Fallout New Vegas Hardcore/Very Hard - Looking for some advice

[Kav]

I just bought Ultimate edition of New Vegas and was going to do a hardcore/very hard play through for the challenge. I was wondering what skills you guys suggest I tag and why. I hear good things about the survival skill, but have also saw that some think it is worthless. I plan on making a fighter, not a lover, (though not sure what build yet) and plan on going the "evil path" ( bad karma). Anyone out there that has played this on these settings that can suggest some good skills to tag and good perks to take, as well as what stats you took. Is high luck, endurance, etc needed in hardcore/very hard?

[PizzaSHARK]

Been a very long time since I did a vanilla playthrough. Charisma is a useless stat so you can drop it to 1 and leave it there. High Luck will give you a ton of "free" caps through winning at casinos, which will let you afford the various stat implants pretty easily.

[hailey]

Charisma isn't great, the only real advantage is companion damage, which they don't need help with

It's best to just max your int and get a perk like educated so you can pump speech up

[Afrospinach]

Survival skill increases the amount of health you get from food and the amount of hydration you get from water(you will get more health from food and drink than anywhere else unlike fallout 3 where you are in stimpak heaven), it is pretty useful imo but more of a quality of life thing if you want to be harsh about it. You should not have any issue maxing out every skill to 100 by level 50 with int around 7ish or higher, I don't think educated or comprehension are needed but IIRC I usually get one or the other for lack of good alternatives. There are something like 6 skill books for each skill in the dlc + original game which is 18-24 points for each skill, in your travels you will at least visit the locations of most of these books, whether you find them or not is another thing. As far as the base stats go I just look at the perks I want and go from there, keep in mind you can pay to increase every stat by 1 point later on.

Luck is fantastic as it increases your crit and thanks to the way armor is dealt with in this vs fallout 3 it will often more than double your damage output on a critical hit.

[Buckwald]

You have the ultimate edition, so, you'll have the canteen which means you'll never go thirsty and food is insanely easy to come by, so you won't need to dump too many points into survival.

If you play like me, I was always stealthy. So, I used medium armors and silenced guns and sniper rifles (with attachments) and was always crouched.

The main skills I got to 100 ASAP Were: Sneak, Guns, Lock Pick, Science and Repair usually rotating which skills I put the points into as to not be too far behind, but it's not that big of a deal.

Here is some more reading:

At the base level, you need 1300 skill points for complete maximization (100 points for 13 skills). At level 1, you get 45 skill points for free (from your 3 Tag! skills), and an average character (5 in all SPECIAL stats) will have 15 as a base for all skills. This reduces the amount of skill points you need to 1060 (1300 - (45 + 15 x 13)).

For 49 levels at average intelligence, you get 612 skill points (12.5 x 49). Just with these base stats, this is enough to get all but 6 skills completely maxed out (remaining 448 / 85, rounding up).

Simply by taking Educated at level 4 leaves us with 356 skill points remaining to completely max out. Taking Comprehension at level 6 (and saving skill books until then) means that reading 89 skill books is enough to net you the remaining skill points (so long as you adapt your per-level skill points to the remaining skill books). As a note, the base game contains 53 skill book; Old World blues contains 16 skill books/recipes; Dead Money also contains 12; and Honest Hearts can contain anywhere from 0 to 8, 0 to 2 per workbench (and may require a bit of saving and reloading before entering caves). With diligence in finding skill books/recipes (all well-documented on this wikia) and a bit of reloading in Honest Hearts to generate all 8, you can max out all skills without any other special character effort.

A character with Intelligence of 10 with Educated at level 4 and starting off with Skilled will be short only 408 skill points, not including skill points from initial character creation (which will yield at least 111: 45 from three Tag! skills and 22 from Repair/Medicine/Science, ignoring Luck). This character will need only very few skill books by comparison, about 42 if all other SPECIAL stats are left at 5.

As far as perks go, take the ones you saw above and here are a few that are a main staple to me (in no particular order):
-Intense Training (I take all 10 to boost my S.P.E.C.I.A.Ls)
-Bloody Mess (+5% boost in all damage)
-Tag! (+15 to a skill)
-Action Boy (+15 AP) (You need 6 AGI to get this perk)
-Silent Running (you can crouch and run and still be silent) (need 6 agi and 50 sneak)
-Toughness (+2 DT take it twice for a total of +4 DT)
-Life Giver (+30 HP)
-Light Step (ground traps won't go off) (need 6 PE and 6 AGI)
-Jury Rigging (large pool of weapons to repair from) (90 Repair) - I know that seems steep but when you get further into the game it'll be easier to keep up your weapons without wasting caps on repairing.
-Strong Back (+50 carry weight)

Also, I'd wait until your at least lvl 20 before trying any of the DLCs. They can be insanely tough on hardcore mode.

[Jesusmobile]

Good luck on beating it. It was a pretty good game but Fallout 3 was way better imo.

[PizzaSHARK]

Good luck on beating it. It was a pretty good game but Fallout 3 was way better imo.

FNV has a much better plot and setting, but vanilla vs vanilla, FO3 definitely wins. FNV was rushed out the door before it was ready.

Modding... it's a tough call. Many of the best mods for FO3 got ported to FNV, and with TTW you don't even need to choose - it's FNV or nothing at all, though since TTW is still definitely in development stages most mods are incompatible or are "use at your own risk," status.