What I mean by that is that the game has incredible amounts of inertia, much like Monopoly which among board game enthusiasts is notorious for its completely awful game design.

If things are going well. They continue to go well and the mechanics make things better.

When and if they start to go bad it quickly devolves into chaos and an unwinnable scenario. With no catch up mechanics to help. Here are some things wrong:

The 10% increase in resources when everyone is happy just makes winners keep winning. When everyone is unhappy however you lose that bonus and they are unhappy *because* you don't have resources. So losers continue to lose.

The radio station is a trap, it shouldn't be used except to raise happiness levels. Babies can give people at a faster throughput and the radio station doesn't level its inhabitants. It also draws dwellers away from producing resources.

Rushing rooms is untennable in the situation where you need to most. When everyone is sitting at half radiation and the water is in the red you would want to rush but the consequences of doing so could wipe out the vault since everyone is low on health. The only reason to rush when everything is ok would be to get quick caps and xp, and when everyone is high on health you can rush without fear of incidents because they can be handled easily.

Much of the success is determined by the first 3-5 lunch box pulls you receive for free. Which I suspect may be gamed from the start...But I won't get into that on this initial post. But suffice to say if you receive an excellent weapon or character or both you will be able to succeed much better than if you get caps from the initial pulls. The weapon effectiveness will carry you through attacks and high stat characters will pull their weight in the proper rooms. Whereas caps will only get you resources to build or upgrade rooms you can't staff and upgrading will make attacks stronger and you won't have the weapons to rebuff them. This might be the biggest problem. Getting caps from lunch boxes and using them is a death sentence.

High level dwellers generate tons of revenue and help to mitigate attacks. When and if they die it is a huge expenditure to bring them back which quickly drains caps. They are all important to revive though because of their revenue generation. IMO they are too expensive to revive, and sometimes unclickable when running around in an emergency. Reviving a level 1 character is 100 caps which you won't make back on that chracter until they reach their 14th level... That's waaaaaay too much! I saw a mid teens I think 15th level character revive for around 400 caps. That investment won't return until level 32. Why have a revive mechanic if it is too expensive to use?

Lastly there is a lack of a catch up mechanic. When things go bad, which they inevitably do there is seemingly no chance to recover. A lunch box every 7 days doesn't get anyone off their feet again. Rush chances only get worse in desperate times. And high level dweller deaths remove any caps from the equation.

The game is basically the player trying to prevent a landslide from occuring where everything is just peachy and then suddenly awful. It shifts from extreme highs to extreme lows very quickly.

If this was the aim to help explain why so many vaults end up like they do... Then great! But that doesn't sound like a fun game.

You've obviously thought about this a lot! I agree with most if not all of what you've said. In addition:

- I also don't understand why dwellers in the Radio room gain no experience and hence do not level up - it doesn't make sense.

- experience gained through combat in the vault (raiders, radroaches, fires etc) seems tiny, if you watch a dwellers level bar after an event, it hardly moves... beating an event should net you a good chuck of experience!

- Something funny going on with room rushes, the "chance of an event" percentage doesnt seem to match what actually happens - the number of times I've had 5 or 6 failed rushes in a row on rooms which are 20% chance or less...

You're right in that there is no "catch up mechanic", especially frustrating for those people that have spent money on lunchboxes only to see the benefits lost when the vault falls apart. What do you think would be a practical fix? Would reducing the revive costs be enough?

Got to the happy people make more resources part and stopped reading.


Keeping dwellers happy is part of the game. So, if you do part of the game well, not get bonuses for it?

Placing dwellers where they should be and with other people makes them happy.

as for the people in the radio rooms gaining exp. how many dwellers are they bringing to the table? if they are just talking into a mic with no results, why would they get exp? they aren't successfully doing anything until they do so. I've had a guy on the radio for days without bringing anyone in. He is there for the long shot. making babies is a much easier way to go.

Cart before the horse there. If you lose all the benefits from lunchboxes because your vault fell apart, you probably built your vault poorly. Build with a more measured pace and stop upgrading just because you have the caps. There is no end game to rush to; no raids to take part in. Carefully build your vault and build it strong at each step. Prep dwellers for their new rooms before building a new room. Keep enough resources on hand to respond to emergencies. Finish each room before adding a new one.

If you don't read half of a post then I don't know how you expect to add to a conversation.

IF you read further you'd realize the happiness mechanic is akin to an ouroboros. It's a self fulfiling prophecy.

Of course I have people in the right rooms. That isn't the issue.

The real problem is that people are happy when there are a adequate levels of resources. So they make *more* resources in this situation. But when there aren't enough they make even less resources than normal. So it creates a pit. Maybe I should dumb down this concept for you though.

Think of it like this:

If gas costs $2 normally regardless of how full your tank is...

In fallout shelter land

Gas costs $1.50 at a full tank when you don't need it.

$2 at half full

and 2.50 when low or empty.

So if you're at empty and only have 5 dollars you get less gas than the guy with a full tank and has the same amount of money.

If you want to rag on the radio for not getting xp, what about the diner then? Everyone is just sitting around there shooting the breeze except 1 person cutting food.

I think his problem though is that he's sunk money into a failing venture though. I don't feel like he's wrong though.

When I pay for a dlc I expect to be able to use it in every playthrough I play the game.

Buying the lunchboxes though is only for one playthrough that may in fact flop due to luck based mechanics in part.

If lunchboxes cost twice as much but carried through every playthrough I'd be more than down to buy a ton of them.

Answer is only one - money.

It's sad, but it's true. All that hidden game mechanics that You talk about are true.

They are made for people who like winning and hate loosing.

Because when casual gamer will want to buy launchbox? When he is winning and don't need anything else or when he is loosing and he know that getting all that resources and dwellers back will take him forever? Answer is simple.

Game is made to make money, not for our pleasure only. Like I said, it's sad but this is how games are today, especially those mobile and "free".

They won't fix it....Look what they did in patch. They added Deathclaws that will wipe out almost all your Vault and make you to play from a scratch. Why?

Because when you are making a new Vault You are most likely to buy another set of launchboxes to give you a boost.

I stopped playing this, and playing on a hacked version with unlimited launchboxes is not fun.

I thought that maybe Bethesda is different and they really made game that can be played for free to the end, but unfortunetaly no...

Patricko, not all free games are designed to punish you into buying from the shop to win. Take Plants vs. Zombies 2. Every map is winnable without boosts, and even if you need them, you can earn every kind of boost with some diligence and effort to proceed. It is by all means a free game.

Another example is Ingress. In this game there is no shop. All money the makers make is from investors looking to get their name in the game with some "product placement" a.k.a. items that bear the name of the company.

I'm just waiting for Bethesda to start pumping advertisemants into the game somehow like PvZ2 though. Not sure how they'd work it, but it's a typical move in a free play with shop set up.

Of course, I'm not saying that all games are bad. There are few good games, but it's just like a drop in the ocean.

What I wanted to say is that, almost all freemium games sooner or later have paywall.

It's possible to beat it without spending any money, but game suggests you to buy some boosts and it's up to you if you want to spend 10 more hours on farming or just spend 2$ and buy some [censored]

Fallout Shelter is the same. Deathclaws are like this paywalls. If You don't have good weapons You won't be able to survive them.

And You can stop at 60 dwellers and farm for many many hours or just buy few launchboxes for legendary weapons.

Like I said, it's up to us if we are willing to spend money or not, but those games are made like that to milk all money from us.

I read somewhere that somebody spend like 90$ on this game. For me it's crazy, but hey! It's not my money

For that money I could buy 3 games PS4 in my country I'm just saying

Sorry, I wasn't clear - I was sympathising with people who have spent money on lunchboxes thinking it would work similar to something like Plants v Zombies 2 by giving an advantage. Like other people have said, I think reliance on paid lunchboxes in this game can create an unbalanced vault. I also don't like DLC which is "one use only".


For the record, I haven't spent a cent on this game (nor PvZ), I hate the whole concept of IAPs especially when you are forced or continuously "encouraged" towards them. I'd rather have a free limited demo to assess the app first, then pay for the *complete* version if I want it. I also can't stand in-app advertising (PvZ again) ... I don't understand how some people have spent a lot of money on FS lunchboxes; in the hundreds of hours I've spent playing, I've never once thought I needed to buy one, I've just used the game mechanics (ie challenges) to get them. But kudos to Bethesda for not forcing the IAPs down our throats (and no ads), I just hope it stays like that

Try to think a little more long-term. On my second vault I made the mistake of not making enough water, and placing the too large water facility too far away from the too small boxed in generator...

Every dweller had 50/50 health/radiation and general happiness was at 12 %.....

This was rather frustrating, because I indeed could not afford a rush go bad or otherwise keep my head up.

I used NO money on that vault and managed to get it back to work again. Took me a day, and now everything is alright again - except for the 3 dwellers that had to give their life in a failed rush....

Basically, plan ahead, don't count on boxes (on my main I don't get any legendary stuff anyway...) and destroy a room if you either don't need it or if you can do without. You also don't HAVE to expand all the time.. try and make some 4-5 hour (or a day) stops just to see clearly where everybody is at, train dwellers in a stable environment and see clearly what your resources do..

Only thing I really agree with is the rush-chance.. That just seems to be an arbitrary number made up by chucking a jigsaw puzzle at the wall and seeing how many pieces face up or down.

You forgot to note high endurance dwellers. When they are in storage rooms they get nothing out of it other then preventing happiness from dropping. They don't get any kind of leveling from doing it. In combat at least in the vault you won't even see any change with that dwellers health or damage resistance. They will die just as fast as anyone else that is in the vault that doesn't have high endurance. For example I had a level 25 dweller with seven endurance. He died just as fast as a dweller that was at level 5 with two endurance. Both died in the same event and at the same time to molerats in a room of six people. The worst part is that they where the first two to die as well.

This brings me to another subject. Explores vs. Dwellers SPECIAL stats and levels are actually calculated differently. So even if you keep what you think is a tank explorer inside after a point they will die as quickly as the rest of the dwellers because the calculation is not the same. An example is I had a level 30 explorer with 4 strength, 6 perception, 5 endurance, and 4 agility for best default stats. He could live in the wastes for almost 10 hours before even getting close to death with out taking any stempacks or radaway. However in the vault at full health he could die to common raiders and even did negligable damage to them. I didn't even change his gear. He still had the same stuff he had when he was out roaming the wastes. His gun was a gauss rifle and he had on combat armor. Then again the armor doesn't matter anyways because that doesn't have any calculation for protection in this game what so ever but that's off topic. He still died from that attack as if he was a low level/stat dweller.

Anyways this game's calculation system is all over the place and is not actually balanced at all. I feel like it is actually programed to hinder the player as best as possible. Games like this are programed with what I like to call the troll mechanic. It's made to troll the player into thinking they are doing well then turn the tables on them at the drop of a cap. It's because of that mechanic that I feel is what ruins the fun for me and kills the game.

I think your recovery had something to do with losing those three people actually. Your resource requirements dropped with them.

I still think the happiness-resource increase is circular logic though. The people are only happy when you have resources so you don't need an increase in their production, and comparatively when you don't have resources its an even bigger kick in the %^& and harder to guage because your production before was pumped up by happiness.

To a lesser degree rushing follows the same circular logic. You only need it when you're in trouble and that's when it can hit you the worst. Which may be a good mechanic, but it makes it a real crapshoot on if a vault will survive past the first 30-40 inhabitants.

I think there is something to be said about the children mechanic though and building slowly. It seems like kids take up resources without doing any work. So making 3-4 of them is kind of a bad idea. I think I've found my sweet spot with 2 kids at a time. They don't force me to rush or build new resource rooms to support them at that amount.