Brotherhood outcast aside (due to inbuild movement restriction mechanic), armour seems like the most crucial part of this game. In every competitive game I've played getting some good armour early was the crucial move I made towards winning, and in co-op, strong armour went alongside the better performing players. As soon as you get level 2 armour and well rested, a deathclaw is nothing to you.

Considering that there's only 1 set of combat armour, and that T-60 (and tesla) armour is more or less given out at random to the closest player to its trigger, there's really not much skill in winning a game. Has anyone tried to fix this?

While useful for surviving battles, it's only good for that; winning requires getting the SPECIAL tokens that will help with the quests, gathering the agendas to help build influence, and making the most of perks, gear and companions to get through the game. Also, no amount of armor will deal with Rads.

8 hours ago, PillarNexus said:

While useful for surviving battles, it's only good for that; winning requires getting the SPECIAL tokens that will help with the quests, gathering the agendas to help build influence, and making the most of perks, gear and companions to get through the game. Also, no amount of armor will deal with Rads.

Fair point. I've yet to see anyone win with less than 5 special tokens. However, Armour helps quite a bit with gaining those tokens, as fighting aggressive enemies (preferably while travelling) is the most effective way to level up quickly. Armour makes it easier to punch through multiple encounters without taking a multi-turn pause to regenerate health, and if all else fails, can be sold for a strong weapon or crucial item.

Your last point is true as well, but I'm obliged to point out the biohazard suit, which not only counteracts pretty much all radiation, but also gives a bonus in E tests - crucial for drug based play.

For that matter, most of the purchasable armour pieces have strong buffs during one kind of test or another, so you could almost treat having a piece of armour as having a special token of the corresponding type.

There are couple of nice combos for combat survival too:

Formal Wear armor and Blackwidow perk:

Blackwidow adds C to all combat rolls and Formal Wear adds +1 automatic hit to any roll using C, plus gives 1 armor and allows to ignore companion requirements and thus you can exhaust companions more often when no need to worry them leaving at next rest. Add this to Vaul Dweller and you have 2 points of armor in total and thus you are near immortal in combat.

Missile launcher plus Vault Suit:

Vault suit gives one extra reroll to E rolls, missile launcher uses EL (and Vault guy just happens to have L) and missile launcher kills all enemies of equal or lower level when exhausted.

I had spent couple of turns in level 4 exploration space and there had gathered quite a doom stack around me, with that pesky Mirelurk Queen closing in as well. Then a level 2 enemy activated and attacked me, I killed it, then I used the Ricochet-perk I had to kill that Mirelurk Queen and tapped the rocket launcher to kill every level 1 and 2 enemy around my orginal target (not sure if it should have been around the mirelurk ricochet, but it wouldn't have mattered much). Ended up killing 7 enemies in total with the worst enemy in game included and also some annoying armored level 2 enemies, which would have been much harder fought one by one and also some radioactive enemies. Ended up clearing all enemies around me and getting two level-ups...

THAT particular vault dweller was quite OP in the end game...