A while back (at least a few months - might be as much as a year ago), in one of the threads on the boards, someone said they were playing Fallout Tactics. They noted that they had trouble with the game because they'd built their characters all wrong and restarted so they could do it better. Subsequent posts outlined what they did better and how much of a difference it made. I think they mentioned they'd used a mod or two as well to make the game better. Anyone know who it was and can link that thread - or if the person that posted it could dredge up that thread, I'd be much obliged. Got an itch to play the game, but wanted to look at the info provided in those posts first.

Not exactly what you asked for, but I have two links you might care about while waiting to get what you asked for:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/fallout-tactics-any-tips-from-the-pros.98518/ - Unkillable Cat's post midway down page 1 is pretty much all good info

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/3gq32n/ok_some_advice_before_i_start_fallout_tactics/ - also full of good individual tidbits.

Remember that FO:T uses the old SPECIAL system where INT is grossly overpowered. Use Gifted, take the skills hit, boost your base attributes and pump up INT so you get those skill points. Unlike in FO1&2 you don't need to worry about CHA since the focus is on combat and unless you let your medic die off you've got a good talker in the group from the get-go.

Thanks, OFP, really appreciate the links. +1 :)

As I said in one of the messages you linked, CHA 8 is quite useful (I would say even mandatory) because then you will be able to get the "Divine Favor" perk at level 14, which allows you to get get further perks more often (e.g. every second level-up instead of every third for human players). Getting perks more often?!? Sign me up! I don't even recall if Fallout 1-2 had this same perk?

Beyond that though, high CHA didn't have much of use unfortunately. I think it just meant you would get a better selection of veteran recruits later on, but IMHO that is useless as at least I wanted to get new recruits as soon as possible, because then I could decide myself what perks to get and skills to develop for them in their level ups, instead of them having some completely useless perks pre-picked already. So having better veteran recruits available later in the game didn't matter as I would stay with my early picked recruits anyway,

You don't have to necessarily to have CHA 8 right at the beginning because IIRC there were two ways to bump your CHA later in the game. IIRC I got CHA 7 for my main character (later bumped to 8 so that I could get Divine Favor), and with some companion I was able to bump CHA 6 => 8.

I don't know if this is different in the vanilla FO:T and related only to the Redux mod version.

Divine Favor is nice, yeah, but with a full squad and a pre-planned build, I didn't find that it was really worthwhile to have all those perks. Of course they don't hurt, but I played it on whatever the Ironman mode was (which in vanilla FO:T, at least, doubled the XP you got for missions) and max difficulty and didn't even have to pass on a single critical perk for my builds, without DF.

I would never argue that Divine Favor isn't powerful (it's crazy) but I would say it's not necessary. You can get by without it, but you can't get by without high skills. If you're willing to drop STR & END to 4 though, you *can* get both if you take Gifted, and still have the points free to make a godmode plasma rifle sniper.

EDIT: To put it in perspective, *if* you make it to level 30 (which is a pretty high level to hit before the final missions) then you get +3 perks from DF, one of which is DF, so +2 perks, at the cost of whatever stats you would have gotten with the 4-6 points you added to CHA. If you used a perk to get +CHA, then you functionally only got 1 real perk from it. If you took those points from INT and put them into CHA to get DF, you basically hosed your endgame because overcapping skills is pretty important. If you got them from somewhere else, you may not have minded the opportunity cost.

It may depend on the playing style (and that I was playing the modded version), but at the end of the game I don't recall thinking "damn I wish I could have bumped that and that skill even further", but I did feel I would have wanted to pick a few more useful perks for my characters before the last mission.

I recall with my builds I was able to get high enough skills for all the relevant skills for all my team members, even though I had a max number of team mates (which meant I'd get less skill points per team member). E.g. the important shooting skills (small guns and energy weapons) were at about 160% or so. It became harder and harder to push them further anyway, as the game heavily penalized you if you pushed your skills well beyond 100%, like taking 2-3 skill points for advancing the skill by 1%.

I guess I also specialized somewhat, so I didn't try to make all my team members jack of all trades. I tried to make them all pretty good sharpshooters so that they could cause damage from long distances accurately, but on top of that one or two concentrated on heavy weapons as their secondary weapons while the rest concentrated on energy weapons, only one of them was a good medic IIRC, only one of them needed to have good skills for computers etc. Specializing also saved skill points.

That is not to say I didn't try to get INT high as well, and I also think I might have picked a perk to get more skill points for some of my team members as well (since I could get perks more often, after all).

Anyway, your mileage may certainly vary, these were just what I found out playing the modded version, and restarting it from the scratch when I was already quite far in the game (because I just couldn't get over of having made some poor character decisions earlier in the game).

I just bought this game the other day and am enjoying it. I'm on the third mission right now so i haven't seen all the guns and whatnot. What are your tactics? Do you think they work really well? Right now I like having one or two guys with double barrel shotguns, go in close and rip em apart with one or two blasts. It works great. big grin I know obviously this won't work in the later missions cause I'm sure they'll be more difficult than just making your way from objective point to objective point and kill what ever doesn't like you. (AKA mission 2 your supposed to be sneaky so the alarm doesn't sound...I went in guns a blazing and took out the whole town.) So what works for you?

Ps. I don't know if it matters, but I played the game completely in turn-based (combat) mode. I've understood some of the stats might not matter (much) in realtime mode.

I've seen Youtube-videos of people playing it in realtime mode, normally equipped with some miniguns and running around just shooting everything. At least at the difficulty level I was playing the mod at, that was simply not doable, and you'd die constantly if you tried to play it in realtime mode. The only way to proceed especially in later missions was completely turn-based, and lots of save scumming.

I was playing Fallout Tactics earlier this year but got stuck on where exactly to go on a lvl. I would play it again if I could. It's a fun game.

Awesome! Those are the exact posts I was thinking of. Couldn't for the life of me remember what thread they were in. Thanks so much. :) I plan on using that mod. I'll read up on it so I know what to expect. Thanks for the advice (and thanks for those previous posts way back when!)

You're welcome! Do let us know how it turns out, will you?
"At ease, Initiate. My name is General Barnaky. I will be giving you your orders before every mission."

I'll try to remember to do so. Currently have Hard West on the go, but thinking Tactics will be next up.