I’m surprised that no one’s recommended wiping out the town of Cordon and looting all the guns / ammo / medkits from the corpses before you proceed to the first mission.

You’ll earn yourself a shotgun with plenty of ammo and a rifle. Slam the rifle on single-fire mode and proceed to meet up with your friends at the waypoint.

From there, allow your teammates to distract the bandits. You’ll want to flank them while they’re engaged. There’s a hole in the building on the right, iirc, and I’ve found that to be the perfect spot to lean in and take a few life-ending pot shots.

Remember to crouch or walk as you set yourself up for an ambush. The AI in STALKER is not psychic. It will not cheat. It can, however, hear your character and prepare for engagement with you based on sound. The game designers provided you with a sound meter in the top-left of your HUD. Learn to use it.

If things go tits-up, just sprint out of the enemies’ line of sight and do your best to ambush them again.

PS – Quicksave abuse. Save when you’re in an advantageous position. Save after a stealth kill. Save yourself some frustration. STALKER is not a game for the impatient… try to think of each engagement as a puzzle and intelligently utilize everything in your inventory to put yourself on top.

That mission had me spitting blood, too, and my first instinct in any game is to spend ages carefully scouting and sneaking and isolating people before offing them as quietly as possible. Stalker makes that nigh on impossible, though, while simultaneously making direct assault useless as well. I’m looking for mods to change a lot of things about the game right now, because I’ve been playing it for two days getting more and more irritated by its brokenness.

For the start, though, I found that the best thing to do is to sneak upstairs (or run up there – it all amounts to the same anyway since the bandits are practically psychic and will find you however careful you are) in the building on the left. Kill the bloke on the balcony and then retreat up to the roof, and you should be able to pick most of the guards off from above as they mooch about trying to work out what’s going on.

Oh, and if you’re not two feet away, and can’t go for a head shot, don’t even bother firing – it’d be like spitting at a tank.

But that’s just 1 issue, state your os and rough specs.

STALKER’s memory usage actually makes some sense to me, as the game is so AI-driven… there are literally hundreds of script files all firing off and working in tandem, lots of routines to keep in sync, etc. And mods like this add to the overhead with their own AI and weather routines, not to mention the much larger textures and bump maps. So while I doubt the engine is especially efficient or optimized, it’s also doing a lot more than your typical FPS so I cut it some slack.

Edit: I do wonder about the excessive memory usage I see from some engines. Remember Vietcong [sic] and its sequels? Their engine underperformed and used excessive amounts of RAM.

Anaphiel: AMK was impressively stable for me, I can agree on difficulty level, though. Close encounters often ended up with me being instantly shot in the face (that swaying effect didn’t help too – even if you survive first hit you’re unable to fight back for a moment). AMK makes you damn cautious.

B-B-B-Brian, Rebalanced is indeed pretty impressive and oddly overlooked. 1.05 is getting a little long in the tooth though, and while ShadowState at the time mentioned that it was the final version, it looks like he is working on an update that will use some of the newer sound, weather, and graphic mods and address some of the little quirks that are left in Reb. He took a nice approach with the mod, not being slavishly devoted to the original game but not going nuts throwing in new features either, focusing on fun. Probably my second favorite of the megamods behind Complete.