I have only found a 50% gas mask, not the 100% one. There’s a lot of gear I haven’t come across actually.
I am playing the Dead City expansion right now. It has several 100% masks/suits.
It is pretty painful. Lots of enemies with 4 attacks per round, which is really really slow. And rats. Lots of rats. I wouldn’t blame anyone for skipping it, though the loot is nice. It’s the only part of the game where I was ALT+TAB-bing out of the game waiting for the enemy turns to end.
[edit]
I was able to finally buy a 100% mask from a caravan trader. The suits and masks have different stats. The mask is -1 Attention, the suit is -1 Dexterity. The suit also protects against radiation.
[edit]
Anyway, game over! I was hoping to continue on to the Death Tunnel, but I guess I beat the game. Best game I have played in many years, since Underrail at least if not longer. Can’t recommend it enough (except for Dead City which can be skipped).
I leveled up and put all my points into tech and was able to repair the machine. I found a hazmat suit at one of the vendors in the Dead City, blocks all rad and poison. I need to get on the main quest again as at 123 hours, I’m starting to get a little bored.
What does repairing the machine do? With the hazmat suit I was able to wander around the bunker as much as I wanted.
Clears the bunker of gas.
Time for me to share my story. I do like the game, but it can be tough.
So, I created a character with points in martial arts, pistol, and some speech. But I’ve learned that you can’t be a generalist here, you’ll get stymied at some point, unable to get past either combat or unlock speech options. But I took leadership as a perk since I know you get companions later. Only I didn’t really think it through, and all the perks in this game come with some brutal negatives. Leadership drops your dexterity when a new person joins the party. It’s like instead of a handshake to welcome a new person, you let them kick you in the balls. The new party member gains dexterity, you get stuck in fetal position.
I’m level five and trying to kill some wolves for a quest with Fidel. There are five or six in this cave but you can approach so that you can take them out in smaller groups. But we have such crappy weapons that we can’t beat the last group of three. So I figure, ok, let’s go find some other side quest and come back in one more level. But where random encounters were doable before, with reaching level 5 and having Fidel, the game has really kicked up the challenge and instead of two religious nuts attacking us with fists and maybe one pistol that jams all the time, we now get three or four bums with shotguns against me with a pistol (that I can barely shoot since I lost dexterity) and Fidel with a knife. Great.
I’m in this weird spot now where I can’t get very far without getting toasted, but I don’t want to start over. Somewhere a Russian gangster is laughing at me. “Bwahaha, you learn hard way comrade! In Russian RPG, you don’t play role, it plays you!”
Yea, while the story telling and quests are definitely fallout-ey, the gameplay mechanics are lacklustre. I can’t quite put my finger on why that is.
I remember encountering this, and for the life of me i cant recall how i overcame it. I want to say i headed to the bunker and took on the stuff there to gear up, then things got better, but its really fuzzy now.
Ah yes, the bunker. It looks ominous so I’ve avoided it, but maybe that’s what you’re supposed to do before going further south. I’ll try heading up there.
I think I did the bunker much later. First I tackled everything around Otradnoye. Then I went to the Abandoned Factory and tackled those assignments. After that I got lucky I guess and picked up two companions at roughly the same time. Once you have some companions things get a bit easier. Oh, and I cheated and looked at a walkthrough for instructions on how to get the dog.
I played a lot of this game and I think I almost finished it before putting it down. I was in some kind of super-vault which was a bit puzzely on how to open sections of it. I think the problem for me was that the combats were pretty much all the same with only a few scripted exceptions. The story was just ok as was the world you were exploring. Nothing really cool to find, just more of what you found before.
Ok so I had my first kind of fun combat. It’s where you recruit three mercenaries to help take out a group of raiders at a place called End of the Line, planning to attack the city you started at in the game.
The three join you in the battle and totally kick ass; my character was almost worthless and my companion not much better (to keep him alive I told him to just run from contact).
But one of the mercs died in the battle. Anyone know if that’s going to be a problem down the road? Should I try it again?
Aside: the game loves to kick your ass. After the battle I was excited to finally get decent weapons off the dead but there was only one. They did give up some armor, though I’m not sure if it’s worth it yet given the cost in dodge points.
Was there a train on the map? I think it’s okay if those mercs die.
Yes, there’s a train. The three mercs seem to be a sniper, a gunner, and an explosives guy. The sniper, Ludmilla, is really good. Your character says something about seeing her in the future so I wondered if you’d be under strength if you met these guys later and there were two instead of three.
FYI: there’s a standalone expansion that just hit early access:
I’m tempted, thanks!
Yup, I think I am having enough fun with Atom that I’ll definitely consider Trudograd. Although I do find the difficulty scaling very weird in the game. I’m about level 10 now with two companions who have leveled up to competence in basic shooting (although we still have pretty weak weapons), and about a third of the time I completely outclass the enemies I encounter, about half it’s just about right, and the rest we face guys that have AK-47s against our pistol, SMG, and hunting rifle. I know I can just keep grinding and eventually we’ll be the kings of the wasteland, but I just found it interesting the way the game manages difficulty. Some RPGs just limit you by geographical region, this one lets you roam anywhere you want.
But first, more questions for you experienced guys. I have found radio handsets and also something called a hetmofon (basically a tanker’s helmet with integrated radio). Are these of any functional value outside the slight armor the hetmofones provide? Like in Jagged Alliance, if you have radio headsets, doesn’t that allow you more control over the team? Unfortunately I don’t think it does and strangely enough searches on Atom and hetmofon turn up almost nothing on internet search.
I am just in the starting town and have had a couple of annoying crashes (currently on 1.15). The lack of autosave makes it worse, and I think if I lost hours of progress I may not care enough to start again. Maybe I will leave this one to settle for a while.
I’ve been fortunate, the game has been solid for me. It will autosave whenever you switch environments, and you can quick save with F5 and quick load with F9.
The headset in JA2 controls the robot drone character. Enemies have radios to alert each other of danger IIRC. Otherwise, radios serve no purpose.
Try to capture the dog companion too. It helped me a lot. It’s tricky and you only get one chance at it, however, so consult a walkthrough.
There is autosave when traveling between locations. Check the load menu again. I’m in the habit of quicksaving every few minutes in addition to the autosaves.