» Sat Sep 10, 2011 6:46 pm
Take both Cowboy and Grunt perks (if you have the DLC); this covers pretty much all the pistols and dynamite/frags/launched grenades as soon as you can.
Work towards hand loading asap.
Get Lucky as soon as possible.
Light Armor is not going to cut it, there's several ways to get Combat Armor early, check the Wiki.
If you can get the drop on enemies, throw down some mines, toss a grenade from stealth to whittle down their health (maybe even kill) then pull back behind your mines to cover while potshotting.
Get all the powder charges from the Powderganger camps, and the schematic as soon as possible. While they aren't the most potent mine, they help, and are easy to make.
Dynamite is cheap and abundant, don't hoard it. Long Fuse Dynamite svcks. Even if you throw it in VATS from stealth, unless they just stand there you're most probably going to do little if any damage to anything but dirt. If on pc, get a mod to let you convert it to dynamite.
Stealth is going to be important for the early levels, unless you've got the HP and DT to run in behind your nades with pistol blazing.
Swap ammos. For a standard playthrough you can pretty much ignore the various ammo types if you like, because you've got a wide variety of weapons to choose from. With only pistols, you need to swap out ammo per target.
If you like VATS, go two shots to the right arm, then the rest to the dome on everything, at every opportunity. Get NoS and GRS when they become available. When stealth attacking, this is a decent way to toss nades as well, though the range is pretty limited and bounce can get wonky.
Getting the Mysterious Magnum might be a good choice, you can get it pretty easily early on, just a ton of running.