Explosives

[Madballista]

Anyone every tried playing a hhaaaaaaaarrdddcore grenade/mine character?

 

Seems interesting, although having a companion would not be viable at all! Would be fun though haa! :biggrin:

[Kellao]

Anyone every tried playing a hhaaaaaaaarrdddcore grenade/mine character?

 

Seems interesting, although having a companion would not be viable at all! Would be fun though haa! :biggrin:

 

already have been. I play my character Barnaby who is an engineer and pyrotechnic. He uses strictly grenades land mines and sneak for battle. he also likes makeing bombs and is an excellent repair man. he also always carries a Rock-It launcher just incase he runs out of explosives.

[thegord]

Other than mining for anticipated spawns (like before talking to Sydney) and the occasional pants explosion, I was never able to see much of a practical use for landmines in Fallout 3. There are few opportunities for sneaking up close enough to drop a mine outdoors, and when indoors it's usually much more fast and efficient to simply whip out the Combat Shotgun and pop a few shells into the cranium of whatever it is that needs to die.

[xm20k]

There is a mod on here somewere that lets you throw landminds like grenades. They retain thier proxcimity function but hve no delay, so they explode when you toss them at enimies.

 

If you realy want to have an explosives only character look it up and give it a try.

[WrathOfDeadguy]

Mines are best used indoors. Grenades are best used outdoors. It sucks to have a fast melee enemy pathfind around your bottlecap mine on open terrain, and it also sucks to have your Nuka-Grenade bounce off a collision box and come right back at you in a tight space with nowhere to run. Even worse is when you VATS a grenade and it bounces, it gives you a slow-mo of the silly thing rolling right under your crotch, then dumps you back to realtime an instant before detonation. Ouch!

 

Grenades are, on the whole, much more useful than landmines... but landmines are positively brilliant for clearing out buildings. A combat shotgun can eat up any enemy in seconds, but it can't instagib four at a time and splatter them all over the walls. Sure, the shotgun is more useful, but it isn't as much fun as making Instamash out of your enemies with high explosives.

 

There's also a mod which allows players to use explosives to open locks... that adds another use to the skill, and a much needed one.

[thegord]

but it can't instagib four at a time

 

Nor can your standard landmine, unless you're specifically specializing in explosives and your enemy is fairly low-level. Bottlecap mines are much better, of course, but I still find the general procedure for mine kills to be patently retarded: place mine, do the "peekaboo" thing, then run and hope: hope that you're able to clear the blast radius before your newfound friend sets the mine off, hope the enemy doesn't simply run right past the mine before it blows, and hope that it either cripples them or kills them outright so you have time to whip out the shotgun if need be.

 

It's my opinion that Bethesda primarily intended mines to be simply obstacles for the player and didn't really give any thought to them past that - the mechanics for efficient (and immersive) offensive mine-laying just are not there. If NPCs had longer patrol paths one might be able to get some better use out of them, but most indoor enemies simply sandbox around their general area or patrol short paths (fifty feet or less).

 

What I'd really like to have seen is more (well, any) opportunities to use mines as a defensive measure; some sort of scripted "we just got word from our scout(s) that a large group of [raiders, Enclave, whatever] are approaching the [camp, base, whatever]; if they keep to their current course, they'll be here within three minutes" thing wherein the player can go out and preplace mines in anticipation. Besides providing an actual use for the 3,500 landmines one is apt to accumulate by the midway point of the game, it would be just plain badass - and provide replayability - to have regular attacks on settlements.

 

I dunno. Beth could have done so much more with mines, but I guess it just wasn't a priority.

 

Grenades are best used outdoors.

 

I've been using a double radius for explosives mod this playthrough, which has made explosives in general much more useful, but has also brought to attention a couple of annoying discrepancies.

 

For one, the Mini Nuke has a ridiculously small radius for what it is: MMM Increased Increased Spawns gave me six Big Guns Super Mutants at a T-intersection in the Dry Sewer, with me at the bottom and them around the corner to the right. I couldn't think of any good way to dispatch them at Level 9 other than with the Fat Man I'd conveniently found earlier, so I charged around the corner to the left, turned, and lobbed a nuke before they could spin up their miniguns from a distance of maybe forty feet (remember, double explosion radius mod), expecting to either be gibbed to pieces or wake up in five minutes with three bars of health and crippled everything, but nope - *FOOM* go the Mutants, and me without a scratch watching meat chunks rain down on me and wondering if I somehow had God Mode toggled on or something.

 

The other is that explosion radius is not affected by physical objects or barriers whatsoever, which puts a downer on the double-radius mod in some situations: I can toss a grenade, duck around a corner or back through a doorway and still be seriously wounded, and on several occasions I've fired into cars and been almost killed by the explosion despite being behind substantial barriers; one from about sixty feet away ducking and covering below a ten-foot-high embankment (the Super Mutant camp near Rivet City) and one from behind an entire building (the Super Mutant-infested building shell south of Dukov's; one of my lobbed grenades set off the car just behind the shell, which then exploded after I'd ducked back around the corner of the intact building to the left of the shell, damn near killed me and blew Cherry's newly-minted corpse ten yards out into the Potomac).

 

So, obviously explosives in general weren't a focus point for Bethesda...

[SangRahl]

For the guys who REALLY want to blow everything to hell... 'Explosive Explosives'.

 

Litter the ground with UNARMED Landmines, or maybe even a Mini Nuke... Let the NPC's path over them.... And snipe with something silent, say a WMK-modified Suppressed Sniper or Suppressed/Scoped Hunting Rifle.

*chk**BOOM*

 

DLC Spoiler:

I knew that the Outcasts were going to turn on me, so I just left a few piles of Frag Mines behind the rear-most guards, and when Defender Sibley finished hiw spiel, I just blasted the mines and was left with only Sibley and his Gatling Laser to deal with...

 

 

Best part is... NPC's won't pick up Landmines, as they aren't made to actually USE them, so you can be strategic in your placement.

 

Now, of only there were a way to chuck them a yard or two... then you could REALLY have fun.

 

One of my next characters will likely be Unarmed/Melee (will pick one, or the other... just unsure which) & Explosives based. Use the booms to soften them up, and whatever's handy to clean up the stragglers.

[BadlyDrawnRhino]

There is a mod on here somewere that lets you throw landminds like grenades. They retain thier proxcimity function but hve no delay, so they explode when you toss them at enimies.

 

If you realy want to have an explosives only character look it up and give it a try.

I don't suppose you or anyone else could give me the name of that mod. I already know of one to allow me to fill up empty soda bottles with Nuka Cola Quantum to be able to make practically unlimited amount of Nuka Grenades, but being able to throw some Bottlecap Mines into the mix would be a nice touch as well.

[frankc]

Anyone every tried playing a hhaaaaaaaarrdddcore grenade/mine character?

 

It's not efficient, but it is fun :)

 

The only use I've really found for grenades is to "herd" enemies back for a few seconds to get some breathing room. The AI for most creatures seems to be ridiculously aware of grenades. Herding doesn't work well with a companion, because the stupid little twats will chase the enemy right into the big old mess you were trying to avoid.

 

The other bummer is that explosives tend to toss loot all over over the place, making it so you might wind up missing stuff because it got blown under a wall.

 

The best part about explosives characters is that sentry bots become so much easier to deal with. Sentry bots don't run from pulse grenades and will happily run right over pulse mines, and pulse explosives don't deal much damage to non-robots (a little concussion damage I think) so they are fairly companion friendly.

[Sarpedon]

I tried one, she's a lot of fun, but I found it necessary to give her a high melee skill as a back-up.

 

Now, has anyone noticed if people sitting down are immune to grenades? I once was sneaking through hamilton's hideout, saw the two raiders sitting at the table, threw a grenade right between them, only to find that they were unhurt!!