Hello! I picked up this game just a couple nights ago and am loving it thus far! Currently I have 89 dwellers and am steadily growing. I have a few things that I've found to be useful in my development but also have a few general questions as well.

Also, if anyone has any questions please feel free to ask and I'll try to help as best I can!

- The biggest tip I can give so far is to grow slowly. Rapid expansion is a recipe success. With each small expansion in population or build, I make sure I can consistently cap my resources and make adjustments as needed before moving forward.

- Currently I've 89 dewellers, 20 of which are exploring. I choose the ones that I simply have no open jobs for and have low SPECIAL stats. For now, I'm sending them out with 6-10 stimpacks and radaways as they explore for anywhere from 4-24+ hours.

- Gear doesn't seem to provide any armor bonus for explorers. However, luck does affect what they find so an outfit that boosts luck is beneficial. I'm not sure how other stats affect their survivability though. Is anyone able to confirm?

- In terms of vault design, I spent quite a few caps early on rearranging the foundation. One thing that has worked well for me is having a 3 room power generator as my first room next to my vault. I have 6 men with guns there so any raiders that come in just get killed without needed to shuffle anything around and it makes it easy to figure out where my strongest guns are.

- I keep all my women pregnant but only expand my maximum population as I'm capping resources consistently and am ready to do so.

- Every SPECIAL skill has it's purpose though in regards to Endurance, I've yet to find a use for it. I've heard that the Nuka Cola building for having 100 dwellers is boosted by endurance though I'm not yet certain.

Do all of your explorers have weapons? Do any of them?

At this point, almost all do. Some new advlts do not but they quickly find one. I have a surplus of stimpacks and radaways so it's easy to stock em full and spit em back into the wasteland.

This nets a pretty good sum of caps as well assuming you call them back when they run out of stimpacks. Currently across 20 explorers, I've a sum of about 8k caps waiting to be called home with a ton of weapons and armor.

Endurance i believe is good for exploring the wasteland.. the more endurance they have the less damage they take and the less likely they are to be hurt in the first place.. i believe that also works in defending... basically it functions the same way it does in other fallout games.. more hp and less likely to be hurt.

so its mostly a combat stat good for prolonging how long your explorers can survive in the wastes.

This would make sense and it's what I had originally assumed but I've not found any info to support this. Is it mentioned anywhere in game or is anyone else able to confirm this as well?

All i know is my character with really high endurance lasts much longer out in the wastes and when radroaches come i havent noticed her taking any damage (i trained endurance really high on her with the um.. athletic room i think (i may be wrong there are like 3 rooms that are similar but for dif stats lol)

So endurance really seems to be the defense stat which makes sense as armor doesn't provide any defense at all unless it gives endurance stat.