Is there a good reason to use AP round and not using normal rounds?

I finished Fallout 1 last week and I don't remember AP rounds being far inferior in terms of damage. Even a burst short from an assault rifle with AP rounds does little damage, usually less than 10.

And I just got the 1000 watt laser pistol, was really excited to blast some people. To my surprise the laser pistol does too little damage, just like AP round.

In Fallout armour piercing rounds are not designed for high damage, they are designed to lower the enemy's Damage Resistance (DR), therefore AP bullets have less direct damage, but still have a specific use against heavily armoured foes.

So does using AP round results in better critical chance?

I read the fallout wiki about AP rounds, saying something about a "mistake in the game design", making AP rounds far inferior than normal ones.

No, criticals don't factor into ammo. Ammo has modifiers (AC, DR and Damage) but it seems the actual Fallout engine doesn't implement the modifiers -- hard coded bug, unfortunately.

That's one major flaw. No mod can fix this?

I've tried AP rounds on super mutants, AP round is still far inferior. I guess I will need to find bigger guns with better punch. Bigger caliber = more damage right? Because Marcus' minigun does zero damage on the Super Duper Mutants.

No, no mod can fix it if it's hard coded into the game executable, short of modifying that.

Bigger calibre doesn't always mean more damage. Damage per second is more important, that's why some automatics are better... in theory. But in Fallout the assault rifle is crap. I tend to go with a sniper rifle, or the SMG.

You really can't guess the weapon damage from anything but the weapon description.
Weapons that should have high damage, like FN-FAL are actually very poor, nevermind miniguns.
Considering how much the laser weapons were hyped in the story, it was a surprise they were actually so poor.

The damage shown in weapon description is per shot, so burst weapons can do a lot of total damage.
Only their actual damage per shot tends to be very low so they're normally very ineffective against armored targets.
But if you get a critical hit, the damage goes through the armor. With a burst weapon this is usually an instant kill.

And yea, since the AP ammo is inferior to normal, it's something to use against weaker targets.

For Fallout 2 exists a mod called YAAM (http://falloutmods.wikia.com/wiki/YAAM_%28Yet_Another_Ammo_Mod%29) that implement a new (and similar to the one used in New Vegas) system for bullet damage.

The mod is included in the Restoration Project 2.2.
http://www.killap.net/

Laser weapons in Fallout are weak against armor, especially metal armor and above, but do just fine against unarmored targets. Plasma weapons are more powerful, but have a bit shorter range and don't fire as quickly.

I've completed the game with an older version of the RP (1.x? whatever it was prior to 2.2 Beta), and I switched YAAM on in that one (it was also included in that version, although it may have been an older YAAM version for all I know).

From what I remember, against armored targets (anything better than basic leather armour I think), the AP ammo was significantly better than the JHP ammo. When the enemies wear stronger armour (metal and above) you really notice it - in that the JHP ammo will often do zero damage due to not being able to penetrate, while AP will rip through them.

I used the FN-FAL a fair bit in that version of the RP, and it was actually pretty decent and used it for a fair while - better damage than the Assault rifle, despite its ammo not being as penetrative (I guess the rounds it fires on auto make up for it). Naturally, there are way better weapons, plasma being up there, but the heavy weapons are crazy.

I played through it once using heavy weapons for my main character, and although my personal preference would lean toward plasma, guns like the Bozar are pretty good if you have the strength and skills. With YAAM at Vault 13, I was tearing through Deathclaws in one-two turns. Minigun was similarly lethal from memory. You just have to get close enough to get lots of hits in so the shot doesn't scatter too much.

Also laser weapons still don't live up to the hype, and they are very quickly outclassed by plasma weapons (less range/accuracy was never a problem for me).


You will discover some awesome conventional weaponry though, if you haven't already. I'm pretty sure that these were pretty damaging in the vanilla F2 as well - they were pretty awesome when I used them with YAAM that's for sure. I am of course referring to the Gauss gun and Gauss pistol, which use the 2mm EC. Prior to that, those guns that use the 4.7mm caseless are nothing to sneeze at. Basically, they refute the bigger caliber = bigger punch theory. :)

Fun thing to try: with YAAM on, when you get to the rig, charge head-first into the turrets... ;)

BTW, has anyone tried the RP (or F2 in general) simply with Glovz's Damage fix? Apparently this fixes some of the major "bugs" with the ammo but it doesn't radically alter the formula lika YAAM does. I'd be interested in anyone's thoughts on how this compares to Vanilla F2 or to F2 with YAAM.