Had a little explore of this last night. Just got to the point of leaving the first town.
You're flattering the little village of Otradyne
I can already tell it's going to be brutally unforgiving. I entered the town with max hunger and no food or money, and saw the warning that my hunger could soon lead to death. Couldn't swipe any food, couldn't afford any. I eventually found some corn in a field and cooked that, but then I found I needed that for a quest, so I guess I've snookered myself on that one.
Maybe not. I don't recall that quest (I played the game a couple of years ago), but I recall that corn isn't unique in the game.
The game is brutally unforgiving, especially early on and even more so towards the end if you rush the main quest. You're given the main quest pretty much from the start. After all, you've been sent to the area on a specific mission. Incomplete information, but the basics are known including a rough location. But at the start you're a long way from being skilled enough or well equipped enough to handle the main quest. Bad planning, poor intelligence and a fairly large serving of both complacency and desperation on the part of the organisation you work for. The intention is that you take the time to explore the area, train in the field, acquire good equipment locally, gather intelligence, form relationships with the locals. Rather a lot to hand to a new recruit who's just finished basic training.
It's pretty rough and janky, with a dated and clumsy UI, but I think I'm going to really like this. I am probably going to start over, though, and try doing things a bit differently in the town.
The devs have refined the UI somewhat with the sequel, Trudograd. Did a nice job of it IMO. It's similar enough to be very familiar to Atom RPG players but definitely more refined. Same goes for the graphics.
I wouldn't say the Atom RPG is rough and janky, though. The UI is outdated but adequately functional and the game itself is well polished. I didn't encounter any bugs at all other than an inability to repair both the bedroom and bathroom in my player base (you can get it further on in the game - find it and claim it and it's yours). One or the other, but not both.
Planning a female rifle-user with sex appeal to make up for a low-mediocre personality stat (around 4, I think) and dumping luck to 1. I think my other stats will be str 6, end 7, dex 10, int 8, att 6. Planning to pump speech and then rifles. Does that sound like it should work? I get the feeling with this game that starting of with a poorly-optimised build will see me needing to restart (again).
Maybe, unless you're as stubborn as I was
I started off with a poorly optimised build, but I stuck with it until I acquired the opportunity to respec. There's 1 opportunity to do so and you'll probably miss it unless you look it up or play the game the same was I (and many others) play this sort of game - go everywhere, examine everything, talk to everyone. Which is how I was able to hang in there with a quite seriously suboptimal build.
Your planned build looks good to me. Personally, I would start with a higher personality and a lower intelligence but I wouldn't say your planned build was at all wrong. You need a balance of persuader and enforcer. I'd edge a little more towards persuader, that's all. You do get a few potential opportunities to add a point here and there to your stats. Very few and hard to find, although a helmet with +1 strength is something you should probably encounter. It's a fixed reward for a specific side quest, so you'll get it if you're exploring and doing side quests. You'll want it with a rifle build with 6 strength because the best rifle is a high power high calibre high weight sniper rifle (Dragunov) and it requires 7 strength to use efficiently. It also requires 10 AP to make really good use of it (single shot takes 5AP, so 10AP gives you 2 shots per round if you don't move).
Overall, automatic weapons is a more useful skill than rifles in Atom RPG. Most of the long guns are classed as automatic weapons rather than rifles. Almost all of the ones classed as rifles are incapable of full auto and full auto is often more useful. But sniper rifles are an exception to that rule of thumb, so having a sniper on the team is a good option and if you do then it's best that the main character is the sniper so you have more direct control. But I'd build all companions with automatic weapons as their weapon speciality.
Speechcraft is as useful as your planned build implies you think it is. You're there in part to acquire information and maybe make an impression on the locals in order to help the organisation you work for. Persuasion is a good fit. You can brute force situations instead, but some finesse usually works better for your purposes. Low personality might lock you out of that in some cases. Sometimes it doesn't matter how persuasively you can speak if the person you're speaking to thinks you're not someone to speak candidly with, somewhere they can trust with personal matters and with secrets.
You'll need to pump your main weapon skill as well, though, to some extent. There are plenty of situations in which persuasion is not an option and force is required. It's a brutal and unforgiving world. I'd say maybe speechcraft and your main weapon skill equally, maybe 2/3rd speechcraft and 1/3 main weapon skill.
Any good tips for someone just starting out?
Go everywhere, do everything, talk to everyone. You're fresh out of basic training and that basic training isn't very good anyway. It's a post apocalypse world. Everything is limited, including training and personnel. You weren't the best choice for the mission. You were the available choice. Then you're dropped into a completely unfamiliar area and you have almost no resources. You need to learn skills and acquire resources, especially effective equipment. Of course, you will end up going into places you can't handle. Generally stay out of the countryside in the southeast for a while. Slaver gangs control that territory and they're
very well equipped and very experienced in violence. Go in early and you'll be dead with most of your head missing before you get within shooting range of them. They often have a well equipped and highly skilled sniper in their teams.
Talk with everyone who will talk with you. Where possible, be friendly, persuasive and helpful. Hearts and minds style. Also, pragmatism. You need their help. You could seriously use some companions as well, and why would they agree to follow you if you're an arse to them or you haven't even spoken with them? This isn't a game in which you can easily go alone against 6 bad guys and stroll through it wondering what you'll have for tea later. You'd be much better off with several people in your squad, people who are skilled and well equipped, with skills that complement yours. You can't be an expert in everything in this game. Maybe you're charismatic and a brilliant orator, able to sway almost anyone who'll listen to you. That won't do you any good against a locked door. You can't talk the lock into opening for you. But if one of your squad is a skilled lockpicker, they can deal with the lock.
Try to avoid using scrap metal. Later on, if you acquire the player base and you handle a situation at the base correctly you'll have a very skilled ammunition maker who can make all the common types of ammunition and who can learn to make other types if you bring them a gun using another type of ammunition to study. That's extremely useful for some of the best guns as they use rare ammunition. But the ammunition maker will require scrap metal (amongst other things) to make ammunition.
You can use any container other than a dumpster-style bin as a stash. No other containers respawn and NPCs don't take things from containers so anything put in them stays there. Initially, I used a container in an abandoned derelict house towards the southeast of the open world map that contains Otradyne. After acquiring my player base I moved everything to containers in my base.
There's a skill tree. The UI doesn't make that obvious. I played for a couple of hours before finding out it existed
Your companions have their own skill trees, which you control. The skill tree is split into related sections, e.g. crafting, survival, pistols, rifles, etc. Personally, I think that the defensive skills (spreading out towards the top right of the skill tree) are the most useful. For example, being able to wear heavy armour without penalties is extremely useful. You will have to specialise to a large extent in the skill tree because each skill you take increases the skill point cost of taking more skills. You will never have anywhere near enough skill points to learn them all, so you can have low level skills in everything or high level skills in probably only one section. The skill tree UI in Trudograd is clearer. One example of the refinement of the UI.
You can unload a gun in a merchant's inventory and buy only the bullets. Bullets are often much more useful to you than a gun. I was roleplaying, so I felt bad about doing that and leaving the merchant with an empty gun they would have trouble selling. Except for the gun merchant in Kroznanomenny (wrong spelling, but close enough so you'll know where I mean when you see it). When you see the prices he charges, you'll understand why.
You can trade with many people in the gameworld even if trading doesn't appear in the dialogue options. In the top right of the dialogue window you might see a barter button. Clicking on that opens the trading window with that NPC. Only merchants mention trading in the dialogue, but a lot of other NPCs are open to the idea of trading. They rarely carry much, but it can be useful. For example, you might be able to trade some stuff you've picked up for a bit of food with some of the non-merchant NPCs in Otradyne (or anywhere else). Barter is commonplace, which is realistic in a post-apocalypse gameworld.
The game was designed for a fairly extensive amount of looking around, talking to people, exploring, finding and doing side quests. There's a
lot of scope for that. To give you a rough idea of the scope, I was L27 at the endgame and I had the best possible equipment and close to max in my main skills and with 3 highly skilled and very well equipped companions. At the other extreme, players have been hitting the endgame as low as L7 with early game equipment and skill levels and probably fewer companions (or none). They get mashed. One round slaughter time. I walked the endgame, enjoying the developing story. The devs planned the endgame for a well equipped party of 4 at ~L15, based on the fact that if you start a new character in the sequel that character will start at L15. The difficulty of game does not adjust to your character. Your character is not the centre of the gameworld. The gameworld doesn't give a rat's arse about your character.
There are areas of contamination. Some chemical, some biological, some radioactive. Go there and die. Often without knowing what's killing you. There are plenty of very dangerous substances that will kill you in ways you can't see, hear, smell, feel or taste. You stop to camp in an area that's contaminated with radioactive material. You don't have a radiation detector, so you can't detect the radiation. By the time you show symptoms, it's far too late. You die of radiation sickness. The gameworld does not care. Or maybe it was a tasteless, odourless toxic chemical that was contaminating the place that killed you. Your corpse doesn't know.
Yikes! Now that's hardcore old-school style!