In a round about kind of way, resource and crafting perks are combat perks.
I swear, I spend more time at the weapons bench trying to decide what to do with my limited supply of screws than I do actually shooting things.
Yea been giving crafting some love today, the payoff is great since you can re chamber your choice weapon for different ammo types on the fly to save on ammo costs.
Still gonna need to grind 5 levels of rifleman tho am barely getting damage into some of these nigga now.
Just realized they changed unarmed from being endurance-based to being strength-based. Of course, my character only has 1 strength point and I’m fucked 
Nah, you’re good- you can spend perk points to upgrade your SPECIAL stats directly, so you are only a few levels from being as buff as you want to be. The first ten levels go very fast, so you’ll be at full strength very quickly. Aside from that, there are a CRAZY number of ways to buff your strength in this game. Drugs, booze, food, each armor piece, and your clothing can all have one or more points of +STR. There’s a combo between a certain cooking recipe and two points in Party Boy/Girl that can give you +6 STR off a single cocktail!
Maxed out nuclear physics and my power armor is nearly at max bad assery, my opinion of the game is improving as I near becoming the terminator.
This road to freedom quest tho got me stumped so hard I think I might be retarded. Gonna be gud…
Need to give Power Armor more of a spin one of these days, finally building up a real surplus of fusion cores. Find myself spending vast amounts of time as a stealthy nerd trying to figure out how to clear buildings and live through it (survival difficulty). Haven’t invested in anything that directly improves combat abilities yet, I’m switching between weapon types so often it makes it hard to commit points to one thing.
It is pretty doable, if brutal, though it depends a lot on not being horribly out leveled by the enemies. I really like that it is pushing me to use a very wide variety of tools, even food buffs and advanced crafted drugs. Washing down that Buffjet with a Dirty Wastelander. Bottlecap Mines when you pull a Glowing One. Shooting things legs out and then finishing them off with my Bladed Crowbar just to conserve ammo. Good times.
Think we went about it the same way. You will notice a few venders that sell fusion cores so you stop hoarding them and start using them, considering the price is very good as well.
The difference and palpable feel of power when you switch from stealthy tactical lurker to Astartes Space Marine, World Eaters legion, is pretty god damn fun. And honestly pretty ridiculously OP.
If only I could find a vendor that sells steel and wood…
Have you been scrapping all the random debris around settlements? It isn’t a limitless supply or anything, but I’ve been getting a lot of steel and wood just clearing out ruined houses, wrecked cars, and fallen trees.
Yea i completely strip all the settlements I unlock, which I think is most of them now. Whenver there is room I make a 3x2 large floor base structure. Then make it 2-4 levels high. This way I can have a nice looking house with 10 - 20 beds, a floor for the trade shops, a roof for defences etc
I fucked up and didnt take into account how much I was spending in material cost because I thought I was swag AF. Nope. Need to find a merchant or let the game run a year through sleep or whatever and let my people salvage that shit. Or break up thousands of weapons and armour…
Pain in the ass, am becoming more agreeable to settlement building but its still atrociously poor how they released it. Shite AI, zero management and vendors will supply anything but the 2 most ambundant resources… ok. 
I’ve been keeping the settlements deliberately low-key, partly because I am not invested enough in Charisma to maximize the return on doing it, but mostly because there’s a limit to how much I want to micromanage anonymous imaginary people.
I’ve been doing just enough to make the people that quests throw into my lap happy, which is admittedly moderately satisfying, but haven’t been going beyond that to build up or recruit. Lots of ‘settlements’ for me remain abandoned. I might bang out a few personal projects later, like a water farm, but I don’t see myself going nuts building new cities or anything.
Don’t know how I ended up looking like this
How come I’m averaging 67fps in the outdoor playfield, but I get 24fps indoors (vaults, special buildings, etc)?
What the fuck Bethesda? Usually, it’s the other way around but you ziggans managed to fuck the norm up.
I find the framerate really only drops in the financial district/downtown area.
I suspect it is because there is a lot of “vertical space” there. It is pretty cool how you can go through a building and end up on the freeway…and then just find a little spot and snipe gunners and super mutants.
Random thoughts and observations:
-Ran into my first major bug: I can’t completely the “Boston After Dark” quest. It tells me to clear out secure the rendez-vous point…and I have…and all the surrounding buildings…but nothing happens. Pretty annoying, considering this is in the middle of a quest chain.
-Also, at some point in time I stopped getting the little notifications at the top left side of the screen (IE 200 Caps removed). Not really a big deal…but mildly inconvenient.
- The Overseer’s Guardian has been my go-to gun for some time. It is a special combat rifle that you buy in Vault 81. Kills pretty much everything in one or two shots.
- Intelligence seems much less useful this time around. Before it was one of the best because of skill points…now…not so much. Gun Nut…hacking and medic are still useful…but it no longer feels like a “must have”.
- The game (at least on normal) is significantly easier…after a least a bit of a “hump” at the beginning where my character was really squishy. Most of my deaths have been from random mooks with Fatman’s. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to let random characters have mini nukes is an asshole. The first mutant suicider I ran into got me…never again though.
- I am pretty sick of of all the little quips about picking up garbage from my packmules/companions. Picks up screwdriver “If you can find a use for that, I will eat my hat”. Look a major part of this game is picking up garbage and crafting shit. I don’t need somebody consistently reminding me they have no idea crafting exists, despite their numerous comments on how handy crafting is when they watch me do it.
- Why are only some “outfits” “underwear” while other “outfits” are “full outfits”? Like, you can’t wear armor with this shirt and pants…but you can wear it with this very similar looking set of shirt and pants?
- I haven’t found much of a use for the cover system.
- There should be a job board at settlements that lets you just automatically assign people to different stations, or at least some kind of birds eye view so I don’t have to go running back and forth. And/or directly equip stuff from your workshop storage to the settlers…rather than move it to you inventory…run to them, talk to them, move it to their inventory and then equip it on them.
- Also, I want to be able to assign companions to a room so I don’t have to waste like, 10 minutes running around trying to find them.
- You should be able to sell stuff directly from your companions inventory.
- Sometimes, the lighting makes scenes look just amazing.
- The random battles that break out, usually involving the brotherhood of steel, are really cool. Just explosions and people running around, gun fire everywhere. The wasteland is much more lively, and I like it.
- My character can’t seem to decide if he knows what synths are or not. Like one mission, just guns down hundreds of them. Another and it’s like “Synths…what are those?”
- Once I discovered you keep the companion perk, even if they aren’t in your party…they have all been in constant rotation since. They are all kind of the same, really. Just different quips about garbage.
- Need to stop hoarding fusion cores. But I figure they are too precious to be used…ever.
- Hot pink power armor. Hilarious.
I mean, they all look unique, have a bunch of unique dialogue for just about everything(hell I just took Curie to a random quarry and she had special dialogue for it), and will occaisionally hold conversations with you about their specific back stories. I’d say they’re all pretty different. I’m pretty sure they all have quests tied to them aswell.
Also some of them have suuuuper good skills, like Nick can hack any terminal, and Cait can pick any lock, and Curie will heal you occaisionally, for example.
I just remembered FO4 has the traditional console commands. Can I use the unlock command on the case holding the freeze-gun in the first vault? I remember Skyrim prevented cheaters from obtaining a powerful weapon inside a locked room by placing a float immovable object in the threshold; if you bypass its collision properties, the room would become empty or the game would just crash sometimes.
Build the Bell, it’ll summon everyone in town to that one spot.
It also helps with managing the tons of settlements you have to as the game progresses.
Bitchy peons always complaining about needing more defense.
Some Gameplay tips
[details=Spoiler]A few play tips that are a bit game breaking as they kind skip over the needs for several perks etc.
When you get weapon that has an upgrade you want you can replace the mods with a grade 1 mod for any category and add that mod into your inventory and you can add it to whatever weapon you want that shares the same category (Pistol,rifle,melee etc) without needing the required perks since you’re not actually building it.
When a settlement has a connected body of water, build as many top grade water purifier’s as will fit, they add free purified water into your workshop inventory and it’s free money fast.
Build a home base to consolidate all your shit, put the merchants close and all the workbench’s in a row with a floor safe near so you can quickly dump the set you want to actually use so there’s no danger of modding/selling
Foundations under Structures/wood/floor. These let you level out some of the uneven patches of land to make pretty much every area build-able with whatever you want and wastes a lot less space.
L2 and R2 when building Rotate the item so you have less OCD flare ups.
To build up a new settlement fast get a item merchant/power generator/recruitment beacon asap before anything else since it starts drawing bums to the settlement immediately.
Assigning peons to a building, go into construction mode then click on the bum and target the building then you will see the assign option at the bottom(Dont assign the first squad you rescue to be merchants if you can avoid it since they randomly roam around being useless and bitching more often then they stay at the building)
Give your merchants something easily identifiable for each category ( i went with a green rag hat for all my item merchant, a sea captains for armor,lab coat for doctors etc) Since they still randomly roam and are only at the stalls from 7am to like 9 pm you can locate them easily to sell if they are not at the stall.
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Man, this game sometimes. Was fighting a boss who was 21 levels higher than me last night, who had much better Power Armor than I did and 5 henchmen that were themselves around 15 levels higher than me. The way the mission was set up, an opening dialog vignette in an enclosed area prevented me from using stealthy headshots to carve down the competition, which is how I worked my way to the encounter in the first place. Again, playing survival mode which doubles the damage you take, cuts in half the damage you do, and makes healing so slow it is barely useful at all in combat. I haven’t spent any perks on directly increasing the damage I do or reducing the damage I take. Only help I had with me was Dogmeat.
Came up with an elaborate plan based around retreating back through the entrance and kiting them around the industrial complex I had cleared on the way in. Started off great, pulled the henchmen across an area where I had set up a Bottlecap mine, which allowed me to finish off the survivors with just a few potshots from my four crank laser musket. The boss was of course entirely unphased. In fact, the boss wanders over to one of his dead lackeys and loots a heavy flame thrower off the corpse.
So I move to the next stage of my plan, which is to kite the boss in loops through the facility, using potshots to whittle him down. Except I fuck up badly almost immediately. I zig when I should have zagged and end up in a dead end where my only out is back the way I came, through a narrow hallway right passed the upgraded power armor heavy flamer wielding monstrosity.
So thinking this is going to be a reload as soon as he rounds the corner to me, I do the only sensible thing- I go into my inventory, pop one of each drug I have, switch to the only melee weapon I have on me, and proceed to manually beat this armored behemoth to death with a tire iron in one of the most brutal muggings I’ve ever experienced. Good times.
Bitch ass deathclaws don’t understand the power of cute dresses.
Oh, if anyone hasn’t seen it yet there’s a cool Blade Runner easter egg [details=Spoiler]on the roof of the Mass Fusion containment shed. It’s the tears in the rain scene from the end of the movie.[/details]