Tried this a good while ago in continuous mode.
Things started going bad and difficulty getting a bit steep... I drifted off to other games.

Now a fresh try in squad turn based mode and I'm having a well good time.
It's not just tactics after all, you get to make a few choices as well.
The story also seems interesting enough for me.

Preoria was bit of a bother, did the necessary bit and decided to go back later.
At Quincy I suddenly realize I should have more guys with stealth skills,
heck of a good time there anyway even if a few hostages ended up dead.

I probably need some energy weapons skills later on as well,
but have a hard time deciding on best skillpaths when I don't know what's coming up.

A few questions as well, try to answer with minimum spoilers:

Will I actually need science, repair, piloting skills at some point?

Will there be new recruits later on, with decent energy weapons skills?
Maybe some other useful skills as well?
Or do I need to start developing energy weapons experts out of the current crop?
Do I even need energy weapons?

Have one char with 10 strength, later on when you fight muties keep hold of a browning M2? (big fuckoff machine gun) and any 50 cal or 50 cal DU.
Push Big gums and stealth up to 150 and just destroy everythin with 1 char and use the other 5 as donkeys.


Another thing I do is to get the full 6 chars and leave one at the start of the map when the other chars inventories are full just dump it on the stationary one, then when the map is complete, put one char on the exit grid and ferry the stuff back. (missions with vehicles makes this obsolete)

Uh, oh, my whole team is at STR6 except Torn, and she's all unarmed and traps.
Maybe there will be someone good coming up or something,
maybe up strength with power armor, or I'll just have to pass the .50cal

Can't imagine soloing these missions, I've hard enough time pouring fire from 3-4 barrels. :)
Maybe on another playthrough if I feel crazy enough.

Guess I'll start giving some folks strong back or such perks soon.

Beastlord lair was another fun one.
Looks like another base and a very odd brotherhood mix coming up,
as I've picked everybody along who's willing.

Piloting is a tertiary skill. It is only relevant on the 2 or 3 levels that feature vehicles and in some wilderness random encounters. It doesn't need to be a primary tag skill for any character.

As you get to the medium and higher levels, you will want to move away from small guns to energy weapons. The only small guns expert you will want in the later parts of the game is a sniper with the Gauss rifle. There are special types of ammo (like electric shotgun shells) which can make small guns useful longer, but plasma rifles and laser rifles will be more common than the unique ammo types.

You should definitely keep 1 or 2 big guns characters all the way through the game. The SAW becomes the standard weapon. You absolutely need someone who can carry and wield the Browning M2. Just like its real life counterpart, it is a devastating weapon. Very few enemies in the game can take more than one good burst from the M2. Also the ammo, while not copiously abundant, is common enough to use the weapon regularly. Similarly, the rocket launcher is an effective weapon and there are enough rockets throughout the game to make using it worth while.

In Fallout 1 and 2, grenades were little more than cute oddities. They didn't do as much damage as the high end big guns and energy weapons and were much rarer than ammunition. This is not so in Fallout Tactics. Grenades are powerful and plentiful. They also do not require a direct line of sight to be effective. As you've no doubt learned already, to shoot an enemy requires a direct line of sight (i.e. both you and your target need to be exposed to register a successful hit). This is not the case with grenades. By targeting areas instead of enemies, grenades can be lobbed from behind cover over sandbags and barricades to injure or kill enemies who aren't exposed. If the area blast from the grenade doesn't kill your targets, it will sometimes cause them to stand up and run, thereby exposing them to gunfire from the rest of your team. A character who is good with grenades is extremely useful, especially in the early and middle levels. Just be careful when attacking with grenades and rockets from a prone position if your target is on lower terrain. A poor shot will sometimes explode in your face. While it is shocking and hilarious to blow yourself to bits, it doesn't leave you feeling like a tactical genius.

Unlike in Fallout 1 and 2, in Fallout Tactics sneak is directly affected by armor. In other words the better (and bulkier) your armor is, the higher penalty to sneak your character receives. Sneaking successfully in power armor requires very high sneak. The penalty is not insurmountable, but if you want a character to wear power armor and be very sneaky, they will need an extremely high sneak skill.

As your personal character levels up and completes missions, you will have access to a larger pool of soldiers with specialized skill sets. These will include characters who are good with big guns, energy weapons, explosives, piloting, etc. If I remember correctly, you can only recruit characters whose rank is equal to or lower than yours.

You will definitely need energy weapons to complete the game. They are the most effective weapons (along with the high end big guns) against the enemies which frequent the later levels. Whether you develop low characters to use energy weapons or wait until later characters become available is up to you. Personally, I always develop my own character to use energy weapons in later levels.

Guess I'll be tossing Jo who's pretty much a pilot/repairman, pick someone with energy weapons skills and strength instead. Probably need to get rid of Torn (unarmed/traps) at some point, but so far the combo works pretty well. Or maybe I'll start giving her energy skills. Doc Stitch can double as secondary energy specialist.

I've been too cheap to use grenades & rockets, sell them instead. :)
Have to rethink that and start using them a bit more!

Now at Gamma Base and a bit of a super mutant threat coming up!
If they're not too well armored I might be fine with combat shotguns.
That's the plan anyway, have to look and see..

I was always a small guns fan in FO1 and FO2, and managed quite well with AKs and sniper rifles in FOT as well. Once my characters were good enough shooters, they kept killing super mutants 2 screens away in auto-attack mode. Sometimes it took a while to clear an area on continuous mode, but fortunately they had bad enough aim that their rockets didn't hit me often.

But as I soon realised, energy weapons is the way to go, especially on later levels.

Hunting riffles moving on to sniper rifles then specialising in energy and big guns. after you get the M2 and enough ammo, if your careful you can solo the game from ther on. It is incredably hard to do right from the start

Jo and Torn got tossed, replaced by Alice (big guns, energy weapons, throwing) and Sharon (small guns, big guns, sneak).

Jo wasn't missed much, piloting seems to be done well enough with low skill and Stitch started developing repair skills as well, making him a silly jack of all trades (Small guns, First Aid, Doctor, Science Repair, Barter, even started on Energy Weapons), high enough skill makes him proficient (around 100%) in all those.

Torn on the other hand was sorely missed, for awhile at least. Unarmed skills are probably useless later on, but she could butcher a deathclaw with those Wolverine gloves like there's no tomorrow! A hit takes 2AP and does more damage than double barrels from a shotgun! More importantly, when I brought Sharon along, she had like 20% Traps skills, took a while to skill her up! But being level 4 when others were 9 meant rapid leveling. Fed her "near death" opponents to get her the XP.* Now she's at lvl10 while other are at 12, proficient in traps and a decent sneak&gunner.

*Do skills actually even go into the killers XP pool or is everything divided?

Alice came on board all ready to go, currently the only team member with enough STR to handle an M2, oh vey that's truly a weapon! Don't have quite enough ammo for it yet, so she's also lugging a M249 SAW and spends much of the time encumbered! That .50cal ammo sure weights a LOT! 500 shots is 100 pounds, while 500 of 7.62mm is 15 mere pounds! (one of the few realistic things in weapons in the game, so not complaining too loudly).

Super mutants were fun as hell! M2's and SAW's a plenty, seems one more resque mission against them and it's off to new direction again.

Getting the same problem as with every other Fallout game (including FO3). I'm having most fun early on against Riders and other low end opponents, when Magnum 44s and pump action shotguns are devastating and reserved for the better shots. Later on you get all these neat guns but never actually find a use for them, like M60. It's good enough, but SAW is better in every single way and you get a pile of SAWs first.

Ok the Reavers were a barrel of fun! Actually a lot more so than supermutants, being easier to kill and all. But it seems it'll be robots next, blah. Don't like fighting robots too much, all too impersonal when they don't scream out or bleed. :)

Loaded up on plasma rifles, laser rifles, a bunch of sniper rifles and an M2.

The storyline is, all in all, much better than I'd have expected. Pretty much a full blown RPG minus a ton of fetch&carry busywork.

Currently playing this alongside Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout New Vegas! I actually bought it when it came out originally but I don't think I got that far. Not sure if I found it too hard or if I just drifted away from it. Either way, the system is well done; it's a shame this game isn't respected that much when you consider that its aim was to take the pretty crappy and half-assed combat of Fallout then polish and tune it to be a more worthwhile and fun experience. An aim I'd say it achieved.

The last mission awaits. Robots were much neater than expected, easily the finest robots in Fallout series, behemoths as well. The action is getting a bit repetitive though, clear the area, now clear this area, now clear this area. Here's hoping the last mission is something else, although there'll be a lot of clearing up before I'm in, I'm sure.

The team is working out pretty well. With a bit of help from power armours Brian and Sharon can both use M2's, Stitch, Ice and Alice do well with energy weapons, while my sharpshooter is plenty effective with a gauss rifle. Even plain combat shotgun in single shot mode does real well against robots, at least as long as the dwindling supply of EMP shells holds out. Tossed the last few sniper rifles as well, no use for them anymore.

Came to appreciate the power of pulse grenades, should have paid more attention to grenades and other thrown weapons during the playthrough. Bazookas I'd still consider much too heavy to lug around, although a few tank busting rockets would have helped against behemoths.

All over but I'm sure I'll return to this eventually. Ended up lugging bazookas as well, turned out to work fine in the endgame.

The ending was a bit surprising, to say the least. I was prepared for a pitched battle against some superpowered endboss. Turns out I didn't really need to save that gatling gauss, or .50cal DU shells. Just as well, I never was a fan of overpowering boss fights.

The Reavers were the dividing line for me, much as I feared. After those it was just roling over a huge bunch of robots. Actually this was the most fun during the first 1/3 of the game, bandits and raiders, shotguns and rifles. The same really goes for all FO games so no blaming tactics too much.

Hi all, seeing as this is a questions thread, I was wondering something. How do you force a character to use all of their AP? My guys seem to keep the number required to fire their weapon once, no matter what I tell them to do- they just start their move animation and then halt it suddenly, without moving. I seem to remember being able to spend it all on movement in the other two fallouts, is this just something they changed in FOT or am I just being dense?

Thanks in advance.

You should be able to use all the AP points on movement. Are you perhaps playing with real time mode? Or are you trying to do an action that takes more AP than you have left? Trying to move to some point you can't move to? Trying to fire without line of fire?

Nope, I was just trying to move. In Squad turn based. I've also tried finding somewhere that is within the remaining AP range to move to, but still they wont budge.

Actually, just to double check, I booted it up again, and can now move fine. So it seems the time honoured trick of turning it off and on again a couple of times works for this too.

Thanks for the reply though.