Dunno if you're asking for general tips, but here goes anyway:

• When you start out as a baby and get to assign points to your S.P.E.C.I.A.L in the baby book, put 9 points to Intelligence, and 1 to whatever else (preferably Agility) The higher your intelligence is, the more skill points you'll be able to distribute when you level up. This is critical if you want to ever be able to max out your skills before you hit the level cap.

(You probably already know this, but the reason you only raise skills to 9 is because there's a bobblehead for each of them that raises them 1 point. No sense in wasting.)

• Focus on Small guns and Repair skills at first. You need to be good with guns to protect your ass, and be able to keep them serviceable. I usually focus on Lockpick and Science too, but you can always come back later to locked doors and terminals, so it's not totally necessary, but there's usually a lot of loot to be had that helps early in the game which usually has to be picked or hacked.
• If you play evil when you first start out, you'll make your life a lot easier. Don't worry, you can always gain back Karma as you go along... what I mean is kill traders (not caravans) and steal their stuff, steal valuables from people in Megaton and sell to Moira. Get caps... The more caps you have, the more ammo, guns, and stimpacks you can buy. Those three things are your lifeblood. You won't find enough of any of them when you first enter the wasteland, and you won't survive without them either.
• Skill books are awesome. Make them more awesome by choosing the perk that raises the points skill books adds, to 2 instead of 1. Do it early in the game.

I have tons more... I'll stop though.
Are you playing the PC version or console?

Just started Alan Wake. It's pretty impressive so far.

thanks a ton! i will be sure to come back here if i have a query. PC :)

Oh dude... you gotta get these Fallout 3 mods:

Mart's Mutant Mod:
Marts Mutant Mod - RC 6 at Fallout 3 Nexus - Fallout 3 mods and community
* Every creature and NPC is unique with its own stats, size, confidence, health, damage and even skin (texture)
* Creatures and NPCs suffer improved wounding effects such as visible bleedng and statistic penalties
* Creatures and NPCs can loot the corpses of fallen enemies, afterwhich you can find this loot if you kill them
* Creatures and NPCs have improved behavioural AI based on class -- in any given group some may be aggressive towards you, some may be ambivalent, and others may avoid you outright.
* Configurable increased spawns allow you tailor how many creatures and NPCs spawn in the game at any given spawn point
* Improved faction system to better reflect inter-faction relations and ensure the player isn't the center of the universe
* New creatures and NPCs to add variety to the wasteland -- all hand-crafted with their own stats, abilities, loot, weapons, textures and in some cases scripted AI behaviour.

FOOK2 (Fallout Overhaul Kit)
FOOK2 RC v1-1 Beta 2 at Fallout 3 Nexus - Fallout 3 mods and community
FOOK2 is a complete overhaul of FO3. It adds hundreds of news items (weapons, armor, clutter, food etc.), has high quality retextures for many vanilla items and many new gameplay features.
On top of this are all items completely rebalanced and fully integrated into the game and it has also support for ALL DLC's.

Fallout Mod Manager
Fallout mod manager at Fallout 3 Nexus - Fallout 3 mods and community
Small program to manage your mods. Absolutely priceless.

FOSE (Fallout Script Extender)
Fallout Script Extender - FOSE at Fallout 3 Nexus - Fallout 3 mods and community
Needed for a lot of mods that use additional scripting. I think FOOK2 needs this. Good to have either way.



There are A LOT of other mods, but the above are the absolute best for making FO3 far more immersive, balanced and kick ass. You shouldn't have any issues installing the mods, but if you pick some up and need help with load orders and what not, let me know.

I just got done playing that as well, definitely a worthy follow-up to Left 4 Dead and does a good job at improving nearly everything from the first game. The characters are far more fleshed out than the first group of survivors and the introduction of melee weapons is always enjoyable, especially when you realize how good they are for dispersing groups that swarm you. The A.I. Director is far more merciless now, at the final stage in "Swamp Fever" he spawned 4 Tanks in a row while I was trying to make it out to the rescue boat and I was playing on easy, I have yet to try normal difficulty on any of the campaigns. My biggest gripe with the game is that the friendly A.I. seems to have gotten far less reliable. In Left 4 Dead I could be pretty confident that if a Hunter pounced me or a Smoker constricted me, my friendly A.I. would be there for me before I started loosing too much health. In Left 4 Dead 2 I've had Chargers pounding me into mush while my A.I.s just stood around shooting common infected, and if a Jockey gets me then I'm screwed. I don't know how something that worked so well in the first game could get screwed up so royally in the second, but I really hope Valve fix that for the next installment.

i think i installed these without a hitch, but i have an annoyance. this one mod has this big red ! box for quest-givers(i assume). is there a way to make this box smaller? it's about as tall as the people.

That's usually because there's a missing texture or mesh. You have to make sure that you add whatever textures/meshes that come with the download. Just open the folders from the downloads and look for each of the additional textures/meshes/etc and add them to the existing folders in your Fallout3/data directory. You have to keep the folder hierarchy intact, so make sure to put things in the right place. If a folder doesn't exist in the original fallout3/data directory but it exists in the mod folder, just put the whole folder in the proper place in the data directory. Just make sure you don't overwrite any folders or files, as you may overwrite stuff from another mod.

Edit:
I almost forgot. You need to download and run this:
http://fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=944

You should only have to run it once. That may solve your problem (and any future ones) if the issue isn't a missing texture. Do this first anyway, because it's easier.

Edit 1.1
When you run Fallout Mod Manager, make your load order look like this: (each of these checked, and in this order from the top)

1- Fallout3.esm
2- CALIBR.esm
3- FOOK2 - Main.esm
4- FOOK2 [WANK] World And Neighborhood Kit.esm
5- Marts Mutant Mod.esm
6- FOOK2 - Main.esp
7- FOOK2 [EVE] Energy Visuals Enhanced.esp
8- Mart's Mutant Mod.esp
9- "all the other marts mutant mod esp's you want applied"
....
LAST- FOOK2.esp

Don't worry about any of the DLC's if you don't have any.
It's critical that the load order is correct, because position in the load order affects which mods take priority. If they're not in the right place, there will be conflicts.
Also, I don't remember if CALIBR came with Fook2 or not, but if it doesn't, you might want to pick that up too because if I remember correctly it's the mod for the bullets that go with Fook2 weapons.

One last thing... obviously you know you need to run FOMM to start the game. Just click "launch FOSE" in FOMM to do this... and all your checked mods will be in effect. I also remember something about MMM where if you're not starting a new game, you have to wait in an area for 4 days or something for the mod to start up. Information on that is available on Mart's mod page if you need it.

so i finally finished a 'huge' map in civilization 5 this weekend. had been playing for a few hours every night.

the good - it was quite fun for the most part. was novel to see the Russian's massing hordes of knights and pikemen at my borders while I was researching electronics and mobilizing cavalry and infantry. they didn't last long.

i tried going for a cultural win, but it just takes TOO long to build up, even with multiple consecutive golden ages. tried for a diplomatic victory but couldn't get enough votes in the UN even once the Russian empire (they were the 2nd best nation) was within my borders.

so i went for science. the classic rocket ship out to Alpha Centauri, launched it in '76.


the bad... this game is BLOATED. like a 2 ton family of 4 at an all you can eat chinese buffet. you have to sit through the first 20-30 seconds of the intro movie every time you load the game. then it's another 3-4 minutes to load your campaign if you've developed any sort of empire. the processing time for handling AI turns in the endgame is a solid 2-3 minutes and i wasn't even on the largest map possible.

when people who've been playing Civilization games for over a decade now are scratching their heads and going 'where the HELL is the diplomacy screen' in a Civilization game there's a problem. when you have to click through a bunch of different screens to get half of a vague idea of what the global political situation looks like in a Civilization game there's a problem. but i can adapt...

the ugly - the ending. what a huge ass slap in the face. i realize the conquest and the development of your nation or empire is the real gift of the game but.... there's ALWAYS been some sort of little animation, some sort of closure. this time just a little splash screen window in the middle of your game.... that's it. there's more animation in carting my space ship parts to my city (you can see them on the back of trucks) than there is in launching it (absolutely nothing at all).

the splash screen has a few tabs, the main one is a nice little picture based on your victory type and buttons to exit or keep playing. then there's a tab for stats, but only for the best and worse of certain fields, then there's your ranking list, and a hall of fame list.

that's it.

no power graph like EVERY other civ game. no replay like EVERY other civ game. hell they don't even provide you with details on the other civilizations so what's the point of even providing you with demographic stats if you can't actually compare them to other cultural demographics?

i can understand wanting to change things around a bit to keep the game fresh, the change in combat is quite effective, but these were features that had become standard to the series. seriously having to sit through some old fart bestowing the glory of his people onto his son every time i load the game so i can be rewarded with absolutely nothing when i beat the game is a piss off.


as it stands the game is still fun but WOW is it ever a huge let down when you beat it.

i think all the rest of that i got right. it looks like i forgot to download the main files for fook2 1.0 rc. i had just downloaded the beta files. hopefully this fixes it. ugh, 1gb for a mod!

Best gig you'll ever have.