I've gotten so good at this game that it holds no challenge anymore unless I intentionally gimp myself. I'm going to try a pure Throwing build, no other combat skill.
That's quite a challange.
Have you finished the game with no deaths before? There's quite a few situations that can easily end up in death depending on circumstances/luck throughout the whole game. You need a lot of planning to make sure you can survive absolutely anything the game throws at you.
I did notice there seems to be a lot more Throwing feats than I remember, so perhaps Styg wanted to make this viable?
Throwing is more of a support skill, but yes, throwing only builds are completly viable.
I'm spreading around my skill points quite a bit as well. Trying Stealth with this build, although I suspect it's somewhat wasted with such high Initiative and ranged attacks.
Stealth and initiative complement each other. There are tons of situations where one has the advantage over the other. Stealth won't save you when the combat is initiated after dialogue/cutscene, initiative doesn't give you as much options and is far less reliable when stealth can be used instead.
By the way, with 10 DEX and 10 AGI, your initiative will be 25. That's hardly a high initative. It's high-ish, but not enough to reliably act first when there are multiple enemies or enemies such as Carnifex or Faceless Gaunts who have high initiative themselves. Reliablity and consistency is really important when trying to finsih the game without deaths.
I would say 11-19 is low, 20-29 is medicore, 30-39 is high and 40+ is extremaly high.
If you wish to rely on initiative, you probably should take Paranoia for the +5 bonus. You might also consider taking Gunslinger and holding a pistol for +7 bonus. If you are going pure throwing then you are not going to use it anyways while 37 initiative is something you can truly rely on.
One of the issues with Underrail is it's toughest at the start, then after Junkyard it becomes far too easy. Wish it was the inverse.
I agree the game gets a little easier after Junkyard, but it still has several difficluty spikes that can easily kill you if you let your guard down. Carnifex, Gautlet, warehouse mercs, snipers in general, stealthed enemies in general, tchortist ambush, gasing the drones, only a few examples of situations that can end up very badly very quickly.
Still thinking about starting over without Stealth, and dropping Pinning. This feat is unpredictable and I prefer Taser/Throwing Net/Flashbang for reliably immobilizing enemies.
I wouldn't drop stealth, but I agree that Pinning is unreliable and not essential considering how many other options you have to immobilize enemies. Over 1/3 chance to immobilize when you are already throwing knives a lot is not bad, but not needed.
I may even drop Dodge
I'm not a fan of dodge/evasion in general, to me they require way too much investment for too little benefit that can be easily substituted with crafting, be it an energy shield or good armor. Crafting has also other benefits beyond defense. The other problem with dodge/evasion is that it drops to 0 when stunned/incapacitated, effectively leaving you defenseless in a situation where you need your defenses the most. I can avoid damage with clever positioning most of the time so I want all the protection when I can't move, not the other way around.
They are also unreliable by nature. This is not that much of a big deal when playing normally because they do work most of the time on average, but on ironman runs reliability is far more important.
Dodge also suffers a 25% penalty when wearing googles and NV goggles are awesome for any ranged build.
Overall, I wouldn't bother with either. You will be much better off with electronics/tailoring and a good energy shield/armor. You may even add 80 biology to craft Bullhead pills which will make you immune to stun/incapacitation for 3 turns.
with very high Init, and the fact that a low number of enemies use Melee in comparison to Guns, it's not hard to root or stun the Melee guy and then Dodge is wasted.
Gun users are not a threat whatsoever with a good energy shield, except for snipers and maybe dreadnoughts. They are simply not capable of going past the threshold (or only getting a really small amount of damage past the threshold) of a good crafted shield, not even a low fequency one and you can get over 1500+ capacity so they are not going to burn through that anytime soon. An amplified high frequency shield together with good armor should save you from being 1-shot by snipers.
On the other hand some melee enemies, while uncommon, are nonetheless a really big threat. In most cases you can stop them before they get near, but stealthy cutthroats/crawlers, Carnfiex, charging pigs, gaunts etc. can easily close in and quickly deal a lot of damage before you can do anything to stop them.
What do you guys think about taking Paranoia on top of 10 Dex/Agi for guaranteed Initiative, as a sort of Stealth substitute?
As I said, 30 initiative instead of 25 in a big difference. It's not a substitute for stealth however, I would go with both.
I could pair it with Recklessness, assuming it really does affect "all weapons", including Throwing Knives and perhaps even Grenades?
Nope, it only applies to weapons that are in weapon slots, not utilities.
Well he's not entirely unarmored, I use Tactical Vest which is good for bullet defense, with only 10% armor penalty.
Tactical vests become almost entirely useless after you craft an energy shield. There is simply not need for the bullet protection at that point because crafted energy shields make you virtually invulnerable to bullets. That said, they are very good before you get the shield, so usually until you finish Junkyard.
The only use for a tac vest I could see after that is against snipers if you craft it with nanocomposite plate that lowers the damage you get from criticals by a huge %. But that's very situational.
I would recommend using a pig leather armor- in my opinion it's the best overall armor with low penalty. It has high DR at the cost of lower DT, but DR is more useful in most cases, especially when enemy is dealing huge amounts of damage per hit. DT is only good when you can stack it to very high numbers.
+1 CON means more HP at that's universally useful, especially against psi and enemies that can potentially one-shot you. Infused pig leather gives a huge flat HP bonus in addition to +1 CON.
Add high density foam padding for added protection aganist melee (and 1-3% extra DR aganist everything in general) and together with shield you have pretty much all bases covered. By the end of the game you can easily have over 120 extra HP on Hard and over 60% DR against melee at only 20% armor penalty while being almost immune to bullets and other ranged attacks, with the exception of snipers and crossbows.
Ancient rathound leather armor is also very good, but I like the added HP from pig leather better. Also hate the persuasion penalty as it's hard enough to keep it high with only 3 WIL, but that's only if you care about persuasion.
