About the Minutemen Radiant Quests

[H00V3RD8M]

I know that the radiant quests Preston Garvey, Radio Freedom and settlers give you are a main cause of frustration in the game and may seem rushed, however I feel that its possible to look at them from a different viewpoint.

 

One main issue about Minutemen radiant quests, specifically the ones that take place at an owned settlement, is that the odds of triggering one are the same regardless of how well your settlement(s) are defended, fed and watered. This may hint to the fact that the Minutemen radiants were first implemented early in development as part of a more in-depth workshop mode conceptualized by Bethesda. Presumably, a part of this more ambitious incarnation of a key feature of Fallout 4 was that the chance that you were to get a radiant quest associated with an owned settlement depended on the settlement in question's stats. For example, it would more likely for one of your settlers to get kidnapped if your defense stat is less than twice the current population of the settlement.

 

Due to time, and likely, space constraints, the developers had to water down the workshop system to make it work like it does in the finished product. As a result, the mechanic that allows the chance of getting owned settlement radiant quests to be governed by settlement food, water and defense stats, was cut from the game. The only quest in the category that is influenced by settlement stats are the "help defend" misc objectives in the Pip-boy. The reason is that they are configured differently than the start marked radiant quests; you can get them as long as you have one or more owned workshops with a population of at least one, and regardless if you're a member of the Minutemen or not.

 

Hope that sheds some light on the nature of the Minutemen radiant quests. Anyone think the same?

[ToroMontana]

I found that a way to not bother with tedious attacks is to give everyone a mini-gun with at least 1 ammo and install security cameras from the Ambush Kit Creation Club mod.

 

When an attack starts - just check the camera from a central settlement, perhaps Hangman's Alley, and watch your settlers completely destroy the attackers. (For some reason they lose if you're not around to watch them at least.)

Edited February 12, 2019 by ToroMontana

[Moraelin]

Actually, it's not true that it doesn't depend on those factors. Just it's not the production that governs it all, it's the amount STORED in water, food and resources. If you uncap those (without also adjusting the attack formula), or just dump a few thousand units of that in a workshop, the probability to be attacked will spike sky-high, and it will get attacked again and again, as soon as attacking it again goes off cooldown.

 

The reason it doesn't happen in vanilla, is that settlement production is, frankly, a dumb practical joke. Food, water AND components cap out so low that that limit is reached within a day or two tops, if the settlement is producing a surplus of any of those. With the corolary that you're encouraged to think that settlements will produce stuff for you, if you only take the many hours to scrounge for materials to build them up, but in practice if you don't actually go there every 1-2 days to take the resources from the workshop, they cap out and stop producing anything at all. So basically it's a time and effort sink that will never actually pay for itself.

 

But anyway, the reason all settlements end up having roughly the same chance to get attacked in vanilla is because -- again, unless you keep doing nothing else than going around taking the resources from each -- they cap out within hours to the same caps. I.e., they'll all hold the same amount of food, water and resources, regardless of whether you have 24 people there or you kept just the two original guys at Tenpints Bluff. So when that same value goes into the same formula for determining the odds of an attack, OF COURSE they all produce the same result from that formula.

[Moraelin]

I found that a way to not bother with tedious attacks is to give everyone a mini-gun with at least 1 ammo and install security cameras from the Ambush Kit Creation Club mod.

 

When an attack starts - just check the camera from a central settlement, perhaps Hangman's Alley, and watch your settlers completely destroy the attackers. (For some reason they lose if you're not around to watch them at least.)

 

TBH, that sounds like entirely too much work. The chances of losing are based on the difference between 150 and the total of the defense value and number of people. So if you just put enough turrets on the roof for that total to be 150, they'll automatically win every single time without needing you to watch them or buy miniguns for everyone.

 

Or, of course, just letting them lose is also just as good an option. I mean, what happens if they lose? Yeah, the raiders steal some of those resources in the workshop. But unless you had uncapped it or were constantly doing the rounds to take the resources out, those guys weren't producing any more resources anyway. All that happens if the raiders win, is that now your useless settlers will actually have to work for at most a day to fill the difference, before they cap out again and go back to just faking work again.

[SKKmods]

I have two approaches to this:

 

SKK Workshop Ownership Utilities that can disable workshop attacks .AllowAttacks and .MinRecruitmentAllowRandomAfterPlayerOwned when I am ignoring settlements.

 

SKK Settlement Attack System that replaces workshop attacks with those calculated from actual safety ratings when I want settlers and defense to be useful.