Fallout Shelter PC

[Daehawk]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/588430/

Fallout Shelter is out on PC now and its free on Steam.

[Paingod]

I was intrigued until I got down to the "Stuff you can Buy" section where they're selling "pay to play" type game items.

I get it that it's free, but if the model requires spending money just to play without being annoyed or going at a snail's pace, I'll pass.

[Blackhawk]

It doesn't. I've played it a couple of times on Android. It is completely payable without spending a dime, and doesn't cripple the gameplay to get you to spend.

[killbot737]

I think the progression is a little slower on the PC (babies and rewards and such) but other than that, and I could be wrong, it's exactly the same as on Android. You don't have to buy anything to progress and it isn't like that dumb candy game where you have to wait 24 hours to be able to play again.

[NickAragua]

I actually tried playing this on an iphone a little while ago and bounced off the interface so hard I don't even want to bother trying.

[GreenGoo]

It was vaguely interesting but I'd already played at least 3 populate this skyscraper/tower games so I lost interest pretty fast. Being able to send out explorers into the wild was kind of neat though.

[Daehawk]

Being new to this maybe Im missing the reason but I had two of my explorers come back wit ha bunch of outfits and i collected them but they are not in my inv stock or available to sue. Does it take a bit before they show up?

[Isgrimnur]

Being new to this maybe Im missing the reason but I had two of my explorers come back wit ha bunch of outfits and i collected them but they are not in my inv stock or available to sue. Does it take a bit before they show up?

You need the powdered wigs as well.

[Sepiche]

Being new to this maybe Im missing the reason but I had two of my explorers come back wit ha bunch of outfits and i collected them but they are not in my inv stock or available to sue. Does it take a bit before they show up?

Should be in there unless perhaps your inventory is full or you accidentally sold them. Keep in mind there are also extra tabs at the top of the inventory screen that change what item types you are viewing.

I played this on Android before the update that added the overseer's office and yeah, it was pretty boring and not worth fighting the interface. The interface works much better on PC, and the quests you can do through the overseer's office are much more entertaining than random wasteland collection missions.

Still a rather slow paced game that's no comparison to building/management games designed for PC, but a good game to waste time in if you're watching TV or something.

[Jaymon]

it seems to be more of a pimping simulator than a survival game.

"Attention vault dwellers. Elder Lyon has returned from the wasteland, all Ladies in reactor room two, please change into your evening wear, and report to the living quarters"

[LawBeefaroni]

It's fun. Once you get a full vault the game changes from a management sim to going out and questing for loot. And trying to hit challenges for loot. I actually think paying-to-play would kill the fun.

Alas, I haven't had time to play for like 5 months.

[Blackhawk]

Being new to this maybe Im missing the reason but I had two of my explorers come back wit ha bunch of outfits and i collected them but they are not in my inv stock or available to sue. Does it take a bit before they show up?

Should be in there unless perhaps your inventory is full or you accidentally sold them.

That's my guess - you're accidentally selling them when your dwellers come back.

[Daehawk]

Maybe so. I do have more money than i thought I would.

[Daehawk]

Im finding this a nice slow relaxing game. The worst that happens is a fire, radroaches, or raiders who die on my second floor. Im up to the Overseers Office now. its next to build. I have 19 people and one is a kid and working to make that 20th person. Ive started combining the last names of the parents so I can kinda keep a running info on who is whos..instead of one two three hahaha.

Ive reinforced my door only once. Gives me time to move fighters up before they break in.

The game seems to run a bit while Im away but not at full speed. Or maybe it only goes so far before it basically waits on me.

Why does my storage room need a person or two? Does it not work without a person? Also should I build a new room or upgrade at least once before that? My power, water, and diner are all 3 rooms and I think upgraded once each and they seem just right...barely.

[ColdSteel]

I was actually quite interested in this when I saw this thread. The microtransaction model just turns me right off though. The first Steam review is actually pretty well written and I happen to agree with their points:

Spoiler:

I'm actually really enjoying this and it's why I'm kinda torn with this review. I'm a huge Fallout fan, coming up to 30 and followed the games all the way from the first. I'll likely continue to play only for a short while though -

Fallout Shelter could have been so much more. I'm not sure what went wrong at Bethesda, because there's a real gem game hiding underneath the monetisation.
It's such a lovely, charming game. The artwork is brilliant, the audio is fantastic, and I like how much you can customize different aspects of your vault. I like that you send your dwellers out into the wastelands, and the logs they record while they're doing it. I played on release on ios as well, but in all honesty it didn't last very long.

The game is weighed down by microtransactions. I wholeheartedly believe that if this was treated like the single player game it is instead of parroting that crappy model that countless games on the mobile stores follow, if the wait timers were divided by 10 and all of this stupid quantum cola stuff was removed altogether, if questing was fleshed out somewhat and timers were reworked to timers in the range of 1-3 hours, long enough to put down but quick enough to ride through if you kept yourself distracted, if you had slapped a £17.99 price tag on the front of it, I'd imagine it'd have sold like hot cakes and the reviews would be immeasurably in your favour. You could have added card expansions in the form of paid DLC if you really were looking to squeeze a bit extra and it would have raised a lot less eyebrows.

If you had slapped it on the ios store like that at £9.99, it would have sat at the top of different mobile site's top charts for years to come. There's very little in the way of deep strategy games on mobile without in app purchases, this probably would have made a mint done the right way with integrity, instead of taking this trashy route that only serves to annoy people into paying money. A Fallout themed strategy game with no iap that cross synced between my PC and my iPhone? It'd feel like Christmas.

I'd like to imagine that many of the designers were not on board with any of the monetization stuff and I'd like to believe there's probably a few guys out there that wanted to do something entirely different but had to keep the bosses happy. I feel like this is a good example of what happens when the quest for money interferes too much with a player's experience. You pick these designers up because they are talented people who are passionate about their work and art, let them do their jobs properly!

Bethesda in my eyes is respectable when I compare them to other companys in the industry. Get off this road, it leads to ruin. And from a fan's perspective, Fallout deserves better than a honey trap. Shame on you, Bethesda. >:(


The jist of my review is that the content is fantastic, I can't fault it. The problem is the way it's served is questionable and why I have not recommended it. Fallout is a flagship title and holds weight in regards to normalizing IAPs in the PC gaming marketplace, and said games are more often than not shady, anyone who is familiar with mobile gaming will understand what I mean. Their design makes it easy to irresponsibly mine money from people in an irresponsible way, and I fear that this title will help make it easier for this price model to become commonplace.


Cont-
So why would you use the microtransaction model? As others have touched on in the comments, part of the reason is that it makes more money, particularly by badgering players into spending small amounts a lot of times to make it harder to recognize the value of things. It's a deceptive price model and the majority of the reason I didn't recommend the game is because I see a brilliant game underneath a model that is unhealthy for the industry.

There's a perfectly reasonable argument that places the responsibility entirely in the hands of the person spending, and I believe the majority of people who thumbs up or downed me are probably divided specifically on how they view that. Is it the responsibility of the designer or the player? I'd argue it was both and I'm not one to complain incessently about games, but this kind of price model is notorious for going after what you call "whales", and I just think it's in bad taste.

It's not where I want to see PC gaming go, and in my opinion it's dishonest game design and irresponsible because the majority of income from this game will come from players on both extremes, the ones with oil baron parents and addictive personalities or "low hanging fruit". I work in mental health and these kinds of games can end up pretty much robbing vulnerable people, where the model is most effective. You could quite literally lop the microtransactions off this beautiful game, readjust the timers to compensate, and have an honest title at a set price.

[Blackhawk]

That isn't a review, it is a rant against a design style the writer hates. He went into it hating it, and looked for anything that agreed with his position. I've played the game through twice, my son has played it three times. Not once did we ever, ever have a situation where we felt we needed to spend money. Not once did we ever end up unable to play because we hadn't spent money.

It is a mobile game. It is meant to be played five minutes here, ten minutes there. If you're trying to play it like a regular PC game, yeah - you're going to have issues. You will run out of stuff to do if you try and play for three hours straight. Beyond that there is no obnoxious push to spend, and I think it is the way that microtransactions *should* be done.

[Blackhawk]

Ive reinforced my door only once. Gives me time to move fighters up before they break in.

The game seems to run a bit while Im away but not at full speed. Or maybe it only goes so far before it basically waits on me.

Why does my storage room need a person or two? Does it not work without a person? Also should I build a new room or upgrade at least once before that? My power, water, and diner are all 3 rooms and I think upgraded once each and they seem just right...barely.

Storage rooms don't need people. You can put people there, but there isn't any benefit besides keeping the out of the way.

Don't reinforce your door. Once you have enough people, you'll have full-time door guards, and later you'll have full time guards on the entire top floor. The problem is that your vault goes into lockdown mode as soon as enemies are spotted, preventing you from doing anything else. You'll soon be at a point where attacks take almost no time to resolve, and the enemies will actually spend more time getting through the door than they do inside the vault. The stronger your vault door, the longer you have to wait before you can get back to the game.

If you lay it out smart (only one elevator on the top floor), enemies will never get to floor two. Here's the trick, showing the door, floors, and elevators:
[........]||===================
==== ||===================||
==== ||===================||
==== ||===================||
==== ||===================||

Notice that there is no far elevator on the top floor? This forces the enemies to run clear to the last room on the top floor, then turn around and run back across the top floor to get to your elevator. That means that they have to cross the top floor twice. You fill that top floor with your meanest guys with your biggest guns (although you need to keep your other floors well-armed for roaches and molerats, too.)

As to rooms, the secret is to build balanced. There usually comes a point where you will hit a sudden spike in the need for one resource. You'll have a litter of kids and suddenly find that you don't have enough food and water anymore, and that your vault is going down the drain. Add in a strong attack right at that point and it can really, really hurt. Or perhaps you'll build a bunch of diners and labs and suddenly find that you don't have enough power. Build balanced! Get your resources way too high, then add people to use them, not the other way around. Power excess, then food and water excess, then people.

If those spikes do occur, it can be tough to bounce back. Often the secret is to solve the water problem by kicking out a bunch of dwellers, or to solve the power problem by demolishing rooms you can live without for now. My last game saw me building the Overseer's Office too early and almost wiping out my vault when I couldn't manage enough water.

Upgraded rooms are always better than lower rooms, and always build your rooms three wide if you have the room (each floor can have two 3-space rooms and a two-space - use the two-space rooms for things that don't produce basic resources, like medical rooms.)

Oh, and no radio rooms. You don't want radio rooms. They are not just useless, they are detrimental.

[ColdSteel]

That isn't a review, it is a rant against a design style the writer hates. He went into it hating it, and looked for anything that agreed with his position.

Maybe. I don't know. It does sound like he likes the game.

I'm actually really enjoying this and it's why I'm kinda torn with this review.

I guess I may give it try (why not, it's free) and form my own opinion then.

[Blackhawk]

Storage room trick, for when you can afford it. It is based off of the idea that disasters spread from room to adjacent room. First, dig your elevator shafts clear down to the bottom, then stagger your rooms so that no two are touching. Think of the dots as earth, the vertical lines as elevators, and the horizontal lines as storage rooms, and remember - this is at the very bottom of the map:

......||........................||
......||........................||
......||=====.............||
===||............=====||
......||=====.............||
===||............=====||
......||=====.............||
===||............=====||

Note how no two rooms touch? That means that any random event - fire, molerats, radroaches - can not spread! A fire flares up in one room, can't spread to the next room, and just dies. That means that you can build a ton of storage rooms, and don't need to keep people in them. You can just ignore fires and such that start there. Later in the game when you have lots of storage rooms, this is a huge time saver.

[Blackhawk]

And in case people don't know about it, there is a thread in Console Games with all sorts of info on this (really, staff, I think it is time to merge these two forums - they're not separate hobbies anymore like they were a decade ago.) Here's a quote, from a discussion on stats and training rooms (hint: they're the secret to the second half of the game):

All stats matter for explorers. Luck is how much money they get. Perception, Chariasma, and Intelligence let them pass special encounters successfully. Strength and Agility determine how much damage they take. Endurance is the most important stat from 1-49, and irrelevant after 50.

Here's the deal on Endurance: Every time a dweller levels up, they get a permanent number of hit points based on their current Endurance, including bonuses. If they raise their Endurance later, it does not add health retroactively. That means that if you want the best possible explorers (and door guards), you want to level their Endurance all the way to maximum at level 1, then outfit them with the best +Endurance gear you can find (it goes up to +6, I believe.) Only then should you level them up to maximum. Once they hit max, change out of the Endurance gear. High Endurance only helps when they level up, so put them in Strength/Agility gear (for fighting) or Luck gear (for money.)

The characters I set up this way as both my explorers and door guards are essentially unkillable. Deathclaws can come in multiples and hit my central guard room twice without my needing to heal them. Explorers will never, ever die. They go out, fill up their inventory, run out of space, and turn back before they die.

As to weapons, avoid Fat Man and missile launchers. They are a huge waste of damage. It has something to do with how the total damage is divided among the targets. You want plasma weapons or gatling guns (including gatling lasers.) One fat man in the guard room is fine, especially for ghouls. Avoid them like the plague on anyone you're going to go into a building in the wasteland with.

A note on questing. Stats change a bit for questing. Luck affects how fast your crit meter fills, and Agility affects how often you fire. Once your questers are at level 50, put them in Agi/Luck gear for the best results.

[ColdSteel]

Thanks for the tips. They look like they will really be useful.

[Daehawk]

This is mine.

[LawBeefaroni]

If you lay it out smart (only one elevator on the top floor), enemies will never get to floor two. Here's the trick, showing the door, floors, and elevators:
[........]||===================
==== ||===================||
==== ||===================||
==== ||===================||
==== ||===================||

Notice that there is no far elevator on the top floor? This forces the enemies to run clear to the last room on the top floor, then turn around and run back across the top floor to get to your elevator. That means that they have to cross the top floor twice. You fill that top floor with your meanest guys with your biggest guns (although you need to keep your other floors well-armed for roaches and molerats, too.)

Put power plants onto that top floor so that intruders have to face your highest Strength dwellers too.

Oh, and no radio rooms. You don't want radio rooms. They are not just useless, they are detrimental.

Eh. I got some fun rare dwellers from the radio room. You can always leave them empty of trash them if you don't want to deal with deathclaws.

You can also set it to just broadcast internally for the happiness bonus only. No new dwellers but no deathclaws either.

[Blackhawk]

This is mine.

A good start. When you get a chance, build a new barracks further down and replace that one. You want people stationed on the top floor full time, and there isn't much of value they'll be doing in a barracks (at least as far as guards go.)

I trained my guards to full 10-stats across the board, but if you don't want that kind of investment, I agree with LawBeef - power plants for Endurance/Strength dwellers.

[Blackhawk]

I loaded it up on my tablet to get a shot of my last vault (Vault 47.) It has been a few months since I've actually played, so it needs a bit of housekeeping.

[Daehawk]

Good Lord. At the pace the game moves it will take me a year to get that far

[Blackhawk]

It accelerates once you have a half a dozen people with good stats out exploring.

[Daehawk]

Ive had to stop sending people out for now. I have two I use with good armor and weapons but I tend to leave them overnight and when I get up they are dead. Seems 10 stims and 5 radaways are not enough.

Other than visual is there no way to tell what level a room is? I play sporadically and I cant tell if a room has been upgraded or not.

[LawBeefaroni]

Ive had to stop sending people out for now. I have two I use with good armor and weapons but I tend to leave them overnight and when I get up they are dead. Seems 10 stims and 5 radaways are not enough.

Early on just bring them back when they're down to a few stims. Ideally at zero but if you don't want to babysit the game constantly, just a few. Send one at a time with as many stims as you can rather than multiple with split stims. The further out they go, the better the loot

[Blackhawk]

Early on, before you get good weapons, armor, and Endurance training, explorers are very short term. An hour or two at most. Later on you'll be able to send them out for a couple of days at a time, and eventually you'll just be able to send them out and forget about them, as they'll come back when their inventory is full.

Don't give up on them early on, though. Sending them out is how you get most of your gear, not to mention an economy boost.

As for rooms, hit the upgrade button. If it is level 1, you'll have a cheap upgrade. If it is level 2, it will be expensive. If it is level 3, you won't be able to upgrade.

[Daehawk]

Lol whoops. I started it up and went and did some house work. Came back and the power was out and happiness had dropped from about 89 to 12 and it was a mess. It wont let ya exit without saving either so I alt-f4'd it.

[Blackhawk]

Lol whoops. I started it up and went and did some house work. Came back and the power was out and happiness had dropped from about 89 to 12 and it was a mess. It wont let ya exit without saving either so I alt-f4'd it.

Molerats? Sounds like molerats.

[Daehawk]

I was thinking its because I wasn't there to click to collect the resources..power. That hold out from mobiles of clicking to collect everything needs to go.

Imagine if they took this game , got rid of the mobile traces, and made a bigger deeper more detailed true sim/rpg out of it?

[LawBeefaroni]

I was thinking its because I wasn't there to click to collect the resources..power. That hold out from mobiles of clicking to collect everything needs to go.

Imagine if they took this game , got rid of the mobile traces, and made a bigger deeper more detailed true sim/rpg out of it?

You eventually get robots to do the gathering for you.

IIRC, it was created to build hype for FO4, not to be a full fledged RPG. It's a time/resource management sim with RPG elements.

[Daehawk]

Heard a music alert play once and found a Mysterious Stranger looking guy in my vault. Clicked him and it gave me about 300 caps. Ive heard it many times since but never can find him. Then a second tone plays. Im guessing he shows up on the first and is gone on the second pretty quick after and Im somehow not seeing him. unless those music tones are for many things.

[Daehawk]

Spotted the Stranger that time. He was inside the reactor area! No wonder I was missing him. I was looking at the normally accessible areas not inside walls and such.

[Blackhawk]

Stranger tip:

As soon as you heart he sound, zoom out until you can see the whole vault. He has a unique color that makes him stand out like a sore thumb. Once you learn to recognize it, you'll pick him out three out of four times.

[DD*]

Downloaded it twice, it does not seem to like my PC. Keeps insisting that I have a controller and I can't move the screen around with mouse or keyboard. Uninstalled.

[Daehawk]

Everytime I open the game Im low on power. I upgraded the 3 room power plant 3 times and its still just on the line of having enough even with all the people working it. I guess Im going to have to build a 2nd power area.

[Blackhawk]

You will eventually need a bunch of power rooms. One at first, probably four or five eventually. All four of the green rooms at the top of mine are max level power rooms, and all are filled with the maximum number of dwellers with the relevant stat (Strength, I believe) maxed.