Thank you very much for the awesome and addicting game! What a great surprise from E3 - a free mobile game right after your conference!

There is a serious issue with the game which is affecting my ability to enjoy it, and has even deterred me from playing anymore. After a week of building and managing, my once-successful vault is effectively a graveyard because of a roach infestation. It started in a single room, and overpowered four of my dwellers (all equipped with weapons and armor, mind you). Guns do little to stop these roaches.

Within minutes the infestation spread to other rooms with, and quickly took over the vault. Nearly 6,500 caps that I had been saving was blown on reviving my dwellers, only to have them be killed once again by the growing population of roaches. Now I have no more money, and only a handful of dwellers. The dwellers that are alive are not nearly enough to operate the resource rooms, and so the remainder of my population is slowly dying away. The happiness index went from 90% to under 30% and falling, as there are so many dead bodies around.

This was my second attempt at making a vault, and I really thought I had it under control this time. Now facing the situation I am in, there is no way I want to start over from scratch. Since the game is so new, I am hoping you guys can scale down the power of these roaches for the next update. It just seems like it should not be so easy to lose all of your progress over one stupid roach attack.

Thanks for your consideration.

I lost a Vault with a population of 22 to 1 or 2 Radroach infestations, and most of my people had guns and armor. I even revived them and used stimpacks, but the roaches killed them so much I had to restart after everyone died.

It was tough at first. But right now I have a steady pace of stimpacks coming in. I heal the dwellers during combat if their health goes down half way. But the rad roaches are definitely OP right now. It's crazy. The only deaths in my vault so far have been from roaches. Raiders can't touch me. But a little bug? Everyone is doomed.

There is a solution for overpowered radroaches.

1st advise:

- Use only single rooms. Its much more easer to defend room! Even 1 dweller can defend room for fire and radroaches. One room system is easier to manage. I have now over 30 dwellers vault and it's very stable and easy to defend. I have no problem with resources.

2nd advise. Don't build new rooms until you not upgrade all existing to maximum, unless is necessary for some reasons.

I'm sitting on 175 dwellers at the moment and rarely ever have to shuffle people around to respond to roaches, fires, or raiders. 3 days in, I don't think roaches are overpowered at all honestly.

I definitely agree with the OP : roaches are way way overpowered. I already have suffered 3 near complete wipes (15+ dwellers dead) this make the game really not fun.
Anybody got some tips for dealing with them ? I gave weapons to every dweller and they still get [censored]...

Please help, please fix...

Ok I find rad roaches quite tricky.

The single room trick works because its easier to have to correct number of people in the room a triple room can hold 6 people if you only have 5 or less in it then they will get over whelmed more easily, that said they have cost me dear a number of times to learn that, get people in the room fast and use simpacks to keep them alive. The worst is when they hit empty rooms and they spread if your population is still low like mine I only have 27 currently its hard to cover rooms to max and have plenty of production to cover disruption by random events.

I need to up my birth rate. So I have full population for all my rooms that way things are easier to deal with. I Hope that helps I think that rule effects fires as well, low numbers of people adjusted by room size takes longer to get them under control.

I can't even imagine the headache of gathering resources from single rooms, that's a lot of extra clicking around. Plus you'd lose a lot of the extra xp gains when only 1 or 2 fight a fire or are in the room that finishes off the raiders, rather than all 6 getting XP. And of course there's the obvious exponential extra cost as upgrading 3 individual rooms costs so much more than a 3 room set. And of course 3 room sets produce more resources than 3 individual rooms ever can.

Of course, all those extra resources and caps can be spent pretty quickly on reviving roach victims. I got up to 40 dwellers and had 10,000 caps before I hit the suddenly amazingly strong roaches and spent half my caps reviving victims. Shortly after I got things running normal, I got hit again and paid out the other half. After that I started leaving no room empty, not even living spaces, and haven't had a problem since. Even 1 dweller in a 3 room living space helps. If you have an empty room and start seeing rats running around, get someone in there quick, the roaches are surely soon to follow!

Personally I'd like to see the roaches nerfed a touch at higher levels, and the raiders buffed. The biggest hassle with raiders is that defenders don't automatically chase them from room to room. Gets annoying under pressure trying to grab the right dwellers and send them from room to room in pursuit. Really appreciate how they all go back to where they belong afterwards though. Would be a pain if sending them to rooms to fight reassigned them and we had to try and put everyone back where they go after each attack.

I have to agree with the OP. Radroaches are one of the weakest things in the games, yet they are more devastating than raiders or anything else in this one because of (1) how quickly they spread, (2) the damage they deal, and (3) how much it takes to kill them off even with fully geared dwellers. I suggest:

• Decrease the time it takes for them to spread to other rooms


• Make it more difficult for them to spread to upgraded rooms


• Decrease the damage output and their HP/defense


• Design preventative defense mechanisms to be added to individual rooms or the vault as a whole


• A less irritating method of interacting with/selecting/moving dwellers - even a screen or camera lock would help when dwellers don't want to be picked up

the main frustration i find with roaches..and fires is if they spawn in an empty room. they spread soooo fast! as soon as it pops up, i drag someone over to it and i sit and watch helpless as they casually make their way to the elevator, then wait for the elevator, then get on the elevator, then ride the elevator, then the elevator door opens, and suddenly the radroaches leav the room and reappear in 6 other rooms, with double the numbers in each room! i had a large room with 9 roaches in it, they killed everyone in 3 seconds, then they disappeared and more appeared in 4 other rooms.

i managed to defeat them all but it cost me about 5000 caps to revive everyone.

the roaches themselves are not that powerful, they just spread so dam quick.


the same thing happened with fire, a fire broke out in an empty room and before i could get there, it spread to 4 other rooms, and eventually almost consumed my entire vault, but that was not as big a deal since fire doesn't really do any damage, it's more of a nuisance and i pisses me off because i have to drop whatever i am doing to deal with it...


if the things didn't spread so fast out of empty rooms it would not be such a problem, i guess that's an argument for why you should have at least 1 person in every room? ( but i don't want to have to post a guy in each dorm and storeroom, they are unproductive there and won't get xp)


now, these problems occurred early on, before i stabilized myself at 60 dwellers (with an accidental baby on the way)


TL:DR

in other threads, i read a strategy of unequipping you most powerful guns and keeping them in storage and then pass them around to whoever is currently fighting roaches. that way, you always have the strongest possible weapons to fight roaches, you need weapons, fists aren't gonna do anything beyond level 1. explorers can usually find 5-6 damage guns in 3-6 hours.

just saying...it wouldn't be a Bethesda game without mobflation, it's like their signature lol



i think though, it's lazy. instead of inflating the roaches, they should have more variety, like mole rats, radscorpions, bloatflies etc...


and instead of raiders all the time, have super mutants or killer robots knock at your door.

another thing that causes extra difficulty is in the heat of battle its really hard to tap on someone and use a stimpack. they run around like chickens and their health bars stack on each other, i lose guys from time to time because i am unable to tap them because someone else is in the way. there should be like, a hud on the side during an attack if you aoom in on the room that lets you easily manage everyone in the room

Holy crap, I have just recently come across the Murder Radroaches myself. Haven't had any fatalities yet, as I'm quick enough to jump in with the stimpaks, but I sometimes have to call in my door guards to stomp them in time before someone REALLY gets hurt bad.

And I know what you mean by the Mobflation thing... They had the perfect setup to finally give creatures like Draugr an actual armor system in Skyrim, and.... nope. Still inflating the HP to absurd levels so the only way to kill them is rote damage infliction. No armor circumvention route.

I am hopeful that the id Software and (former) Bungie dev input helps them understand the need for proper enemy balancing in FO4, otherwise that "armor piercing" effect will again be largely useless as it was for maces and warhammers in Skyrim.

I have this problem constantly. I amazingly just had 2 fatalities to raiders because of this issue, well that and because the game kept crashing and within 1 minutes of loading my vault up again I got hit with raiders. "No problem" I said, but by the 3rd attack my top level dwellers were no longer starting the fight with full health, so I was clicking around trying to get the ones in back stimmed up. Usually I don't even worry about Raiders. Enough guns, and an elevator at the far right of the top level means the raiders don't visit any room twice, and won't ever kill a dweller that starts with full health.

The problem is the combat system in general and the way health is depleted. I understand 3 raiders in a room vs 1 dweller their health declining rapidly. But when it gets down to 1 raider in a room with 4-6 armed dwellers, and this raider has already fought their way through 6 other rooms, I shouldn't be losing half or more health on a room full of dwellers. Our dwellers obviously lose health way more rapidly than any attacker. If it was even, then 1 dweller vs 3 raiders would cost a lot of health to all 3 raiders, so by the 2nd or 3rd room they'd be toast. 1 raider vs 4 armed dwellers they should hardly be able to get a shot off, much less make a serious dent in everyone's health.

Radroaches are even more senseless, as they are little bugs, yet as long as there is 1 left in a room, the entire room loses health at a crazy pace. Roaches in Lvl3 rooms, unless you have serious firepower it's nearly impossible to select and stim fast enough.

The best way I've found to handle roaches is to NOT level up living spaces. It seems like 90% of roach attacks start in living spaces, maybe because they are rarely if ever fully inhabited. But if kept at level 1, the roaches that initially spawn in them aren't immortal monster roaches. I keep one not very useful dweller in each set of living spaces. Armed with a rusty .32 or better, E+3 wasteland armor (because I've always got extras), they seem to reliably shut down roach infestations before they can spread to Lvl3 rooms and cause mass fatalities. Also, because there is only 1 dweller fighting them, it is easy to keep them selected and stim when necessary. You also end up using fewer stims since there aren't 4-6 dwellers in there all losing the same amount of health that 1 dweller loses fighting the roaches.

I made an account just to voice my opinion on this issue as well. The roaches, supposed to be one of the weakest creatures in the Fallout universe, have come back gamma radiated and hulked out. I have had a number of people die to them and they seem invincible. Granted, I have crap luck and most of my guns are sawed off shotties or worse, but 3-4 of them in a room should be able to take out roaches without casualty. The other problem I am having is that they move so fast that it's difficult to get people into place to take care of them in time. My MAIN problem is that my dwellers often run around, stack up, or hide not allowing me to give them a stim before they perish. If I have stims in stock, any dweller below 50% should just auto heal. I play the game during down time at work and between caring for my 3 young boys and I turn my head for even a minute I come back to dead dwellers and roaches/raiders out of control. You should be able to assign dwellers who are well geared to active guard duty allowing them to go wherever needed automatically as well. There are a lot of simple solutions that could be implemented to keep the game from failing in it's infancy. It's very frustrating because I like playing this game but feel like it's just going to cause more grief to play with these game breaking mechanics.

+1 very difficult to give out stimpacks even in full zoom on an iPad. Their health bars come and go so even when they are near death because they are not under attack that second the health bar drops off, so its twice as hard to find them.

I agree that the radroaches are quite powerful but think about it in this perspective they took down the vault in fallout 3 even with the guards. Also two tips for your next battle with those pesky roaches. 1. Smaller Rooms make them more vulnerable to you because when you rush something and radroaches appear they will almost instantly die if you have people with guns and armor so that should help survivability alot. 2. You can remove old vault dwellers once they are dead and new ones will appear next to the vault ready to recruit like the beginning of the game. Also if you are in a absolute need to kill them and they are spreading bring as many of your dwellers to the biggest room that is infested and they will all attack the roaches at once resulting in a somewhat better defense.

Some thoughts on the Murder Roaches...

People note that the raiders seem like easy street compared to them. However, I think it's not that they're "easier", it's that the radroaches can come in anywhere, without warning, and potentially in rooms not with hardened people. You know when the raiders are gonna pay a visit because they have to breach the door, and the load screen tips even recommend posting a guard in the door room against them. They also only come in through one way. It's almost a pattern for me now... Raiders blast open door, door guards gun down two of them, I top the door guards' health off with stimpaks, the third bolts through my first elevator, my top floor room, and then start terrorizing my top floor power room workers. I send my door guards in pursuit, third raider dies. The Murder Roaches, however, pop up in any room with people often without guns or armor just doin' their job. However, if I scramble my door guards to the infested room, they die just as quickly as the first two raiders who never make it past the door room.

I haven't had any deaths from radroaches yet, but I've definitely had to drop some stimpacks mid-battle to make sure everyone survived. I agree that they are pretty overpowered, especially compared to raiders, and simply because they're RADROACHES. I think an interesting change would have been to make radroaches deal little damage, but cause a small amount of radiation on your dwellers. That way, they're not such an immediate threat, but could spread radiation sickness around and cause long-term damage. Buff the raiders instead, and make their attacks actually matter. As it is, radroaches have me panicking, but I watch and laugh as raiders get ripped apart by Harkness and his guided Fat-Man.

Please help with this -- I lost 8 well-armed people because of one radroach that would not die. It's taken me forever to get out of that hole. It's not right.

the idea is that as your characters get ihgh in levels...like 30-40's radroaches would not normally be a threat. they make the roaches stronger as you go along so they are still always a challenge.

however, i still think it's a lazy copout. the idea of any rpg is to throw more challenging battles at aplayer as they level up, but they should be harder because its more dangerous monsters, not the same monsters just inflated..

why not, instead of "murder roaches" they spice it up by throwing mole rats, radscorpions, bloatflies, nightstalkers ( just no cazadores please)


maybe ghouls that come up from below and act like raiders that work their way up like raiders but in reverse. have super mutants attack the vault, or robobrains and protectrons, maybe even a deathclaw once in a while

( not gonna happen, because the main point of this game is to promote fallout 4. they will make the gameplay as shallow and repetitive as they can get away with)


to be honest, the roaches aren't what's getting to me, it's the resource drain.

i dunno how it is that 6 large food rooms and 6 large water rooms, each with only a single guy in them, can sustain 85 dwellers, and yet 20 power rooms with 3 people in each one is barely keeping me above the line.

I have had two vaults fall to radroach invasions. My vault of 35 dwellers just took a big hit because they spawned in a single room and spread to two triple rooms. Spent all of my caps reviving.

I don't play many of these types of games, actually I only play Boom Beach, but I think a game like this shouldn't let you "die". The maximum it should be allowed to do is grind you to a halt or a slow progress, but not kill you.

I have only been playing Fallout Shelter for 3 days and I'm not familiar with everything, I guess, and today I suddenly ran out of water and food for my dwellers even though I didn't get any new dwellers in and the water & food supply were always maxed. Perhaps I need to constantly collect these two resources when I have the game open and because I left my room with my iPad turned on, the resources ran out. That's kinda dangerous. I came back 10 minutes later only to see food and water completely drained and half of my dwellers almost dead.

What I want to say is .... if my dwellers died I would certainly not start from the beginning. I would just delete the game. The other game I play doesn't let me "die" so I keep playing it.

I went from 33 dwellers to 7 dwellers and lost about 2 or so more after that to OP radroach attacks, if this wasnt bad enough, while I was trying to get enough caps to revive all my dwellers I get on the day after to find all them removed without my permission and not am I bassically undermanned for my vault now, I lost I special dweller "Three Dog" dog to that bs as well, im really angry over this, since them dissappearing seems to be a glitch im sure of.

Three overpowered radroach attacks over a short period of time wiped out all the inhabitants of my vault. Not enough time between the infestations to generate the needed caps to revive the inhabitants. Now I have no inhabitants or enough caps to even revive my lowest inhabitant. Is this vault now forever unplayable? Will drop the game if so. Spent too much time building and managing the vault and then having to start from scratch to probably have the op'd radroaches destroy a new vault s not worth the frustration. I find it hard to believe that they designed the game to not have some sort of restart for a mature dead vault due to op'd enemies - radroaches, raiders, etc.