I just started the game and loved it, I was even thinking about spending real $$ on lunchboxes. My little shelter of about 70+, very happy (94%) dwellers was suddenly attacked by deathclaws. First attack and I was ready for it. I had, max stimpacks, nealy 100% resources, my strongest, most experienced, heavily equipped guards in the maxed out, fortified vault door room. They surviived but didn't stop them. Then they moved into the next room and that's were things got super frustating. My only high damage weapon was with the guard in the vualt door room, and like with raider attacks, I would swap weapons to keep the damage up. However, the combination of my clumsy fingers and smaller iPhone6 screen was no match. I couldn't keep up and the deathclaws were too fast making it to the next room before I could swap the weapon. If I played zoomed out on a room and tried to click a dweller I would get the room ui or the wrong character. If I tried zooming in and then zooming out and then zooming in to place the weapon on the correct dweller, the deathclaws would already be in the next room. I had similar problems swapping dwellers from adjacent rooms, by the time I selected the dweller and dragged him across, by the time he got there the deatchclaws would already be gone.

Even though I was frustrated, I was up for the challenge. It's been too long before I played a game with so much risk, and I was ready to rebuild. So, the deathclaws went from room to room literally killing all dwellers in those rooms if they passed through a second time. Those deathclaws made it into the deepest bowels of my shelter before they finally died to the fists of the lower dwelling dwellers.

I ended up using all 25 stimpacks and all 3000 caps healing and reviving, but then I noticed that some corpses were gone and with them some of my deadlier weapons and outfits. I never knew there was a timer on the corpses. And then it got real. My food, which was maxed, at the start was now in the read. Those dwellers who were either just revived or low health started to die because I had no remaining stimpacks. Revived dwellers didn't go back to their correct rooms and I couldn't remember accurately who was where. They were dropping like flies litterally. Again I had troubles selecting the write dweller and dragging him to the right room. Lower rooms were flashing that they needed resources gathered, or dwellers leveled up. it was a race across the clock and I failed as overseer. My happiness was at rock bottom, I had no food and water was next. I had only a handful of my once 70+ dwellers left and all this becasue of 3 little deathclaws.

Bottom line, this was cool. My 3 day creation had failed and there was no way really to rebuild it. They were dying so fast without food and I tired to fush my cafeterias but 2 failed the rush and I didn't get enough from the others to make a difference. It was over. So what did I do? I deleted the game from my device. Why? I did enjoy the game a lot, and I really enjoyed the risk, but I really don't want to invest the time again just to have it all lost again due to another random attack. I don't even know if I could have rebuilt, because they were still dying without food I couldn't produce and if that was true, there is really no point in keeping this game because it does take time to build up,and then to loose everything so suddenly and randomly just doesn't entice me so much. I like the risk, It would be better if the risk wasn't as severe.

This is a common frustration with many threads. Build more medbays to increase your Stimpak cap - I've got 65 dwellers with 85 pak cap. Other than that we can only hope for an update.

get a stimpack storage of 100+

just follow the deathclaws and heal the crap out of the dwellers that are fighting them

I was recently attacked by deathclaws 2 times in a row, and I didn't have at all any problems fending them off. I got at least 6 unis/rare weps and 5 unis/rare armor plus my dwellers don't even have their highest SPECIAL Stats yet. I don't know what your guys problems are but obviously you don't scavenge enough or complete objective for lunch boxes because that is how I'm getting all those nice items.

Really a lot of it has to do with chance. I guess I'm addictied, so I put the game back on my device. Previously I had only completed 3 days, all with an A- for the eval. During that time, I had 4 objectives that offered lunchboxes, my highest weapon only did 9 damage, and I had sent out at least 1 wanderer a day. So, after startng a new vault today, after about 1 hour of gameplay I had 5 objectives that offered lunchboxes and my explorer found a weapon with 11 damage. That's just after the 1st hour and I already had more lunchboxes to open and a better weapon. From the previous vault I received 2 rare dweller cards and some nifty outfits. With this new one, I've received no dwellers, 1 outfit but lots of food, water, and cap cards which has been more helpful starting out. Gotta love the RNG.

In response to the previous posts:

My explorer would be out all day from when I got up, and then I recalled him when I went to bed. I'd collect his loot and them send him out. He would always bring back lots of weapons in the 2 - 3 range.

I had a medbay with 4 intelligent dwellers. I was churning out stimpacks faster than I could spend them. Often I would make 6 more but I was already at my max of 25. Thought it was EZ mode so I had never once thought about making more medbays, now I know. Still though seems like there needs to be more of warning letting the new players know that they'll be needing more.

I think that it's just a matter of balance. If I had been attacked by 1 DC or even 2, I would have fared much better. Maybe for your 1st attack that's what it should be letting the player feel the pain, allowing them to recover and prepare for additional attacks. If they are wanting us to have vaults that wipe and can't be recovered then I won't be spending real $ on it unless I can restore my purchases to other vaults.

Something else I've learned. With this new vault I've changed my layout. I plan on going rooms > elevator > 3 x rooms > elevator rooms. Before I had a zig - zag approach; I only had one elevator from each floor. So with this new save I had a raider attack and the raiders went though my vault room > then to my living quarters > then to the storage room. They went out of the storage room, down the elevator and then to my 3 x power station. I had 6 dwellers there well armed and those raiders died quickly. With my old vault's zig-zag layout the attackers would ofter go through a room twice when going back to an elevator to go down a level. If the attack patterns are this predictable, it might be better to have the parallel room layout rather than the zig-zag so DC's don't go through rooms twice.

There still needs to be a more efficient way of transferring your best equipped defenders/weapons though to rooms under attack. All too often the wrong thing would be selected because of clumsy fingers or software misinterpeting what you wanted.

Hey Mizpah!

I understand your situation. More or less the same happened to my first Vault. 84 dwellers, great economy, but just one good weapon and some medicore, to build a defense of.

I was able to defend the first DC attacks, but it started to get worse with the third and the fourth. After the fourth, my vault was at razors edge. Another DC attack (which seemed to happen randomly at that time) would have been the end. So i brought the vault back to a more or less save level (all ressources green), saved and turned off.

Then i turned to this forum and started reading, checking for mistakes i could have made.

My faults were:

1.) I expanded to quickly. With a hand for economy, i bred dwellers to get new rooms. I send out explorers with low luck and endurance, and i put much effort in a well functioning radio station (with my best charisma chars, gear and Three Dog on top of it). The result was a vault with many rooms to defend, a radio station attracting DCs at a high rate, and a large number of low level vault dwellers with crappy weapons.

2.) I underestimated the importance of the first four Lunchboxes. From mine, i received one weapon (an upgraded minigun), one character and tons of caps. I was happy with the caps, since they allowed me to expand quicker. This was wrong.

I then decided to start another, new vault. My first rule was: start all over again, if you don′t get 4 weapons or chars of blue or better value out of the first four boxes. I had to start all over 6 times, before it was worth staying. The second change i did: i kept all rooms small and without upgrades as long as possible. Small rooms are easier to rush, no upgrades mean less difficulty to deal with incidents (the more upgrades a room has, the more difficult the incidents become). In addition, i exchanged the level 1 barracks against a power generator room. This way i always have dwellers with strenght and weapons in the first room behind the gate, instead of empty barracks, which makes defense a lot better.

My barracks are no at level 3.

This second vault now grows much slowlier, i bred only if i urgendtly need a low ammount of new dwellers, or if a tast requires it. the same goes for room upgrades.

This way, it takes even longer to grow my vault (29 dwellers after three days), but my dwellers level more consistantly, and my single explorer delivers enough gear to equip the complete population.

In addition, i reduced the use of the radio station to a minimum. One room, no upgrades, one dweller. Enough to keep the population happy, but not effective enough to attract attackers.

Since this new vault grows slowly, i started a third one, with the same concept. It received even better loot than the second one.

With this new knowledge, i returnde to my first vault. I turned of the radio station, stopped breeding and started to focus on leveling my dwellers and supplying more and better explorers.

The number of DC attacks has decreased to a very low count, which can be taken on without great difficulties by my gurads, and the population and economy is growing in strenght. The vault is working again.

Oh, one sidenote: i had that food/water problem aswell. If possible, you should make sure the following: at least enough power to support food and water production. Then, ensure food supply. Third, ensure water supply. Without food, dwellers die, without water, they just get irradiated. Once water supply is back to optimum, irradiation will decrease automaticaly at a slow rate. Just make sure, you get your water supply back to maximum, once food and energy are halfway secured.

I hope you don't mind Vaderan but I am going to copy your logic. I have built lots of vaults and all have failed. My latest was doing fine until my 34 dwellers were whittled down to 8.....by MOLERATS....yes bloody molerats!! At least you others were decimated by something half decent. I just couldn't kill them, I had shotguns enhanced pistols one combat shotgun and these things would not die!

I'm a glutton for punishment and I'll try again. I'm using your method then maybe it'll be SOFTLY SLOWLY CATCHEE MOLERAT and kill the ******* thing!!

Seriously though, thanx to all of you for giving out your methods. It helps people like me get more out of the game

Last couple days, on my game (I'm at home with 3 badly bruised ribs), I got about 14 lunchboxes, playing continually. Don't even get me started. The most interesting stuff coming out was a "rare" bb gun or 500 caps or some crappy suit that only looks nice. One time I got lucky with a focused laser rifle and Amata (AMATA!!) but that's it really. Not sure why everybody, including my wife, seems to get that many rare/legendary drops from the boxes.....

That's a good strategy and worth using. However, unless gamesas has some sort of way of transferring purchases, I won't be spending money for lunchboxes. I've been tempted to buy a Mr. Handy or other lunchboxes, but if my vault fails again that's money I'm not getting back. If they implemented my purchases going to all new vaults I create, I would not hesitate to spend some real $ on this game.

Not sure if this is an advisable strategy or not but its something im currently testing. Im sitting at about 55ish population and training my explorers for a few days. So far the best thing my best explorer has found was a rusty combat shotgun (I think the damage is 13). Otherwise the best was an enhanced sawed off shotgun (which is like 6-8), Overall not that great. But I'm letting her keep it because it helps her stay out much longer and get exp faster. I'm taking a few days off from "playing" I set timers when to log in to confirm the explorer teams skill upgrades, max my resources quickly (since they still tic down for a few mins after you exit) then close the game. I'm logged in for about 2 mins tops and most times I dont get any incidents. I'm extrmely terrified of deathclaws and I want my vault to survive, so once my explorers have max luck (which will be in 18ish hours) I'm going to get the rest of their specials to 5 then start sending them out again and hope they pick up some decent weapons. Until everyone in my vault is armed and my first 3 defense rooms have weapons with 6+ dmg. After that I'll have tons of caps (I'm above 30k atm and it keeps going up because while im gathering max resources ppl keep lvling) then ill continut to expand and hopefully be ready for deathclaws.


Now for some stuff i do know. The vault door room is useless pretend it doesnt exist,don't keep people in there. They dont gain exp and they will just keep losing happyiess becaues their health goes down when you get attacked. You want your first defense room to be able to hold 6 dwelers. You also want them to gain exp so it should be a production room. storage rooms, trainig rooms and living areas are a bad idea. The best is nuka cola bottler since that uses endurance as its main stat and the people placed in there will be tougher to kill, but thats not possible for a lot of ppl since it requires 100 population to unlock. So for now mine is the power room. Give all your best weapons to the dwllers in there. Raiders want to clear a floor at a time and if possible they will do it from left to right. I'm going to assume deathclaws are the same but only more murdery. You cant kill deathclaws in one room unless everyone has extremely OP weapons you probably need at least 3 rooms of 6 people with decent weapons(6+ dmg) to take them down. So the best things I can think of to do is try to build your first few floors to funnel enemies through the rooms you want kinda like the shape of a Z.


Annother idea I had reguarding stim and rad away storage is a block of isolated empty rooms just to increase capacity so build 2+ elevators down below your lowest segment away from your main vault and just build 2 rows of lvl1 3x bays and labs, each having a capacity of 35 and with your level 3 main production rooms you should have a capacity of 105 each. Just leave them empty. If an incident starts there just ignore it. Since the rooms are empty they incidents will spread to eachother and just go away since their are no rooms dirrectly connected to the main part of your vault

https://www.dropbox.com/s/x5xslgca5c7m531/Vault2.sav?dl=0


Mizpah,


Here is a link to my Vault2.sav if you want it...

My first vault I almost wiped from pregnancy that caused over population which caused resource drought which caused rad poisoning and health reductions. So I sent all non-essentials out of the vault, had them wait outside until my skeleton crew could create enough stimpacks and radaway to cleanse the vault 1 at a time. I hit the 30 population way too fast but I unlocked most of the training rooms. I'm sitting at 28 people right now (lost my two best to the game eating them cause I didn't have the caps in time) and spending the time to up as many of their special stats as possible - I don't know if you can max them all but I'm going to try. I love how I have a storage level but stimpacks and radaway, that can survive for hundreds of years, can't fit in any of those boxes in those rooms...

My most heavily armed vault is the one above, I have a guy with great stats at the door with a fatman and the next room is a bunch of heavily armed female sandwich machines, the very next room bandits hit is a power room full of strength level 8 people with rifles, they usually never make it past my sandwich girls. I'm affraid that once deathclaws get up in my grill they're gonna eat up all my sandwiches and wipe my vault so I'm trying not to add any more dwellers until I get their stats and levels up higher. I know I'm taking it really slow but aside from the fatman and two dwellers, my luck with the damn lunch boxes is just stuff I don't need.

Thankfully I apparently havent reached the population where Deathclaw squads appear. I think they're OP just by reading about them and then I realized that nowhere in the wasteland do you find groups of deathclaws with the exception of the deathclaw sanctuary but they're usually never in proximity of each other. So I think that having 3 of them assault your vault is way too many for casual gamers who don't necessarily strategize and can't be expected to prepare for this as well as the invincible molerats and overpowered radroaches.

Hope they fix the invisible and invincible creatures and ease up on the health degeneration a bit as well as balance some other aspects.

Didn't see anyone mention( or I miss it ) the problem where invasion happening, the dwellers HP bar stack together, make it hard to figure who is dying.

Found the best strategy is to have guns in every room instead of in one or two as enemies don't care if there's people in the room when they want to move on to the next

Or, in the first room, have them equipped, if you don't have enough weapons. Then, when they move on, enequip all weapons and put them on the guys in the next room... tedious indeed but it's effective.