I am presently level 73 and have noticed an increasing number of settlement attacks. I don’t know what’s prompting this — leveling? more settlements and population? the lure of tasty carrots?
Whatever the reason, I get attack notices pretty frequently now. Mostly they occur down south and they’re usually in water-facing places like Kingsport Lighthouse. Often, I’ll not get a notice but decide to go to a place to improve it. About ten seconds into my workshop activities, an attack begins. I can pretty much count on some kind of violent occurrence when I’m in a settlement just trying to get something done.
I thought this would bug me, but I love it. I really enjoy running to the assistance of besieged settlers. I’m sure it will get old eventually, but right now it’s insanely cool to spawn in a place during a big battle. Appropriately, some enemies don’t notice me; some do. Fortunately, my 300 bl / 300 en ballistic weave armor protects me from most damage as I start sighting multiple targets in VATS. If I start getting shredded, I run for cover and wait for enemies to lose me. It all works really well.
The best thing, though, is watching my well-armed settlers and all my machine gun/laser/rocket turrets go nuts. Heaven help the poor schlubs who try to steal carrots from one of my settlements. Sometimes I don’t even get to shoot anything because the attackers are annihilated in a matter of seconds. Even high-level gunners and legendary raiders scurry for cover and probably have second AI thoughts about rushing into one of my places.
After one of these human-enemy attacks, it’s nice to loot the bodies and give a bunch of upgraded weapons to the settlers who don’t have any. It’s also a good way to collect legendary items without going to a lot of trouble.
Sometimes the settlers seem to handle things on their own. I’ll arrive to build or defend and notice a bunch of ghoul or animal corpses all over the place, and I had no hand in killing them.
Last night, for the first time in an age, Sanctuary got attacked. It turned out to be a couple of unlucky radscorpions. They were vaporized before I even figured out what was happening. They obviously burrowed past my defenses near the bridge, thinking they’d pop up closer to the middle of town and start eating my pathetic Sims. As a line in Beowulf might go, they soon learned how wise they had been.
As a cool plus, one of the settlers ran to a warning siren I’d installed and switched it on. Of course, the scorpions were dead long before he got there, but it was a nice touch. I think I’ll put sirens in all my settlements.
So to sum up: hooray for settlement harassment. Be assured that I will now improve more places. I just have to keep buying oil. I can never keep enough oil.
Ugh. This sounds like a nightmare to me.
I think the game finally caught on that I just don’t give a crap, because my settlement attack notices have all but disappeared. Of course, this may be because I haven’t checked on any settlement except Sanctuary in weeks. The build tools frustrate me too badly. I’m tired of shacks floating above the ground, etc.
I haven’t been to Ten Pines bluff in ages. I had 16 settlers there at one point. I bet it’s zero now.
I know. I felt the same way for a long time. This was mainly because the settlements never had enough material for any meaningful improvements. However, I decided to try out the Local Leader perk and boom — I was hooked. Once I started sending provisioners to under-supplied settlements, everything changed. The settlers in some places do manage to produce surplus food and even scrap items, so in a way they’re self-supporting. Anyhow, it’s worth the trouble to see the overpowered responses to attacks.
I have local leader because I wanted to build a shop that didn’t suck. So much for that. Maybe I need to build the specialty ones. I made the Vault*Tec rep the guy in charge of my general store, and now there’s this dialog loop we repeat about whether he wants a job every time I go there to sell shit. It’s super aggravating.
I have supply lines between most of my settlements and lots of junk to build with, but I do always run out when building anything powered.
I haven’t got the second Leader perk for shops. I may add it eventually, but I don’t have much use for it presently. I think you have to max the cap-collector perk (or whichever one gives you discounts at stores) to benefit much from your own stores anyway.
I always loved the idea of defending settlements but I’m just a bit less excited about it because settlers don’t die and I cannot rename them to make things a bit more personal, and they cannot be conquered – so why should I care? But yes, watching battles between AIs and seeing your defences in action is fun.
There’s a new update coming, building wires no longer uses up copper!:
http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1583568-fallout-4-13-beta-update/
That patch is about what I expected from Bethesda. They’re concentrating on dopey fringe things and doing nothing about the problems people complain about most (e.g., the building misalignments muppet mentioned, enemies ignoring walls around settlements and just spawning inside, and a hundred other things). Instead, they go nuts closing off exploits, like the one in Jamaica Plain that gave you a reliable supply of fiber optics. And naturally in this upcoming patch, they’re fixing the broken MacCready perk, which makes all headshots in VATS 95% accurate. Okay okay, they should fix this one. It really is hilariously broken. But so many more things go unaddressed.
I guess I’ll have to make the rounds of labs and medical centers to get fiber optics (grab all microscopes) and see what the modding community comes up with for the rest.
Oh I found something out about oil. When I use a chemistry station, I keep seeing “cutting fluid” under the Utility category. I never could figure out what cutting fluid was. Turns out that it’s the oil equivalent of vegetable starch. As you probably know, each unit of vegetable starch you craft yields 5 adhesives. You can also craft cutting fluid and get 3 units of oil. My new mission is to get a cutting fluid “farm” started, beginning with installing more water purifiers in Sanctuary and elsewhere. Unhappily, I also have to figure out where to find more bones. I knew all those skulls and severed hands had to be good for something.
Update on settlements:
I started The Molecular Level, which is part of the main quest. I won’t go into spoilery details, but I had to construct a “thing” at the Boston Airport.
Now, the airport, for some reason, is considered a settlement, even though you can’t put a beacon there or even direct any settlers to it. I suppose this is because the Brotherhood of Steel occupies this location. I needed a lot of crafting parts to build this “thing,” but because it won’t behave like a regular settlement, I couldn’t even send a provisioner to it. Provisioners will dutifully travel there and try to reach the workshop, but they turn around just before getting to it. So I will have to manually locate the parts for the “thing.”
Before I knew all this, I was trying to get a provisioner to travel to the airport. I went to Finch Farm because it had lots of people. As I was directing my new provisioner, a ruckus broke out. Some gunners had taken an interest in the farm and had mounted a pretty concerted attack.
Just as the last gunner died, more to-do erupted. It seems that some Forged raiders were also interested. This went on for a while, and then I noticed that the guards with a passing caravan had gotten into the fight, but, oddly, they were hostile toward my settlers and me. Not wanting to hurt them, I went away and hid. Eventually, the fight subsided and the caravan went on its way.
As I tried to go about my crafting business, yet another fight broke out. This seemed very unusual, so I stepped back and tried to assess what was going on.
Here’s the thing:
Finch Farm is located very close to a gunner-occupied overpass. I have missile launchers installed all over Finch Farm. Therefore, any time a gunner pops his head up on the overpass, the missiles go off.
The Forged raiders are also very nearby, so any time they wander out, they get hit by missiles.
This is also a regular caravan route, and of course provisioners are going back and forth all the time. Outlaw NPCs are automatically hostile toward provisioners and, I assume, caravans. If my provisioners get spotted on the road, gunners and/or raiders will start firing at them and will probably try to get close. The missiles see the enemies and a big fight ensues.
This isn’t even figuring in all the wild mongrels and bloatflies that roam around.
So Finch Farm is one of the worst places you can build a fortified settlement. There’s hardly a moment when the settlers aren’t in a fight with someone or something. Because they chase attackers, the whole crowd of them will go after anything hostile until they kill it or until the attacker gets out of their huge range. As they’re chasing one enemy, they inevitably cross into the territory of another enemy and start chasing it. Once they kill everything, they stand on that spot for a long time, just gazing into space. If something else spawns during this time, the chase is back on.
It’s therefore improbable that the Finch Farm settlers will ever stay close to home for any appreciable length of time.
Naturally, all this is my fault for installing the missiles. If I hadn’t done that, everyone would be able to co-exist in blissful unawareness of each other. I should remove the missiles and maybe even pare back some of the machine gun turrets, which have a surprising range.
Yes yes, I should do this. I really should.
*giggle*
Oh. The caravan guards were hostile because the missiles apparently generate “friendly” damage if an ally or neutral is nearby. Eventually, I think they whole Wasteland will be affected by the chain hostility created by my missiles. The whole world will ally against Finch Farm in a hopeless last battle for humanity’s survival. When the dust clears, my settlers will be standing there, alive and well, staring off into space.
It occurred to me that the farm surely wouldn’t be even in missile range of the aforementioned enemies. I’m probably mistaken about gunners and raiders getting attacked merely for patrolling on their own ground.
Thus, this mess has to be the result of provisioners traveling the road too near the enemy “settlements.”
Even when I take missile potshots at gunner/raider settlements out of the equation, I’m still left with an inordinately large number of provisioners following this route. So it’s still a very volatile area which would probably benefit from reduced missile placement.
Yep, that would be the thing to do. Yep.
I built the thing in Sanctuary. I had very little trouble getting parts, except for all of the power it needed which was a pain in the ass.
I got the Brotherhood ending last night. It felt… kinda anti-climactic. The Minutemen were just too freaking annoying to deal with.
I haven’t decided whether to keep clearing the map of fetch quests and the extremely rare FO3/FNV style stories, or just start a new character and play more casually this time. I’m finally at a point where I’m not choosing which weapon to use based on how much ammo I have left, and I sort of like that condition.
I only do the radiant quests to level up and get the perks I want. Also to collect junk for my settlements. If you’re patient enough, the game lets you become extremely powerful.
I’m almost level 80 and am in what I assume are the final stages of the BoS main story line, which, as you know, require passing various speech checks if you want things to turn out a certain way. Grape mentats ftw.
Spoilers for anyone who hasn’t done this story branch:
I didn’t think I would care much about Danse living or dying, but I got strangely caught up in that part. At first, I just shot him, but boy, did that feel wrong. So I reloaded and finally managed to talk him into self-exile. Then I was really kind of shocked when Elder Molerat showed up and I had to defend Danse. That was pretty messy, but I finally got Molerat to agree to the exile. Then I felt much, much better. During the dialogues, I was also surprised by how much sense Maxson made in his reasoning about killing Danse. He basically laid out the ethical rationale for the Brotherhood of Steel, which was very persuasive within the game’s context. Pretty good writing.
But now they want me to murder the Railroad for no very good reason, and I’m having a tough time getting on board with that. Not that I especially like the Railroad, but I am a bit fond of Deacon and really don’t want to kill him. He’s not as much of a synth-hugging hippie as the rest of that bunch, and I like our conversations better than the ones I have with the other companions. How can you not like someone whose every other sentence might be a troll?
Now, on to more settlement things.
The last time the Castle was attacked, things got pretty gnarly. I decided to pay them a visit to see if I could beef up the defenses.
I don’t much like going to the Castle because every time I’m there for more than two minutes, I get 88 radiant settlement quests. I figured out that all these(including, I think, Preston’s “another thing” missions) are tied to the Minuteman radio station. So while I’m in the Castle, I now disconnect one wire leading from a generator to the radio equipment. This doesn’t prevent the attack situations or random settlers coming up to you and asking for help, but it does at least stop the broadcasts so I can get things done.
I noticed that the Castle has at least two major breaches in its walls, so I fixed that. Then I looked around and observed that I had too many generators being used inefficiently. Third, I had a lot of turrets, but they weren’t placed very effectively.
I found this video on youtube that seemed tailor-made for the Castle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L-16W5uKX0
Reproducing this guy’s setup is harder than it looks, especially when you’re near your settlement’s build limit. Therefore, instead of creating a whole new apparatus, I had to re-purpose much of what I already had in place, but I came up with something pretty close and extremely effective. No enemy who gets inside the Castle yard will live, and they’ll have a very tough time damaging the defenses. When possible, I’ll produce a screenshot.
I did what you did. Slaughtering the Railroad when the institute was already destroyed seemed kinda pointless, but boy was it easy. They just went down and stayed down. I’m at level 47 and those Railroad Guardians or whatever they’re called folded up like cardstock.
Still, seemed pointless. The Synths they’ve smuggled out are already smuggled, so…?
I don’t think Maxson is persuasive at all. He sounds like any ol’ propaganda victim to me. The writing was… meh.. it was better than most video games. Not better than FO3. 😛
The BoS argument is that the Great War started because humanity put too much trust in technology. This is why they’re so keen about collecting and curating it (guarding it would be more exact). They also see themselves as the guardians of what remains of humanity. They aren’t a bunch of Nazis. They’re dedicated to service and protection.
To them, a robot constitutes an attempt to displace a human or something a human should do. The creation of synths is the ultimate atrocity because they’re so human-like. It’s technology like this that must inevitably lead to the destruction of humanity at the very end of things. Mutated creatures are also the deliberate or accidental work of humans who became irresponsible with technology, so it’s not the creatures the BoS hate so much as the idea that they’re the products of man’s crazed management of tech. They’re also dangerous, so they’re “abominations” in a dual sense.
Following this reasoning, synths are the most dangerous abominations in the wasteland. For the BoS to have sheltered, nurtured, trained, and even loved a synth unawares is the ultimate horror. Danse therefore must be put down. Even he agrees with this. He cannot deal with the idea that he contaminated the Brotherhood all this time.
I should add:
Fallout lore never overlooks the fact that the Brotherhood is crazy. They try to keep their intentions good, but they have obvious thinking disorders. You could say that this is a “natural” outcome of living in a destroyed universe. In spite of their phobias and generally bad treatment of common folk, they’re the least crazy option for arriving at some semblance of order and safety.
Side note: I think it’s interesting that the two quest-givers at the Cambridge Police Station, Rhys and Haylen, were obviously contrived to represent the two main impulses of the BoS: destruction of abominations and collection of tech.
I took the castle and haven’t been back once. I hate settlement building. I assume they’re drinking their own urine by now and I couldn’t care less.
LOL. Since you like Minecraft so much, I’m surprised that you’re indifferent about settlement building. Well, the Sim part of it I understand. I don’t like that either. The actual building is rather neat to me.
In Minecraft, the fucking parts fit together and nothing floats off the ground. 😛
In FO4, the disjointed connections are obviously caused by radiation and nuclear-generated tectonic plate shifting, so this is a feature.
Also the suspended gravity, yeah.