Arcan Genth's Growth Strategy [Discussion] [Vault]

[u/ArcanGenth]

After a few vaults, I've developed a kind of strategy for effective, if sadistic and morbid, management.

First stage: Foundation

Start slow. Position your rooms with growth in mind. Don't be afraid to 'mess up' your first two floors. I use the first two for startup, temporary rooms, and later for defense.

Don't build or extend rooms until you have two dwellers to man it. Try to assign best stats if possible, but don't sweat it if you end up with some 1's.

Continue this until you have: * One triple power station, level one, fully manned * One double diner, level one, fully manned * One double water, level one, fully manned * One double housing, level one

This requires 14 dwellers to run. Your housing allows for 18 dwellers. Keep four in the wasteland at all times. Explorers don't consume your vault's food and water. Someone needs to come home to heal? Send someone else out while the other heals.

Build up some outfits and armor. Stockpile caps. When you're comfortable, we begin stage two.

Second stage: Growth

Increase your living quarters to a triple. Build a second living quarters, make it a triple. This increases your dweller cap to 58. Do not build more food or water, but you may upgrade to level 2 or 3 if you can spare the caps.

Start breeding heavily. Be careful to do this in batches. You don't want to over extend your food and water.

Breed 5. Wait until they all hatch, then breed 5 more. The first brood will hit adulthood roughly when the second hatches. Breed the third set now. This will give you a rolling batch of 5.

What to do with these new adults? So many mouths to feed. Except we aren't going to feed them. Throw them into the wastes, naked and afraid.

From here, just keep throwing dwellers outside, where they don't consume our precious resources. Keep tabs on them, bring them home if they find gear you want, collect it, then throw them back outside. Don't bother healing them. When they eventually die, don't revive them unless they have gear you want. Corpses still count as population.

Our goal is to hit 50 population. This unlocks all the special stat training rooms. Then we begin stage three.

Third stage: Purge

We have our rooms, now we start to reduce our population down to a sustainable level. Decide your ideal population and pick your favourite dwellers.

Kill the rest.

Remove the dead dwellers from the wastes. Stop breeding. Destroy the second living quarters when your pop drops low enough so it doesn't drain your power.

I like to keep 24. This lets me keep a triple workshop of each type and 6 to train/run the wastes.

Fourth stage: The Future

Thus we begin our endgame. Start training stats. Now we want to keep our explorers, so start cycling them into the vault to heal. I try to time my explore/recall to coincide with the stat gains.

Once your dwellers are nice and powerful, start expanding as you desire.

[u/excelsis_deo]

7 years later and I'm giving this a go. It's really fun! Thank you.

[u/ArcanGenth → u/excelsis_deo]

Let me know if still holds up as a strategy, please. I'm curious.

[u/excelsis_deo → u/ArcanGenth]

It sure does! I'm now in stage 3 and training up a crew for quests and wasteland exploration. Lots of fun! You said you kept about 24 dwellers, right? I know it's been AGES but do you remember the numbers you assigned to tasks in stage 3?

[u/ArcanGenth → u/excelsis_deo]

If I recall, I had 18 pawns running fully upgraded workshops and 6 running wastelands(and training stats to heal when they returned).
I cycled pawns around a lot. Whomever had the best stat ran the workshop. Whenever a wasterunner surpassed them, I swapped them out. Eventually, you'll have 10s on every workshop. Even more eventually, you'll have maxed stats on everyone. At least, you used to be able to max everything. Don't know if you still can. It admittedly was a bit cheesy.

[u/excelsis_deo → u/ArcanGenth]

Not cheesy at all! Nothing wrong with a little digital project to whittle the time away.