Overview
This just a quick guide to offer a few tips for making what are arguably the hardest battles in the game currently, a cakewalk. Battling the Hippos!
Intro
If you have been exploring the wasteland, you might have come across a truly mighty beast and stumbled into a fight that resulted in your entire party of well armed murderous scumbags being slaughtered and eaten.
After dropping nukes on cities and fighting battles of 8 vs 80, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a single Hippopotamus would pose no threat compared to the four dozen gun toting militia that your used to fighting – but you’d be mistaken.
I’d argue that a single hippo is stronger than the garrison of the Citadel.
How do I beat this godlike mammal?
While I applaud anyone who dares to fight a Rabid Hippo mano el mano and getting the satisfaction of killing it without ‘cheesing it’, for those who don’t want to suffer several losses for small gains, read on.
Firstly, where are Hippos?
There are a couple of special locations to explore in the wasteland that contain hippos, two such locations include a big green toxic lake, and another an oasis.
If you stumble into one you get warned by your raiders that Hippos are dangerous and you get the option to fight or leave, just in case your not ready for it.
What makes the Hippo so darn dangerous?
At first, the impressive 1000+ hp looks daunting, especially with all the armour it’s rocking. But the true terror factor comes from it’s high initiative and incredible damage output – 150-300 damage seems to be the average, most attacks will one hit kill even a heavily armoured Raider, and with such high initiative they bite hard, often and first.
How do I destroy this critter?
There are two methods that are both quite easy and effective.
The first, and easiest/cheapest involves having one character with 200+ initiative (or close to), a taser and one character with a wrench or nightstick weapon.
If you have a Hellion (the damage dealing class) that should cover you for the initiative section if you have the bottom right skill levelled, give that character a taser item – in a perfect world this character gets to act before the Hippo and can use the taser to stun the beast before it chomps someone.
The wrench wielding Raider can use the skill ♥♥♥♥-bang which totally drains the Hippos stamina, so when it does recover from the stun it has to rest to recover, giving your party a lot of time to kill it before it can land a single attack.
Option B;
The second, and less recommended method involves bringing your best ranged fighters, and then fill the melee rank and reserves with useless, totally expendable Raiders to act as delicious meat shields while your gunners go hunting.
The low level raiders you start with in your garrison, and the deserters with woeful combat stats that you pick up from battles are perfect for this.
Stuns and stamina drain abilities are just as effective as the first method, but this way there is no risk of the Hippo going first and eating someone important.
As an aside, using a hostage as a meat shield works very well if you don’t have a very high initiative character, or useless raiders to spare, but the loss in chips hardly makes the fight worth it then.
And that’s all there is to it!
The rewards for killing the Hippos are quite low, normally a small pile of chips, around 10-15,000, though the experience is fantastic if your people aren’t level 25 yet.
So there is no pressure to rush the Hippos – they aren’t guarding WMD’s or anything particularly valuable.
Hopefully this guide helps anyone who has been frustrated by these monsters.