I KEEP RUNNING OUT OF AMMO VERY QUICKLY.

I feel like I'm being shoehorned into always having to melee, which anyone that has played Oblivion, knows the melee system beth uses(the exact same in Fallout) is seriously flawed(mobs basically block 100% of time, or reflect your damage back with parries, while you do barely any damage).

And paradoxically I get ammo for guns I don't even have yet!

For raiders(I'm just level 4) it takes 5 shots to kill them. VATS is usually 4(woo who?) Before I even get halfway through a level(springvale school is the only 'dungeon' I been in so far) I'm really low on ammo, then when I reach the area with the ants I'm spent, and stuck with pipes or whatever. At that point I find the game unplayable unless I buy bullets and repeat this frustrating escapade all over again. I'm having to rely on sneak to get criticals, but that just delays the inevitable.

So my question is, how do you all deal with this?

It depends on what type of weapon (Small Guns, Energy Weapons etc) you're using, your skill with this weapon, the condition of it and how much damage it does. A shotgun will do more damage than a pistol, for example. (And as there are different weapons in the world there will be different ammunition.) And your aim, of course. There's no bug I'm aware of where melee/ unarmed attacks never cause any damage, I'd guess it's near the start of your game so you won't be that deadly yet. Build up your skills and you'll be shooting enemies down easily. That's a RPG for you.

Follow the advice of the Pipboy, and be sociable in Settlements.

VATS is based on character Skill, not Player Skill. VATS kind of stinks unless a character is close enough, or Skilled enough to hit a target. Hunting Rifles are durable and Ammunition for them is plentiful.

This is something that bothered me the first couple of times I played too. I've more or less come to terms with it now.

I've fallen into the practice of putting off using guns until after level 5. I may not begin using a particular gun on a regular basis until level 8 or 10. Until then I mainly use melee weapons with VATS.

The Scrounger perk at level 8 ("Considerably more ammunition in containers") is a perk I almost always take.

I think this is pretty good advice. This is an RPG and not an FPS. It does, however, look and play a lot like one on the surface and that takes some getting used to (it did for me at first, anyway). Guns and ammo are supposed to be relatively scarce in the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout, so especially at earlier levels when each round of ammo doesn't do a whole lot of damage, you really feel that. I took this more as an incentive to experiment with various weapons (guns when I could find them and melee when I ran out of ammo). Then once you have some levels under your belt (and the scrounger perk indeed helps a ton, too), it becomes a lot easier to get the ammo you need for your weapon of choice, and you can start to focus more on specializing with one type of gun.

Uhm... no. Then I am chugging through anything that restores health rapidly and running out of THAT(while also racking up radiation). It also sounds incredibly illogical to run up against several people with guns while using something like a bat, which from what I've reading here, is exactly how this game is going to play out.

I'm just going to not play this. It's not too disappointing since the game was only 20 bucks, but if I bought this at release I would have been incredibly pissed off.

While ammo and spare weapons to repair with were scarce in the beginning, I never had to resort to melee. Are you saying you won′t play Fallout 3 at all, Terra? You′re missing out on something great....

Even at level 2?...right out of the vault?

Call me unlucky. Or maybe I didn't search thoroughly enough, but I exited the vault with only 139 rounds of 10mm and 35 BBs. Between a pitifully low Small Guns skill and weapons that need repair, that ammo gets used up pretty darn fast in my games.

No. Somehow I got by using whatever gun and ammo I could find; 9mm, 32, hunting rifle. I mean it was tough, I barely had my guns in working order for a long time but I cannot recall ever having used melee in this game.

It was tempting to knock down Simms for that sweet rifle of his though....

You can follow the signs out of the vault and go straight to Megaton without having to shoot anything other than a mole rat or ant. I have never had to resort to melee, and never waste points in the skill when leveling up.

I also sell ammo I don't use to Moira in exchange for ammo I do use. I also sell guns I don't use like Chinese pistols, .32 pistols and such to Moira and buy the guns I do like. Early on that would be the 10mm pistol, hunting rifle and assault rifle. Once I get a Chinese assault rifle I sell off assault rifles. I always keep lots of 10mm ammo, to use with the pistol or machine gun if I run out of my preferred weapons.

By purchasing cheap guns from Moira you can use them to repair your guns and keep them in as good a condition as your repair skill will allow. My current character build focused on repair and small guns skills first and I would put a majority of my skill points into those categories before spending the remaining skill points in other areas. This allowed me to do lots of damage with the small guns early on.