Does anyone use automatic weapons?

[infamousxiii]

I love the damage on the automatic weapons. That being said, they chew through so much ammo so fast! Does anyone here play with Automatics? How do you stay stocked on ammo? Even with the scrounger perks, it looks really rough to do without outright cheating with the console.

[Jeesmies]

The trick is to have many guns and buy out all the ammo for them and if it's not enough grab the machete. And if you clear the warehouses in goodneighbor with melee you get a ton of ammo from the gangsters

Edited January 18, 2016 by Jeesmies

[Moraelin]

Well, I'm mostly a melee guy, if anyone couldn't tell from my making dozens of melee weapons from rapiers to halberds for FO3 and NV, but I've played with automatics.

 

Essentially the trick is to

 

A) carry a weapon for more than a caliber

 

B) have a pimped out .38, since a LOT of ammo drops for that caliber. And .45 is good too

 

C) take the perks for automatics, or generally whatever weapons you use. If you do twice the damage per shot, considering how armor works, you need about a third of the ammo to take an armoured opponent down. Or so.

 

D) pimp out your weapon. What a lot of people still don't seem to realize -- at least judging by some LP-ers -- is that you don't need to be able to craft weapon mods to have those mods. You find a weapon with, say, a better barrel, you replace it with a normal barrel and put the new barrel on your old favourite weapon of that type. Concentrate the best mods you find into one weapon per type. (Again, don't underestimate how much that can cut down on ammo use. And stimpack use.)

 

E) have a working economy to make caps, which then you can trade for ammo. E.g., you'd be surprised how much you can get for water, if you build a lot of purifiers.

 

F) the Scrounger perk helps a lot. Like in FO3 and NV, not only it affects ammo you find in desks and crates and whatever -- which actually is a LOT of ammo at the highest perk level -- but also what ammo the vendors have to sell.

 

G) well, don't be affraid to carry a semi-auto around too, for when you run out of ammo for the automatics. Most pistols are lightweight and can get the job done.

 

H) stealth and suppressors can let you open the fight with a lot of damage for relatively little ammo use, if you can squeeze that too into your build

 

I) use crits for powerful opponents, and/or

 

J) well, you could also try my Old Style Critical mod, which lets some of your bullets randomly do critical hits in and out of VATS, like in all the other Fallout games. More useful if you have SOME points in luck, obviously.

 

The last one will probably do the least to cut down your ammo use, but, eh, it helps a bit.

[oldspice2625]

The most important part, emphasizing on Moraelin's post, is the Working Economy part.

 

You have have HAVE to have at least a handful of settlements to do this. The game was designed thinking that everyone would love settlement building, and the game was designed around it unfortunately (one faction devoted to it should be glaring evidence).

 

You're in luck though, the first settlement you get is one of the best ones. Maybe not by looks, but certainly by utility and all the free scrap you get.

 

I would do this: make sanctuary into a water-farm buy building industrial grade water purifiers (i'm a cheating bastard, so I used TGM to build whatever I wanted anyways). You can easily have about 300 purified water per day, that's a crap ton of caps.

 

Ballistic ammo is cheaper than energy ammo by far (base value of 2mm carts is like 24 caps PER round, and plasma carts are like 22 per cap... that's with crap Charisma and no barter skills).

 

I would advise getting Caps Collector, because it gives a staggering 33 percent reduction in prices, or something near that value, which is HUGE. The Barter Bobblehead is easy very easy to get, you don't even have to get into combat or finish the quest that's in the location for it to get it, and offers 10 percent discounts on buying and an increase in value for selling. Tales of a Junktown Jerky Vendor give price reductions and selling bonuses as well, and are very easy to find, I have three that are in very new locations with easy enemies.

 

PUrified water is much heavier than Mutfruit (with a very low weight for crops, and the most value of all the crops available, by far the most profit for weight ratio), but is much more valuable, you can do both in Sanctuary. The best part is, Mutfruit is always essential for adhesive for the veggy starch, so you need it anyways.

 

I would dedicate your first settlements to mutfruit plantations, and you can fit about 3 or so industrial water purifiers in Starlight Drive In. Nordhagen Beach is the one where you should build as many purifiers as humanly possible, I have over 900 water produced there, and have a huge bonus (although I exploited the workshop space thing to have enough turrets).

 

Settling up the settlements should be bare bones. I throw down one prefab large wood shack, throw down sleeping bags, and get working on the mutfruit, turrets, and purifiers. It takes about 15 minutes to get a settlement decked out, and then you go on with your business.

 

You should build all the stores when you have the Local Leader lvl 2 perk for spending change as well, I usually get about 300 caps per settlement and I have about 20 settlements, that's not even counting the fact that my purified water nets met about 35k caps just by going to each settlement and collecting from the workshop, and about 15k caps from mutfruit.

 

That' can be harvested about each day or so in game.

 

That's how I got 4k ammo in every energy weapon in game, and I assume it'll be easier for ballistics.

 

Working economy is SO critical in this game because without it, you cannot, I repeat CANNOT afford to use automatics in any efficient manner. It's just too cost inefficient because weapons and armor, especially without barter/charisma boosts is so pathetic you can hardly afford to buy all the ammo for just one caliber type. You get such pitiful PITIFUL (if you look how much they sell your stuff for that you sold them) return on big guns like miniguns, fatmans, missile launchers, mininukes, etc... without barter and charisma boosts.

 

The Charisma bobble is kind of involved to get, but it's not HARD to get it, just tedious.

 

Always use Grape Mentats, and buy all the mentats you can get, orange and berry ones are really useful too, but grape gives, on top of all your other bonuses, 10 percent for buying and selling, like having another Barter Bobble on you. That means picking up all the hubflowers and whiskey you see as well to make them.

[Moraelin]

Well, to be fair, you don't HAVE to build a lot of settlements, so I'm not sure the game was built based on that assumption.

 

There's a bit of a tradeoff there. If you build less settlements, you get less fruit to sell, yes, but you also don't need as much stuff to protect them and stuff. Basically you can just focus on hauling the valuable stuff, like weapons and stuff to vendors.

 

Also, considering how much water space you have in Sanctuary hills, you don't really need much more settlements to have more water than you can sell. You can build insane numbers of purifiers there if you want to.

 

So basically, yes, there is a return on investment for making more settlements and shops and stuff, but you can do well enough with just Sanctuary Hills too.

 

Or you can go somewhere in between, and focus just on the places with lots of water. Sanctuary, Taffington, the lighthouse, Egret Tours Marina, stuff like that. If you can bear to do First Step too, although that one doesn't directly give you lots of water, you'll then get the Castle which has an INSANE amount of water around, all crafting stations pre-built, a pre-built shop, and an underground place where nobody else ever goes to store your power armour collection.

 

You can have a lot of water and even enough stores for a steady income with a small and manageable number of locations, basically.

[Jeesmies]

Hmm I haven't realy built a single settlement yet except for the mistake in my first playthrough when I went to finish the quest at sanctuary... :D Sorry I just read your statement bout economy and stuff but its false since I blast automatics all day and I dont even know what economy means

Edited January 18, 2016 by Jeesmies

[oldspice2625]

Well, when you play on Survival, you can't expect to earn enough money to have a deep supply of ammo on you at all times. I have invested a significant amount of time into the game, and the conclusion that I have come across, is that you probably mean .38 ammo, which, yes, even I have over 700 ammo for that caliber, but the pipe pistols suck ass against anything that's not a trash mob, they just do compared to their high damage upgraded counterparts.

 

There'rs no way that by JUST scavenging alone you can have enough .308 or 5.56 or .45 caliber ammo to consistently be comfortable with exploring an entire "dungeon" with it... I find that really hard to believe, since enemies become bullet sponges at that difficulty, and you simply don't, unless you maxxed out scrounger and have a high luck, find that much 5.56 or .308 ammo (I rechambered my guns so that the combat rifle uses .308 and the HRifle uses .50 cal)

 

Maybe very late game you'll have more opportunities, but the point is, without a working economy, you won't have a steady supply of ammo. You'd have to spend all of your time picking things clean instead of, with a much easier once set up way, go round your settlements once, pop a grape mentats, then have so much ammo you're good for the next three missions. You can't do that and have enough ammo like the OP wants with your method of only scavenging.

 

I really find that hard to believe and dubious at best.

[oldspice2625]

Oh yeah, and Moraelin, I was thinking maybe like three or four settlements ;P.

 

You don't need to overkill it like I do and get nearly all of them, since I use the exp for leveling early on.

 

You're right, you don't NEED settlements, you're not forced to, but it's abundantly clear that the game WANTS you to have at least some, like four or so if you follow the MM questline, which most will do first playthrough, and just assume that's what you should do.

 

So you are right (as usual :P) that you don't NEED them, but on difficulties higher than normal, they make things much more managable, especially when you have enough settlements where you can have dedicated scavengers to get enough drugs, stimpaks, raw materials to do things legit and not be a cheating (settlements only) bastard like myself. Otherwise, you will be going at a MUCH slower pace because you won't have a steady source of resources, income, and such to support the needs.

[Jeesmies]

Excuseme, for a moment I thought we were playing the same game. :D

[Moraelin]

Well, I think the cheating part is what skews the impression. Now I won't tell anyone not to cheat, since, well, it's none of my business how someone plays a single player game. But it can skew the balance.

 

If settlements don't cost you anything, well, then of course you're only seeing the positives. Sure, they're totally worth it if they cost you nothing. And I can see how you'd see the game as totally rewarding that.

 

The balance between building and not building is however precisely in hunting down all those materials and such. The balancing factor there is really that it takes a lot of effort and time before you actually see a return on investment. That's how balance works: to get X you must do effort Y. When the several things A, B or C you could get with the same effort D are of roughly equal value, well, that's when the game is balanced.

 

Of course, if you can get one of them for free, then that's totally more worth it than the others you still need to do an effort for. Equally, if you just cheated the money, then buying all ammo and shipments everywhere would start to look so much more rewarding that obviously Beth must have intended you to play that way. Or if you cheat the carry weight, then just hauling every single weapon and armour piece to the vendors starts to look like the most rewarding thing in the game. Or if you cheated to get a weapon that uses no ammo (like my old FO3 and NV blasters), then WTH, automatics are easily THE best thing ever. Etc.

 

Basically, again, I'm not telling you to cheat or not cheat. Hell, I've even made cheat mods. But, well, I'd caution against judging what you were meant to do or what works best based on a cheated game. You might possibly get a skewed impression.