California or Bust! Anyone else?

[Tex_Recoil]

Doing the California part of the game. Is it me or did I just go broke coming here? Seems that none of the encouters are dropping anything worth scrape. Just killed a group of Children of New Citadel and all they dropped were photos of the moon landing! Worth $2 each, got a total of $20 out of that encounter and prolly spent $600 for the fight. Not one weapon, bullet, healing item... The robot encounters, arent even worth fighting as the Bots drop nothing for me. Thought my first encounter with a huge robot would have at least given me something in scrap off its dead body, yet that disappears when blowing up.. Plus everything costing way too much and I have a member on my team with Barter Lvl 10.. This part of the game is just not even close to balanced on the cost of fighting a encounter and Reward. Currently have less than 100 scape to my rangers name, Started the California part with at about 25k... anyone else having this problem?

[Gillsing]

I've barely started the California part of the game, but I spent 20k+ at Holliday's store, buying 7.62 mm and Sabot Rockets at half price. It'll be quite a while until I'll have to buy any ammo for my Rangers, so I won't be relying on loot from my fallen foes.

[SnapSlav]

S***, forgot about the Holliday sale. (Pun intended, sorry.)

But no, I can't say I'm having ANY issues with the California part of the game. The CotC haven't posed much of a threat (for Seasoned difficulty) and my team could be much, MUCH stronger, so it's not because my team is OP or anything. My first encounter with the CotC (excluding Cerritos) they dropped SEVERAL weapons, and some ammo, in addition to their random junk, and the Cerritos crew also dropped a couple weapons for me to pawn off.

I left Arizona with well over 80k scrap, and I went on an unhinged spending spree to gather as much of the end-game ammo as I could when the good shops showed up in California, and I STILL have over 80k in scrap! I haven't ever been wanting for items all game long, California or not.

Chances are you're just unlucky with the drops, and it sounds like you haven't planned ahead, so those two things can compound each other to make the game a little rough for you. That and it sounds like you're getting whooped in combat, which again strikes me as either bad luck or poor planning. $600 per encounter? Eliminating robots, meson cannons, squads of CotC, only ever cost me a couple dozen bullets... and I have hundreds of each. =/

My advice would be to just start save-scumming as you play, before you open loot, before you run into random encounters, etc, and in very short order you will amass the things you need to keep you going. Good ammo, weapons to pawn (or break down for REALLY good mods), etc.