» Sun Feb 14, 2016 12:11 pm I read most of the guides floating around the internet. Most of them predate the deathclaw update. Since that update I read most of the posts all over the net and watched videos about deathclaw attacks and read numerous guides on base design to combat attacks and other vermin. I wanted to compile all of the knowledge into a condensed location for new players to ease their frustration.
Firstly Deathclaws don't attack until you go over 60 dwellers. You can safely sit at 60 dwellers forever and never have a deathclaw attack, no matter how often you open your vault door.
Vermin other than deathclaws are easy to kill as long as you don't upgrade your rooms.
Don't upgrade your various rooms to level 2 until you have one or more people armed with weapons in every room. You get armor and weapons hourly from people exploring the wasteland.
I don't recommend ever upgrading rooms to level 3 unless you want the challenge of radroach and molerat invasions requiring stim packs to survive.
You should focus initially on creating a working vault of 60 people so you can gear up for the inevitable deathclaw attacks once you cross the 60 dweller threshold.
My vault that was stable indefinitely with 60 dwellers had two of the three room wide food and water producers that were upgraded to level 2 and three power plants that were three rooms wide and also upgraded to level 2. I had non-upgraded three room dwellings to support the population and one non-upgraded three room science and med bay. I also had two room non-upgraded training rooms for each S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and one two room storage bay and later a three room storage bay.
This set up generated enough power, food, and water for the rooms and 60 dwellers and the shut down energency thresholds for each resource were somewhere between a third of the bar and the half-way point.
Most people feel safe keeping the cut-off line below the half way mark.
With your 60 dwellers you can keep your 2-4 best dwellers out in the wastes (hopefully legendaries from your initial lunch boxes) and rotate a few people into your training rooms for leveling S.P.E.C.I.A.L.S.
When your stim pack and rad away storage are full you should have your scientists train, or pick up the slack in rooms short people because they are training, OR as place holders in rooms that are empty.
I recommend keeping one person in every room to prevent disasters from spreading. They spread faster than you can get someone into the room typically, even if the rooms are adjoining, so having someone standing there to intercept the disaster is preferred....you can then send neighbors over to help out.
I would say your goal with 60 dwellers is to get everyone in the vault equipped with a weapon. The higher the damage the better and to get everyone leveled up over level 20.
From what I have read elsewhere, stats and armor play no part in battles inside the vault. The only variables for vault combat are dweller's level wich adds hit points and the weapons equipped which increase damage over time.
I rotate my best weapons and highest level dwellers to the top of the vault closest to the door and cycle the crappier ones the further down the vault I go. I arm everyone. The game makes us all sixist as I tend to give better gear to men, as they are never pregnant non-combatants.
I keep everyone armed though even pregnant females who won't fight, as the interface is far too clunky to weapon swap mid-battle and deathclaws hop rooms way too fast for that tactic to even be viable.
Once you feel you are prepared and your top two floors are full of level 20+ dwellers and all are armed with shot guns, rusty lazer pistols, and hopefully some legendary guns, you may as well get another group of women pregnant to cross the 60 dweller line.
I also redesigned my first floor specifically for deathclaw attacks. I read a good tactic is to make the top floor small rooms with just two people because healing two dwellers with the clunky interface is far easier than trying to select six different dwellers who are all running around like idiots.
So my top floor is vault door, elevator, one room power, one room food, one room water, two room storage, and lastly NO ELEVATOR at the end. This causes the deathclaws to have to doubble back through all my best dwellers a second time to get back to the elevator. Yes, I do have to stim pack them all after the first pass, but they are all my best guys (and girls) and some of them are packing legendary guns.
The Deathclaw attacks I have endured so far have gone very well. No one has died and they never make it to the third floor, they all are killed by the end of my second floor.
Once you start getting attacked it is time to build a second or third med bay and staff it with those new pregnancies, so you can store and churn out tons of stimpacks to deal with the deathclaws.
Lastly I have NO radio room as in my experience deathclaws don't have a CHANCE to attack every time you open your vault door...they DO attack every single time you open the door in three minutes or less, so you really don't need the headache of the radio room adding to this already excessive punishment.
Good luck, hopefully they will pin this as it seems many are getting wiped out by deathclaw attacks and disasters from level 3 rooms.
Oh lastly I recommend manually copying your vault saves to another folder regularly as there seems to be numerous game breaking bugs other than vermin destroying your vault....so save often. You can also use a backup save where you have several lunch boxes and keep copying it back into the game folder untill the boxes cough up some legendaries....if you want to cheat "a little lol."
