http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=8918

Oh wow, didn't think of being pickpocketed, percpetion would be good there too, i would hate to wake up and find a message saying your plasma rifle appears to be missing.... but then if you woke up while he was stealing it from you, he may well kill you with it!

FWE doesn't touch the numbers of spawns, unless you're using the MMM / FOIP plugin, which builds in the basic increased spawns capacity. It's easy to change as Kai has mentioned.

Couple of other points:

1) Why would you expect leather armor to be a suitable armor to wear against 12+ super mutants, especially if you don't want to be sneaky. If you're wearing light armor and get into a tough situation, don't forget to use chems. It's pretty easy to max your DR with a handful of chems if need be.

2) Similarly, the Wanda AR, although a unique weapon, doesn't mean that it's by any measure the best weapon to use in all situations. I find the 5.56 caliber AR's to only be moderately effective against super mutant brutes/masters. You'll need to mix in some other weapons types to be effective. If you're specialized in small guns, use gauss rifles or sniper rifles, and aim for the head. Explosives are your fried as well.

3) Followers are dumb, but at the same time they are now set to essential. Get them some PA (you don't need to fit PA to followers), and they can take a lot of punishment if need be.

The next version of FWE will have an in-game menu that let's you customize many of the options and tailor the difficulty to your playstyle, so there is that to look forward too =)

Kai's tweak's to reduce damage might be worth a try, but in my view slightly reducing the damage changes the dynamic in a number of ways. Sure, you might live a little longer, but it also means that enemies take more time + bullets to kill. With less ammo to go around, that can present a new challenge. Just something to keep in mind =)

First and foremost get very comfortable with your tools. Forget about VATS. Learn how to use Bullet Time. This really gives you an edge. Assign one of your side mouse buttons to Bullet Time and click it on and off as needed. Bullet time is especially helpful when using scoped weapons as it slows dowm the wobble making head shots a lot easier. I turn on bullet time when I'm taking a head shot then turn it off for the reload then turn it back on for the next shot. Invest in the Bullet Time perks to increase the length of time that you can be in Bullet Time. You might also want to get one of the zoom mods on Nexus so that you can really work from long distances.

Get either your Small Gun or Energy Weapons skill up to at least 70 as fast as possible. This really helps in accuracy. Use silenced scoped weapons to deal death from afar. Using sneak attacks you can usually cause critical damage and often death with a single shot to just about anything except the toughest Super Multants, Deathclaws, and Sentry Bots.

Plan you attacks in advance. Use mines to provide a protective barrier around you when dealing with a large number of enemies, just be careful that you don't blow yourself up so start away from them. Use grenades to deal with crowds.

Don't be Rambo. If you run into a hostile room you'll die. Keep alert and be careful and quiet. Sneak when you are anywhere near enemies or if you are not sure. Don't let them see you first. Followers make it very hard to play smart because they are dumb. They give your position away making it impossible to use stealth. Get rid of your followers they make the game too hard. WHen you want something done right do it yourself.

I tend to use light to medium armor. Combat armor is my favorite. I don't use Power Armor. I never found it to be particulary useful unless you like going in guns blazing. Supplement your armor rating with the Toughness Perk if you need a little more protection, but the best thing to do is avoid getting attacked as much as possible.

I've had to play some parts of the game a dozen or more time to make it through alive. When I'm finally successful I save and play that part over again trying to do it better. I have a number of saves that I keep as training exercises.

FO3 is not a FPS, its a roleplay game with pretty good FPS game play. FWE certainly does make the game a lot harder but it also gives you a lot more tools with which to work.

Would there be a way to get FWE without all the primary needs stuff?

I've never seen the point in modding the game to a point where you need to eat, sleep, and drink all the time or suffer penalties.

I've installed FWE once and it said I'd be able to find a misc item or hold the numpad enter key to bring up a menu, but I haven't seen anything.

Or am I just blind and not realizing that those items don't appear until after vault 101?

Good suggestions, I respect your point, but these last lines make me think: how can you roleplay playing in this way?
I mean, between other things FWE aims to improve immersion, but how can immersion coexist with things like saving and reloading often?
To me, dying is a major immersion-breaker... when I die, loading a savegame seems to me a cheat, something I shouldn't rely on. So I always try to keep myself alive, and when I face a too dangerous situation I prefer to retreat than to attack ready to reload in case of death.
I also avoid to reload when I do something in a sub-optimal way, after all the essence of a rpg is choice and consequence... doing everything in a perfect way by systemathic saving and reloadind is the death of all this.
FWE high damage surely increase immersion, but if I play in such a way that I have to repeat 10 times the same battle to win the final gameplay experience is not so immersive...

Everything imho, clearly.

Just go into the inventory, click on the PN Tool(in the "Aid" tab) and in the PN menu just hit disable.

except....It's not there?

Which is why in my last line I was wondering if everything was disabled until after the tutorial, and THEN it was added.

Heh sorry, yes after the tutorial you get those tools, not before.
Or you chose an alternate start, in that case you will get those tools all right at the beginning.

You say it's suppose to appear after exiting vault 101?

All I have are my sprint, bullettime, CASM, and Trigage stuff. Nothing else

Upon exiting Vault 101 in the normal start or leaving the shack in the alternate start a number of quests are started. One of them is [Your Primary Needs]. It doesn't happen instantly, it usually take about 30 to 60 seconds for it to start. After it starts you'll have the item in your Aid inventory. Click on that and close your pip boy. A few seconds later the Primary Needs Configuration menu will pop up and you can disable whatever function of Primary Needs you don't like. You can also bring up the Primary Needs Configuration menu by pressing and holding the Enter key on the numeric keypad. If you don't see the item in your Aid inventory perhaps [Your Primary Needs] quest didn't start. Check the quests in your pip boy.

Yeah. I ended up restarting the game and it popped up.

All these 10mm rounds are finally useful!

You are absolutely correct. I'm a save junkie. I'll sometimes between shots. The fact is I really don't care about immersion. I don't even like role play games much. What I like are FPS that permit character development (beyond just getting more weapons) such as Bioshock and my all time favorite Deus Ex. Fallout 3 and to a lesser extent Oblivion make decent shooters with a ton of character development. These games also enable non-linear play and have absolutely fantastic user-developed mods. This all means a lot of replay value.

I use FWE because it provides a greater challenge. I expect to be killed often so I have to practice a lot. In Fallout 3 the success of your character depends to a large extent on the skills of the gamer and to a lesser extent on the skills of the character. This isn't tue in more traditional role play games like Morrowind, which is frustrating to me.

I probably approach Fallout 3 differently then most players and often forget that most people like FWe because of the immersion and realism. I just like it because it makes Fallout 3 more challenging. Well back to the game I have a few hundred saves left to make tonight.

Two questions:

Project Beauty and FWE?

I saw on Mez's mod list that Project Beauty is listed as an incompatible mod. I did have FWE and project beauty installed at the same time the last time I played about a month ago, and I wondered if PB had installed correctly or not, maybe it was having issues with FWE?

Anyways, is there any way to get these two to work together? PB's people look much much better and do alot for immersion IMO! Possibly merge PB into FWE in the future?

FWE Power Armor revisions:
I really liked how power armor was tank-like and it had this "wow I gotta get me one of those" mojo in Fallout 1/2, small arms fire was more of a nuisance than a problem, etc. I haven't had time to play through FWE enough to evaluate power armor, so my question is this: given the difficulty of FWE, if I'm looking for power armor to have the "legendary" status it had in the first two fallout games, should I leave the defaults with FWE, go for a mod like TUPAM, or maybe power armor revival to work with the BoS diversification mod?

Any thoughts on this or PA w/FWE in general would be appreciated!

Thanks!

Use the FWE integrated power armor, it's the most powerful version.

Regarding PB:
I don't like it. The problem is that it is incompatible with more mods than anything else out there. But Mez is currently working on a compatbility patch for FWE. In any case, I would load PB at the very top of your load order, so any other mod that comes after it has priority.

Are stimpacks going to continue being this rare? Currently I'm only finding them through doctors (though very expensive and only 2-3 each) or out in the wild (1-2, usually)

How else do you heal up besides having to travel to a city to visit a doctor and waste all your money just so you can get hurt five seconds later?

Eh yes stimpacks are supposed to berare...

But later on you will eventually amass a large amount of them(I have enough so that even my companions have always atleast 20 on them). Actually it's pretty easy to get them once you meet the Outcasts, since you can trade in energy weapons, sensor modules, scrap metal, etc... for stimpacks.

Sleeping helps, too. You could also grab a natural health regeneration mod, which will slowly heal you when you're not in battle (And I mean slowly )

I think the one feature I'm still trying to get used to is the fact that drinking water is now completely useless if you turn off primary needs. Why even carry water around now if it doesn't do anything besides give you insane amounts of radiation?

FWE is not balanced for not using primary needs, it's a fairly integral part of the experience. It never gets annoying, it's not "OMG EAT NOW >:|" every 5 minutes

Just released http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1061677&hl=, and I'd like to know from players if the FWE version contains any bugs. Also: shameless plug

Edit: by the way, when installed through FOMM it automatically detects FWE, adjusts load order and activates the compatibility mod.

I guess that's part of my problem, then. I was in a sense looking for a fallout 3 version of FCOM, for oblivion. But everything I've seen so far forces immersion on everyone.

I looked through the readmes, (well, glanced over them...) but is the http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4641 mod or a mod like it included in FWE?

FWE has a powerarmor overhaul integrated, but it doesn't add new power armor types or grafics.

I am guilty of this train of thought myself.
What about FOOK though? Does that overhaul have a hunger system in it too?