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Roight. Had him on all the dozens of runs I did in this game. First time I played and waltzed into Heidi's Hideaway, I curled up under my bloody desk laughing my butt off and I still giggle. "Rangers. you can leave me here. I found my retirement home!"
He's basically an octogenerian raider still trying to act SO hard, it's friggin hysterical, espcially on first play. Just too bad the "canon ending" prevented them bringing him back in Wasteland 3 like Scotchmo, might have been an actual incentive to play that c*** game.
Both times it was from the first random encounter in Cali against the CotC, and was the fight where Vax got permanently destroyed. But the one time I got a Plasma Hammer, and the second time I got a Proton Axe.
So if you're like me and believe that encounter WILL happen, and WILL get you the weapon you want, if you savescum enough for it, you can take either one.
Of course at time of character creation, there's also the option of making 4 original rangers with high enough Int that you can take BOTH of them, Chisel and Tak, as permanent team members. Then you have TWO strong, dumb guys.
The way I see it, NPCs come and go at different times, and thus probably cannot be relied upon to make all of the important skill checks throughout the course of the full game. As such, I think there's some merit in the idea of making four OG rangers with Int of like 8 each and letting them handle like ALL of the necessary non-combat skills. Then you can grab Tak and Chisel, let them carry all the heavy stuff, and maybe give them two combat skills each, one melee, one ranged. Maybe one of them can switch to Energy Weapons for the robot fights, and maybe the other has the Heavy machine gun, which let's face it, you don't want to shoot ALL the time, like not in easy random encounters at Waste Wolves and lizards, etc.
As for giving your core rangers high intelligence, I'd go all out with that if not for the high hidden charisma quotas needed to recruit certain companions like Gary Wolfe. I think it works whether you give your rangers 8 or more intel at the start if you decide to forego such companions and their charisma quota check. Most core rangers would also need at least 6 awareness at the start and increase it by one later on where possible to have decent initiative.
If you don't wish to forego certain companions due to the charisma quota check, the recommended starting intel is 6 unless you need to trade off to meet the charisma quota, but no lower than 4 and should be upgraded to 6 asap. Rangers that score kills more efficiently due to long range (sniper) or high firepower (heavy weapons) can afford to have 4-5 intel at the start. That's because their high kill rate can compensate for the lower intel until such time when I can upgrade it to 6. Again, all these assuming you don't wish to forego the charisma check.
CHARISMA: Assume one of the four "core rangers" in just about every team has decent CHA for Leadership, and assume you have 7 spiked collars at that point in the game. Even Gary, who is the most picky about it (25 or 26 CHA requirement I think) should not be a problem. And if so, you could always gulp the sriracha (+2) and eat them melons (+1), if split over the party thats +5 CHA on top.
SKILLS: The skill that nets you the most XP over the course of the entire game is lockpick, there are waaay more locks than anything else. Demolition and safecrack are about the same in second place; assuming you clear all minefields/traps, demo might even net some more in total.
And also there is Outdoorsman, which can quickly rack up loads of XP in the second half of the game; skipping an encounter with CoTC or God's Militia will net about 50XP each time, so if you run around for an hour, skip a dozen encounters...well do the math. However, only the ranger with the highest Outdoors score gets the XP. Still pretty good for a low-CHA ranger who gains XP slowly.
XP: I really don't recall how that worked in the original game, but in the DC version, only skill use nets XP for individual rangers; all party members gain the same base amount of combat XP, no one gets anything extra for kills, if I am not totally mistaken. The onyl difference is the multiplier from CHA, that applies to all XP-gains.
But ultimately, everybody needs to figure what to make of it and how they like to play. Those are just my 5 cents after hundreds of hours playing this game and min-maxing characters.
Yuki and Chisel can actually level up decently fast in their primary skills (explosives and brute force) despite their low intel. The trick is to reserve shrines within maps for them to gain extra SPs, unlike shrines in the wasteland that don't benefit companions. So you'll want to click on shrines within maps only when they are in the squad. And if you use them only for their primary skills, they can level up these skills pretty fast when used together with the shrine bonuses.
Spike collars help but how many you get aren't guaranteed. It all depends on your loot RNG. That's why buffering some extra charisma at the start still helps instead of leaving everything to chance.
My understanding of how XP works is that the number of kills should matter. Feel free to correct me if that isn't so. Killing enemies with your proficiency weapon IS using a weapon skill and if that doesn't give you extra XP, then it should be fixed. I'm also pretty certain that all rangers get different amounts of XPs at the end of the battle because I see the green XP numbers are often different for different rangers. Whether this is due to intel level, number of kills or both and how much each contributes to the XP pool after battles isn't clear afaik.
i'm not being facetious, i legit am curious,
i never made it to the endgame.
i just know that early game, sniper uses 30-06 and then later i assume she uses 7.62.
i guess you're making a build that utilizes both sniper rifle and energy weapkons? or is there an endgame sniper rifle that uses energy?
as for OP question : chisel or tanuki. i dunno. i never take takuki because one of my custom rangers is always bladed + demolition. i just have this thing for bladed weapons. i always make someone bladed weapons melee in every rpg if it lets me.
as for bladed vs blunt . . .every thing i have read regarding this game claims that bladed has better armor pen, but then other sources say blunt is still better and i don't know why. maybe it's a better stun chance? i dunno.
but i also made my blader have brute force which has perks and you can get +15% stun chance if you take all 3.
i suspect both of thise guys with their 2 INT are gonna be severely stunted in their skill progression if you're attempting to do more than 2-3 skills on them.
my current run, my bladed is doing blade, brute, demo, hardass. at level 22, i have 7 on all of them. i should be able to max them by the mid 30's 4 INT and delayed gratification perk of which honestly i might have preferred the +2 armor quirk, but then yeah +30 skill points at level 50 is nothing to sneeze at, but then i suspect i won't "need" those.
on the subject of stats,
for a melee, from what i was reading is that the most important stats are speed, awareness, and some strength, and then enough coordination to hit a "sweet spot" for AP, but speed is more valuable than strength, for the movement bonuses from combat speed
i do know that combat speed affects the number of AP you spend per square you move,
what i'm confused about is why they decided to balance it such that a combat speed of 1.0 i poses a cost costs 2 AP per square oved.
one would think that the "base" to balance the entire thing around is a score of 1.0 and that a 1.0 ought to be 1 ap per square, no more no less and then less that that increases the cost while higer lowers it.
why would that put the "base" at 2 per square?
with bladed, i have a combat knife that with a weapon mod uses 2 AP per hit and i have 10 AP, but the knife does less damage than my hatchet which uses 3, but it also has a higher crit chance, knife is 12 dmg/ap while hatchet is 14, but knife can be swung 5 times while hatchet can only be 3 times.
i never tried blunt, the higher ap cost always turned me off.
i never comsidered taking either of these guys, because of their low INT and their melee focus as well as their unoptimized stat spread.
i figure if you're gonna do melee, do it right, and i suspect i'm not optimized either, lol. my melee kinda just runs around poking at things doing low damage and soaking up hits but not really all that well, because i didn't take the armor quirk
edit : the 2 AP per square movement thing came up, because i made 3 of my custom rangers have brittle bones and they all have 1.0 movement speed as a result and they all cost 2 ap per square to move and i'm like wtf. . unless maybe there's a rounding error somewhere and the 1.0 is actually .96 or something and is imposing an exta -1 ap on the first square of movement which is really messing up my positioning. the sniper and the assault don't relaly need to move much, but my leadership with handguns is suffering. i can fix it sort of, if i take tinkerer, but yeah, annoying
I can't comment on melee builds since I prefer ranged combat but I don't rule out their use since it saves ammo. Except for my heavy who also has blunt weapons proficiency, I guess why I don't have other melee rangers is because I want to reserve the SPs for energy weapons. Of course, those points are not immediately available at the start, but they will come in later. I won't say you can't go with melee because you can make them work for you. The blunt rebar staff that I dug up from the abandoned railway map is insanely powerful for the early to mid game.
All I can say is that whatever your build choices, intel is king. The only reason why I don't give my rangers 8 or more intel at the start is because I want to allocate enough charisma points to get Gary Wolfe. This is just a personal preference and doesn't stop you from going with strong melee builds.
You could mod them to lower the AP cost to 4 or 3.
And even if you don't like the min-max approach, you need to max the skills that let you go places and loot stuff fast , since LA is pretty unforgiving and about half the skill checks over there require a 10 for your rangers to even attempt it. Thus, I'd say INT is the one Attribute you should push to the number you want it at right from the start.
Sniper vs Energy: Energy weapons have high AP cost without adequate damage and never crit. Nuff said. The only REALLY viable energy weapon in the whole game is that thing that Mercaptain doles out in exchange for the toaster uranium. Even the best tier 6.2 E-weapons in LA don't come close to that thing. And it eats Slicer-dicers with 2-3 burst attacks (which are by the way quite rare, only one outside Damonta is the bunch in the old railyard).
In the second half of the game though, top-tier AR & Sniper damage is waaay superior to any energy damage. With armor pen 8 or 9, you can even one-shot the generic wobots you meet in LA.
CHA: Dump-stat on most my rangers. Spiked collars are common enough to collect a bunch without a hassle before you get back from Silo 7. And iffen you're still lacking at that point, go back to Ranger Citadel before you re-enter CoT, put Ralphy in the party and slap on the melons or the Sriracha to get Wolf.
Blunt vs Bladed: In my experince, Chisel regularly cracks the 350-mark when he crits with a top-tier hammer, Takayuki rarely goes over 300 with his top-tier axe crits. Blades are usually 1 point cheaper AP-wise though. So in terms of raw damage, blunts win, but I guess it really depends on personal preference. Just like the question wether to bring along Yuki or Chisel, that kicked this whole thing off :)