Well you may find them helpful early on as additional firepower and targets for you opponents especially if you are playing weak diplomat sort of character. If you're good at combat on other hand you may not need them at all beside carrying loot.
It's a sidequest as are all of the Restoration Project content. I've only played thru once with RP and that was with Sulik so I don't know if he's necessary. Other place you may need Sulik is primitive tribe village but again I don't know if he's absolutely necessary there either.
There's new Party Orders add-on mod that may ease the pain of handling NPC's somewhat but I wish they found a way to give player complete control over them in combat.
Here's what it does:
Party Orders add-on: Allows the use of hotkeys to give general orders to the party. It's a sfall mod which uses a global script as main file and one ini file. Some settings can be configured through this ini file. It does not work in combat mode, obviously. These are the orders currently implemented:
- Heal yourself: injured party members try to heal using first aid/doctor skill or stimpaks.
- Holster weapons: Armed party members will put their weapons away.
- Regroup: Party members will regroup near the PC if they are away from him/her more than 3 tile hexes.
- Loot dead bodies: This will make one party member to try and loot corpses around him/her and the PC.
It requires latest sfall (2.0 or higher) to work so make sure you move over the settings from RP sfall.ini to new sfall.ini before overwriting if you are going to use it as not doing so may break the game.

I've got a small question here...
In the Fallout 1 Mods thread, someone posted what was possibly the ideal Fallout 1 set of mods and the order to install them in. I was hoping someone might be able to suggest such a thing for this one, as well.
Like Fallout 1, I'm mostly interested simply in mods/patches that enhance the game itself without adding a lot of fan-based content. The Fallout Restoration Project is, of course, most welcome as it simply brings back things that were unfinished or taken out at the last moment.

Thank you for all your help, Petrell. I just really don't like travelilng with a party. Some of the early Final Fantasy games worked well in a turn based fight scene to use Heal, Fire, etc., but as a rule, I find travelling with a party like taking a dog for a walk without a leash.
Do you know if the game engine is set to know whether you have a backup crew and adjust the fight difficulty accordingly? That would be a decision maker for me.
Currently, I am stuck in Modoc trying to find a darned bag in the rats cave under the outhouse. I cannot find that blasted thing. Wish I had never heard there was one down there.

In case of Fallout 2 it's mostly just choosing between Killap's patch and restoration project, installing latest sfall (remember to copy over any sfall settings set for patch/restoration project to new sfall ddraw.ini before overwriting to prevent problems). Then you can install high resolution patch if you want. Rest (like the Party Orders add-on mod) is mostly flawor and depend on player's preference.

The latest version of Sfall doesn't seem to be on Timeslip's server:
Not Found
The requested URL /current/sfall.7z was not found on this server.
Apache/1.3.36 Server at timeslip.chorrol.com Port 80

Timeslip has taken it temporarily offline because he has at some point borrowed code that was licenced under GPL meaning he had to either strip the offending code and reprogram it or change sfall licence to GPL (been unspecified thus far). He chose the later (GPL) road. Here is the Sourceforge project page. Note that there is no files yet and it may take awhile before one is uploaded.
Here's the news update from Timeslip:
5th of December
Right, here's the opinions of someone else who knows what they're talking about:*
• I don't have the option of just stripping out the offending code and pretending it was never there. I can remove it and take sfall closed source, but I would still need to continue providing a GPL (or compatible) source download of the latest version that contained the code. (Which would be 2.0d)
• As long as it's distributed separately, the interactions of sfall with fallout do not constitute a complete program under the GPL and there's no need for a special exception, so there is no issue with me using the GPL on sfall.
• Interplays actions of continuing to distribute an offending version do not put me in harms way.
I don't want take sfall officially closed source anyway, so my plan is to GPL sfall once I've given the other contributors enough time to object. I'll probably be removing the eax code though, as I doubt I can get permission to GPL that,** after which I'll probably upload it to sourceforge so the other contributors can get proper commit access rather than having to email me code all the time. With me sorted out, that just leaves interplay. I don't want to be committal here partly because we only have second hand information to go on as to what interplay has actually done, and partly because there's too much Legal involved, but here's my resident advisor's first thoughts.
• As sfall's readme mentioned no specific licence terms, Interplay failed in due-diligence by not either seeking representations from me about the licence of sfall or checking the code themselves, and thus they are responsible for their own breech of the GPL.
• The trilogy cd's still don't count as a complete program, because even though sfall is on the cd, it's only an optional extra in the installer, and there's no dependency. The only breech in this case is that interplay are required to include a copy of the GPL with sfall along with source or the offer of source for the version which they are distributing.
• In the steam case, where sfall is mandatory, it does form a complete program and thus fallout2.exe also falls under the GPL. (Which can't happen, because interplay does not hold the rights to relicence fallout, Bethesda does.)
Furthermore, it was mentioned on NMA that interplay would need Bethesda's permission to include sfall on their cd anyway, even if no GPL issues were involved. Given that Bethesda is in the middle of suing them, I think it's fair to say that they never got it.
*Only friendly advice from a legally minded friend, not official legal advice, so this isn't definitive. I'd actually fired off an e-mail to the FSF before he chimed in, so they may offer a different view.
**To the best of my knowledge, no-one has ever used it, so no great loss there.

Ouch, well, I guess it comes down to using 1.47B, or just go with Killap's patch and the Resolution Mod on their own.

Well it didn't take Timeslip that long to get new sfall released. Sfall 2.1a is up so go grap it. Steam users will especially be happy as they can use new sfall again but both eax and win9x support was removed in the process.
Changelog
v2.1a
>Some elements of sfall can now be translated
>Added a check-for-updates option
>Added an option to allow scrolling of quest lists in the pipboy (From Ray)
>Removed eax support
>Removed win9x support
>Removed the block on steam, and the timeout code
Worst thing is FO1 support was dropped entirely (there no sfall for FO1 anymore) and there seem to be no plans to support it.

Yes, development stopped quite while back (almost 2 years ago) but sfall1 was still available. Now it's not available anywhere as far as I know.
While most of the options did not work too well sfall1 still added support for mouse wheel (for easy inventory browsing), middle mouse button (for switching weapons) and game speed settings.
I'll probably upload it (and last non sourceforge sfall as well as I've seen it asked elsewhere) to my site at some point.

Not a bad idea, I still can't get the mouse scroll to work however:
[i][Input]
;Set to 0 to disable everything in this section
;This will also disable any input related script extender functions and the keyboard commands used to control other sections!
Enable=1
;Set to 1 to enable the mouse scroll wheel to scroll through your inventory
UseScrollWheel=1[/i]
One off-topic question: what's the minimum science required to activate counter-insurgency?

As promissed here are the pre open source sfall files:
sfall for Fallout 1 - readme
sfall V. 2.0d - readme
Latest sfall can be found at sourceforge.

Sfall 2.4a is out now:
[url=Sfall 2.4]http://sourceforge.net/projects/sfall/files/sfall/sfall%202.4.7z/download[/url]

I need help making wasteland merc work. When I try to play I just have usual stuff.

sfall 2.8 out now.