Tips from a completed game

[BearEssentials]

Your mileage may vary.

Combat initiative is pretty much useless 98% of the time. You can start a combat at max sniper range with your guys all lined up and crouched facing the oncoming enemy. The enemy wastes their first turn running into your gun range without any cover, then you blow them away with all the extra action points you have from putting your stats into coordination, intelligence, strength and speed instead of awareness. Even better than starting a fight from close range, since this ensures the enemy is standing up in open ground half the time, and also tends to bunch up into lovely shotgun group targets.

If you have to start a conversation to start a fight, have everyone lined up at the same range away, and send in an NPC with high combat initiative and no movement loss from armor to start talking. First round, get that NPC to run to your line at max speed while your side starts opening fire.

The other 2% of the time, just tank the fire and heal up with the zillions of spare medkits you have from normally taking so little damage in combat.

Charisma is not worth it for the one or two obscure NPCs, considering you can get quite adequate ones otherwise (any NPC with a good INT counts, you can get them to specialize in say, 2 skills plus their gun skill, and stop adding points in those skills to the Ranger that had those skills.)

As far as I can tell - and I've finished the game - you can set Charisma, Luck and Awareness to 1 on all your PCs, give 7 points to Coordination and 8 to Intelligence, then split the last between Strength and Speed depending on if you want more muling/melee dmg or more running speed. You should aim to have 10 AP for all 4 characters, this allows 2 shots/bursts a round with a lot of weapons. Be aware however that melee dmg can be poorer in effectiveness compared to specializing in say, SMGs or Heavy Weapons. You should always have enough MAXCON for the job even with 2 strength, but be aware having more muling capacity can make it easier by not having to go sell items so often and carrying more RPGs and grenades around.

I suggest putting 1 gun skill and 4 or 5 utility skills on each of the 4 starter PCs. 8 int = 4 points per level = more or less enough points to get you through until you start getting NPCs that can take over certain roles. Save up points until you really need them, don't apply them straightaway; apply points until checks get 61% to succeed and then savescum. Barter skill can be ignored, there is always plenty of money if you keep scrapping weapons and selling weapon parts at the Citadel and looting random encounters throughly.

Keep in mind most safes can be opened with explosives without destroying contents, unlike basic chests. This lets you avoid wasting skill points on Safecracking for the occasional really hard safe prior to endgame. However some safes that have electronics locks instead of safecracking locks will have destroyed contents.

I also suggest spreading out certain high-points-required skills over several characters instead of all on one char, to avoid running out of skill points at bad times. Put two out of Safecracking, lockpicking, electronics, demolitions, hard/smart/kiss ♥♥♥ and alarms on each char. These will need more points than other skills.

With barter ignored there are 18 utility skills. You have 2 extra slots on your PCs if you give 6 skills per PC including 1 weapon skill. I suggest putting in a few more weapon skills to round out your chars. Eg, handgun on the sniper works very well, when the sniper rifle doesn't work the handgun does. Shotgun on assault rifle char or heavy weapons char also work. Give someone energy weapon but don't expect them to use it often, so have another all-round skill like SMG on that char.

Field medic will only ever need 5 skill points ever, towards very lategame where you will have tons of levels and skillpoints you can boost it to 8 to use the best medpacks.

Do not rely on Angela Deth for Brute Force or Hardass, she won't be around for too long. Make a PC the main for Hardass.

Do not neglect leadership. 3 NPCs are a lot easier to manage with high leadership and it gives a good to hit bonus to everyone in your firing line group.

I suggest keeping in mind skill-increasing trinkets when deciding when to use skillbooks. For example you have a +2 Surgeon item. Improve your skill to 7, then use the skillbook to make it 8, then wear the item to get 10, the maximum in game (nothing can push skills over 10). This way you get the highest possible skills ASAP. Will work for Hard/Smart/Kiss ♥♥♥ as well if you don't mind quicksaving before talking to *anybody*.

Lategame, any fights with robots will be energy weapon dominated. Take the armor off all your troops and focus fire on grenade/melee/heavy weapons only, the energy weapon enemies will do negligible damage.

[Gregorovitch]

I would argue your recommendation on Combat Intiative is highly debatable and dependent on specific combat tactics that you developed for a high AP/low CI team plus specific weapon choices to make it viable.

- you forgoe additional turns that high CI chars get during combat which is very powerfull

- High CI chars can use high damage/high AP per shot weapons and get two shots per round (technically three, but that is probably unrealistic for a a balanced build). A head shot + burst with a G41 or headshot with .50 cal sniper rifle for instance costs 9AP. You are not going to get 18AP for two shots. 15 CI will regularly get you two such shots per turn which amounts to about 400-800 total damage per turn depending on difficulty.

- High CI gives you early moves to take advantage of tactical possibilities more likely to be unavailable if the enemy always goes first. Examples are closing on lobbers with melee or focus shooting them down before they unload explosives on you, spreading the team against lobbers, heavy guns and shotguns and taking available cover positions before the enemy does.

I would argue a high CI team gives you greater tactical flexibility and more options in battle, wider weapon selection, higher damage output per turn with high end weapons/special shots and is generally a lot more fun to play because of that. One of the reasons Angela Deth is so deadly and can do so much for you early game is precisely because of her high CI.

Also a caveat about Charisma. CHA controls the range circle for Leadership. In your low CI/high AP play style I imagine you are typically working with a tightly grouped and mostly stationary team relying on multiple shots from high AP to mow down the enemy as they appraoch. In this special case low CHA will still deliver leadership bonuses, but for a more mobile team using a wider variety of tactics you will need a leader with higher CHA to cover.

[Baron01]

As Gregorovitch already posted in a lot of detail, Combat Initiative vs Action points is a topic still open for debate. I have opted for 10 AP builds on my 4 rangers from start but the rest is going into Awareness. There is also whole sub-topic of AP sweet-spots, which is however, aimed more for late game (LA). Back to CI, CI at 15 or 16 with developed characters will net you fair amount of extra turns in combat. CI also works better in late game due to high AP costs of end-game weapons where it is not feasible to use 2 attacks.
CI will not always work; for example NPC initiated combat after dialogue or triggered events; but it is generally very good combat stat through out most of the game.

Intellect at 8 is also questionable since you spent 4 extra attribute points to get 1 extra skill point while adding 2 more points into INT will grant you another skill point. I would suggest to go all the way to 10 INT if you want to go above 4. My personal experience is that by lvl30, you have so many skill points between your 4 main rangers and recruitable NPCs that you dont need your combat oriented rangers to have more than 4 INT, ie. 3 skill points per level.

I like to have 2 surgeons, one being Rose with high skill and other with a single point in the skill just in case, and 1 medic. My medic skill was at lvl 3 while in Arizona and I got it to 8 eventually in LA. I guess that playing on harder difficulties would put more incentives on medic skill for the extra healing.

Skill books should definitely be saved for later levels of skill. If you have or know there is a skill increasing trinket available, you can use a book for lvl7 or more since it costs 6 SP from lvl7 to 9.

Weapon skill wise, I would suggest to get 1x Assault Rifle, 1x Sniper, 1x Blunt melee and 1x Energy weapon specialists. You dont necessarily need energy weapons early as you will not face many high armor enemies in Arizona. You can even have it on recruitable NPC since they only become important in LA. You should definitely get Gamma Ray Blaster from Mercaptain's requisitions--one of the best energy weapons available.

My weapon setup is as follows:
1st Ranger: Sniper (10) & Handguns (6)
2nd Ranger: Assault Rifle (10) & Brawling (6)
3rd Ranger: Blunt weapons (10) & Shotguns (6+)
4th Ranger: SMG (10)
1st NPC: Energy weapons (10) & Brawling (6)
2nd NPC: Handguns (10) & Energy weapons (6+)
3rd NPC: Handguns (10)

[deadsanta]

1. Even on your first playthrough, you should know that two areas are mutually exclusive and plan your ranger skills to accomodate one or the other. I actually prefer the outdoor/perception NPC since angela can get you to her and you need not put a single point into those skills with your main chars. Thus I take one route with that NPC in mind. The next keeper NPC is the CHA-locked one in a distant Village, so an aggregate group CHA of 21-22 is needed, but you can get that by equipping people with spiked collars and using temp CHA boost NPCs and items (which is much easier if you go to AG center. For this reason, I usually have a CHA 6-7 main character and then go for her with three high-CHA NPCs aalready in party. 2-3 spiked collars is all you should need.

2. mechanical repair is practically worthless, it and barter and animal whisper can be jettisoned without worry. I think I had 1 mech repair skill check in my entire game. In any case there are a couple mech repair NPCs you can get later.

3. I only ever needed one weapon skill per char, with the exception of adding an energy weapon skill to the shotgun/SMG type for when enemy armor really ramps up late game. Plenty of time for that though.

4. Use the rockets/good grenades to get you through tough encounters, any char can use them perfectly without missing, so don't worry about it.

5. Brawling is crazy good, make one guy with it. He can do brawl/harda$$/brute force and get by fine with a 4 int.

6. Your backup surgeon only needs skill 1-4 for most of game, s/he exists solely to rez your main surgeon.

7.There are late-game trinkets that give CI and a couple that do AP, usually a trade off, but understand that you might be able to get 3 CI by giving up 1 AP, and if you can get to 19 CI it might be worthwhile trading away AP for someone like a sniper or minigun user (anyone with a 7+ AP weapon might be better served with a high CI, debate continues...)

[ArchAngel]

Some of us don't savescum so this "guide" only works for those that do.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by deadsanta:

2. mechanical repair is practically worthless, it and barter and animal whisper can be jettisoned without worry. I think I had 1 mech repair skill check in my entire game.

That is only true if you save scum. If you don't you need high mechanical repair to fix the locks and tumblers you get a critical fail on from your locksmith/safecracker.

[deadsanta]

Originally posted by Gregorovitch:

Originally posted by deadsanta:

2. mechanical repair is practically worthless, it and barter and animal whisper can be jettisoned without worry. I think I had 1 mech repair skill check in my entire game.

That is only true if you save scum. If you don't you need high mechanical repair to fix the locks and tumblers you get a critical fail on from your locksmith/safecracker.

No you really don't, you just leave them until you get a locksmith level up or you break them with an explosive if its a safe, accept some broken gear if its a locker (which if you arent savescumming you'll be blowing up half the time from the attached bombs, so why bother wasting the points?

[Sentient_Toaster]

Originally posted by deadsanta:

No you really don't, you just leave them until you get a locksmith level up or you break them with an explosive if its a safe, accept some broken gear if its a locker (which if you arent savescumming you'll be blowing up half the time from the attached bombs, so why bother wasting the points?

There are very, very few traps that you can't easily handle at demolitions 10 (90+luck% is pretty common, and there are trinkets giving you as much as +3 demolitions, and at least one skill book for it, too -- it's one of the easiest skills to boost because of this).

Safecracking, computer, have some -very- hard checks. Demolitions are mostly easy.

[Patrick]

I have to agree with the others, a guide that is based on savescumming multiple times isn't really helpful.

[jammer_kelly]

Thanks Dominus. Being new to Wasteland I found your post very helpful. One item I would like to better probe however is your suggestion to spread skill points like lockpick, safecrack etc across multiple characters. If I understand it correectly, when I need to pick a lock I'd use whichever character has the highest skill for that, ie it is not cumulative across the squad like Charasma. So I'd think one would want to specialize those skills into single characters. What am I missing ?

[Papa Shekels]

I also had that question. Unless you intend to have frequent deaths in your squad, spreading out skils across multiple characters that you often need checks of 10 for does not make any sense to me. I am pretty far into the game and have only one character that has a 10 in the essential skills with boosts. My advice personally is to give everybody at least one point in surgeon - even the smallest kit will revive people, and having your only medic(s) go down in battle can mean game over in the long run. Especially if you are playing on SJ difficulty.

[jamesc70]

I'm only now going to Damonta on my new party, and my biggest tip would be :

Take only two skills per character when you start, with the majority of points going into the weapon skill of the character. On my Sniper - 4 sniper rifles, 2 lockpicking for example.

By level 10 or so, I had 7-8 in the main weapon skills for all characters. Sure I had to leave safes and other skill check items alone since my party did not have all the skills needed, but all my characters are in the high 90%'s to hit with good critical chance and they stomp everything (rarley ever miss).

I went high Awareness, and every third combat round I get two attacks. At level 20 (?) my characters had 4 skills; generally 8 weapon, 6 skill like lockpicking, and two skills with 3-4 in them. Taking high INT to start for skillpoints is a waste imo; I have many more levels to get, and can easily max the skills I have. I'll take the extra attack over being able to have 6 maxxed skills.

[Dorok]

Originally posted by jammer_kelly:

Thanks Dominus...

You shouldn't, set aware to 1 for your characters is a huge pointless burden.

Make a team character A aware 1, B aware 10, C aware 13, D aware 16. Play the game, then check the characters stats tab and see damages and number of kills and how it follows the aware stat. There's no arguing on that.

I won't advise high awareness for all your characters but aware 1 is stupid. Aware 10 is low but fair enough, 12 is ok, starting from 13 it's good aware, 16 very good, above will burden your character creation.

10AP is interesting but 11AP not that good, so it's also good to start with 9AP and at level 20 add 2 point in coordination for 10AP. INT 8 for all 4 characters is pointless, it's better do one INT 10, and one INT 4 than 2 INT 8.

Luck definitely seems pointless and that's the only point I agree with OP, otherwise OP see necessity where there's none.

EDIT: About skills go for one per SP gained at level up this including one weapon skill. INT 4 support only 3 skills, INT 8 is ok for 4 skills and INT 10 for 5 skills. Some skills will be pointless at low value when some other will be ok, so try spread those less demanding skills on multiple characters. And there's 3 recruits it's a lot, and count on them to support some skills. OP advice will require plenty scamloading with skills check at very low chance of success that is very boring play.