How do SPECIAL Stats affect Companions?

[Sneakimus]

How exactly do special stats affect companions, if at all?

I have searched around the web but I have found no solid answer to this question beyond simple guessing and speculation.

My questions include:

Does Strength affect melee damage for Companions?
Cait has a high perception. Does that affect her probability of hitting enemies with ranged weapons?
Does Endurance affect companion HP, or is it set in stone?

Would gifting Companions items with stat boosting effects have any sort of effect on them whatsoever?

And what on earth might Int, Lck and Cha ever do for my Companions?

Thanks for any help!

[Emmental]

As far as I can tell strength is the only special stat that matters to companions. It increases their carry weight and melee damage. The other special stats are there and can be improved with gear, but have no effect on their performance.

They do benefit from other special effects though like pockets will increase carry weight etc.

[Eminem]

on the topic of companions....I must say Fallout 4 has the best companion group of them all. Their voice actors are a dead match for their personality / looks. The UI to equip companions exactly what you want them to wear / use is a huge improvement from earlier releases as well.

[Sneakimus]

Originally posted by soge99:

on the topic of companions....I must say Fallout 4 has the best companion group of them all. Their voice actors are a dead match for their personality / looks. The UI to equip companions exactly what you want them to wear / use is a huge improvement from earlier releases as well.

From a roleplay and story perspective they have definitely improved, but they suck in terms of actual gameplay.

I miss the companion wheel of New Vegas. Being able to customize AI behavior was just so useful.

[Shadow The Innkeep]

Originally posted by Master:

How exactly do special stats affect companions, if at all?

I have searched around the web but I have found no solid answer to this question beyond simple guessing and speculation.

My questions include:

Does Strength affect melee damage for Companions?
Cait has a high perception. Does that affect her probability of hitting enemies with ranged weapons?
Does Endurance affect companion HP, or is it set in stone?

Would gifting Companions items with stat boosting effects have any sort of effect on them whatsoever?

And what on earth might Int, Lck and Cha ever do for my Companions?

Thanks for any help!

When it comes to your SPECIAL chart, only a few perks will influence your companions. I am pretty sure the only SPECIALs that directly affect companions are the two perks under Charisma tree that: perk 1) followers cannot harm you with their attacks aka grenades, mini nukes, missiles fired by your comapnions will not deal damage to you; per 2) your attacks will not damage your comanions aka any shot you fire at your ewnemies will not contribute to your companion taking a knee or sit down after taking enough damage. Also, you can double their carrying capacity via the third perk in Inspirational Leader.

Also, charisma affects you passing speech checks that in some cases have positive and negative reactions that result in the level of affinity of your companions depending on who you travelling with and what speech check is about.

If you are talking about SPECIALs of companions themselves, I am not sure. It's really hard to judge, and smth tells me AI doesn't quite know how to apply SPECIAL perks when it comes to followers, so they mostly are even-Steven in performance.
Therefore, I have observed the follwoing:
- Dogmeat has the highest lvl of sneak of all companions (rank 5) but I find Danse to be sneakier with only lvl 4 sneak.
- Garvey's Perseption is lvl 10 but he can't shoot for ♥♥♥♥ no matter what gun you give him. -
- Curie's stats are one of the worst, if not the worst, in the game of all vanilla companions yet people manage to make one Hell of a tank out of her (via Robot Station from Automatron DLC).
- Strong being Super Mutant goes down a lot faster than Danse (even when latter is not in Power Armor).
- Codsworth has 9 strength, but Danse (especially unmodded when his PA pieces are hidden from his inventory) seems to carry a whole lot more crap on his own, befre I have to play force games and make them pick stuff up one item at a time;
- Deacon with 10 AG can't sneak for ♥♥♥♥. etc etc

[Azrael]

Although it's kind of a necro, I'm affected by the very same question as the OP and can't find an answer to it and to be clear, since I saw a "grammar war" on a reddit thread about this question:

I'm talking about Companions and their own SPECIAL Stats, I know that my own SPECIAL Stats leave companions largely untouched.

I'd figure so far, since Companions don't level, don't buy or sell stuff or pass Speech Checks or do Crits, that +Intelligence, +Charisma and +Luck items are useless for companions.

However, what about Strength, Perception, Endurance and Agility?
Do companions, who get +x Strength items carry more and beat harder with melee weapons?
Do companions, who get extra Perception shoot more accurate?
Do they live longer when they get more Endurance?
And do they sneak better when they get +Agility?

[Chaosium]

Strength and Endurance definitely affect them.
Perception doesn't, their accuracy is exclusively determined by their combat style stats in the Creation Kit, and since there are no enemies who use sneak mode, their awareness remains the same
Couldn't say about Agility, but it probably works for them

[Zotliatlicor]

From the Wiki (and verified by me ofc)

* - As a synth, Curie's 670 health and ability to equip armor makes her by far the most durable companion, and the other companions will not catch up to her until the player character exceeds level 107.

Companions Health are hard coded. They will lvl with the player and gain more healt as you do. Equipping items with + to Endurance has NO effect at all.

SORRY THIS WAS WRONG - STR FROM ARMOUR INCREASES COMPANION CARRY WEIGHT!

Curie is hard coded with higer health as she lacks some resistances. As Nanny she be best on HP until other Companions are at lvl 49/50. As Synth she has most HP until player level 107. -(source: Wiki)

Carry Wight is also hard Coded for all Companions, NOT affected by STR increase, but affected by Armour enhancements like "Pocketed".

Most Companions are set to 150 Ibs Carry weight. Some Claim Preston has 165 and Nick has 141, (the wiki does..) but i have not verified this myself yet. Dogmeat has 150 in normal and is nerfed to 27 in Survival.

Strong is hard Coded with most carry weight at 270. Ada has even more but that is because she comes with pre-made Robot Pieces that increase Carry weight a lot. Her base is supposed to be 140 Ibs.

Survival nerfes Carry weight on Companions too. I couldnt find the scores, but Ada is the best Pack-Mule on Survival, as her Robot Legs are not nerfed but still fully active on Survival.

No Companion uses VATS. No Companion uses Action Points the way you do. So high or low Agility does not affect them.

Perception "should" work, but it is hard to verify. Most Companions are very poor in Combat. All Robot Companions shine vs all living one. Dogmeat is worst un-Perked and best if you choose all the Perks for him. Giving a Companion a better weapon to use will be vastly superior to boosting their Perception.

My Curie has the Spray and Pray. In a lot of fights i get no xp because she kills all enemies before i get even a single shot.

[deidian]

SPECIAL effects in companions are:

STR=> +10% melee damage and +10 carry weight per point added to their base value.

PER=> the same effect as with any other NPC. It affects their awareness, that is: higher PER they will have bigger range spotting other NPCs. It's useful to raise it if you shoot at mid-long range since you avoid the situation:

PC:[Bang...Bang...Bang]
Companion: "There's something nearby!!"[Moves around trying to spot...but doing nothing]
PC:[Bang...Bang...Bang]You must be genious mate, you can guess why I shoot. Now, why don't you join? Or you blind?[Bang...Bang...Bang]

AGI=> not sure but it might affect their overall noise factor when crouched same as with PC...thing is for stealth is way way more relevant the 'Sneak' perk, specially the lv4. The real game-changer for sneaking is only having Sneak Lv4, the rest is barely noticeable. Before lv4 Sneak gear weight makes a big difference tough...but since companions have Sneak Lv4 they will not be noticed by enemies unless they physically see them or if the companion fights, since even sneaking they will shoot repeatedly when engaged so eventually the enemies will figure out the companion position.

As for companion shooting accuracy it depends on the combat style as said in a previous post. All companions anyway have the same ranged accuracy modifier for their combat style(0.60) except Hancock(0.75) so he should be a bit more accurate than others.

For resistance purposes aside robots every companion that can step on a custom PA will become practically impossible to take down.

[Azrael]

Where do you have your information from? I couldn't find any info online on that topic and you're partly contradicting each other...

Because I'm going to give Hancock a set of Heavy Combat Armor, if Companion's SPECIAL Stats don't influence the companions at all.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by Azrael:

Where do you have your information from?

I would go with this:

Originally posted by Zotliatlicor:

From the Wiki (and verified by me ofc).

It also sounds like Z did a lot of comparisons and reach in the post.

The other poster, well seems more like guessing and quoting what the stats do for the player.

[Zotliatlicor]

I did a lot of testing. But i was wrong.

In the Trade window, companions will often not accept more stuff once they reach the limit, and upon equipping a Fortifying piece it was indeed so, until i simply clicked one more time. Then my Piper could get more stuff, equal to +1 STR.

So parts of my analyze was plain wrong. I have edited it in my post. Sry.

[Zotliatlicor]

And i hate beeing wrong but there it is....lol

[Bored Peon]

Well from everything I had heard over the years the only thing NPCs get from gear was resists.

Weapons were damage and some increased accuracy but for only certain mods.

[FINISH HIM!!]

From what I can gather, the only stat that really matters is strength, which is clear when you give strong a super sledge compared to cait. Aside from that, perception might make them more aware but realistically from my experience it is up to the player to notice stuff better than the AI, the AI has no action points or VATS, and their health is not determining by endurance, they can’t level, they don’t have speech checks, and the only stealth differences are Curie since she is bugged and Strong who actually can’t sneak.

[Iron Knights]

I seem to notice that giving Codsworth perks like Rifleman and Commando sharpened his accuracy some. Going to experiment more with SPECIAL too.
I keep giving companions Legendary Armor with Ability bonuses on them.