Fallout Tactics (in 2020)

[Kalin]

Played it as well this year, had some fun as a big gunner, game turned really boring with the robot slog though. Can't even bring myself to finish it.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

The best tactics games have excellent writing...

wat?
Silent Storm and X-com can hardly be praised because of their writing.

 

[Krivol]

Played it as well this year, had some fun as a big gunner, game turned really boring with the robot slog though. Can't even bring myself to finish it.

This is my experience exactly. When robots shows up, game gets boring IMO.

OTOH quite a nice game and very good looking too. Still it's better to play UFO (original one, preferably OpenXcom) or JA2. Lack of destroyable environment is not good.

 

[laclongquan]

I recall the writing being really retarded and the gameplay pretty mediocre. Still managed to be fairly fun on first playthrough, but I don't plan ever returning to it.

It's a tactical game, not a RPG. Writings simply dont have to be good or cohesive, just functional.

 

[DraQ]

FO:T?
Mediocre to decent I guess - p. OK overall.

Pretty nice (if a little bit plastic) visually, workable gameplay.
Lack of destructible environment is a shame, progression and story are formulaic, doesn't stay true to Fallout's aesthetics and setting in many places.
Also, FO:T deathclaws look awesome, but I don't think they were supposed to be hairy.

I like it, but you have to play it as a real-time game or the missions are too long

I'm not a fan of RT combat, especially in tacticool games. It makes sense I'm not fond of FT cause it seems to be designed as a RT game.

Try it as RT combat, and you ll see it is a really different games. It works very well for instance because you can use the "Rule of Engagement" rules (start to shoot when you at 1% //33% //66% //95% chance to it), because you can really od funny stuff like crawl to a position and then suddenly stand up and shoot (and for reasons you ALWAYS shoot first doing this), ...

Of course, it makes melee almost impossible to use for YOU, except deathclaws who have a chance to reach melee, but honestly you lose nothing.

Why not both?

 

[luj1]

Played it as well this year, had some fun as a big gunner, game turned really boring with the robot slog though. Can't even bring myself to finish it.

This is my experience exactly. When robots shows up, game gets boring IMO.

Yeah the robot arc (final arc) is when it gets boring for most people. I think the game is too long

 

[laclongquan]

The problem is the lack of Behemoths walking around.

Redux and Equilibrium mod them in greater number and mang, those last missions are hairy as heck.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

- Small arms (standard raiders, beastmasters)
- Big arms (Supermutants)
- Energy Weapons (Robots)

Everything else is pretty much suboptimal or useless.

that's if you ignore the random encounters. Everyone does though. if you go with Random Encounters to grind then Melee characters make more sense as to not waste precious ammo. But you don't have to do that anyway as the game throws enough XP and loot at you that you can get by with just the missions.

playing any fallout game while skipping random events is like trying to enjoy christina hendricks without her tits. in fact 3 and 4 haven't them.

 

[Shadenuat]

I don't remember much trouble crit clearing maps of mutants with sniper rifle and wrecking bots with jackhammer loaded with EMP shells tbh

 

[Strange Fellow]

The best tactics games have excellent writing...

wat?
Silent Storm and X-com can hardly be praised because of their writing.

Silent Storm has cool mercs, not quite up there with Jagged Alliance but good enough to be recognizable and memorable. The X-Com research blurbs set the overall tone and characterize the aliums perfectly. Maybe "excellent writing" is going a bit far, but the writing adds to both those games and most other good tictacs games as well, despite not being the focus.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

The best tactics games have excellent writing...

wat?
Silent Storm and X-com can hardly be praised because of their writing.

Silent Storm has cool mercs, not quite up there with Jagged Alliance but good enough to be recognizable and memorable. The X-Com research blurbs set the overall tone and characterize the aliums perfectly. Maybe "excellent writing" is going a bit far, but the writing adds to both those games and most other good tictacs games as well, despite not being the focus.

Riting is still tertiary in those games, even if it's serviceable.

 

[Poseidon00]

wat?
Silent Storm and X-com can hardly be praised because of their writing.

Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together is the peak of tactical RPGs and Law Denam is an excellent anti-hero.

 

[Melcar]

I had fun with it back in the day. Got the game from the old Interplay website along with a few others, all in their jewel cases and shit. It was rad. The game was fun, (at least before you get to the robot missions) especially since I seem to be one of the few people that genuinely enjoys Fallout combat. Graphics are cool, but I do remember the game just being "slow" and would thrash your HDD for no reason. Had fun with the editor too, making my own levels, vehicles and weapons. The latter robot missions are not as fun, maybe because by then I'm usually bored of the game.

 

[Cael]

They tried to spice it up with the Gauss weaponry (included the frankly hilarious Gauss Gatling that you'll never have enough ammo to properly run)

I recently took a look at the wiki and found out that 2mm EC in FOT has no DR and DMG modifiers.

That's why shooting gauss bullets at the robots simply bounces. Humanoid Bots have ridiculous normal damage DR, I think its 65% - and they surely have pretty strong DT. If 2mm EC had the same modifiers it has in FO2, then it would reduce their DR to 45% (still better than Powered Armor lol) and the cheesy damage mod (3/2 in the original I think, AFAIK in FOT system that would be like +100% I think?) would take care of the rest.

As it is, they have 0 modifiers and therefore can't do crap. 2mm EC in FOT is useless, rather than the God-Ammo it was in FO2.

So yes, Small Guns was totally meant to be viable in end-game Fallout Tactics. They just fucked up the 2mm EC modifiers.

(also, Gauss Minigun should have been even cheesier)

The compensation is the 60-80 damage the Gauss Rifle does, which is far higher than in FO2.

 

[Cael]

Man, I played this back in the days when it came out. I was at school with almost infinite time on my hands and the game seemed okay. I tried to replay it now and it feels so boring from the get-go. The Steam reviews are overwhelmingly positive tho. The negative ones mostly about not being able to play on Win 10 properly.

Did it not age well? Was it ever good? What's the consensus? I didn't find any recent or general impression threads about the game.

I run it on Win10. Still play it, in fact, but I have modded it to have many more enemies every mission. Some of the enemies even start charging you from halfway across the map when you get spotted.

It aged pretty well for a 2D isometric tactical game. I like it more than some of the wowser 3D crap we get these days (Vampyr, I am looking at you).

Killing robots with a sniper rifle never gets old :D

 

[laclongquan]

The best tactics games have excellent writing...

wat?
Silent Storm and X-com can hardly be praised because of their writing.

Hammer & Sickle ( sequel in time of SS) writings are dry humour, kinda like black humour but not that sad. I dont say it's of best level, but it can worth the adjective "great".
Silent Storm and SS Sentinels writings are okay. It doesnt have that disctinct HS level of dry humour.

 

[luj1]

Cael Are there any must-have mods for Tactics?

 

[DraQ]

Considering buying FOT, BTW. Lost my CDs ages ago and never finished.
Was fun enough though.

 

[Cael]

Cael Are there any must-have mods for Tactics?

Not really. The base game is pretty good. Just don't try the higher difficulties. They just HP/armour bloat the enemies and increase their skills. That is not fun, just tedious.

The sad part is that quite a few maps in the game would actually make darned good RPG hubs. Quincy, is a prime example, as is Coldwater. FOT is truly a missed opportunity.

 

[Cael]

They tried to spice it up with the Gauss weaponry (included the frankly hilarious Gauss Gatling that you'll never have enough ammo to properly run)

I recently took a look at the wiki and found out that 2mm EC in FOT has no DR and DMG modifiers.

That's why shooting gauss bullets at the robots simply bounces. Humanoid Bots have ridiculous normal damage DR, I think its 65% - and they surely have pretty strong DT. If 2mm EC had the same modifiers it has in FO2, then it would reduce their DR to 45% (still better than Powered Armor lol) and the cheesy damage mod (3/2 in the original I think, AFAIK in FOT system that would be like +100% I think?) would take care of the rest.

As it is, they have 0 modifiers and therefore can't do crap. 2mm EC in FOT is useless, rather than the God-Ammo it was in FO2.

So yes, Small Guns was totally meant to be viable in end-game Fallout Tactics. They just fucked up the 2mm EC modifiers.

(also, Gauss Minigun should have been even cheesier)

The compensation is the 60-80 damage the Gauss Rifle does, which is far higher than in FO2.

I checked and yeah, true. But its still bad.

Humanoid Bots have 65%, if I remember right (tbf I'm basing off the Robot Recruit). I don't know what's the DT of a Humanoid Bot, could't find it, but assuming its similar to that of FOT Power Armor or FOT APA, then its going to splatter against 13-18 DT or so. Maybe even 20 DT, Humanoid Bots are stupid tough. I'm assuming 13-18 for convenience.

If it does 60 damage, the rifle loses 39 damage against the 65% DR of the Humanoid Bot. Which means, 21 damage left before Damage Threshold is applied. Then its going to hit into 13-18 DT. Which means 8-3 damage.

If it does 80 damage, its going to lose 52 damage against the DR. Which means, 28 damage left before DT is applied. 28 - 13 = 15. 28 - 18 = 10.

Which fits perfectly into my observations in-game: The FOT Gauss Rifle is a useless piece of wood and metal. A far cry from the Gauss Rifle of Fallout 2, a god-slayer weapon forged by Hephastus himself. 2mm EC is neutered in FOT.

Ironically, I suspect the Fallout 2 Gauss Rifle would do better against the Humanoid Bots, because it had decent armor penetration and an excellent damage modifier.

Bot armour is similar to Power Armour MkI, or it feels like it. I am not sure here. Just a feeling I get playing the game.

The difference between FOT and FO2 is the fact that critical hits in FOT does NOT ignore armour. In FO2, it does. That is why armour on enemies in FO2 is quite useless once you start aiming for eyes or get the Sniper skill. In FOT, you can do 0 damage vs eye shots on a crit. FOT also did away with instant deaths on crits (plus the Sniper skill is bugged and doesn't work; this is actually due to a typo in the source code, but I digress).

The trick to using small arms vs robots is to aim for the "eyes" and knock them out. Then, close to melee range and use extreme haymaker on them. Extreme haymaker does ENERGY damage. It makes robots explode like you won't believe. It is also the reason to not use melee weapons over unarmed.


EDIT: By the way, 32-43 x 1.5 is still nowhere near 60-80. It is how armour is handled in FOT that makes it seem worse. In my opinion, the FOT way is far, far, FAR better than the FO2 way of handling armour.

 

[thesheeep]

I remember rage-uninstalling the game after almost beating some pretty hard mission and getting stuck because:
Two enemies had died in a tunnel in such a way that their corpses blocked the path and prevented me from progressing.

Good times

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Oh yeah I was almost brought to tears the first time I beat the first mutant mission (Saint Louis I think?) by clearing out the whole map and being loaded with a fuckton of loot only to get stuck because the game refused to tick off the objectives as completed (I think it was because I didnt visit the site with slaughtered BoS squad before I started to attack the mutants and only came to them after the map was cleared which somehow fucked the whole thing up). Took me a while to recover from that and even nowadays I approach this mission with a bit of anxiety.

 

[Cael]

I remember rage-uninstalling the game after almost beating some pretty hard mission and getting stuck because:
Two enemies had died in a tunnel in such a way that their corpses blocked the path and prevented me from progressing.

Good times

That would be the damned lifter robots. Yeah, they can be a freaking pain in the ass as you can't walk through/over their corpses.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Never liked this game, nor 12 years ago when I tried it first, nor the last year when I tried to replay it.

- art direction is completely lost. It's like Wake of the Ravager to Shattered Lands, assets are more detailed, but everything looks worse and cartooney. Although, some maps do look nice.
- Fallout's distinct post-apo setting is ruined into generic post-apo with Humvees and shit.
- game is designed primarily around RT combat and this is a detriment in my book.
- combat itself is even worse than in Fallout.
- game is strictly linear. Forget about getting nice things earlier than intended.
- pronounced weapon progression, while in Fallout nearly every weapon class was legit till the end.
- changes to the SPECIAL ruleset that add nothing, but tedium.

Being post-apo and Fallout in particular fanboy, this game really accomplished not the easiest task of disappointing me. Never made it past the Beastlords, just lost all interested in process.

 

[laclongquan]

The key part of its name is Tactic, not Fallout. FFS.

Fucking hell. I think Interplay should have left the Fallout part out and just carry on with everything else. That would save the whines.

The biggest problem is that it's a tactical game that would hit the rpg gamer hard in the ball. Because tactic is hard, yeah. SO the storyfag and questfag keep whining and whining.