Part 54: The Dakka Way: Update 1
The Dakka Way - Update 1Now that there's practically nothing left to spoil, it's time to start with our third alternate playthrough. I was originally planning for only three, but another one reared its head. More on that later.
This is our protagonist, Dakka. The name has been chosen for a reason, as you can see from our tagged skills. Speech is the really important one for what we're about to do, however, and everything else can catch up later.
Dakka starts off as normal, but instead of heading east to Klamath we're going somewhere else entirely.
In some ways Fallout 2 is very open world and very punishing if you stray too far from where the game expects you to be. It doesn't take very long for this...
To transition to this. If you're heading far south of Arroyo it's a dangerous place, although this is by far the worst encounter we can run into.
Fire geckos are a fairly easy one to escape, and it's entirely possible that you'll only have one of them coming after you if you turn around and run away immediately.
With 10 agility we've got enough AP to get the hell away from Aliens and Centaurs/Floaters pretty easily, but the Centaurs and Floaters are annoying because of just how long it takes them all to move. If you keep getting wiped out, you can make progress by stopping every couple squares, saving, and then continuing to move.
Even further south you can also run into some encounters where we're just caught in the crossfire, which are some of the easiest ones to escape. As long as you don't mess with anybody, you can pretty much make your escape unmolested. It'd be tempting to let them fight it out and loot the corpses, but sometimes the remaining faction will turn on you.
The point of all this is to get to San Francisco and talk with our friend at the Brotherhood of Steel. His quest isn't linked to anything else, so he really doesn't care who you've met or where you've been prior to coming to San Francisco.
After that we can head over to Navarro, using the same process. We actually ended up passing pretty close to it on the way down, and you can actually avoid the Enclave patrols by tacking a bit more east on your initial trip south.
The entire trip takes long enough that we actually reach the scripted scene when Horrigan kills a bunch of farmers for no apparent reason. At least in this case he's somewhere near the Enclave so it actually makes a bit more sense.
The key with this build is to pump as much speech as you can to convince Chris here that you're one of the new replacements. It's actually possible to fail this one, but really this is the only check we have to worry about here at the moment.
Once we're inside the goal is to grab as much loot as you can, especially the power armor. If we just walked out right now the first half of the game would be a cakewalk, but we have grander ambitions.
Once we're inside this guy is who we have to talk to about the vertibird plans in order to get the conversation option to ask Quincy about the vertibird plans. For the longest time I couldn't remember, and there's nothing to set this guy apart as THE guy you have to talk to.
At that point we're home free, and we don't even have to start the fight between Raul and Quincy. I do anyway, since it's fun and lets me loot Raul's stuff.
Running back to San Francisco with our freshly minted copies of the plans is enough to jack us up three levels at once. Between that and the experience points you pick up for making your way through the Navarro base we're actually around level 7 or 8 right now, but we're not done!
We can also go ahead and turn in our extra set of plans right now for an experience reward with the Shi to pick up another easy 5k.
Next stop: the old military base. Basically, the only place in the game you can't wander into if you already know roughly where it is on the world map is Vault 13.
Even with our lousy hand to hand skill we can still punch all of the wolves to death and they are pretty much incapable of hurting us. There's no actual skill required for the dynamite push cart, so that's another easy 5K and is enough to pop us up a level...
And with our speech skill, going over to talk our suicidal police friend out of his plan and get 6K and a pile of manuals. Altogether that's enough easy experience for now, so it's time to go through and steamroll the game properly.
I decided early on to make this a run to explore the various jerk/evil options for a character in Fallout 2, starting with being an asshole to the greeter in Klamath. Surely, my fall into villainy began at this moment.
Having a good number of skill points to put into lock picking as well as and advanced lock picking set makes it easy to bust into a few places in Klamath, including this shelf in the Dunton store.
You can also help yourself to a velvet elvis in the Golden Gecko, which is worth about $300 early in the game...
As well as to a pile of gecko pelts in a house in trapper town...
The Buckner's also have a stash that you can raid, although it turns out this is less a case of picking a lock as much as it is just walking in and starting to jack their crap and then selling it back to them.
After dealing with the normal events in Klamath (Torr, the Rat God, ect) it's a better idea to just head to the Toxic Cave at this point, although we really don't care about Smiley at this point. All those repair books make getting in here fairly easy, and the electronic lock pick MK II makes easy work of the elevator lock.
I picked up Sulik as a pack mule and handed him a super sledge, but this is actually a bit much of a fight for him right now. Luckily you can also pick up a couple of EMP grenades in Navarro, and those do serious damage to the Security Robot.
All of which leads to our real goal for being here.
