Fallout – Quest Combat Strategy

Ok, I will address the issues as I come across them:

• It is indeed cheaper to build one large room and upgrade it all at once than individual parts (upgrade discount is 25 % for size 2 rooms, 33% for size 3 rooms). If you have the option to build in this manner then always do so.. Running low on some resources though can make getting a single room more important.
  • NOTE: The exception to this, from my knowledge right now, are the radio rooms. A larger room will reduce the time a bit but not increase the chance at the end of that time of getting a new dweller. It is better to have single individual rooms for this (though I will admit I have not answered the door in over a month myself). Radio Room bonus happiness is based only on the number of dwellers assigned to it (observation with a size 3 Radio Room, putting 6 dwellers with 1 charisma or 6 dwellers with 10+ charisma yeld the same 6% happiness boost).
• Room production is very simple and straight forward. Each room produces a resource of a certain amount. That amount is directly tied to the size and upgrade level of the room. The time it takes for the resource to be made ready for collection is also an initial fixed time based on the same factors. Your workers then combine their appropriate stat together and reduce the time it takes for the resource to be produced. Dweller stats have diminishing returns on production cycle duration (having a dweller with 6 PER in a water room won't give half cycle duration as assigning a 3 Per dweller).
  • Basically this means that one worker with a stat of six is equal to six workers with a stat of 1.
  • Luck adds towards this score for any room and also assists with the random caps bonus you can get. I am not sure what the chance is to get caps but by going over the cap of the primary stat with luck, you can reduce the time and rush failure rate significantly. I so far have gotten one rush to 0% followed by a 6% chance of failure. I have heard reports that you can get 0% twice in a row with enough points. Having all your dwellers with 10 Luck and 10 in the romm-related skill yeld 0 % failure on first rush, increasing with each rush.
• For the raiders, the room does not matter. Health is determined by the people's levels. Their damage is determined by the weapons you give them. You basically want the first room with someone in it to have the best weapons inside your vault. Endurance -may- have some impact on damage taken but not enough to make it noticeable as compared to level variance of the dwellers (endurance is directly tied to HP gained when they level up : a dweller with END5 will gain less HP when leveling than an END6 dweller, confirmed by reading values in save file [all dwellers have 105 base HP at lvl 1]).
  • My first room was my diner and now garden.. My staff are just armed to the teeth with the best weapons.. 2 of the 3 raiders drop dead before they even make it to the middle of the room.
  • Do NOT use the gate room for defense. You can only put two people in there.. its just not as effective as a full sized room can be.
• Layout of the vault has nothing to do with the attacks. The only thing to be concerned here is if something happens in an empty room, usually rad roaches but some times fire, that they will spread until a room with people in them are found. After that they will only spread if they kill all of the people in them.
  • Simple rule of thumb, arm everyone in your vault with guns. The best ones should be in your diner to stop raiders since they steal resources vs the other events just annoy the room they occur in. But cycle the weapons from First Room to Wanderers to Everyone else until everyone is armed. As you get better weapons, spread them around and upgrade people.

And so much for a short answer.. If anything needs more detail let me know in the comments.

Edit: Redid the Luck section based on @SkyHiRider's information in the comments.

Try to avoid upgrading rooms. Incidents are much worse in fully upgraded rooms than a room with hasn't been upgraded. In particular training rooms don't benefit much from upgrades so I don't bother to upgrade those rooms. I also don't upgrade medical and science rooms, so I can rush them over and over as necessary to generate stimpacks/radaways or to get rushing or incident related objectives. Most of the time I leave these later rooms occupied by a single dweller, and that's enough to deal with any incidents.

The only rooms I do upgrade are the energy/water/food resource production rooms. For example I have fully upgraded a Nuka-Cola bottling plant next to the vault door, and the dwellers there are armed to the teeth. I also make sure that any production room that I have upgraded is fully staffed. I don't bother to try to respond to incidents by moving people around. It never works well. (Though early in the game I did move weapons around. One missile launcher can make a big difference.)

You should also consider your vault layout. Storage and residential rooms should be left unoccupied and placed so incidents in them can't spread to other rooms, or at the very least only to one fully occupied room.

I've also limited the population of my vault to about 110, as there doesn't seem to be much point in going beyond that. It's already pain to deal that many dwellers. I'm not sure if vault population factors into the severity of incidents, but that might be something to consider. I don't seem to have as much of a problem with incidents as you do even in my fully upgraded rooms, but that could be because my dwellers have better weapons than yours. I'm currently tossing away anything that doesn't do least 10 damage on average. At the very least reducing the population of your vault would let increase the damage of the weapons the remaining dwellers are equipped with.

Finally, I'd recommend just putting your phone in your pocket when you can't pay close enough attention to respond to incidents. Unless you're actively grinding certain objectives, you might as well just leave the game alone. You can't have any incidents while you're not playing the game.