[F1]Few questions to more experienced players

W

wjelo

First time out of the vault
I've just finished Fallout for the first time and I'm planning to start a new game soon. That's why I would like get some answers about few things that are bothering me.
1. Is the Minigun completely useless? I mean in comparison to the Gatling Laser would it do more damage to the Supermutants (I read somewhere that laser weapons don't do much damage to armoured enemies but still the gatling ez killed the supermutants)
I ask about this because i don't know if the Big Guns skill is worth any building up and I'll appreciate answers more detailed than 'no, it isn't' ;)
I'd rather like a Minigun vs. Gatling Laser comparison if anyone would be so kind
2. What does the difficulty level change in particular? edit: shame on me, found answer in Omkar Namjoshi's guide
3. Whats the maximum number of action points? (12 or 13- 10 for agility + 3x action boy perk)
4. Does the critical hit chance depend only on Luck?

Thank you in advance and forgive me if i asked in a wrong forum or the answers have been already given, but i really tried to find them and what's more I asked less questions than I planned because I actually found some answers here :}
 
1. It isn't completely useless, it can be quite useful against tight-packed enemies. Also, it can be more effective against better armored enemies because the laser beam reflects off the armor's surface. On the other hand, laser weapons can do much more damage to unarmored or lightly armored enemies (e.g. mutants) than regular weapons. Note, however, that the Gatling Laser is an energy weapon, so you can use that and the Plasma Rifle or some other energy weapon. But hey, you can try beating the game several times with tagging different combat skills.
- Correct me if I'm wrong since I'm not 100 percent certain of the things I stated above.
2. Difficulty changes your base skills (-10 on hard, 0 on normal, +20 on easy, if I recall correctly) and some other minor things I can't recall at the moment. Also, as combat difficulty is set to higher values, enemies tend to use more proficient tactics, like aimed shots, attacking weaker members of your party, etc.
3. Since there are no drugs in Fallout 1 that would increase your current AP, your max AP are 12 (AG 10 + 2x Action Boy)
4. The critical chance increases on targeted shots, but its base value is influenced solely by your luck.

Corrected a few typos
 
4. There's also More Criticals which adds to your crit chance, and Sniper/Slayer which add crit conditions rather than affect the chance directly.
 
1. Considering the sheer impressive over-powering disbalance of the turbo plasma rifle, no other weapon skill is ever worth "building up" from a tactical viewpoint ('cept possibly melee or small guns for early game).

3. 13. 10 from agility and 3 times action boy (yes, pastorius, you can get action boy 3 times).

4. Luck + traits and perks. Finesse raises your critical chance (+10% if the top of my head), more critical hits perk increases it (by 5% per rank, so maximum of +15%). Also Slayer (all HtH hits are crits) and Sniper (10% crit chance per point of luck versus normal 1% crit chance, I believe) later in the game. I might've missed one.

Also note that critical failures in combat don't work like that. Critical failure rate is based on your to-hit chance (probably modified for luck, I'm not sure), so the lower your chance to hit, the more critical failures you'll have, and if it's at 95%, you'll rarely/never have a critical failure, no matter your luck.
 
Hm. I always believed Sniper overrid other crit bonuses. I mean, obviously, the initial one from Luck. But is it also true to other crit perks/traits? Just for clarification purposes. ;)
 
Madbringer said:
Hm. I always believed Sniper overrid other crit bonuses. I mean, obviously, the initial one from Luck. But is it also true to other crit perks/traits? Just for clarification purposes. ;)
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Sniper overrides, as does Slayer. It goes like this:

1. Finesse and More Criticals give a bonus to the critical hit rate, but do not adapt it otherwise.

2. Sniper (from the description): "any successful hit in combat with a ranged weapon will be upgraded to a critical hit if you also make a Luck roll." I believe the Luck roll is a standard D10 roll, hence 1 Luck = 10%, 10 Luck = 100%. In other words, it turns your base critical hit rate x10, but ignores Finesse and More Criticals.

3. Slayer (also from the description): "In hand-to-hand combat, all of your hits are upgraded to critical hits", i.e. 100% critical hit rate.
 
Mentok said:
1. Considering the sheer impressive over-powering disbalance of the turbo plasma rifle, no other weapon skill is ever worth "building up" from a tactical viewpoint ('cept possibly melee or small guns for early game).
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Gatling cost twice as much AP (I consider a character with Fast Shot + Bonus Rate of Fire) but also does more than twice as much damage (in specific conditions) I believe (and Micro Fusion Cells aren't a problem). Therefore I think usually it's more effective to use it against groups of enemies or from short distance. I mean there are quite few well armored guys around. That's why I requested the best burst weapons comparison. (Obviously both Gatling and TPR belong to the same skill so there's no need to invest skill points into Big Guns or whatever but that's not the point...)
 
wjelo said:
Gatling cost twice as much AP (I consider a character with Fast Shot + Bonus Rate of Fire) but also does more than twice as much damage (in specific conditions) I believe (and Micro Fusion Cells aren't a problem). Therefore I think usually it's more effective to use it against groups of enemies or from short distance. I mean there are quite few well armored guys around. That's why I requested the best burst weapons comparison. (Obviously both Gatling and TPR belong to the same skill so there's no need to invest skill points into Big Guns or whatever but that's not the point...)
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Nope, sorry. Gatling is impressive and all, but if you drop Fast Shot, which is really a terrible trait, the TPR will be a one-aimed-shot one-kill machine. That's two kills a turn without any action boy, 3 kills if you have two. Gatling is too spread out for that + you can't shoot from a distance, whereas it is very tactical to snipe super mutants who will in return try to shoot you from a distance with their big guns (which is stupid, as they miss a lot or do nearly no damage).
 
Then you've got a point there, I guess. I'll try the aiming shots in my next game I think. When the chance for a critical hit is the biggest (i mean which part of the body do I have to aim at).
The fast shot trait seems quite useful at the beginning to me but of course I'm probably wrong :}
Do you chose any traits, Mentok? Or I should rather ask which are your favorite ones\best according to you?
 
wjelo said:
Then you've got a point there, I guess. I'll try the aiming shots in my next game I think. When the chance for a critical hit is the biggest (i mean which part of the body do I have to aim at).
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Eyes.

wjelo said:
The fast shot trait seems quite useful at the beginning to me but of course I'm probably wrong :}
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Well, considering how easy it is to snipe someone in the eyes later on...it's a bit badly balanced. It's not the worst trait, though.

wjelo said:
Do you chose any traits, Mentok? Or I should rather ask which are your favorite ones\best according to you?
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Well, there's one trait everyone always takes because it's too stupidly powerful...

Spoiler...

...

Gifted. Nothing beats it. It's horribly disbalanced, giving you 6 extra mainstat points to use, many of which you can invest in Intelligence to offbalance any loss of stat points later on.

Secondly I usually choose bloody mess, because it's a lot of fun, but obviously a lot of traits are meant for specific characters, and you should use them as such (for instance, if you're playing a HtH brute, take Heavy Handed, if you're playing a nutso, take Kamikaze and Jinxed or, even better, Jinxed, Bloody Mess and Luck 1)
 
Mentok said:
wjelo said:
Then you've got a point there, I guess. I'll try the aiming shots in my next game I think. When the chance for a critical hit is the biggest (i mean which part of the body do I have to aim at).
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Eyes.
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Groin works decently as well.

Mentok said:
Well, considering how easy it is to snipe someone in the eyes later on...it's a bit badly balanced. It's not the worst trait, though.
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Nope. In fact, you'll still be a killing machine with the turbo plasma rifle if you take this one, simply because you'll have 5 shots per round with 10 Agility and Bonus Rate of Fire, versus two aimed shots without Fast Shot. Add in two Action Boy perks, and it goes up to 6 shots per round vs. 3, slightly better for the aiming shooter.

I think it's really a useful trait, though. Especially early on in the game.

Mentok said:
Well, there's one trait everyone always takes because it's too stupidly powerful...

Spoiler...

...

Gifted. Nothing beats it. It's horribly disbalanced, giving you 6 extra mainstat points to use, many of which you can invest in Intelligence to offbalance any loss of stat points later on.
Click to expand...
I'm still not sure about that. I think Gifted is somewhat overrated because of the immense impact skill levels have on your successes in-game. Although the advantage of better skills diminishes later on, when you'll have your main skills over 100 (which is usually more than enough) it's very noticeable early on in the game.


Also, for as far as I know, critical misses occur when you miss a shot, and then fail the luck check.
 
Sander said:
Nope. In fact, you'll still be a killing machine with the turbo plasma rifle if you take this one, simply because you'll have 5 shots per round with 10 Agility and Bonus Rate of Fire, versus two aimed shots without Fast Shot. Add in two Action Boy perks, and it goes up to 6 shots per round vs. 3, slightly better for the aiming shooter.
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Combine with Sniper and I guess you're well off. You'd need to be level 18, though, which isn't necessary without fast shot.

Sander said:
I'm still not sure about that. I think Gifted is somewhat overrated because of the immense impact skill levels have on your successes in-game. Although the advantage of better skills diminishes later on, when you'll have your main skills over 100 (which is usually more than enough) it's very noticeable early on in the game.
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Considering you can just pump your intelligence up to 10 without much of an impact on the rest of your skills with Gifted, I don't see the problem.

The impact of skill levels isn't *that* high, unless you tag the wrong ones.
 
Mentok said:
Combine with Sniper and I guess you're well off. You'd need to be level 18, though, which isn't necessary without fast shot.
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Not really. That's a deadly combination without Sniper as well, it gets better than the aimed shots experience *with*, though.

The 10 AG fast-shot character would average 1 super mutant kill per three shots, or 1 2/3 super mutant kill per round. The aimed shooter would probably do better, but not by much.

Mentok said:
Considering you can just pump your intelligence up to 10 without much of an impact on the rest of your skills with Gifted, I don't see the problem.

The impact of skill levels isn't *that* high, unless you tag the wrong ones.
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Even if you pump all the extra stat points into intelligence, that only barely offsets the skill point loss per level, and then factor in the skill point loss initially, you'd just be sacrificing one trait for extra stat points you pump in the (outside of skills almost useless) Intelligence.
 
Sander said:
Even if you pump all the extra stat points into intelligence, that only barely offsets the skill point loss per level, and then factor in the skill point loss initially, you'd just be sacrificing one trait for extra stat points you pump in the (outside of skills almost useless) Intelligence.
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What? Dude, consider the following facts:

Unused skills are useless. You'll concentrate on a maximum of 2 of the 6 weapon skills. Of the 12 remaining skills, 6 are useless to invest in (yes, including steal), and you're not going to want to invest in all 6 of the remaining ones. Let's say you invest in 2 of those.

That means the initial "skill loss" will be 40. Say you pump up Intelligence to 9, this'll give you 20-5 = 15 skill points per level that you'd normally not have. That means you'll be up in skills again within 3 levels. If you invest in 8 skills (fairly speaking the maximum number of useful skills), you'll be up again by level 6.

And that's not even factoring in tagged skills, or putting Intelligence to 10. Considering that in Fallout 1 all seven stats get a +1 bonus, investing 4 of those in intelligence leaves 3 free stat points (which will also prop up several skills) AND the bonus in skill points you'll benefit of from level 3 onwards.
 
For FO1 I highly recommend creating character with LK 10 and Gifted/Fast shot or Gifted/Small frame trait (second being my favourite- One shot in the eyes will very often make instant kills).
With LK10, Sniper is DEADLY. Also great random encounter fun :)
About Gifted- set IN to 9 or 10 and read books, heaps of books.
 
ok guys, thank you a lot
But I also asked about a little Gastling vs. Minigun comparison and will be grateful if anyone would share his thoughts. Please don't reply sth like 'just use teh TPR, k?' because somehow I like burst mode weapons.
Also would like to hear something about the middle-game burst weapons: Combat Shotgun and Assault Rifle. Which one is better?
Is the AP ammo total crap or actually is more effective against heavy armoured critters?
 
Oh, Combat Shotgun, most definitely. It's damage output and critical potential puts every non-heavy burst weapon far behind it.

About Minigun vs Gatling Laser - Minigun has lower damage (even considering the fact it shoots more bullets out in a burst) and the end-game monsters have far better protection against "normal" damage than "laser" damage. The offset would be that Gatling Laser depends on TWO skills instead of one (heavy weapons and energetic weapons).
 
Madbringer said:
The offset would be that Gatling Laser depends on TWO skills instead of one (heavy weapons and energetic weapons).
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Does it??? But it affects damage accuracy or what? I mean I had Big Guns skill like the basic value and still i did well with the Gatling...
Other question: are burst mode weapons also more effective when you aim?
 
Weapon skills only affect accuracy, afaik. It's, of course, perfectly normal to just pump points into one of those two skills and still be able to use Gatling Laser effectively. As a side note, i'm almost sure the ratio isnt 50/50, but i dont remember which of those two skills is more important for that weapon.

And, uh, you cant make aimed shots when bursting. :)
 
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