Part 2 is out! We clean up the rest of our business in Arroyo and set out into the wide and wild world.
I did find out what exactly Combat Difficulty does, on Rough enemies get a 20% flat bonus to their accuracy, a 1.25X multiplier to their damage, and the Intelligence required for an enemy to potentially use Aimed attacks is lowered to 3, meaning most enemies in the game can potentially perform them. The damage buff they receive is definitely the most prominent thing, since that multiplies with critical damage bonuses they get.
Just to clarify on something I said regarding Steal EXP, I mean you hit diminishing returns in a pure mechanical sense as the game literally awards less EXP after six successful steals in a single attempt. Were it to scale endlessly upwards, it could very easily be worth the "risk" to grind it out for awhile. With our paltry Steal skill, 4 times on a non-aggressive mark is the best we can manage.
There's a funny interaction that can happen with the quest to rescue Smoke. There actually isn't a time limit on rescuing him, but the quest to do it will become unobtainable after 90 in-game days. If you accept it beforehand though, you can wait forever to rescue Smoke though the Experience for doing so becomes unavailable. If you wait 11 months in Arroyo without leaving it, Nagor will claim Smoke will have been cooked for food, but you can still rescue him.
Speaking of 90 in-game days, all Arroyo quests become voided at that point and Hakunin will no longer craft Healing Powder for you. The Elder will also not give you the money or flask if you delay that long.
The EXP gained in Arroyo is really quite marginal, if you paid attention you'd notice that even the simplest quests in Klamath are giving us double or triple the payout. You can comfortably ignore these quests without setting back your character growth if you just want to get on with it, but this wouldn't be much of a completionist playthrough then, right?
It does not take much positive buzz to make the Dunton's think you're not worth getting in on their cattle wrangling scheme, but for whatever reason Arm Wrestling them, win or lose, gets their trust.
I'll mention this in the next video, but the quest to save Sulik's sister is probably the most infamous piece of cut content in this game. Despite it being his whole reason for joining you and encounters with slavers happening multiple times in the game, this plot thread is dropped as soon as he joins you and cannot be pursued further. There IS dialogue in the game files that seems to be in reference to Sulik's home village, which is likely as far as they got with implementing the quest before it got cut.
If you complete the wrangling scheme, you get the same EXP you'd get for scaring off the Dunton's plus some Beef Jerky and negative karma. Not a big deal either way, but I went this route because I needed to scare off Torr regardless and it's a really funny way to resolve the quest.
Despite participating in the cattle wrangling scheme just to double cross the Dunton's and being responsible for Torr running off, this whole affair netted us positive Karma. Such is the way things go in Fallout 2 sometimes.
Saving Torr is easily the best way to go about freeing Sulik, as it saves you the money spent on freeing him while still giving you Experience. Note that you can also pay Maida directly to free Sulik rather than giving him the money to pay off his debt, but for some reason this route doesn't award EXP. Speaking of Sulik!
Companion: Sulik
"Most people have evil spirits. You? You have stupid spirits. Go see shaman. Get hole in head."
Weapon Skills: Melee Weapons, Unarmed Weapons, SMG-type guns
Secondary Skills: Outdoorsman
HP by Level: 85, 93, 103, 113, 123, 134
AP by Level: 9, 10, 10, 11, 11, 12
Sulik also gains bonus crit rate and melee damage as he levels, but the resources on these are inconsistent so I won't list them here since I'm not confident in them. Every companion has their own SPECIAL statistics, but the only one that really matters is Strength because it affects carry weight and weapon accuracy for gun users. Sulik has 225 pounds of carry weight by max level.
Sulik is your first possible companion and by some measure is easily the best. He's durable, strong with melee weapons at a stage of the game where those are dominant, and his SMG gun type means he's actually able to use the extremely powerful .223 pistol in the end game, or the HK G11 if you're willing to risk him bursting it into your back. Sulik also has a very high Outdoorsman skill, starting at 75% and finishing at 85%. When a party member has a tagged secondary skill like Outdoorsman, the game will actually check their stat instead of yours when using it if it happens to be higher. This is why Outdoorsman is pretty useless for the player, as having Sulik and a Motion Sensor (+20% to your Outdoorsman if it's in your inventory) means you hit the effectiveness cap of 95% for Outdoorsman without putting a single point into it or even reading a book.
Just past that though, Sulik is very consistent across the whole game and is a welcome force in your war on the wasteland. Set him up with a Combat Knife early on for frequent hits on the Geckos and Rats we start against, and then switch him over to an SMG so he can engage at a range. Once the 223 pistol becomes available, slap that in his hands and watch him blow apart enemies from across the map. If you didn't tag a close range combat skill, Sulik is practically mandatory for actually doing combat in Klamath if you go there first as the guns you can pick up in this town suck a fat one. Even if you don't plan to use Sulik long term, his high Outdoorsman makes him indispensable for traveling with minimal headaches until you get the car, so definitely grab him for that. We'll be swapping out companions as we go along this playthrough, but Sulik will be with us full time from here on out, and it's an instant reload if he dies.
