I haven't used shotguns in the game since the beginning missions, because I can't really get close enough to robots (even with sneaking) to a shotgun range, when they start shooting at my party from sniper rifle ranges, doing something like 80 (or more) points of damage per shot. This is also why melee or unarmed combat seems quite useless in this game (in Fallout 1-2, it was still somewhat useful with certain characters).

That's why two of my characters have also rocket launchers, with explosive rockets. Sometimes it is indeed easiest to shoot at enemies (which you can't fight head to head) which are standing around the corner, and they take splash damage from the explosive rockets. I tried also a grenade launcher, but it makes much less damage than explosive rockets.

Sometimes that is not an option though, you still have to fight enemies head to head (from a longer range hopefully), or try to sneak up on them from behind.

My main weapons at this point are energy weapons (plasma rifles and one pulse rifle) as they do much damage to robots (and other enemies too), and there are craploads of ammo for them fortunately in the robot missions. For cases where I need the extra range, I may use 14mm sniper rifles or Gauss rifles, but they do much less damage to e.g. robots. And then as said two of my team mates have rocket launchers as well. At least in the later missions you keep getting enough rockets from the missions themselves, e.g. from hover bots and turrets.

As said, I haven't found any other way to fight them at least in the modded version. If they ever see any of my team mates, they can make craploads of damage even from quite high ranges with one burst. Usually if that happens, they kill one or more of my team mates, many times the whole team (if they happen to be grouped together when detected). Even my two most powerful teammates with Advanced Power Armor. At least in the modded version, Behemoth seems to be using 14mm ammo with bursts, so the closer you get to it, the deadlier it is.

Yeah I am starting to think maybe I should sometime try to play the vanilla game, to see if it is easier to play. Too bad though that the mod seems to fix quite many issues in the game, like some of the perks which don't work, and for those perks or traits it couldn't fix, it has made a note in their descriptions like "This perk is useless or don't work at all, do not select this" or "This perk only works for your main character, not your team mates". I really like that I can avoid the perks and traits that just don't work right in the game.

Too bad the mod seems to have also changed many things in the game, besides just fixing bugs. Not sure what all changes there are, but it seems apparent that at least many weapons and ammo have been changed/replaced for some reason, and also all the recruits have been overhauled.

I would have preferred a mod which fixes bugs, without changing rest of the game much. It may be the mod also mentioned it makes the game "more fun and more challenging", so it might be the game is indeed harder with the mod.

Later in the game, shotties take a bit of a back seat but they are still very useful. I'm not sure I'm understanding your post right but it's not a good idea to face robots head on with a shottie, shotties are for ambushing. I observed patrol routes and looked for a place to set up un ambush. Sometimes springing the ambush involves standing up from behind a wall, or waiting behind an obstacle until they pass. Whenever is sprung the ambush, the enemies always had their back turned. There were places I could hide my shotgunner and lure the robot into him by taking a few harrassing sniper shots and running away.

You are right about melee and unarmed being totally unreliable later in the game. Lower damage, exposing yourself in the open and running the risk of running out of AP while the robot prepares to fire is a sure way of getting a squad member killed. But shotties with EMP shells are highly effective if you are patient and are good at spotting good places to ambush from. They take 2 shots at most (providing you don't miss) and smaller robots have no way of retaliating in time. Problem is EMP shells aint cheap but i never leave home without em.

That's true, I also found the grenade launcher much less reliable (they missed a lot) than the thrown grenades and rocket launcher. I usually just used up the ammo and never bothered with it again.

Really? the gauss rifle is still a very effective weapon late game. IIRC, 3 shots to take out a robot. It effectively outclasses every small gun except for shotties with EMP shells (gauss for range, shottie for power). Small guns are viable from the start right to the very end.

In my 2 iron man games, I had my main character as a jack of all trades / support character and left specialising for my squad members. My reasoning was in an iron man game, you don't know who you are going to lose and considering this game focuses on combat, it's better to have your squad members focus on combat skills as auxillary skills don't come into play as much. Tag skills were small guns, doctor and lockpick. He had a bit of a rough start but by the first level up, he was effective all the way until the end. Not sure if the mod nerfed the gauss rifle but in the vanilla game, it's a nice compliment and viable alternative to plasma weapons.

You did say you were playing on the hardest difficulty. Now that i think about it, i might have been playing on normal difficulty in iron man mode. I'm pretty sure you could adjust the difficulty setting in the options menu. I'll have to fire this game up again and check but I still have Jagged Alliance 2 on my backlog that I want to play through first.

This is a pretty dumb one but... Cookie Clicker. I had just made it through all the tiers, maybe even researched everything, which had taken me a week or two I guess? I was ready to "ascend" which meant reaching some sort of meta game that I was really curious about. Just as I was about to do just that the developer pushed an update that just killed my saved game. To make it funnier, it was the first major update in ages and I had just started playing the game again after several years. So... yeah.

I also lost my cookie clicker save recently, after ascending for the first time. But it wasn't a horror story for me really, more a story of redemption :P

I may try that, but I have hard time understanding how that works. Not all robots patrol (but just stand in one place, waiting to see me), and even for patrolling robots, they usually detect me (and shoot) as soon as I am anywhere near them, even sneaking.

I'd be very surprised if two EMP shells are enough to kill e.g. humanoid bots, as it usually takes at least a couple of explosive rockets to kill them. Robots seem susceptilbe to energy weapons, but they also need many shots from them to die. One plasma or pulse rifle shot usually seems to make something like 20-30 points of damage to them (sometimes more, sometimes less), and I'd figure e.g. humanoid bots probably have something like 150-200 hit points, probably. MX14 sniper rifle usually deals only like 5-10 damage to robots, maybe 25 at best with a good critical shot.

Then it must be the mod that has changed that. Against robots, the gauss rifle seems only a little more effective than e.g. the 14mm sniper rifle (called "MX14" at least in the modded game), doing something like 10-15 damage per shot to robots. Plus, the Gauss rifle ammo is not that common either so it can't be used as the main weapon against robots (or anyone for that matter).

Against non-armored enemies (like most mutants and those beastie things) Gauss rifle seems to be very effective. And its main advantage seems to be that it has the very longest range than any other weapon, even a bit longer than that of the MX14 sniper rilfe.

I recall in Fallout 1-2 Gauss rifle was great against also armored enemies, but I think I read in some FAQ that in Tactics it was nerfed, ie. the Gauss rifle doesn't have the same extra penetration power anymore as it did in those earlier games. Hence, I thought, it doesn't work so well against armored enemies and robots in Tactics. Not sure if this is only in the mod then?

In combat, I've had to make everyone good at least with small weapons (the sniper rifle mainly) and energy weapons, and also 2-3 are good with big weapons, like rocket launchers. I just wouldn't be able to survive without everyone being able to deal good damage from a good distance. I think they all now have both small guns and energy weapons at about 120-140%, and three have big guns also at about 120%.

Oh and all of them have high sneak ability too (well over 100% I think), but unfortunately using power armors makes sneaking hard.

The "specialized" things are more about that only one or two need to be good at first aid/medic, or traps, picking locks or piloting a vehicle. (I usually just chose not to use vehicles, instead going around killing all enemies on foot).

Yeah it has four difficulty levels, and I am playing at the hardest (Insane). I chose it because I played also Fallout 1-2 with the hardest combat difficulty, and didn't have that much problems overall. And I guess I was expecting it is only about getting good skills and perks, better weapons and (advanced) power armors, and you can survive against pretty much anyone.

That worked in Fallout 1-2, but not in Tactics, it seems. I have all the best gear and shit... and yet many robots and some super mutants can still easily kill me with one or few shots. In e.g. Fallout 2, getting power armors and better weapons meant you could finally beat Enclave patrols head-on, and survive.

This is why I hate that games have selectable difficulty levels. They tend to make the harder levels almost impossible, and if you point it out that they've made it stupid hard, they'd just say "select an easier difficulty level then". Yeah, i guess I could enable cheats as well while I am at it.

I like games like Dungeon Keeper or Magic Carpet that don't let you choose difficulty, and hate games like Forsaken where I am 100% sure the no one in the world, even the original developers, are able to finish the game with that.

It's alright, I'd have to see the situation to give you a proper example. I haven't played the game for years now so I'm just going by memory. However, considering the toughness of the enemies you're facing, I don't think I'd try this. However, I still recommend you give EMP shells a try.

It's probably the difficulty setting as I rarely ever needed 2 EMP shells to kill off a humanoid robot. I remember one time I left my shottie on burst mode and getting pissed off with how many EMP shells I wasted doing that. I also remember being shocked at how powerful they were. I can't remember specific numbers though. I also don't remember plasma weapons being that weak either. It's gotta be the difficulty setting,


Yeah, I don't ever remember the gauss rifle being that weak. If it was and considering the rarity (and expense) of the ammo, I wouldn't have bothered with it. The gauss rifle is an end game small gun and a very good one at that. Once again, it's either the mod or the difficulty setting making it weak.

Sneak, like melee and unarmed become useless late game. Even early game I didn't make much use of it. I always felt crouching or laying prone had similar effects but I might be wrong on that. However, I rarely made use of his.

More often than not in many games, especially those where killing enemies award XP, I don't like sneaking or stealth PERIOD. If the target has company, the sneaker is gonna get ganged up on when he comes out of hiding. If the target is alone, why bother risking sneaking in the first place? Using all your squad members to focus fire on them is far more efficient (and safer). I I like playing this game on iron man so i prefer to minimize risk, especially when RNG is involved. More often that not, the risks of sneaking are far too high and the rewards, far too low.

Lock picking and doctor are definitely the best picks of those. Doctor is critical in iron man mode. It's a shame traps isn't that good. I usually got around mines by burst firing at them. There was always the risk of having mines exploding while attempting to disarm them. However, there was one mission (Quincy?) were disabling the alarms could be very handy. Piloting was just meh.

I also find it pretty lazy when devs ask "how can we increase the difficulty?" and they just go "tougher enemies, fewer ammo and less player health. It's good enough and it's what everyone else does. This is why I liked Thief's difficulty settings, sure you got less health but you had more (and restrictive) objectives.

I know this is off-topic, but at least I got someone to reply to my Fallout Tactics woes...

I've found sneak skill very useful in many situations, but not all. Especially if you want to avoid fighting altogether, but it also helps to get close to those deadly enemies and then try to take them down with a concentrated shot from all party members.

Late game the main problem is that you want to wear (advanced) power armor, for the extra protection and because it greatly increases your strength (for carrying stuff etc.). The downside is that that it greatly lowers your sneak ability too, I don't remember the exact numbers but something like if I have 100% sneak without power armor, then it becomes 60% with that armor.

In a way that is logical (you can't move as silently with heavy armor), but it also makes the game a bit unfun. It could be a tactcal thing that you have to make a decision whether you run around detected with heavy armor or silently with light armor... but you really need the extra strength from the power armor for carrying heavy weapons, ammo and stuff, so you don't have the option to just take off the armor whenever you want sneak, as then you become encumbered or even immobile because you are carrying so much stuff.

Also, some of the robots (at least the humanoid bots and security bots) seem to have very good detection skills, so if you get closer to them, they most probably will detect you anyway. Sometimes I've been able to sneak behind them and then shoot them at the back from close range, but sometimes it is just impossible because they just detect you right away when you are in their sight range. In those cases I then try to snipe them from afar, shooting at them dozens of times with the MX14 sniper rifle (because sniper rifles cause only little damage to them, but as long as they cause at least some...).

The Behemoths though seem to have pretty poor detection, I can usually sneak very near to them with the whole party (especially from behind), as long as there are no other robots around. If that wasn't the case, frankly I don't think there would be any way for me to fight them at all, I could only avoid and run away from them no matter what.

You mentioned Thief having a good difficulty settings, and I tend to agree. It was a clever way to make the missions more challenging. Instead of just making you weaker and enemies stronger, you have more objectives or have to find more loot, and can't kill people as freely (or at all).

Anyway I think I will manage with Tactics to the end, it is not impossible. Just somewhat tedious and frustrating because I really have to depend on savescumming in order to survive, due to constant one-hit or one-round kills by enemies.

Your last few replies have gotten me to reinstall FO:T again :D. I'm going to be looking at each map and see where sneak comes in handy. I haven't gotten past the first mission yet. I've forgotten how annoying playing on "tough guy" mode (this is actually iron man mode option on FO:T) on the first mission can be. Had my perfect ambush set up, MP5 on burst mode ready, dog rushes in, all 3 bursts miss, Farsight misses and end up getting my arse kicked. Same thing happened again right at the end of the mission, I end up right in the face of a shotgunner and my 2 bursts from the MP5 miss. My teammates miss and i get one shotted. My starting small guns skill is at 45%. *sigh*

But so far, i noticed sneak can be useful (though still risky) for monitoring enemy movements.

Not sure if the mod changes this but in the vanilla game, wearing power armour reduces all technical and thieving skills by 10%, except for sneak which takes a 75% penalty. However, as you've already noticed, robots are hyper alert so sneak is useless anyways. BTW, the hyper alert robots have been this way since FO:T was first released so it's unlikely the mod changed anything there.

Which isn't something you want to do too often considering behemoths have a pretty hefty XP value. Not to mention leaving enemies alive can make backtracking a pain.


Or maybe make a sacrifce to the RNG gods? ;) However, looks like i won't be bothering with impossible difficulty anytime soon :)

We could have continued this discussion in chat, either was fine by me :D

Accidentally saved over a legit save with a save game where I was falling off a cliff. Had to redo 4 hours of game. Sadface.

There was a time when I wouldn't back-up save files. Then I lost my progress in Spellforce 2 because I had to reinstall Windows. I back-up my saves ever since. As for Spellforce 2, I started the campaign again after two and a half year, finishing it sucesfully.

Once I tried to play Medieval 2: Total War at the hardest difficulty as Russia. There was a hard battle against the Mongols, which I won, but before I could get to the campaign screen and save, a blackout occured, putting the whole street into darkness. I tried to win the battle again a few times after that, but I wasn't successful. That was the last time I tried to play a game at it's hardest difficulty, I swore to myself.

This happens with any RPG. My first FO:T character was terrible. Tag skills were unarmed, throwing and lockpick. He was okay but when it came time to start taking on super mutants, unarmed was no longer viable. I ended up tagging energy weapons later in the game.

Charisma affects rank in the BOS and perks. Higher charisma means higher rank and that means better recruits from the recruit pool and better equipment at the quartermaster. You definitely don't want to plunder this stat. You can only have a max of 6 squad members and CHA doesn't change that.

There's also the Leader perk with boosts AGI by 1 for squad members and gives them +10AC. That perk is available at level 4 and requires 6 CHA

Yup, just perks, skill points and starting skills. There are no dialog options in FO:T

I wouldn't leave luck too low (ie, less than 4). critical failures like having your gun explode in your hands, losing all loaded ammo, dropping your weapon etc are all bad. Luck also affects critical hit chances and (I think) combined with the outdoorsman skill, aids in finding the special encounters.

Biggest blunder: attempted a backup copy of my Forza 3 save, with 200+ hours worth of progression ... not knowing that the game does not allow you to do that, but instead resets the entire progression as punishment without warning.

F1 2013, got a corrupt save after 30+ hours of progression. I play with the basic assists off and really do my outmost to learn the track and tweak the car. So this was annoying on so many levels, it's not just about the hours lost.
Previous to this I had the same experience with Dirt 2.

Legends of Eisenwald. Not sure if this counts, but I forgot to do a backup save before a PC upgrade.
Lost 20+ hours of progress.

Most recently: got a corrupt save in Autombilista, a sim racing game. Although I was able to load a previous save I still lost 5-6 hours of progress.

I just remembered a "horror story" my cousin went through with Jedi Knight which he had borrowed from us. He handed the game back to us earlier than we had expected. The reason was that a few missions in he had lost his saved games and he did not feel like playing through the first couple of levels again. His little brother (seven or eight years old at the time, I guess) had simply deleted his entire profile. I later asked that younger brother why he had done that. He said that he didn't know what that word ("remove") meant and wanted to see what it does.

And so it happens that I decided start the game again, trying out a bit optimized main character. Not sure if I'll play the whole game all over again, I left my earlier saves intact of course since I have only a couple missions to play there.

It is just that divine favor perk that I didn't pick until at level 24 (it comes available at 14), the main reason I wanted to start again. At least the first mission is now going smoothly, due to me knowing better how to play the game etc. Playing in Insane mode again, but defnitely not the "Tough Guy" (Ironman) mode. I need to be able to revert back to savescumming if needed, already now my main character has died a few times to one shot kills in the first mission.

The character I made (not that different from the earlier one, but slightly):

Traits: Small Frame + Gifted
Tagged skills: Small Guns, Energy Weapons, Sneak

ST 5 (I will bump it up to 6 with a perk later)
PE 9
EN 7
CH 7 (I willl bump it up to 8 with a perk at level 12, in order to get the Divine Favor perk after that)
IN 6 (in order to get the Sharpshooter perk)
AG 9
LK 5

One thing I read today in a FAQ but didn't know about is that you can save perk picking later, you don't have to necessarily pick them when they come available? If that is true, I will definitely postpone picking perks in lower levels because I recall picking some not so useful perks early on simply because nothing more interesting was available, and then later hoping to be able to pick more perks as important perks became available.

I don't quite understand the recruitment system though. Doesn't it make sense to pick all your recruits early on and stick to them, because then you get to choose what kinds of perks they pick and what skills they develop when they level up on early levels? If you recruit veterans later, they always have some stupid or useless perks pre-selected, like some hand-to-hand perks, or perks that don't even work right in the game.

You get Farsight and Stitch in the first mission, and in my earlier play I stick to them through the whole game. I felt they had pretty good perks and traits and I saw no reason to replace them. Farsight became my second best sniper and energy weapon user (only second to my main character), and Stich was the medic and lockpicker, but still pretty good with weapons too (not too good perception, though).

Ok Stich's traits are maybe not that useful (Fast Metabolism and Chemical Resistant), but at least you get to pick good perks for him from the very start, and avoid the useless perks.

Maybe there is something I don't quite get about the recruimtment system then, but I try to pick all the five suitable recruits as soon as possible, and stick to them. I think last time I didn't even know how to recruit new people so I played several missions with only Farsight and Stich as my companions...