Independent of 'tactics', Fallout 3 would be a closer match to Fallout 2's Enclace if you had:

6 Enclave Soldiers (Rather than just 2-3)
2 of them armed with firelance or alien blaster (equivalent to Pulse Pistols)
And the rest with laser, plasma and gauss rifles

Then yes Fallout 3 Enclave would pose a challenge. As it is, they are easily dispatched.

Indeed as I've easily killed them with hunting rifles and even 10mm smg's with taking little to no damage now.

Ooh. And a decently armed Commander.

I heard someone make a joke that as you rise in rank in the Enclave, you're stripped of armor and armed with a lousy laser pistol for your years of dedicated service to the cause.

Also, armor is much less effective in FO3, both for you and for the enemies, since it lacks AC and DT, only DR is left.



Exactly - it feels like the nuclear bombs just hit recently. Problem is, it's not supposed to feel like it - the bombs hit 200 years ago, while the destruction in FO3 feels too recent.

Fallout 2 did that (more or less) with some NPCs. I remember one of the outputs you'd get for examining an NCR guard was something along the lines of:

"Yet another guard. You think somebody must breed them, because they all look alike."

:D

Gotta love the flavour text

"You see Ed, Ed's dead" - Upon examining the bones outside Vault 13 in Fallout 1

Well sure, you get some variations, and for obvious reasons a game like that has to rely more on flavor text than visuals to portray details like this. (And I do miss the item descriptions - I just like seeing those in RPGs in general, anyways.)

My point was just that Bethesda went a bit further with this sort of thing - in Fallout 1/2, every house you entered was going to be pretty much the same, apart from what loot you might find in there. In Fallout 3, it's still pretty much the same layout every time, but there's always an admirable amount of variety in what you find there, and even in how the place is furnished.

I am actually quite pleased with how few Fallout series newbies we have on the Bethesda forum. Polls show that most of the people who post in this forum have actually played Fallout 1 and/or 2.

Well technically I'm a fallout newbie, but enjoy FO1 and 2 far more than 3.

The first thing you do when you leave the vault is whole sale slaugter a bunch of raiders in springvale school. How can you compare that to getting poisoned in the Temple of Trials and then having your ass handed to you by a bunch of flowers?

Maybe some people don't think FO3 is inferior to the first two games. I like all three for different reasons, and there are aspects of all three that I dislike.

If that happened to you, I'm going to laugh@you.

First time I played FO2 I made it through the Temple without a scratch. I kited the mobs using the infamous AP backpeddle cheap trick and talked my way past whatshisname. Easy.

The plants wee easy too. I took more damage in Springdale, but it only got dicey at the ant bumrush, which caught me by surprise.

I guess you didn't play it on it's hardest settings, and didn't bother to make sure to kill everything in the temple as well.

I didn't play on the hardest level. I have no epeen you know. I did kill everything in the temple though.

Edit:

Except the guy at the end, of course.

Hey now, the backpedal trick is a perfectly viable method for dealing with melee enemies - I do basically the same thing in Fallout 3. (Anyone brandishing a knife at me gets a couple shots in the leg, so that I can just back away and fire at will.)

Hey, those plants can be really hard, depending on how you build your character. There's been many a time I've had to retreat and beg Hakunin for some healing. Not to mention trying to sneak past those geckos to save what's-his-name's dog. Those ants in Springvale can be especially tricky, though.

But yeah, all 3 Fallout games, I've found, have a moment where they're really tough and you're just barely scraping by. And then after that it's usually pretty much a breeze. In F2, by the time I got to dealing with the Enclave they weren't much of a match for me (though that's usually around the time Dogmeat kicks the bucket.) I mean, once you get some Power Armor, the only thing that's going to hurt in those games were some random critical hits. (I remember in Fallout 1 walking into rooms full of Bazooka-wielding Supermutants, getting blasted all around by explosions for six turns, and still not taking more than a couple points of damage.)

And in Fallout 3 I'll have a moment around level 8 or so where I've started to exhaust all my ammo and meds (usually because I've been out of town for too long) and I'm having trouble continuing on any further. But once I get over that hump, it's all smooth sailing from then on. (Though I hate running into Mr. Gutsy when I've run out of EMP Grenades...)

Those tough moments are my favorite parts of the game, though, looking back. But it's also a really tough tight-rope to walk between making the game an interesting challenge and just being plain frustrating. Myself, I find the game a bit easy in Vanilla F3, but I also am not a huge fan of how they increase the difficulty (Mass Effect sort of ruined the whole "harder diffs give enemies more hitpoints" thing - that game just gets ridiculous on the harder levels.) I'm now playing with a mod that slows down how fast I level up, so Normal is actually a bit of a challenge for me at the moment.

How is this relevant? I was answering to a question about why people who think FO3 is inferior to FO1 and 2 come here.

Lool


Well I would be interested in seeing what the result of pure all or nothing engagement goes down in the Temple, I've always had to rely on a certain amount of backpedal, I think you can start the game with 90%+ unarmed if you tailor your character soely to that end, but I personally wouldn't. I can see myself getting overwhelmed by radscorpions without backpedal. If a character is created with combat in mind, they'll have the agility to expend on backpedaling, anyone less enclined to combat will have a lower agility, and would probably benefit from running, excercising the aspects of their better nature and intelligence. You can create a comfortable enough fusion from startup, but your unarmed/melee combat in the temple will be flawed to a degree, so I'd say backpeddaling is a necessity

It isn't a necessity. I usually just run past the ants. In fact, I've gotten to Lvl 17 and haven't backpedaled once.

I did mention the option of running in replacement to combat. And I assume that by level 17 you're no longer in the temple, and thus backpedaling wouldn't apply now you've got that much more HP and armour to match

Heh

Known... sure; Infamous, cheap?... why? The point is to win by using the rules to your best advantage, its the same thing as moving around a corner and dropping a bomb for the opponent to end their turn on (if you've guessed correctly).

Do you call that role play...or rollplay?

I think it's abuse of game mechanics, but I did do it often in FO2.

Maybe it's a bit of a shady area, but I have trouble seeing using your superior Action Points to your advantage in keeping some distance between your enemies as an exploit. That's not even a tactic unique to Fallout - I've done it in Final Fantasy Tactics, for example (and Vandal Hearts 2, I think it was, where you could use the simultaneous move mechanic to great advantage with careful planning.)

Given, I think maybe they should have raised your Armor Class a bit more than they did, if you ended your turn with excess Action Points (to give some more incentive to saving some points in reserve and simulating a more agile character being harder to hit.) But seriously, though - I'm being charged by a Radscorpion: am I really supposed to just stand there and take damage, or plan ahead and stay one step ahead of him?

Kiting in real combat would likely cause your death (probably loss of balance), and would at least ruin your aim. I see it akin to jumping around to throw of targeting in multiplayer FPS games. It's not roleplay, to my mind, because your character wouldn't know anything about action points or how many she might have left, much less exactly how many steps to take so that the enemy runs out of points before they can attack.

I doubt they would call it kiting in real combat, but moving about in combat isn't bad. If you're dealing with meleers anyways. You'd be moving around constantly, particulary if there is more then one, as you would be trying to ensure they are lined up to limit their attacks.