Fallout 4 - it's official! Coming Nov 10, '15

[Markbnj]

Now my settlements are topped out, I have essentially infinite resources, so I want to see them tested. I only had like two settlements early on and rarely got attacked -- I'm a hoarder and risk averse so didn't sprawl out until I had enough stuff to fortify everything.

I finished the robot thing and started messing with the concrete walls. Dang, how did they not include these in the initial release? I can actually properly wall in settlements and concrete shipments are available in large quantities so I don't have to worry about running out.

Snapping for concrete walls is a pain though.

I have... I don't know, nine or ten settlements of various sizes, and they routinely get attacked. Last night I had three attacked at the same time.

 

[werepossum]

I have... I don't know, nine or ten settlements of various sizes, and they routinely get attacked. Last night I had three attacked at the same time.

Holy crap, are you defending them with open bowls of gold?

Mine almost never get attacked, but invariably at the worst possible moments.

 

[Phoenix86]

Holy crap, are you defending them with open bowls of gold?

Mine almost never get attacked, but invariably at the worst possible moments.

IIRC your defense levels don't affect attack frequency unless it's really low. I have had settlements with VERY high defense:resources ratio get attacked often. It's fairly random.

 

[Imp]

Sweet. I read the wiki for the Wasteland Workshop and building cages apparently attract more attacks by the trapped species... Going to build a fort and try this out.

 

[werepossum]

IIRC your defense levels don't affect attack frequency unless it's really low. I have had settlements with VERY high defense:resources ratio get attacked often. It's fairly random.

Ah, did not know that.

 

[Phoenix86]

Ah, did not know that.

Keep in mind this was pre-patch/new DLC. It might have been changed...

 

[GusSmed]

I finally got around to finishing the Automatron quests. I've been playing off-and-on, because I started a new game just to try out the DLC, and I was seeing a lot of the same content the 3rd time around while I climbed my way up to being able to handle the DLC quests.

It's a somewhat short quest line, but the three buildings you enter are substantial, the Mechanist's lair in particular. It's definitely worth it if you're buying DLC individually, unlike Wasteland Workshop.

I kept Ada around the entire time, thinking she'd gain affinity and give me a perk like other companions. She doesn't. She's like dogmeat, completely nonjudgmental, but no perk for gaining trust.

She's also a bull in a china shop. I went Survival difficulty, no power armor ever, stealth for this game, and she was constantly revealing our position. Which got me killed about 4 times in the 2nd Automatron quest before I told her to stay put while I dealt with things more quietly. If you're tromping around yourself she's still good, since she's fairly tough and powerful, particularly if you upgrade her, and she carries a lot of stuff.

The deaths in the Rust Devil base were very frustrating, because I simply could not figure out how I was dying. Something was one-shot killing me, and it wasn't the hostiles. I now think it was the Assaultron Totem traps, but since the animation was just "you're dead" with no clear indication of why, I'm not sure.

The Mechanist's Lair was not too rough until the final confrontation, where they throw a lot of robots at you. I died once, but managed to live the second time, at least in part because I prepped the room with mines. Survivor mode can be rough since you can't heal quickly. I read afterward there's a way to bypass that combat, but I didn't find it on my own, and it is doable on the hardest difficulty.

On an unrelated note: Gun-fu kinda sucks. Spreading your attacks around is just plain bad tactics, it's unusual to have 3+ targets in VATS range, and one of them's probably going to move behind cover during the execution of the attack.

I didn't love the robot building aspect of the DLC as much as I thought I would. Upgrading a single robot companion is fine, but there's not a lot of reason to build a lot of robots just to do settlement work when new settlers show up for free via settlement beacons. Robots don't eat or drink, of course, so there's that. Building them just for settlement defense is very resource intensive if you give them halfway decent parts.

 

[Imp]

I didn't love the robot building aspect of the DLC as much as I thought I would. Upgrading a single robot companion is fine, but there's not a lot of reason to build a lot of robots just to do settlement work when new settlers show up for free via settlement beacons. Robots don't eat or drink, of course, so there's that. Building them just for settlement defense is very resource intensive if you give them halfway decent parts.

Which of your puny human settlers has a top speed of 50 mph has two guns for arms and carries two mini-nuke launchers on its back... Yum.

I haven't started pumping robots out to "settle" my lands yet. I still don't know how to assign/unassign robot companions, actually.

 

[GusSmed]

Which of your puny human settlers has a top speed of 50 mph has two guns for arms and carries two mini-nuke launchers on its back... Yum.

I don't trust settlers with missile launchers, let alone mini-nukes. I assume if I built mini-nuke equipped robot workers that they'd blow me up the next time I assisted with a settlement defense.

In the meantime a network of turrets combined with handing out surplus weapons and armor generally more than does the trick.

Settlement defense is a little odd - it doesn't really feel like it's difficult, barring the case where I aggro'd a bunch of supermutants from a neighboring site. Usually it seems like I win easily if I've made any effort at handing out weapons and putting up defenses.

Yet I have died a few times, so I guess it's challenging. If I'm not in power armor, and I'm out in the open, and several hostiles see me and focus on me instead of settlers, they kill me pretty quickly. So it's important to either have the armor on, or be in enough cover that only one or two hostiles can shoot at me.

Which is why placing fast-travel targets in protected locations is important. When I first played, I died quite a few times because I fast-traveled to defend a settlement, and found myself at near point blank range with a bunch of raiders.

 

[Imp]

I don't trust settlers with missile launchers, let alone mini-nukes. I assume if I built mini-nuke equipped robot workers that they'd blow me up the next time I assisted with a settlement defense.

In the meantime a network of turrets combined with handing out surplus weapons and armor generally more than does the trick.

Ya... I gave my bot those two shoulder rockets and died once already due to friendly fire. I'm actually very apprehensive about letting it keep them because it might kill a bunch of random friendlies. But it's so hard not to equip them...

Get the new DLC and you get access to concrete shipments and building parts. I've used the walls to wall up a few of my settlements already. Makes defending much easier.

 

[GusSmed]

I've got the season pass, so I've seen Wasteland Workshop. I already had concrete walls from a mod. Though admittedly the concrete parts from the Homemaker mod are really wonky - they don't snap together right, and the ceiling heights are wrong, so they don't play well with anything else.

Are the concrete shipments new? I could have sworn I saw those for sale before getting Wasteland Workshop.

 

[shortylickens]

I seem to recall bags of concrete in many stores, but I dont remember shipments of concrete. But like you guys I've been using mods for so long I barely remember what the core game looks like.

Its even worse in Skyrim. I've added several hundred spells, over 100 of which are summons. Not sure what was original. I dont think the base game lets you conjure a colossal mudcrab.......

 

[Imp]

I never used mods so the concrete shipments are new to me. The bags of cement were pretty sparse. Concrete was a pretty scarce material before this mod came out. Not much use for it except for foundations so it kinda made sense.

Speaking of sparse, freaking fiber optics, those are sparse. Only material I have less than 100 of because I use it to upgrade weapons for settlers and to make laser turrets.

 

[shortylickens]

I think you need to scrap highly-modded lasers if you want lots of fiber optics. I believe I only saw one package of them at a store, and that around the time I hit level 70.

 

[Grooveriding]

Is the first DLC coming anytime soon ?

 

[shortylickens]

Is the first DLC coming anytime soon ?

Umm, when was the last time you checked?

 

[Dahak]

I never used mods so the concrete shipments are new to me.

There where concrete shipments before the DLC but I think there was only 1 or 2 places where you could get them

Maybe the upped the locations/rate of them now that the dlc uses them

 

[GusSmed]

Y'know, I just remembered talking earlier in the thread about how I walled in Somerville just for my own amusement. That was prior to the DLC, and concrete was a serious bottleneck because I wanted the concrete foundations for the fort-like appearance. So yeah, concrete is a lot more abundant than it used to be.

One small thing the concrete pieces in Wasteland Workshop gives you are walls and floor pieces that work at 45 degree angles. Before, you could rotate walls to any angle, but they'd fall short because diagonals need to be 1.4x longer. None of the existing mods handle that case yet.

I still have problems making buildings that are architecturally interesting. I always seem to end up gravitating toward boxes.

 

[Imp]

I still have problems making buildings that are architecturally interesting. I always seem to end up gravitating toward boxes.

For some reason, I like to make buildings now that I have concrete as an option. The windowless wood building or two I attempted looked hideous and didn't feel right to me. Unfortunately, the new concrete building pieces don't include interior stairs -- I've resorted to making fire escapes.

 

[Zenoth]

So, have Bethesda given any official date for the release of the GECK?

All I can find on Google points to " April ", and there's only one week left. I'll be a sad panda if it isn't out in two days. I'm 100% sure that they could have released the GECK no less than six months ago, but they know very well how the modding community can make ANY of their DLCs looks completely useless. So they wanted to secure the selling of their DLCs by delaying the GECK, and then release it. Well played Bethesda, well played.

 

[Majic 7]

So, have Bethesda given any official date for the release of the GECK?

All I can find on Google points to " April ", and there's only one week left. I'll be a sad panda if it isn't out in two days. I'm 100% sure that they could have released the GECK no less than six months ago, but they know very well how the modding community can make ANY of their DLCs looks completely useless. So they wanted to secure the selling of their DLCs by delaying the GECK, and then release it. Well played Bethesda, well played.

According to Sir Salami at Nexus it will be when 1.5 patch goes live. They have been working with Bethesda getting Mod Manager to work with the GECK and that is finished. I have the updated Manager downloaded. It should be soon.

 

[GusSmed]

For some reason, I like to make buildings now that I have concrete as an option. The windowless wood building or two I attempted looked hideous and didn't feel right to me. Unfortunately, the new concrete building pieces don't include interior stairs -- I've resorted to making fire escapes.

You can use the concrete stairs indoors. It snaps to either the right or left of the next floor, not the center, but you can use the 1/4 with floors to cover the other half. Or you can use the wooden ladder without the landings, but the stairs look better.

I actually rather prefer setups like this, since you can make a switchback stairwell in less space than the wooden interior stair piece. You can fit two sets of stairs side-by-side in one 2x2 grid square, instead of needing two.

As for the windows problem - that's one reason I ended up using mods eventually. There are some that provide decent looking windows on both wooden and steel walls. Plus there's a proper interior doorway, so I can set up houses that look like they have interior rooms rather than being big open bunkhouses.

 

[Imp]

I ran into very high level assaultron robots introduced my the DLC... OMG, destroyed, completely destroyed me in a couple seconds. Almost won but I ran out of bullets a few shots away from killing it...

Will be refitting my settlements with concrete everything so will have to try using those stairs indoors. I really do hate the interior wood stairs, they take up so much space.

 

[DefDC]

Is anyone playing the new beta Survival mode? If not, it worth a look!

I started a new character, with no mods, just to get the experience they envisioned. It's quite fun, but as they intended, fucking hard.

You WILL lose a 1/2 hour or more of progress. It makes you think, and you are CONSTANTLY on the lookout for landmines. They will ruin your day. Getting swarmed by ghouls will kill you. (And that will piss you off!) But, it's that suspense which has been missing.

Give it a shot!

And, as a quick aside. I think I accidentally told Dogmeat to "stay" and I have no idea where he is. If I get a new companion, I should be able to send him back home, correct?

 

[GusSmed]

I finally managed to complete Hole in The Wall without contracting Mole Rat AIDS. I had to reload saved games at least 4 times, which I usually consider cheating. In this case, though, the mission kind of cheats. I had maxed Sneak and some chameleon gear, but the mole rats still telepathically knew where I was at all times. I could always kill mole rats before they could bite me if I had any distance, but I got tripped up repeatedly by mole rats tunneling through the walls to appear at point-blank range behind me.

The few tough mole rats weren't much of a problem since I was fairly high level and had a pimped out Deliverer. The Ninja, Cloak and Dagger, and Mr. Sandman perks didn't help due to telepathic mole rats not being surprised, but I did enough damage rapidly via VATS to take even the few beefy mole rats out before they could get in range.