Fallout V: Old Thread Blues

[GloatingSwine]

The argument was about there not being an explanation for the trail of litter he left, and not explaining his tendency to litter things around. For some reason not having an explanation was making some people unreasonably angry.

Way to build a strawman there.

The argument was that Father predicting that the player being able to find and follow this tenuous trail in order to find Kellogg is improbable but the plot relies on it, because Father has otherwise set up specific situations which only exist to lead the player to Kellogg and then the Institute so he obviously wants them to get there via Kellogg. (and only to misguide the player about how long they have been asleep because surprise I guess?).


The problem is not "Kellogg leaves **** lying around" it is "Kellogg leaves a highly specific trail of **** lying around for an unspecified but long period of time which requires a highly specific tool to follow (magic dog), and this was all part of some overarching master plan despite relying on a massive string of coincidences".

And this is only one of the implausible and silly things which lead the player to the Institute but which are all apparently "part of the plan", (and the only reason for ten year old robo shaun to be sent with Kellogg is in service to a plan which leads the player to the Institute, so we know the plan must exist, in all its implausibility).

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Wonder: Please discuss Final Fantasy in another thread.


That said, I saw the notes about Fallout: Resurrection, but haven't played it. Is it bad I kinda wished they used the Shadowrun Returns engine for it?

[Blackhawk748]

Hey, what Legendary Effect is good to put on the Silver Submachine Gun? Note that this is on a build that doesnt use VATs

[darksolitaire]

Hey, what Legendary Effect is good to put on the Silver Submachine Gun? Note that this is on a build that doesnt use VATs

Explosive, or wounding if you don't want to play in easy mode.

[Blackhawk748]

Explosive, or wounding if you don't want to play in easy mode.

I figured Wounding would be good, and i already have it as an option, so thats always neat.

[DigoDragon]

Is it bad I kinda wished they used the Shadowrun Returns engine for it?

Oooh, that's an idea. I'd love to see that engine utilized for some classic isometric Fallout.

[Triaxx]

I much prefer explosive to wounding. By the time I've stacked up enough wounding, I've already killed it with bullets.

[Blackhawk748]

I much prefer explosive to wounding. By the time I've stacked up enough wounding, I've already killed it with bullets.

I was afraid of that. Honestly i always saw Wounding working best on guns with a slow fire rate. I am thinking about putting Two Shot on it and just screaming Lead Wind when i shoot.

[GloatingSwine]

Oooh, that's an idea. I'd love to see that engine utilized for some classic isometric Fallout.

Play Wasteland 2?

[Balmas]

Hey, what Legendary Effect is good to put on the Silver Submachine Gun? Note that this is on a build that doesnt use VATs

Let's see, in approximate order of potency:

• Explosive. Explosive is far and away the best option for any kind of rapid-fire weapon. This is because you go from 10 damage per shot to 40, without any perks or modification. Four ranks in Demo Expert boosts that damage to 70 per shot, 10 of which is actual bullet.
• Wounding. Wounding lets you deal 25 extra damage per shot, which stacks and allows you to hose down an enemy with bullets and then hide to let the wounding take effect. Honestly, I prefer explosive, as it does more damage more quickly and has the benefit of being able to spam around corners.
• Plasma Infused: You have a quick-firing weapon that does piss-poor initial damage. Your goal is to stack damage onto each of those shots. Plasma Infused does that, while additionally allowing you to collect nuclear material from gooified enemies. 10-30 extra damage per shot is good.
• Two-Shot. Two-shot is kind of a weird little modification; it adds an additional projectile fired at the cost of a little accuracy. However, this extra projectile doesn't benefit from improved receivers or any of the normal perks like commando. As such, it's kind of situational and weapon specific. Still, with a submachine gun, you'd be doubling your initial damage output.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Explosive on a SMG is always a gas, dramatically increased damage output and high cripple chance on an automatic weapon is never a bad thing.

Plasma-infused or Freezing are also solid choices. People seem to underestimate Freezing for some reason, but it has the same damage boost that Plasma-Infused has, and will freeze enemies in place on a crit. With the high number of shots coming out of that gun, odds at least one of them will be a crit can be pretty decent, depending on your build. You can put a suppressor on an SMG, so sneak attacks are a thing as well.

Personally, I purchased the explosive SMG from Cricket and renamed it the Silver Shroud SMG, but YMMV.

[Triaxx]

I got lucky in my first game with a Plasma Infused 10mm Pistol. I adore that gun. Even as a semi-auto, it's a beast. Hair-trigger early, and then Advanced later, and it lasts the entire game. Unlike say radiated that gets less useful as time goes on. Got that on a baseball bat early on and one shotted a lot of Raiders with it.

Do Legendary effects have their damage multiplied by critical hits?

[NeoVid]

So how does the Kiloton Rifle compare? Seems to me that having a combat rifle that's both Explosive and Irradiating which you can buy for a puny amount of caps would make it one of the most popular weapons, but no one talks about it. I know Irradiating only works on human targets, but even if you're missing that bonus damage a lot of the time, it should still be amazingly strong.

People seem to underestimate Freezing for some reason, but it has the same damage boost that Plasma-Infused has, and will freeze enemies in place on a crit. With the high number of shots coming out of that gun, odds at least one of them will be a crit can be pretty decent, depending on your build.

I always assumed the Freezing effect was pretty useless, since you only get critical hits when you specifically activate them in VATs, and if you're using a crit, you're probably one-shotting the target. Was I wrong? Because I would love to have more weapons that can incapacitate enemies and reduce them to target practice.

Speaking of that, I was shocked at how good Kneecapping is in practice. A good chance of immobilizing your target is a hugely powerful effect.

[Balmas]

So how does the Kiloton Rifle compare? Seems to me that having a combat rifle that's both Explosive and Irradiating which you can buy for a puny amount of caps would make it one of the most popular weapons, but no one talks about it. I know Irradiating only works on human targets, but even if you're missing that bonus damage a lot of the time, it should still be amazingly strong.

As a general rule, I consider the Kiloton Radium Rifle to be one of the strongest unique weapons in the game, and certainly one of the most ammo efficient. With the Rapid Automatic receiver, it has a rate of fire that's only seven points short of the base SMG's fire rate. (Though an SMG set up with its own automatic receiver gets up to 40 points more than that, so YMMV.) Certainly against targets vulnerable to radiation damage, it's the best damage dealer. Even against those who don't take radiation damage, it's one of the more powerful Commando options.

However, as it's tucked away in the Nucleus, at a vendor who's kind of easy to miss, it doesn't get as much love as it should.

Actually, now I kinda want to figure out which gun has better DPS against targets that don't take radiation damage.

Spoiler: Maths

Show

Let's assume no ranks in Demo Expert nor Commando, for ease of calculation. Let's also assume that we're prioritizing firerate, as it's likely to maximize how much explosive damage you get, so rapid receivers for both. I'm also ignoring range and accuracy. In both cases, the legendary prefix does 30 damage on a direct hit, since the way damage is calculated means that the 15 explosive damage is applied twice.

SMG:
Damage: 10+30
Firerate: 159. Rough estimates from Reddit establish that as ~15.9 bullets per second.
If we ignore the effects of reloading, that gives us a DPS of ~636.

Radium Rifle:
Damage: 15+30
Firerate: 120
So, now we have a DPS of 540.

Let's try with the powerful Automatic, tho, since the Rapid Automatic involves a decrease of 12 points of damage.
Damage: 32+30
Firerate: 97
DPS: ~601.

So, that's kind of a surprising conclusion that I didn't expect to see. If you're going against enemies that aren't vulnerable to radiation damage, the Spray'n'Pray is the numerically superior weapon. However, as the DPS of the Kiloton rifle is still 94% of the Spray and Pray, and with better ammo efficiency and potential for much greater damage against humans, I wouldn't feel too averse to using it as a good Survival weapon.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Too bad you'd need a mod to give the Railway Rifle something, because it stands out as one of the 'hidden gems' of Fallout 4. At a base damage of 100, it certainly packs a punch, and unlike most weapons, when given an automatic receiver, it does NOT reduce the damage per shot. So you now have an automatic weapon shooting spikes that are common as candy and can be recovered from your victims.

With a Long Barrel, Automatic Piston Receiver, Recoil Compensating Stock, Reflex sight, and Bayonett, this weapon brings a world of pain to anyone on the business end. The only downside is the 20 weight when you're done modding it up. However, you only need Gun Nut 3 to set it up.

Since none of the mods affect the damage, double-shot would literally double the damage output, which makes it an improvement over OSG since most of OSG's damage comes from the boosted receiver, which isn't taken into consideration for the second hit damage. It's... just about impossible to get better than that.

Consider a moment: a fully automatic weapon dealing 200 damage a round...

[Triaxx]

A full-auto weapon that does 100 per shot is already nothing to sneeze at. Alternately, I'd prefer the endless Legendary. Nothing like never having to reload your full-auto gun.

[NeoVid]

Makes me wish railway rifles were more common, I've only found two ever, and they were both random legendary drops. A 100 damage automatic weapon is just the sort of thing I'd enjoy giving to most of my settlers.

[DodgerH2O]

After exploding my way to level 50 with the Spray n'Pray and an automatics/explosives character I was trying to figure out why that weapon was so good and found people hypothesizing that the explosives do so much damage because they can hit multiple hitboxes (limbs+torso or head+torso). Has anyone confirmed or deconfirmed that hypothesis?

Edit: Even up to that level I have yet to find any non-explosive weapon that seems to outdamage it. And it would also explain why enemy grenades can be so threatening, when they don't have the Demolition Expert bonus that the Sole Survivor has.

[Balmas]

I find myself becoming more and more convinced that the reason Father sets into motion this convoluted chain of events is that he's gone bat**** in his old age, and is just trying to gratify his own ego.

Nonsensical ploy to get me into the Institute? He's nutty.
Appointing my obviously Railroad-sympathizing self to become director? Makes perfect sense, if you don't have to make sense.
Synths for every purpose? Hey, it's always worked before, so why not now?
Build a synth mini-me? That seems quiet smart. I'm sure that there must be raisins for it.
Ooooh, synth gorillas! I'm so smart. Why are you giving me those weird looks, guys? Synth gorillas!
Huh. My son the Railroad agent was sent to kidnap back some synths from the Railroad, and for some reason the Railroad knew about it. How'd that happen?
Okay, I'm dying. We can build amazing robot bodies and program with memories, so in theory I could continue to guide. Nope, Railroad agent it is.
Well, I'm dying. Brotherhood is dead. Railroad is dead. Guess the only thing left is to give my son this synth. Remember, synths are just machines and robots and programmed with all their emotions. I think I'll screw with my father's head by telling him to love and care for the toaster next.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I find myself becoming more and more convinced that the reason Father sets into motion this convoluted chain of events is that he's gone bat**** in his old age, and is just trying to gratify his own ego.

Nonsensical ploy to get me into the Institute? He's nutty.
Appointing my obviously Railroad-sympathizing self to become director? Makes perfect sense, if you don't have to make sense.
Synths for every purpose? Hey, it's always worked before, so why not now?
Build a synth mini-me? That seems quiet smart. I'm sure that there must be raisins for it.
Ooooh, synth gorillas! I'm so smart. Why are you giving me those weird looks, guys? Synth gorillas!
Huh. My son the Railroad agent was sent to kidnap back some synths from the Railroad, and for some reason the Railroad knew about it. How'd that happen?
Okay, I'm dying. We can build amazing robot bodies and program with memories, so in theory I could continue to guide. Nope, Railroad agent it is.
Well, I'm dying. Brotherhood is dead. Railroad is dead. Guess the only thing left is to give my son this synth. Remember, synths are just machines and robots and programmed with all their emotions. I think I'll screw with my father's head by telling him to love and care for the toaster next.

Pssssh, synth gorillas. Everyone knows scorpions are where it's at. For various raisins. They can give you such a pinch...

Personally, I'm still of the opinion that the Railroad is secretly backed by the Institute as a way to distribute their synths across the Commonwealth without needing to expend any resources to do so. Just let the Railroad steal them and distribute them for me, then hit the reset button when I'm ready to activate my plot for world, or at least Commonwealth, domination.

[factotum]

Explosive on a SMG is always a gas, dramatically increased damage output and high cripple chance on an automatic weapon is never a bad thing.

Just be careful where you fire it--friendly fire can cause you some serious problems (see Nerdcubed's playthrough of Fallout 4 where he made an enemy of the Brotherhood by accidentally using Spray and Pray to take down some radscorpions while at the Brotherhood camp near the Glowing Sea).

[Avilan the Grey]

I found an explosive 10mm somewhere in my teen levels that I still use at lvl 72. I am not an automatic person but the trigger is "as fast as I can click" so it chews through most things very easily.
I am also sort of regretting my explosive shotgun. I get crippled a lot with it. If I ever find a wounding one I will definitely switch.

[Rodin]

Play Wasteland 2?

I actually think the SR engine is better overall. Wasteland 2's is good, but quite clunky in a lot of respects. The one big issue would be skills, since SR is naturally based towards dialogue-based skill checks rather than Wasteland 2's more Fallout-y interaction directly with the objects.

Still, it was about the closest thing I think we're ever going to get to another isometric Fallout, unless Bethesda decides to lease the license to Harebrained Schemes, inXile or Obsidian. It had a lot of rough edges, but was damn good for all that.

[GloatingSwine]

Let's see, in approximate order of potency:

• Explosive. Explosive is far and away the best option for any kind of rapid-fire weapon. This is because you go from 10 damage per shot to 40, without any perks or modification. Four ranks in Demo Expert boosts that damage to 70 per shot, 10 of which is actual bullet.
• Wounding. Wounding lets you deal 25 extra damage per shot, which stacks and allows you to hose down an enemy with bullets and then hide to let the wounding take effect. Honestly, I prefer explosive, as it does more damage more quickly and has the benefit of being able to spam around corners.

NB: Wounding bypasses all damage resistances, so you can put it on an otherwise crap gun like a pipe rifle and always get all its damage no matter the target.

[LibraryOgre]

Play Wasteland 2?

Is it the same engine? My brother suggested it, but money and computer problems make me wary about buying something new when I can just replay Icewind Dale again.

[GloatingSwine]

Is it the same engine? My brother suggested it, but money and computer problems make me wary about buying something new when I can just replay Icewind Dale again.

Wasteland 2 uses the Unity engine. Its system requirements are not particularly onerous, but they're a touch higher than Shadowrun Dragonfall's.

Mechanically it works a hell of a lot like Fallout 1/2.

[Winthur]

Still, it was about the closest thing I think we're ever going to get to another isometric Fallout, unless Bethesda decides to lease the license to Harebrained Schemes, inXile or Obsidian.

Play Fallout Ressurection or Underrail to scratch that itch until then. Although Underrail is way more combat-oriented; little you can do with persuasion. Some lockpicking and hacking is there, though.

[Mutazoia]

I found an explosive 10mm somewhere in my teen levels that I still use at lvl 72. I am not an automatic person but the trigger is "as fast as I can click" so it chews through most things very easily.
I am also sort of regretting my explosive shotgun. I get crippled a lot with it. If I ever find a wounding one I will definitely switch.

LOL

Which is why several of us told you NOT to use exploding on a shotgun. Kneecapper is much more effective...shoot the leg, stop it in it's tracks, back off out of melee range, and kill it with something else. Or mighty(?): 25% extra damage and limb damage. But NEVER exploding on something you are going to be using at point blank range

[LibraryOgre]

In playing TTW, I really miss the FO3 Dart guns. One shot to cripple both their legs? Yes, Please.

[Triaxx]

Got PNV? If so, the .22 pistol can fire poisoned darts. One of them can cripple limbs like the Dart Gun.