I'm playing Fallout currently and I have finished the Waterchip quest. However, now that the easy quests are taken care of, I find myself completely stuck, I can't get past any of the more challenging enemies.

I picked Albert as my character who specialised in social skills, so I need the extra firepower of my companions. I have Ian, Tycho and Dogmeat and rather than feeling like I'm running my own gang through the wastelands, I feel more like I'm babysitting a group of suicidal retards.

They will waste ammo like it's nothing, pick the strongest weapons even if they have no skill using them, run into a room full of enemies, run point-blank into the range of the guy with the shotgun just so they can get to the one unarmed guy, and they have absolutely no sense of tactics. I would love to set up some sort of ambush where we lure enemies out of their hiding, or have one guy snipe through the windows, but no, they just rush into the hornets' nest like it's nothing.

Is there something I'm missing? This game has fans, so how did they play through it? I'm just really frustrated because according to various guides my level should be good enough to take on the enemies, but my companions always die in the process.

take away anything they suck at using and or leave them with melee weapons

or just shoot them in the head and leave them in a ditch somewhere XD

mostly the only companion i usually have is the dog (until he suicides on mines)

Companions can be a great help in the beginning but they don't improve during the game, making them useless in later stages of the game. You don't have to drag them along, you won't miss any quests or other stuff if you decide to play solo.

Inventory management is the only thing you can do to affect what your companions do in combat, they don't use weapons they don't have or guns they don't have ammo for.

Now Dogmeat is practically begging me to kill him. He has positioned himself in front of the door and I can't speak to him to tell him to go out of the way. I'm literally stuck now unless I put a bullet in his skull. Arcanum had the same problem. Why can't I just control my companions directly?

EDIT: I found a way out! I had to attack Dogmeat to make him aggressive, then take a few steps away from him so he steps away from the door, then run to the door, open it, and run to the exit of the map while getting mauled to death by your own dog. Once I switched maps all was forgiven and forgotten because Dogmeat was friendly again and I was able to talk to him. The companion AI in this game truly is idiotic. If I had not had enough health to survive Dogmeat's attacks this would have been impossible because his bites pack quite a lot of punch.

Fallout 1 & 2 - I always play solo. Rarely with Dogmeat in F1, but without any hope to keep him alive for a long time. While F2 gives you slightly better control of your party, it's still c...p. One man army is the way to play. :P

Arcanum - I use my party as packmules only. At the beginning of every fight I order them to "Back off" by pressing F5. I tend to play high-DEX, fast characters, so I'm always first to show at the field of battle. Sneaking helps a lot here, too.

This said, I always prefer RPGs where I can play a single character or a party behaving as a single unit, like in M&M series.
AI in games is bad and it's not getting any better, because game developers prefer to release multiplayer games with poor AI, instead of improving coding and algorithms, which is much harder and requires knowledge and real intelligence. :]

Fallout 1:

If you give good armor and weapons to the NPCs, you don't have to worry too much about them. Make sure you're near them, to heal them and avoid them dying. Just have common sense, don't stay right in front of a NPC with SMG.

Don't expect them to survive the late game with shitty equipment, you gonna need expensive equipment.
Power Armors. Ammo, healing items and good weapons, of course (by killing enemies quicker, your companions will take less damage).
I made my group wear PA, and we survived the encounter against the master.

Don't forget to buy/steal tons of stimpacks. You can get a lot of them from The Hub guards.
You can get multiple Power Armors in the Brotherhood of Steel.
Always try critical hits, you want enemies dead ASAP, for your survival, and of your NPCs. AI is far from perfect, they will do stupid things.
Eyes are an excellent place (your combat skill needs to be high, or you'll have bad chances of hitting them).

Fallout 2:

You have much more control about how your companions act in combat.
I had almost no problems here, the most annoying (to me) one is Marcus, who seems to like killing me and the other friendly NPCs in my group.

My previous advices are also valid here, get them good equipment, keep an eye at their HP, heal, etc.
Talking about healing, in Fo2 you can change when a NPC should use healing items.
But like I said before, AI is stupid, sometimes you gonna have to heal them yourself if you don't want them dead.

There's an option to control companions in combat mode, in Sfall configuration file (ddraw.ini). Last time I used it wasn't 100% stable.
There's also an AWESOME small mod called Party Orders add-on, made by NMA user pelicano.

I forgot mentioning you need a mod for that. Big deal!

Let me put it this way (the following is my humble opinion):

The NPCs from Fallout 1 are not worth it, unless you install NPC armor mod.
Because they're too weak, their standard armor is trash. So they die very easily in the late game.
They're mere mules in the vanilla Fallout. They're not useful like in FO2 (you can make a NPC disable force fields for you, repair things, etc).

I like them, though.
Especially Dogmeat.
It's fun, and badass to have a friendly dog following you, a la Mad Max.

I use them as cannon fodder.

Well, in F1 diplomatic characters play solo.
The party CAN be a big help IF you give them the right equipment: ranged, oneshot weapons. They're immensely useful at the Deathclaw Quest. They'll still be support-only, while the main character gives grand firepower (preferably rocket launchers).
Dogmeat is awesome, can be kept alive until the endgame, where it WILL DIE, no matter what in the Mutant Plant.

In F2 you simply should have pre-knowledge on the characters.
Dogmeat is again good (the other dogs are not). Vic sooner or later turns into Apathetic Vic, meaning he no longer fights. Any of the bots (including Skynet) can not go faster than walking speed which is annoying. Marcus either shreds everyone to pieces, or will run out of ammo and at that points will abandon armed fighting :( Cassidy is awesome ranged fighter, and Sulik has plenty of HP to make his SMGs viable (improving his gear helps of course). Goris slows down the game with his change of clothing, and Myron is an antitalent. Don't even mention husband/wife or Pariah. Lennyis mediocre and a muty, but considering all your options...

I'm surprised people play Fallout without the FIXT mod as it removes a million glitches. Among the myriad of ace little things it gives you are the ability to ask a companion to switch armour, but companions are still prone to die regularly even with armour because by the time you are going up against the muties with miniguns and rocket launchers Ian and dogmeat are 1-shot-deaths half of the time. I tend to ask Dogmeat to wait far from battle and then keep an eye on Ian with stimpacks and chicken soup.

And to the guy who said Arcanum was just as bad, you can order companions in Arcanum by right clicking on their portrait and giving them orders. You need to do this when Muttmeat tries to attack something through a wall or he will stand their growling at the wall unless you give him directions towards a door.

Fallout 1 is VERY hard to play with a "Negoiator/Diplomat" as your main character. THe NPC' are too wonky to be depended upon in combat.,and too many of the enemies cannot be negotiated with directly.I love Fallout 1 but that really need a fighter or a thief character to play the game without a lot of frustration is one of the game's weaknesses.

For anybody playing in 2023 or later, I HIGHLY recommend playing Fallout 1 via the Fallout Et Tu mod (also known as Fallout 1 in 2 or Fo1in2)

Which you can find on github

It does require that you own both FO1 and FO2 and take a little time to run the mod setup. But man is it nice. Plus you can use the Fo2tweaks mod (also on github here) which is compatible if you put it in the FO2INSTALL\Fallout1in2\mods folder and adds a few more configurable options. IMHO it is well worth the cost of picking of FO2 if you don't already have it (both of the mods are free but you could always donate to them too if you end up liking them as much as I do and have the cash to spare). Plus it's always nice to show GOG some love by buying here.

I had previously tried using Fallout Fixt (which fixes a lot of FO1 bugs) but prefer Fo1in2 greatly if for no other reason than that it adds some really nice features:

1. You benefit from FO2 engine and don't really run into "trapped in the corner" type situations nearly as much (e.g. AI *seems* to be better). I had those happen to me several times while playing FO1 with Fixt installed... I haven't had it happen as often in Fo1in2 but some areas like 2nd floor in Vault 13 it's not too hard to run into that situation. But even when it happens, FO2 has an option to push followers out of the way (by putting your cursor over them then HOLDING left-click to bring up a menu - and then carefully moving down and clicking on the icon that looks like an arrow and a hand). Not a huge fan of the menus in FO1/FO2 (especially the inventory ones like with bags/backpacks) but I'm still glad the option exists somewhere.

2. FO2Tweaks will let you configure hotkeys for world and local maps (W and Y by default, respectively). You can set them to 0 in the config file to disable this feature if you think this is too "cheaty" for your tastes but if ever you did run into the trapped by an idiot (or an Ian-diot) in the doorway situation, I imagine having those keys available would be pretty darn handy.

3. Not really related to the topic in this thread... but Shift key can be configured to highlight all items (and for you purists out there - it IS configurable so you don't have to use it). This is technically done by sfall (aka ddraw) - which GOG install includes but Fo1in2 uses a newer version of it. But the FO2tweaks mod gives you a little more in terms of options. You're supposed to be able to do the same thing with Fixt using FO1 but I was never able to get that to work.

One other thing to mention, is that when I first installed FO2, I ran into problems with really bad mouse lag and audio/video stuttering despite my pc being able to handle games like Witcher 2 with no issues (this was prior to me adding any FO2 mods btw). To fix that, I had to add SingleCore=0 under the "[Misc]" section of ddraw.ini (credit to Highroc over on reddit for pointing this out). There are also 2 ddraw.ini files (1 is in the main folder of your FO2 install, and then there's another in the FO2INSTALL\Fallout1in2 folder). I am playing on Linux (Fedora) using wine, but it looked like the "mouse lag" bug might apply to windows/mac users as well. I also copied the new ddraw.dll included in FO2INSTALL\Fallout1in2 folder up to the main install folder and overwrote the one from gog (so that when I eventually get around to FO2, it will have the newer functionalities and bugfixes)