Fallout Fallout 1-2 builds

[Zboj Lamignat]

I already showed how you get the cool perks at the exact same moment and the exact same interval

You get Sneak 100% probably before the Raider camp. You get combat armor right at the start of Hub.

None of this is any way, shape or form exclusive to Skilled.

You don't get the sixth attack, my god...

Why do you deem the 6th attack so important? Is this some theoretical maximization game? Or it's the as you say "coolness"? 6 is cool, 5 is boring

Stop talking to yourself. It's weird.

 

[Jigby]

None of this is any way, shape or form exclusive to Skilled.

The progression is exclusive to Skilled. I thought you care about progression?

 

[Comte_II]

real powergamer perk is coming up with a character in your head and picking the perks that fit its personality

Truth brother

 

[Jigby]

On the topic of Steal, does it even work in Fallout? All I know is that when I have -10% steal I seem to have about a 1/3rd to 1/2 success rate and when I have 100% steal I also seem to have a 1/3rd to 1/2 success rate.

just a small addendum, the pseudocode I posted is from F2, it works that way in F2, but it should work that way in F1 too. I haven't tried it though, you can test it...

 

[Average Manatee]

A significant problem with first aid/science/repair/outdoorsman is that you can just get books for them. Money isn't exactly hard to find in fallout as soon as you are fighting humans. Small guns too but most builds tend to raise that on its own before you get to the book spamming stage.

Then again, 1 SP by book, how can you get enough money without investing to barter to the point where you can burn so much without even caring?

Depends on who you kill. At a minimum the drug dealer in The Hub is probably worth enough to get you your first 5 of all the books and no one bats an eye if you murder him. The decker quests and then fighting decker will also give a lot of money. It's not 1 SP per book it's like 5 (more the lower your current stat is, which is also manipulable by lowering stats with drugs or the game difficulty

 

[Ryan muller]

A significant problem with first aid/science/repair/outdoorsman is that you can just get books for them. Money isn't exactly hard to find in fallout as soon as you are fighting humans. Small guns too but most builds tend to raise that on its own before you get to the book spamming stage.

Then again, 1 SP by book, how can you get enough money without investing to barter to the point where you can burn so much without even caring?

Depends on who you kill. At a minimum the drug dealer in The Hub is probably worth enough to get you your first 5 of all the books and no one bats an eye if you murder him. The decker quests and then fighting decker will also give a lot of money. It's not 1 SP per book it's like 5 (more the lower your current stat is, which is also manipulable by lowering stats with drugs or the game difficulty

Which attributes are responsible for that? Never seemed to get more than 1

There are 2 components to stealing, you passing the steal check and the opponent not noticing your steal attempt in his own steal skill check. If you fail your own skillcheck, the game goes on to the opponent's codeblock, if you pass your skillcheck... the game goes on to the opponent's codeblock. There's no difference. The only time it doesn't go into the opponent's codeblock is if you critically fail on your check, in which case you're just automatically noticed. Or on critical success.

So people were tagging it on runs for no reason? Wow thats lame, always thought steal was a factor either, never heard of such a weird mechanic.

 

[Average Manatee]

On the topic of Steal, does it even work in Fallout? All I know is that when I have -10% steal I seem to have about a 1/3rd to 1/2 success rate and when I have 100% steal I also seem to have a 1/3rd to 1/2 success rate.

Steal skill doesn't do anything, the logic is poorly coded, check the pseudocode -> https://github.com/falltergeist/falltergeist/wiki/Stealing

There are 2 components to stealing, you passing the steal check and the opponent not noticing your steal attempt in his own steal skill check. If you fail your own skillcheck, the game goes on to the opponent's codeblock, if you pass your skillcheck... the game goes on to the opponent's codeblock. There's no difference. The only time it doesn't go into the opponent's codeblock is if you critically fail on your check, in which case you're just automatically noticed. Or on critical success.

You can improve your chance of stealing by lowering the target's agility. Every -1AG is -3% steal skill. Lower with buffout. (actually had to check, it's -3% in F2, -1% in F1).

Edit: Let me rephrase. Increasing steal skill doesn't do anything, your chances remain the same, dependant on the target's steal skill, facing, size of the object etc... but not on your steal skill.

Yeah this does pretty much correlate with all my years of experience playing Fallout 1 and 2. The standing behind someone is a big deal and stealing big things is riskier (but if you are stealing you are probably savescumming anyway and the good things to steal are caps/stimpacks because they are both valuable and weightless).

I assume the way it was supposed to be implemented was that you need to succeed on your skillcheck to successfully steal, and that you could fail on your skillcheck to fail to steal but then the target could fail his check to spot you in which case nothing happened. But instead you always succeed on stealing as long as your target doesn't spot you.

I'm not sure, does raising pickpocket at least raise the chance of a critical success that bypasses the target spotting you? Or is critical success always something like 5%?

Which attributes are responsible for that? Never seemed to get more than 1

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout_skill_books

The amount of skill points gained is equal to 100, subtract the current skill level, divide by 10, and then rounded down. Thus, the maximum a skill can be increased by books is up to 91%.

 

[Ryan muller]

I'm not sure, does raising pickpocket at least raise the chance of a critical success that bypasses the target spotting you? Or is critical success always something like 5%?

Dont think so, fo uses a d20 for checks and theres always 5% for critical Failures and 5% for sucesses

So probably it literally does nothing, making it worthless. Oh well, thats lame.

Only good thing out of it would be the pickpocket perk

 

[Jigby]

I'm not sure, does raising pickpocket at least raise the chance of a critical success that bypasses the target spotting you?

hmm, you make a good point. yes it should increase the likelihood of getting a critical success. The game rolls the dice to see if you succeed or fail. (chance of success capped at 95%). If you fail, a dice is rolled to see if it's a critical fail, if you succeed a dice is rolled for a critical success. So to have a critical success, you have to pass the initial roll.

 

[Ryan muller]

I'm not sure, does raising pickpocket at least raise the chance of a critical success that bypasses the target spotting you?

hmm, you make a good point. yes it should increase the likelihood of getting a critical success. The game rolls the dice to see if you succeed or fail. (chance of success capped at 95%). If you fail, a dice is rolled to see if it's a critical fail, if you succeed a dice is rolled for a critical success. So to have a critical success, you have to pass the initial roll.

Each time you expand on the formula, it seems more convoluted. So indirectly we get higher chances at critical sucesses due to having constant acess to the critical sucess rolls?

Chances are still lower within those rolls compared to the initial skillchecks tho arent they? So in general Steal would fall under the underpowered category instead of the useless one

Would this be the reason for stealing to be optimal in FO2 runs, because if you search for it, runs like the popular "ANTHOLOGY " run in GDQ pretty much gives priority to tagging steal

Would this be the runner trying to make the best out of critical sucesses or just an oversight due to lack of knowledge about the pseudo-formula?

 

[Average Manatee]

I suspected it might be like shooting weapons: you have to succeed on hitting the enemy in the first place to get a critical success, and you have to fail in the first place to get a critical failure. That's why your gun doesn't explode often while shooting 95% shots but does when shooting 5% shots. Makes no sense but it's how the game works.

But in either case the chances wouldn't change that much. If base chance of critical failure is 5% then a 95% steal would reduce that to 5% chance of failure and 5% to upgrade that to critical failure, which is .25% overall chance of critical failure, but that's still not helping your overall steal chance much. So 95% steal vs. 0% steal might increase your overall chance of success by about 9% (half due to lower critical failures and half due to more critical successes), and even that's actually too high because avoiding a critical failure isn't an automatic success, just a chance that your target might not detect you. So overall probably closer to a 6% increase in steal chance, if it works this way.

Speedrunners are pretty autistic so if they are tagging it then it probably works, or else they have just nothing else to tag and they hope it works.

 

[Jigby]

The general skillcheck is something like

max = skill_level + bonusDC (bonus I think in stealing is 0, but there are checks with negative DCs to make them harder)
min = max - random(1, 100)

if min < 0, it's a failure, roll another random(1, 100)
if roll <= -(min / 10), it gets upgraded to a critical failure

if min >= 0, it's a success, roll another random(1, 100)
if roll <= (min / 10) + critical chance, it gets upgraded to a critical success

So on the first check if you have 95 skill and you roll against 1d100 (let's say on average you roll 50 on the 1d100), the min variable is 45. Then on the critical check you roll 1d100 against 45/10+your crit chance (with LU10 that's +10%) = 14.5% chance of a critical success on an average initial roll (50). If you fail, the code goes into the target's codeblock.

Some code;
critical success roll -> https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-re/blob/main/src/random.c#L93=
steal -> https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-re/blob/main/src/skill.c#L1000=

That's quite interesting, if you increase your critical chance to 100% via a save editor, you can probably successfully steal/plant just via the critical success branch of the code (assuming you have some steal skill to pass the initial skill check).

On a normal character that has a critical chance somewhere below 10% I don't think it's going to make that much of a difference, although maybe in speedruns it does.

snip

Yeah, sorry. I haven't really thought about doing the stealing via critical success. I don't think it makes a big difference in a normal game though. If you lower an NPCs agility to 1 for a 3% steal skill, he has a 3% chance of seeing you (assuming he has no skill points invested in the steal skill). That 3% can be additionally lowered by the 14.5% to 2.58% chance of being seen.

If the target has a higher steal skill, the gains are also obviously higher. If he has a 20% chance of seeing you, lowering it by 14.5% puts it at 17.1% chance of being seen. Additionally you could increase your crit chance with finesse/more criticals.

If I crunched the numbers right that is

 

[Ryan muller]

The general skillcheck is something like

max = skill_level + bonusDC (bonus I think in stealing is 0, but there are checks with negative DCs to make them harder)
min = max - random(1, 100)

if min < 0, it's a failure, roll another random(1, 100)
if roll <= -(min / 10), it gets upgraded to a critical failure

if min >= 0, it's a success, roll another random(1, 100)
if roll <= (min / 10) + critical chance, it gets upgraded to a critical success

So on the first check if you have 95 skill and you roll against 1d100 (let's say on average you roll 50 on the 1d100), the min variable is 45. Then on the critical check you roll 1d100 against 45/10+your crit chance (with LU10 that's +10%) = 14.5% chance of a critical success on an average initial roll (50). If you fail, the code goes into the target's codeblock.

Some code;
critical success roll -> https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-re/blob/main/src/random.c#L93=
steal -> https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-re/blob/main/src/skill.c#L1000=

That's quite interesting, if you increase your critical chance to 100% via a save editor, you can probably successfully steal/plant just via the critical success branch of the code (assuming you have some steal skill to pass the initial skill check).

On a normal character that has a critical chance somewhere below 10% I don't think it's going to make that much of a difference, although maybe in speedruns it does.

snip

Yeah, sorry. I haven't really thought about doing the stealing via critical success. I don't think it makes a big difference in a normal game though. If you lower an NPCs agility to 1 for a 3% steal skill, he has a 3% chance of seeing you (assuming he has no skill points invested in the steal skill). That 3% can be additionally lowered by the 14.5% to 2.58% chance of being seen.

If the target has a higher steal skill, the gains are also obviously higher. If he has a 20% chance of seeing you, lowering it by 14.5% puts it at 17.1% chance of being seen. Additionally you could increase your crit chance with finesse/more criticals.

If I crunched the numbers right that is

So, if rolling a non combatent thief character i still should go for better crits and high luck + finesse right?

Interesting, eventually will do some tests

 

[Average Manatee]

Going by that formula it looks like 10 luck + finesse + 3x more criticals will get you 35% crit rate and 300 steal gets you between 20% and 30% additional critical chance depending on the roll, for an average of about 60% critical success chance. Is this correct? Never realized crit rate applied to anything other than attacks. I guess it really doesn't matter for other skills except maybe sneak and lockpick?

Incidentally does that same formula apply for attacks? Does extra skill beyond the minimum needed for 95% chance boost your crit chance?

Yeah, sorry. I haven't really thought about doing the stealing via critical success. I don't think it makes a big difference in a normal game though. If you lower an NPCs agility to 1 for a 3% steal skill, he has a 3% chance of seeing you (assuming he has no skill points invested in the steal skill). That 3% can be additionally lowered by the 14.5% to 2.58% chance of being seen.

Well Fallout 1 characters have base 20% sneak + 1% per AG so the AG lowering method isn't really effective.

Also, do characters in fallout 1/2 generally have any points/random tags in their steal skill? Or is it generally all just base + stats?

 

[Jigby]

Going by that formula it looks like 10 luck + finesse + 3x more criticals will get you 35% crit rate and 300 steal gets you between 20% and 30% additional critical chance depending on the roll

This one I'm not following ... Steal skill is only present in the initial roll vs 1d100. It's capped at 95. So even if you have steal 300, it's going to be capped. If you roll 50 on the 1d100, the min variable is going to be 45 (95-50). Then in the critical roll, you'll be rolling 1d100 against 4.5+35=39.5 (4.5 from min/10, 35 from finesse and more criticals and luck). So you have a 39.5% chance of a critical success. If your opponent has a chance of seeing you of let's 50%, that goes down by 39.5% to 30.25% (so really we've improved our chances by 19.75% additively).

Incidentally does that same formula apply for attacks? Does extra skill beyond the minimum needed for 95% chance boost your crit chance?

I'm not sure, you'd have to look in the code. There is some small boost to the critical chance, but I don't remember the specifics.

Also, do characters in fallout 1/2 generally have any points/random tags in their steal skill? Or is it generally all just base + stats?

I think for regular NPCs it's just base+stats, but merchants tend to have the steal skill higher. You'd probably have to check with the mapper each individual NPC. Maybe you can ask on NMA? There's probably some mapper that knows the specifics.

 

[Average Manatee]

Going by that formula it looks like 10 luck + finesse + 3x more criticals will get you 35% crit rate and 300 steal gets you between 20% and 30% additional critical chance depending on the roll

This one I'm not following ... Steal skill is only present in the initial roll vs 1d100. It's capped at 95. So even if you have steal 300, it's going to be capped. If you roll 50 on the 1d100, the min variable is going to be 45 (95-50). Then in the critical roll, you'll be rolling 1d100 against 4.5+35=39.5 (4.5 from min/10, 35 from finesse and more criticals and luck). So you have a 39.5% chance of a critical success. If your opponent has a chance of seeing you of let's 50%, that goes down by 39.5% to 30.25% (so really we've improved our chances by 19.75% additively).

Ahh, OK. I didn't see anything about steal skill being capped at 95 in your pseudocode.

Incidentally does that same formula apply for attacks? Does extra skill beyond the minimum needed for 95% chance boost your crit chance?

I'm not sure, you'd have to look in the code. There is some small boost to the critical chance, but I don't remember the specifics.

I was just going off your code, if its capped at 95% then I guess it isn't getting any big crit boost from excess points? I guess 95% hit rate shots just get an extra +4.5% crit rate. Which is actually a pretty big increase for enemies who have no perks or traits yet always seem to crit your more than a 5 luck average would suggest they should. I guess this could explain why.

Also, do characters in fallout 1/2 generally have any points/random tags in their steal skill? Or is it generally all just base + stats?

I think for regular NPCs it's just base+stats, but merchants tend to have the steal skill higher. You'd probably have to check with the mapper each individual NPC. Maybe you can ask on NMA? There's probably some mapper that knows the specifics.

Don't really need to know about specifics, was just wondering in general if it was a thing where high level NPCs had like an average of +30 to steal skill just from levels. I kind of assumed merchants might have a bit of steal skill. It's clearly not much though since you can steal from everyone fairly often even with 0 steal and trying to lug big items.

Incidentally, I wonder if when kids steal from you in the Den is all this checked the other way around? Does 100 steal mean you're almost invulnerable to their bullshit?

Also I assume Jinxed will absolutely fuck your stealing ability at low steal skill. But won't hurt the target's chance to detect you because if they fail then upgrading their failure to a critical failure doesn't help you.

 

[Jigby]

Ahh, OK. I didn't see anything about steal skill being capped at 95 in your pseudocode.

The 95 cap is more a part of the steal code than the skillcheck code. Some skills are not capped; with sneak you can actually achieve 100% success rate. Not sure about the other skills, but it's arbitrary like that.

if its capped at 95% then I guess it isn't getting any big crit boost from excess points

Yeah, it should be something small like that, below 5%. But I don't want to bullshit, these days there's always the code.

Incidentally, I wonder if when kids steal from you in the Den is all this checked the other way around? Does 100 steal mean you're almost invulnerable to their bullshit?

Well, one would think that it would work that way, but I actually don't know. Would have to test. Or look in the scripts.

 

[Ryan muller]

So, since Steal only affects your initial check at deciding if you will roll to crit sucess or fail

Can i atleast assume it can be more useful to bigger items like Guns and armor as they seem to have applied penalties for item size alongside steal counter and facing?

 

[Jigby]

Sure, you can compensate for those penalties with a higher steal skill, the penalties are applied first and only then the skill is capped. But I think a steal skill of let's say 110% is probably enough of a buffer?

And that's assuming you're going for the critical success way of stealing. If you don't care about that, there's no point to increasing the steal skill, since the code always goes to the part where the target tries to detect you.

 

[Ryan muller]

Sure, you can compensate for those penalties with a higher steal skill, the penalties are applied first and only then the skill is capped. But I think a steal skill of let's say 110% is probably enough of a buffer?

Okay, thats enough for me to not assume i was crazy when thinking it helped me at stealing stuff on some old saves.

I usually dont like save scumming and i always thought steal made a difference on my game (specially on Early NCR- Navarro runs) glad to know i wasnt completely crazy lol

 

[Average Manatee]

By the way, is there any way to lower NPC agility beyond the buffout withdrawal effects? That's only -4. Not sure if there's some specific alcohol or something that affects agility rather than perception. Wiki talks about lowering npc perception with alcohol but that seems wrong.

 

[Jigby]

Well, Mentats addiction (https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Mentats_addiction) lowers AG by 2, but it's difficult to ascertain whether the NPC actually is addicted. Beyond that you can lower AG with buffout by 6. Use 1 dosage, sleep 3 hours, use 2 dosages, sleep 6 hours. The combined effects should be -6AG.

Alcohol lowers only PE and I don't think there's anything else to lower AG with.

 

[laclongquan]

A significant problem with first aid/science/repair/outdoorsman is that you can just get books for them. Money isn't exactly hard to find in fallout as soon as you are fighting humans. Small guns too but most builds tend to raise that on its own before you get to the book spamming stage.

Then again, 1 SP by book, how can you get enough money without investing to barter to the point where you can burn so much without even caring?

Depends on who you kill. At a minimum the drug dealer in The Hub is probably worth enough to get you your first 5 of all the books and no one bats an eye if you murder him. The decker quests and then fighting decker will also give a lot of money. It's not 1 SP per book it's like 5 (more the lower your current stat is, which is also manipulable by lowering stats with drugs or the game difficulty

WTF is this shit?????
Are you guys playing Fallout without a container full to the brim with looted weapons and armors?
We play steal-man because we want the thrill of waiting success/fail check, want the xp gains from succeed steals.
WTF is this Kill a merchant? How the hell do you find more merchants to fence your looted armors and weapons.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

The Ultimate Fallout 2 Build. Can do all content. Good for experts, little rough for beginners.

SPECIAL: 4 8 4 4 8 10 8

Str 4 doesn't matter because power armor
Perception and Luck 8 are needed for Sniper
Endurance 4 will be fixed by Lifegiver
Cha 4 because Speech is more useful and there are only 2 good party members
Int 8 mitigates the Gifted penalty and unlocks many good dialogue options
Agility 10 because AP is king

Traits: Gifted (It's too OP to pass up), Fast shot if you don't care about early/mid game at all. If you take it you can do Agl 8 and put 2 stat points somewhere else. Not being able to shoot people in the eyes makes the midgame harder but by the end you'll have sniper and it won't matter.

Tag skills: Small Guns, Speech, Science. The third tag is really whatever you want. Repair, lockpicking, doctor, hand to hand (for early game and some quests), Big Guns or Energy (to save another tag skill). It really doesn't matter. I pick Science because it's handy for some quests.

Perks: Awareness (lvl 3 perks are not great), Educated, Better criticals, lifegiver, Bonus rate of fire, bonus ranged damage (if using burst, otherwise pick something else), tag! (big guns or energy), sniper. Enjoy sploding everything you see. With 10 ap you can shoot most guns burst twice in one turn, or two targeted shots. Sniper makes targeting shots pointless, with 8 luck you'll crit non stop, but that doesn't pop until late in the game.

Early game: Use a spear for the temple of trials and kite the ants. Get a 10mm pistol in Klamath. Head to vault city and try to upgrade your armor. Once you feel up to it, head to New Reno and get into random fights. Hopefully some gangsters will drop a .223 pistol. This will be your main gun for most of the game. You'll want some points in repair and lockpicking but don't need to go nuts. You can strategically use Vic to repair things for quests before dumping him.

Mid game: Recruit Sulik and Cassidy if you haven't yet. Clear out the upper towns and their quests. Get your tag skills to 120 or so. Put some points into Hand to hand so you can do the boxing and kung fu quest. Figure out whether you want to move to Big Guns or Energy and take the Tag perk for it.

Late game: Get power armor. Military base or buy it in San Francisco. Find either a Turbo Plasma rifle or Bozar machine gun and boost the relevant skill to 120. Third option is to stick with Small guns and get a gauss rifle but I find these and the ammo is too rare outside the final areas to be worth it. Clear up the final quests, get Sniper, and rape the Enclave.

With this build you'll be able to win most fights easily, get the best quest outcomes, and unlock the harder to achieve endings. It's sort of anticlimactic since you'll be able to shoot your way through the enclave with ease but also talk your way out of all the fights. Versatile! Downsides are crappy HP in the early game, skill points are tight and can't be spread around too much, redundant weapon skills (to avoid being underpowered at any point in the game), and some reliance on randomness.

 

[Hobo Elf]

The Ultimate Fallout 2 Build. Can do all content. Good for experts, little rough for beginners.

SPECIAL: 4 8 4 4 8 10 8

Perception and Luck 8 are needed for Sniper

Sniper is 8 in Perception and Agility. All you need is 6 Luck for Better Criticals.

Otherwise, yeah, solid build. I'd swap some Charisma for Strength to have a baseline of 6. It's not really recommended by most or any players, but the extra carrying capacity is something that I personally value a lot. You can argue (correctly) that the extra Charisma lets you carry more as you can have an extra companion, but I really hate them in FO1 & 2. They just constantly get in my way and after a few levels you don't need their help to carry you in combat. But someone else might value them. Or you could deduce some points from Luck.