Settlements: What they could have been.

[SkyEmerald]

Hi guys! I wanted your opinions about settlements.

 

Every game has pros and cons. I thought settlements was a great idea and got to building many settlements. But I quickly tired myself out with them. I felt that I was in the Creation Kit again, making a house mod...There didn’t seem much point in fortifying the settlements or even kitting out the settlers, as raids didn’t really have any serious affects, settlers couldn’t die and left the gates open anyway, the bloody buggers!

 

I feel that the whole experience of settlements could have been better and so much more immersive. I don’t own any DLCs so I don’t know if settlements have been improved by them or not. Also, I know there are quite a few settlement mods which fix some of the cons in the vanilla game.

 

These are my suggestions. If you guys know of any mods that already fix some of these things, I’d love to hear about them. Otherwise, please let me know what you think of my ideas!

 

1) Less Settlements: There are 30 sites in the base game (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki). I think sometimes less is more. Perhaps 10 settlements would be better. 10 well planned settlements with varying completion requirements. (See ‘Settlement completion rewards’ section below).

2) Settlement completion rewards: Perhaps when the vanilla building budget is reached, a special weapon is unlocked. For example ‘Sanctuary Hills Blaster’ Silly name I know :tongue: The building requirements could vary depending on the location of the settlement. For example, Castle is already partially fortified, so the quest completion requirements could focus more on offence. (This would remove the notion of building 50 beds to get that awesome Sanctuary Hills Blaster).

3) Enemies can inhabit settlements: They use up all resources, damage things and have to be evicted before settlers return or inhabit. Strong defence means raiders / enemies cannot get in and either lose the fight and die or retreat.

4) Settlers are mortal and intelligent: If they are about to die, they will flee. If they are kitted out in strong gear they will last longer in battle and therefore have less chance of fleeing or dying. – Thus a reason to clothe them all in good armour! Perhaps settlers level with the player (I’m not sure if they already do).

5) A toggle option: When all settlements are built and quest rewards won, perhaps it’s time to let the settlers live risk free? Might be good to be able to turn off the possibility of raids when you’re ready to focus on different aspects of the game. This would stop settlements being re-inhabited by raiders and thus becoming annoying to have to retake them, just to dump your junk in that storage locker at the end of your bed after a long trek around the wasteland.

 

Over to you guys! <3 <3

Edited October 10, 2016 by SkyEmerald

[TheGadget1945]

1) Yes, possibly with greater freedom to choose your settlements. Obviously some such as the Castle which are crucial to the story would need to be "essential" but it would make sense to be able to choose a settlement which is relatively flat :laugh: and easily defended (not Coastal Cottage).

2) Yes, but make it a useful weapon like a Targeting Quad Missile Launcher not something like a Laser Rifle which has a "20% chance of freezing your enemies legs if your health is below 30%" or some nonsense like that. It was annoying to have to work my way up to really useful weapons without cheating. Oh , and having a Legendary Weapon fall of a "Legendary Bloatfly" FFS. It's just a Bloatfly.

3) Sort of. None of my settlements has ever been seriously challenged by the enemy as I outfit settlers in the best armour and weapons I can. It would be nice ? if it was possible for me to have to retake a settlement.

4) Relates to 3 but I agree that settlers should run when they are outnumbered or outgunned.

5) I have a glitch in my game where settlements in the mainland no longer get attacked - this is a hangover from a mod I installed. It actually makes the game rather boring but a toggle would take care of that. If you could toggle mainland attacks off when you visit Far Harbor it would have saved me installing the mod because it was infuriating to wake up in Daltons Farm and find 4 attacks appear on my Pip Boy !

 

6) One of the best features of Far Cry 4 was that you had to take Outposts and Fortresses from the Royal Army. They were difficult and the Fortresses especially required a lot of thought especially as you were only 1 guy. Then you could use Outpost Master to simply reset the Outpost or Fortress and do it again. I know Bethesda would be pilloried if they had copied this from Ubisoft but it would have been a great feature. Maybe make it impossible to use God Mode as well so you had a genuine challenge on your hands. So you can have Gunners Plaza as a settlement but cannot use God Mode or more than one companion ?

[CiderMuffin]

I think the fact that each settlement differs in size ranging from huge to small is enough to warrant having 30 or so potential settlements. Especially since you can pretty much ignore most of them as the Minutemen only require eight to complete their quest and Nuka-World only requires three for the Raiders. With 30 you have a lot to work with in terms of variety and how you use the space (which can be seen with numerous people building numerous settlements in a ton of different ways)

[gamefever]

Place Everywhere mod

 

Solves everything.

[TheSpaceShuttleChallenger]

1 ) Considering that the entire point of settlements is to build them up to your own liking, I don't see "quality vs quantity" really being an issue. Less development doesn't deter me in the least, but more variety is still more variety. If anything, I'd have liked to see more settlements that were clean slates to do with as I please.
2 ) I don't know that I feel the need for a reward just for hitting the arbitrary max build size of a settlement, especially since I tend to hit max size well before I'm finished building a settlement and certainly before I've finished providing for all its needs. I'd prefer if there were better rewards for being able to keep settlements at high happiness (80% + ) particularly if they're well populated, but I still think the main reward for completing a settlement aught to be the settlement itself: That is, having another piece of civilization where you can stock up your goodies and take a nap without fear of waking up to a radscorpion.

5 ) Yes. There are mods that accomplish this but I don't know why Bethesda subjected us to these unprompted, unavoidable, time-sensitive quests in the first place. If they can't provide us a way to shut off settlement attacks then they really aught not have implemented them at all.

6 ) Merchants are pretty unsatisfying. Even after my settlements have been built into mighty citidels on par with Goodneighbour and Covenant, I still find myself having to walk past my settlements to Goodneighbour and Covenant to stock up on fairly basic supplies. As I said before, I think the primary incentive for building settlements is to be able to use them as a resource later on, so it's a bit of the disappointment if I can't even rely on my settlers to set me up with ammo.
7 ) The settlers. There are, what, two or three dozen different faces? And some of my settlements have populations of thirty people, so you may see how it becomes an issue where I get three of the same guy in one settlement. Especially if you're the sort of tyrant who banishes all your ugly settlers to ugly settlements. Again, there are mods for this but I'm thinking it wouldn't have been that hard for Bethesda to give us more faces to begin with considering that they can generate them automatically.
8 ) The settlers. Namely the fact that they're almost all generic weirdos that showed up one day and started eating your food. I don't honestly expect Bethesda to make every single settler a special snowflake with personalities and unique voice lines, but I do think it would have been nice to have a larger handful of unique, recruitable settlers, similar to the Vault-Tech salesman or our beloved Marcy--enough so that you can have at least one or two familiar faces at each settlement. Surely it wouldn't be that much work to take minor quest-related NPCs and send them to your settlements once their original purpose has been served?

Edited October 12, 2016 by TheSpaceShuttleChallenger