Canon, with its Threshold 4 stat, inflict the bonus damage on more kinds of enemies?
Otherwise I don’t see it as an upgrade.
Ok I’m starting a new party!
I think it’ll be the crew of the Firefly.
Any recommendations on how to build this crew?
Initiative is way more important than I thought when I built my characters. I thought it just set battle order, like most games. But it actually determines how many turns you get by comparing your initiative to your enemy’s. My current crew focused on coordination and action points and suffers for it.
Match your action points to your intended role for that player. Pistol users should have action points in multiples of 3, assault rifle shooters should probably have 7 (or 12), sniper rifle users 10, etc. I didn’t check the high-end weapons to see if the action point requirements were different, but I suspect they tend to follow a pattern.
Brawling is more viable at high levels than I thought, apparently it scales with your player character level unlike the other melee attacks.
Coordination probably isn’t that important to get super high, you’ll get good hit chance just out of levelling up weapon skills and especially if you have someone with leadership.
You can probably use luck and str as a dump stat, they’re not terribly efficient. Str especially is disappointing because melee characters don’t get +dam from it like you’d expect, just one percent crit per point which isn’t that great. It also doesn’t make that huge a difference in HP. It does affect a few weapons and armors you can use, but you can work around it.
Does anyone know what difficulty level affects? I just found out through their new tooltips that you can change the difficulty level on the fly. Does it just give enemies more hp and damage? armor? Do you get less ammo and other supplies from enemies and crates?
Watch out, though. Later in the game, as battles become longer, initiative matters relatively less. Most early- to mid-game battles are over in just a few rounds, and so getting an extra turn is a big deal. If combat takes 10 turns, though, an extra AP might be more valuable.
It’s not that consistent. By endgame, most of my chars had around 10 AP and were equipped with energy weapons. The Death Ray did the most damage (50-70) but had a cost of 6 (and armor threshold of 6). The Neutron Projector–one tier down–did damage of 40-52 but only had an AP cost of 5. So most of the time I could get two shots from each player equipped with one, as opposed to just one shot with the Death Ray. It also only had an armor threshold of 5 so it did more damage against squishies.
Have you picked up Lexcanium yet? He was viable all the way to the end. Great close-range character.
I wouldn’t use strength as a dump stat. Your toons will go down too easily with their lack of con. Charisma isn’t so important, though. I need to check to be sure, but I think I gave everyone this build:
Coor: 4
Luck: 1
Awa: 5
Str: 4
Spd: 4
Int: 8
Cha: 2
Cha probably shouldn’t be at the absolute minimum or it’ll be hard to recruit new rangers, but 2 has proven ok. IIRC this gives 8 AP and 12 initiative–both pretty reasonable. An Int of 8 gives plenty of skill points.