(Request) Politics/Economics mod

[Andy2550]

Ever wonder how the settlements in fallout 4 are actually run?

 

What is their system of politics? Do they divide all resources you collect equally? Are they capitalists? Communists? Anarchists?

 

I am humbly requesting that someone with far more talent than I creates a system of choosing a political and economics system for your various settlements.

A system of law and order (or chaos) based on various political archetypes: Capitalist democracy, Communism, Fascism (brotherhood of steel, institute), National Socialism, Anarchist, Monarchy, Erisianism etc.

 

The npc's within settlements then change happiness level depending on their underlying backgrounds, meaning each settler has their own ideological background you can access via terminal. So for example, an ex brotherhood of steel member would more likely bring up settlement happiness if you adopt fascism, whereas a minuteman supporter would thrive best in American style capitalism.

 

This means that you no longer simply let in random settlers, but a vetting system exists of which you initially decide alone, then depending on your political system your settlers can vote (or obey silently) new decisions. This would create a new depth to settlement systems, where a gdp or aggregate wealth is introduced, basic laws for various political systems (npc's can break laws and be punished), and tension between your settlements and say diamond city for example, or the brotherhood of steel depending on your choice of politics and allegiance.

 

The type of settlers you let in changes your aggregate GDP, but also effects your happiness level. Authoritarian societies with freedom oriented settlers for example would not bode well for settlement happiness. The productivity and income from the settlement, gaining of resources also depends on these factors. Also the type of resources you gain will depend on orientation of society. Capitalists may have lower quality food (irradiated) due to profit maximization, but more of it. Fascism may have high quality food and water harvested, but less of it due to strict rules.

 

This theoretical mod would allow players to create unique societies, in which building for your settlers is no longer pointless, and maintaining your empire is actually fun and challenging. It could also bring more immersion into your settlers, seeing them as individuals rather than generic npcs who do generic things only.

[makedonija77]

Now, wouldn't that be nice? I reckon you don't need to really add alot of content to it either, just script some game dynamics and events.

 

It would be fun to have settlements with bonuses and penalties depending on their system of governance.

 

But what would that change? Honestly? You're not playing against somebody else's 20 settlements, so I see no incentive to make all systems as such and no logic in making an individual settlement adopt a specific system.

 

The current settlement and settler system is very generic in nature. All it is is a bunch of people who produce things that help you out bit by bit and give you some motivation to get into the roleplaying aspect of the game.

 

It's not like settlements have any effect on their surrounding areas in terms of say, territory control or something, where you take all the surrounding buildings and whatnot or some other gameplay dynamic, like Nuka World style except clean the Commonwealth narrative.

 

Bonuses as far as settlements go, you could have:

 

1. Capitalist democracies could have a voting system where you vote in a new mayor or form 2 or 3 parties and group a bunch of named settlers together. But that would mean there would have to be an entirely new system, like a karmic system with levels, that determines whether that party is good or bad. And they would have to level up - the settlers - become stronger, faster, smarter, learn new skills, so them being politicians isn't them just standing around like it would be in the vanilla game. There would have to be functionality, this way your choices are not purely cosmetic and have some sort of semi-autonomous mechanism that brings about actual changes to your settlements. But this would be an entirely new game altogether, and would have to be voiced and scripted and new quests created and it would be a pain in the ass for the creators. Aside from voting, Capitalist democracies could have business registration. You can buy a house, pay it off for the rest of the game, but only if you have a ridiculous amount of caps like 100,000 for a down payment. Once you can't pay for your shack anymore(automatic payments can be deducated no matter where you are), BanCo can seize your house in foreclosure. You can also apply for welfare checks and food stamps. You can have like a school where you pay 40,000 caps for a few lessons and then pay those caps off with 50 percent interest like in actual Capitalist democracies. These schools can also teach you skills you might never use in your adventuring, just like in real life. Also like in real life, everybody has a job, phrases like "do your job" is the most spoken sentence in their vocabulary, everybody is always bossy to eachother and constantly going from farming to defense to scavenging and other tasks because of how easy it is to get fired for no reason in Capitalism and you go on vacation once every 20 years, meaning happiness is always at 50(content, but not happy). You and your settlers are always in debt in this type of settlement. Even Dogmeat is in debt. To make it more like real life, you can have a wheel of pain or something that people who can't pay their debts push on. You can penalize them this way multiple times and eventually kick them out of the settlement the same way you would kick them out of their houses, and in turn they come back as overpowered raiders the same way they become criminals in real life.This type of settlement can focus on money making and lots of interest and lots of credit building and debt.

 

2. Communism can be single party, but you can convert your settlers to partisans, meaning they automatically go from having some weak generic gun in their inventory to having body armor and a laser musket or something. Also they can boost food and industrial production, meaning that you produce something like 100 percent more food, water and power and manufacturing costs 75 percent less. So a mutfruit tree would yield you two mutfruits and produce 2 food instead of 1, and making a pistol would cost 3 metal 1 spring 1 wood or whatever instead of 7 metal 3 springs 3 wood. But you have to go there and manually reset everything and plan it out based on your available amount of seeds, and everything costs something else. Because Communism is central planning. This type of settlement can focus on production capabilities. Happiness is always at 100 percent.

 

3. Fascism can also be single party, but you can convert settlers into veteran soldiers. Not with power armor, but veterans nevertheless. You can produce weapons, ammunition, explosives and armor for a 90 percent discount and your shops sell them at that discount too. Lots of propaganda. Lots of words being used like "police", "charged", "crime", "court", "judge", "counsel", "shooting", "stabbing", "robbery", "prison", "sentenced", etc. that are synonymous with a fascist country. Lots of radio and television broadcasts painting the police as superheroes, with beautiful young news reporters smiling in a horny way whenever they talk about the story. But once in awhile you'll see a standoff where some settlement guard shoots some kid settler or something and claimed it was the right thing to do and most people will applaud it. Settlement happiness will always be at 0, aka on the verge of rebellion, but because the settlers themselves are malnourished and low level and have no guns they will never actually rebel. Everybody aggressively ignores you and minds their own business with the hopes of not getting arrested. This type of settlement can focus on militarism and army building.

 

4. National Socialism can also be single party, except it will be a pure single race settlement, with no ghouls or anything else or the like. They will not want to work with other settlements either, because they're nationalists. Life will be good for the settlers of this settlement but their worldviews will be very ethnocentric and narrow minded. This type of settlement can focus on a pre-war level of beautification but all the citizens will constantly have weird ideas that anybody playing this game will disagree with, so it will be beautiful, but the people will be negative all the time unless you talk about something really conservative that floats their boat.

 

5. Anarchism will have no party, no mayor, no leader. People will randomly be stealing your and other settlers' stuff and shooting at you and nobody will intervene. Even the turrets will periodically malfunction and shoot at random people for no reason. This type of settlement can be good for recruiting raider mercenaries, especially suicide bombers and lunatics with katanas.

 

6. Monarchists can have a king and queen fetish. Everything is about the king and queen. Everybody talks about how great they are. People in guillotines everywhere. Periodic executions of settlers. King and queen won't even talk to you of how self important they are. Taxes brutally collected from farmers and other low level citizens. This type of settlement can focus on Imperialism and expansion in the name of the king/queen/royal underwear stain.

 

7. Erisianists can be completely out of their minds, a theocracy if you will. They will rant random new age hippie gibberish about the universe and existence, similar to the Children of Atom, except they will be pacifists but will be immortal. Meaning they can take no damage but will not return fire either. And you can't place turrets there either. This makes it good for a settlement that just produces stuff all the time.

[Simpson3k]

Yeah and when they decide against you (the sole survivor) and outcast you more or less then the settlement defense has to work independent of the players presence. I mean why should i repeatly return to defend a settlement that sended me in the desert? ^^

 

But this could offer a very nice reason why the sole survor should join the raiders in nuka world and turn against the minutemen. All those settlements the sole surivor builded up so hard and fortified choose to turn against him/her in the end.

[dagobaking]

I've been thinking of an idea like this for a while.

 

In my version though it is more about territories. So, the map gets broken up into many territories and settlements act as bases in each. Then different factions compete with each other to take over additional territories. And there would be local economic/political factors at play.

 

Essentially, it's a Civilization layer on top of Fallout 4. The benefit being that every play-through has a more unique narrative (one of the factions ultimately prevails by conquering the entire map).

 

Technically, I think that I can build this. But, I am swamped with other mod projects at the moment. So, until/unless time frees up, I would need an equally interested partner or two before I would consider taking it on...