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If you haven't played Fallout II I have some first playthrough tips, mostly about Character Creation and some gotchas that might catch new players by surprise.

• Make sure you tag a weapon skill at character creation. You can play through and complete the game using speech or stealth, but it can be much trickier than a combat playthrough. The small guns skill is a solid choice to start with as while heavy and energy weapons are very powerful they don't come in to their own until mid-late game. Throwing is viable if you want to spend the game nailing people in the head with rocks and throwing knives while tossing grenades and other explosives with pin-point precision. It can be tricky as you're relying on consumable weapons. Melee is very good early game but can fall off somewhat later due to lack of late game weapon options. You wouldn't think unarmed would be viable in a game where you're fighting people with guns wearing armor or weird mutants, but it is. It takes a while to come fully online. But when it does... dear god. Note: If you hit someone hard enough they will fly backwards. And keep flying backwards. Sometimes for a very long time. It is possible to semi-soft-lock your game because you punched someone so hard that they went flying and didn't stop until they hit the pacific. The turn won't advance until they stop moving. Worth keeping in mind, but unarmed is still very fun.

• Speech is a very powerful skill and well worth tagging. You can talk your way in to and out of all kinds of trouble. Cha is a good stat for the same reason.

• First Aid is another skill that is very useful. It makes stimpacks more effective and allows you to heal minor damage without using stimmies.

• There really aren't any "bad" skills. They all do cool things and come in handy in the most unexpected places. Steal, traps, science, and repair aren't always as applicable as shooting people, but they come in handy pretty often and can open up really interesting, unexpected routes and options

• All of the stats are important. If you want to optimize in to one think carefully about what stat or stats you want to dump. Strength is required for many heavy weapons and brute force stat checks. Perception is vital for ranged combat and spotting traps, as well as sequence. Endurance makes you harder to kill. Charisma is very important if you're using speech and seduction. Your maximum party size is your Cha/2. Intelligence is important for all kinds of science related interactions, taking advantage of corner cases and details, and so forth. It also effects how many skill points you gain per level. Agility strongly influences how fast you can move and how much you can do in a combat round. And dumping Luck can be bad if you go too low - It influences your critical chance, including both critical success and critical failures. There's an entirely viable build based on maxxing your luck stat, taking some related perks, and just walking through the world as a blessed fool while your enemy's guns jam or explode in their hands, they drop grenades at their feet, and you just stumble across wealth and good fortune.

• Action points and sequence are very important in combat - You spend action points to take actions, and more actions means more damage output, better positioning, better healing. Targeted shooting is important for a lot of builds and taking aimed shots, especially with sniper rifles and other specialist weapons, takes a lot of AP. There are numerous perks to increase your AP or reduce the AP cost of actions. Sequence determines what order your turn is in combat, and how often your turn comes up. With a high enough sequence you can even get more than one turn for each enemy turn as you blitz around the map like an anime protagonist. If you end your turn with unspent AP points they get added to one of your defense stats, which can be helpful in some circumstances. Both are very important for melee and unarmed characters.

• Outdoorsman skill influences how often you have random encounters, what kind of random encounters you have, and the resolution of certain travel and survival related random events. At a high enough level you'll start being able to spot enemy parties before they spot you and choose whether to engage or evade the encounter all together.

• First Aid is for healing small amounts of HP. You can heal more HP with a first aid kit. I believe you can do this three times a day. It's not a lot of healing but it's good for topping off after minor encounters and you'll save a lot of cash on stimpacks over time. The Doctor skill is for healing major injuries - Crippled limbs, head wounds, and so forth. Serious injuries cause serious problems. A crippled leg will greatly limit your movement speed. A crippled arm with prevent you from using two handed weapons.

• Steal lets you steal stuff. You can take items left in the open. You can also pick-pocket items off people. And you can reverse pick pocket items to put them in another character's inventory. This has some interesting applications

• All the traits are viable. Pay attention to the drawbacks, though, as some of them will seriously effect your playstyle.

• Save Early, Save Often. The early game especially can be brutal as you have low health and defense and some enemies are pretty mean. The random encounter lists for a given region are fixed. If you go in the "Wrong" direction you'll probably get creamed by encounters you're not prepared for. This can be a good way to figure out where to go next if you're stumped - try different directions until you get OHK'd by something, then go the opposite direction. Keep in mind that you'll occasionally get ambushed if you choose certain dialogue options, so it's a good idea to save before engaging in dialogues that seem important.

• Your actions have consequences. The Karma and Reputation systems are much more developed than in later games. Different settlements track your reputation separately. This can effect barter prices, how people respond to your requests, and even whether people will defend you in a fight. There are some actions that will cause permanent consequences. This isn't a game where you can re-spec or weasel your way out of the consequences of important decisions.

• The game has companions and they're reasonably in depth for the era - They each have their own skills and abilities. They have a morality system where they'll be impressed or disgusted by the actions you take. You can adjust their equipment within certain limits. The game has perma-death and no rezzing.

• Awareness is a perk that becomes available early on if you have 5 perception. I think it's well suited for a first playthrough - It allows you to look at a character and determine their current HP, what weapon they have equipped, and how much ammo is in the weapon. This can be very helpful for prioritizing targets in combat or deciding how bad-ass someone is before you decide to punch them in the face.

• There are unique dialogue options if you have 1 intelligence. Probably not a first play through thing, but something to keep in mind.

• You have three defense stats - Armor Class, Damage Threshold, and Damage Resistance. Armor Class determines how hard it is to land a successful hit on you. Higher Ac - Harder to hit. Damage Threshold is an armor stat. An attack has to equal or exceed the damage threshold to deal damage. This means that with the right armor or perks you can straight up ignore small caliber gunfire, glancing hits, or weak punches. The final stat is damage resistance. Damage Resistance reduces the damage you take by a percentage. I believe armor has different resistance values for different damage types - guns, energy weapons, explosive, things like that, but I don't remember.

• Radiation - Radiation is present in the game but less of an issue than Fallout 1. Radiation is an invisible stat - As you encounter radiation sources this invisible stat will accumulate and if it gets high enough you'll start experiencing symptoms of radiation poisoning.

Have fun! It's a great, weird, very deep game.

Fallout 1 and 2 are my two favourite iso RPGs, although Colony Ship is looking to be up there once it's finished. Enjoy it 🤙

yeeees, o omnipotent authority figure...