Oh, I'm not complaining about the effect - I can hear a feral ghoul start to rise, spin round, and hit it from down a train tunnel - nothing wrong with that!

The laser sight also has the added advantage of making you feel like more of a BA when sneaking up behind your prey.

A question about Alternate Start, specifically the ex-Enclave history
The readme says that one effect of this history is that the Enclave are hostile. But... aren't they always hostile anyway? Or does this just refer to the eyebots?
Also, will this lock me out of the main quest?

No it doesn't hinder the MQ.
It just specifically states that you are hostile towards the Enclave so people dont ask if they're hostile or not when playing Ex-Enclave

Can you still do Trouble on the Homefront if you do Alternate Start?

Focus on skills that will keep you alive early on - your primary combat skill, lockpicking or science (to open locked containers or hack computers - you never need both), and either medicine or repair. You could also take explosives instead of lockpicking/science, but using grenades and mines really, really helps even things out in the early going, especially if you're running optional mods like increased spawns and harsher wasteland, so you don't wanna have to use them all up to open some dumb chest to get 30 caps worth of ammo or a piece of scrap metal. Barter and speech are nice, but talking pretty and getting a good deal won't help you if you died because you couldn't fight properly.

Try to sneak over and grab Dogmeat at your earliest convenience - if you have the followers mods installed, he can't die, and he makes a wonderful bullet sponge for the critical few seconds during the beginning of a fight, and this is especially true if you're a melee fighter, since you'll tear people using guns up in seconds once you get close.

If you're a melee fighter, use guns against enemies using melee weapons and melee weapons against people using guns (caveat: rushing someone with a decent automatic weapon, flamer, or minigun will be bad for your health) - having to time your attacks and blocks to land a successful hit on another melee opponent takes too much time and will result in you taking too much damage. Pull out your pistol, shoot them until they drop the weapon, then finish them off.

Your house upgrades are just luxuries. You can use the workbench in Moira's shop, Doc Church doesn't charge too much (hint: if you want to lower the price, go heal yourself by sleeping or eating first), and you aren't gonna spend enough time in the place for it to matter if it looks pretty or not. Assuming you're using primary needs, your first extraneous purchases need to be the RobCo grill and water purifier, because grilled meat weighs less (and heals more) and drinking dirty water instead of good water will rack up rads fast. You'll get plenty of energy cells when you knock over the Super Duper Mart, and Rad-X is generally pretty cheap.

If you need cash in a hurry, go to Minefield and sell the mines instead of keeping them. There's a ton of the svckers there, and they're worth a decent chunk of change if you don't think you're much of a trap-using type.

I'm trying to find the answer to why the perk "Strong Back" doesn't give the extra 50 pounds of carrying weight (besides 10 to heavy weapons) but the search function does silly things with my keywords. It is disabled on purpose in FWE ? or is there something I'm missing here ?

PizzaSHARK!'s tips are all very good advice for any player


Yes


in FWE Strongback gives +30 pounds per rank.
If you're not getting that, then you have another mod that is overwriting this.

I've only loaded the FWE mod (+CALIBR / CRAFT) with some of the optional mods from FWE (auto load order by FOMM) and nothing else. I've checked the files with FO3Edit but it seems the FWE mod doesn't override the strong back perk although FO3edit says it's green and loads in the correct order. How can I check if something else is overwriting the Strong Back perk ?

Edit : the tooltip says 50 pounds so it's not overwriting the main file somehow.

FWE most definitly overwrites the strongback perk. In FO3Edit the Strongback perk should have a yellow background, indicating a conflict. If that's not the case, please post your load order from FOMM

Is there anything special I need to be aware of to make sure that people who try using my blatantly unrealistic but terribly entertaining melee mod with FWE won't have problems?

Like, game settings I need to know are changed (ap regen rates?) and such.

Oh, also: you're simulating dodging by just comparing hp frame by frame, right? But where are you running that script? Is it a permanent magic effect on the player?

No, there's nothing that should interfere with your mod in any major way. Except...did your mod do anything special in VATS? Because in FWE you receive more damage while in VATS and you're not nearly invunerable like in vanilla.


Correct, it's simply a quest script that's permanently running in the background.

How well does it work? Can you diferrentiate between like... bullet damage and fall damage?

I was thinking of using the same idea for Musou Tensei since in the source material it basically made the protagonist impossible to hit. For gameplay reasons I like the idea of a "dodge" better though.

No, I don't touch vats. I have the player spending AP on health and special moves instead, so vats is kind of a waste.

Best you take a look at it yourself, the scriptname is aaUnarmedDodge

It works very well and is actually a fairly simple script.
While it doesn't differentiate between fall damage and weapon damage, I personally don't see it as a problem. Just see it as the character rolling himself off when falling, or dodging out of an explosions way.

I'm a complete tool .... I was looking at the Size Matters perk. I misread the perk name but also what it does (gives 50 pounds at mastery level). Forgive my "Uselessness" ... it's a perk I seem to have in real life :facepalm:. Thanks for the fast responses though !

No worries, happens to the best

Forgive me for this...but I just don't get the POINT of dodging.

If Im in armor, and I dont want hit, I move behind something...and if they hit me anyway, my armor absorbs most of the hit.

If I'm dodging, I either dont get hit at all...or I die instantly... I fail to see the attraction

The point is so players who want to focus on melee and only wear light flexible armor have a better suvivability chance. It's simply an added bonus to unarmed characters who already have it difficult enough as it is.
We want to encourage different playstyles and not "you're [censored] if you don't carry power armor and a minigun".

This way you can even play a Gun-kata style character, who focuses on firearms, unarmed combat and wears very light armor.

Ah, I had the impression it only worked unarmored. Whats the armor cutoff then? DR 10?

There is no real cut off so to speak.
Higher unarmed skill improves your chance, while heavier armor reduces it.

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