Fallout 4

[Art Blade]

AE = American English as opposed to BE = British English. I mentioned it because "subway" could be just a passage below something while in BE it's called underground (station) which is quite a different term for the same thing. Usually AE and BE differ in spelling only but there are a few exceptions like subway/underground and, for instance, fall/autumn.

I'm now level 46 homing in on 47. I think he's leaving me alone now, I took the fortress and he said I should always offer help, then he went away. However, I still have a mission going that I think he gave me, so who knows.. it might indeed go on for a while, still.

A funny thing I came across on my way to said mission is a robot race. I ended up killing the raiders first who ran the show and then the robots after playing around with them for a while. The best part was that even after manually destroying them, I was still able to successfully send a self-destruct command and man, that was quite a set of explosions. I think around 8 robots blew up almost simultaneously, scattered all around the track. 

[PZ]

 

[Art Blade]

D_B, that Preston indeed hasn't stopped spamming me with quests but I did what you suggested: finished those two still open missions and never told him

I've levelled up to 49 now. I explored the map down to the southwest even beyond the map borders that are indicated on the pip boy (some kind of dashed line) and found a plane crash site and decided to venture on. I came across Atom's crater with those weirdos living there, a decayed reactor site, some decrepit factory and a rocky cave. Oh and there was a super duper mart car park not marked on the map, I went in there and checked out both levels. Quite an adventure that involved the killing of several rather massive and at times even glowing deathclaws and who knows what else there was, but whatever it was, it's dead now.

[Art Blade]

Piper, Dogmeat and me, we're a STOP team (Subtle Tactics and OPerations) which means, by all means, put a stop to whatever the opponents are doing. And that's usually a permanent solution we're offering. Subtle as in twin atomic bombs if necessary (using a legendary fat man).

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We thought about painting names on the bombs, like Hiro and Shima, but in the year 2288 it was a tad too retro so we didn't do it. Just the naked bomb shells and the splitting payload.

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Now you know why we're constantly wearing sunglasses  Also note the subtle interrogation techniques.

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And here, that's after all the stuff Piper and my alter ego had gone through -- a little rest, observing the settlers and taking in some peaceful atmosphere for a change. Also, they asked us to sit on the other side because they too wanted to enjoy the atmosphere.. we realised that we hadn't had a shower yet. So, in an act of barbaric altruism we used the bench on the other side. I think, considering the sudden hysterical yelling we heard coming from Preston's house, that the dog was taking a dump in there, so he isn't in the pic.

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[LowPolyOWG]

 

Sounds like a great adventure

[Dweller_Benthos]

Ah, OK, American English, yeah, the subway / underground thing, a different word for the same thing, and you catch the subway at the subway station, which may or may not be underground, but usually is underground, but is not called the underground, or something like that. It's a bit different from words that are the same but spelled differently, like color and colour. It's mostly a regional / colloquial thing really, as in what word caught on in what area? Same goes for cell / mobile, for those portable telecommunications devices that everyone has these days. No one in the USA calls them mobiles, they are cell phones or just cell, as in "Call me on my cell later." It can be a generational thing as well, for instance, my father calls divided highways "arterials", as in, "I was on the arterial today and there was an accident blocking traffic." Almost no one under the age of 75 calls them that here anymore, it's either highway or interstate, which I would think is not the term used in other countries as they don't have the sharp difference in regions called states that the USA does. It can also depend on commercial use or advertising, and what product name becomes popular. The Brits call it "cling film" but Americans call it (for the most part) Saran wrap after the name of the popular brand, even if the one they are using is not that brand.

The robot race track is cool, but I destroyed everything in the area before getting to the terminal to see that they wouldn't have attacked me, so I never saw them racing.

Yeah, the glowing sea is fun if you're equipped for it, and have the rad-away needed. Lots of high level enemies to kill there for the XP bonus. It's an important part of the main quest too.

[Art Blade]

the game is really enormous. So many locations and side quests and even several ways to play the main part as in whom you're siding with. I can see how everything is building up towards a showdown. Question is, where will I be? So far, the minutemen seem to be the ones that are the least fanatic. As far as I can tell, the other factions try to eliminate a different faction each so everyone is at war with specific factions, their ideological enemies, more or less, apart from the minutemen who are a bit like the mercenary group called gunners, only they are generally bad while the minutemen come to help mostly those not militarised farmers who seem to be under attack by every other faction once in a while.

I'll try to tag along with those other factions so I get to play their missions up to a point when I will have to take sides. That's what I'm going to use that guide for that I posted earlier. I think it's the best way. Plus, it's not heavy on the fanatic side to be with the minutemen as opposed to the Brotherhood of Steel and geez, the Atom guys for that matter are probably the ones that not only rolled over the top but under as well.

[PZ]

Indeed - great adventure so far! 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah, I looked at the endings available and didn't really like siding with one or the other, though I did them all after making a hard save to go back to, just to see how those endings went and to get any achievements from them. But I went with the Minutemen as well, keeping both factions around and destroying the institute. There's no way to not destroy the institute when taking that route, they always have to die. The missed opportunity to include the raiders in Nuka World as a faction, is regrettable. If they had included that as an option as well, it would have made the game more interesting instead of just something that was tacked on later. You could have had the "good" Minuteman ending and the "evil" Nuka World raider ending to choose from, along with the other three. Ah well.

Oh yeah, I see you like the two-shot mininuke, somewhere along the way you can get a MIRV attachment which combined with the 2 shot makes it a 12 shot. The range is terrible though, and half the time the result is blowing yourself up.

[Art Blade]

yep, I got the MIRV mod but dropped it for exactly that reason. And I had only used it on a normal fat man.

Today I got caught up in the Nuka World story without actually planning or expecting to do it. I found a dead guy not even so far from Sanctuary with a note on him telling me to find a chem stash in Vault Tec: Among The Stars. Didn't sound like Nuka World in the least. However, I went to check it out. While I was there, I got a message that Sanctuary needed my help as they were under attack. I ignored it and later I subsequently got the mission failed message along with a message that something broke over there. Then I made up my mind as I wanted to check it out. So I went to see what had happened while I was away. That's the real problem with Nuka World: first I had to fast travel to the Commonwealth interchange point that is kind of a hard border between two maps. And from there, now in the non-DLC world, fast travel to Sanctuary. It took too much in-game time. Even a prior savegame wasn't enough -- I arrived too late (already got the mission failed message when I arrived "in the old world")

My 100W generator was broken and that rendered all my defence systems useless. Several of my heavy laser turrets needed repairs. Some of the heavy machine gun turrets that lined the border of Sanctuary were broken. I had no idea how that was possible and what kind of force it must have been. I decided to use a prior savegame to get there in time. Turns out that I had to go back to before the attack was even announced (thanks to an one-hour gap between savegames caused by repeatedly using the quicksave) but when I got there, robots had begun to attack Sanctuary from two sides simultaneously. I fought them back and destroyed them but damn, I don't want Sanctuary to be that easy a target. So I sacrificed the one hour progress in Nuka World in order to rethink the defence installments.

I think I'm going to build a gun tower like I did at Croup Manor which works like a charm.

FO4 Croup Manor

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[Art Blade]

just by the way, the defence system in Hangman's Alley works now. The place is still walled up but I draped heavy turrets around the walls to cover the inside of the settlement. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Last time I checked, it was all over already and all the robots were glowing heaps of scrap metal. No repairs, no losses.. perfect.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Nuka World was fun, I thought, but the story line leaves a bit to be desired. As usual, the small things you find and the sides quests are better. I used a mod to be able to finish it with the park intact and leave my Commonwealth settlements alone. Otherwise, you have an either/or option of raiding the Commonwealth and getting Preston permanently mad at you, or killing all the raiders and making the park empty.

The way a settlement attack works is, if an attack is announced and you don't go to defend, it looks at your defense setup and flips a coin essentially, to determine if it is repelled or the attack succeeds. I think you can even reload the save game from just prior to the attack and it may pick the other outcome, but it may pick the outcome when the attack is announced, I'm not sure. Anyway, if the coin flip comes up that the attack happened and the settlement suffered damage, it then flips more coins and picks stuff at random to destroy or damage. It has no bearing on what might have been the attacking force, or where they might have come from, it just picks stuff at random in the settlement and damages it. There was a video posted of a person who got there just a bit too late and there was no attacking force, the settlers were just standing around and random things where breaking before his eyes as if an invisible ghost was walking around smashing things.

So, there's no rhyme or reason to it, just the RNG at w0#k. You can have a really high defense value and that helps, but it's not a guarantee that you will always get a successful defense. Most of the time I just travel there and wait while the heavy turrets pummel whatever is out there and then go pick up loot. I think I had a few that failed, but not many once I was at higher levels in the game. And yeah, traveling from one of the DLC areas back to the Commonwealth to defend a place (or the other way around) especially when you're in the middle of something, or deep inside a building where you can't just fast travel out, can be a pain and you sometimes just have to take it on the chin.

[Art Blade]

alright, thanks. That explains a few things. Most annoying is the fact that enemies may spawn inside your settlements. A modder wrote about it that even when there are no spawn points, they still spawn randomly. He suspects the game engine to be responsible for that because even after he moved attack spawn points outside, about "every 10" times you fast travel there, they spawn inside no matter what. He mentioned something that seems to be related to the fast travel arriving point but I'm not sure what he meant (when referring that to the fast travel door mat which you can place when in build mode) as it was ambiguous what he said. It could mean that moving the mat stops spawns or that the spawns follow the mat. However. I try to be there when there is an attack.

[Art Blade]

The happiness in those settlements is a weird thing. I'm trying to get Sanctuary to 100% but at the time I'm aware of the 80% cap. To rise it, I added decorations and tier 3 stores including a clinic and so on. Food and water exceeds the population's need by quite a fair bit and the defence is 1,493 right now so that shouldn't be an issue any more However, they're quite adamantly staying at around 80%.

I sent two of the notoriously unhappy people (Jun and Marcy Long) to Covenant the inhabitants of which I had to kill after freeing Amelia and talking to Old Man Stockton.

I think I may have to try to get to 100% with a different settlement that has less people than Sanctuary (22) so I can assign all of them a job. I don't want to run a round like a madman finding unemployed people in Sanctuary. I know that ringing that bell is supposed to call them all but I tried several times and they'd be somewhere close but not flocked together for a close inspection in the build editor. Also, they tend to wander off again quite quickly so I never got to see them all in one spot. I might try it with Marcy and Jun over at Covenant, though

Weird path-finding and glitching around makes it even more difficult to control those settlers. More than just a few times I found people standing on rooftops and other elevated spots they're not supposed to reach. Meaning, I can't get to them easily. What is also annoying is how they're "using" stairs. They tend to assemble in front of a stairwell and a few might take a few steps but then they're locked in place and don't know what to do so they idle around blocking everyone, including myself. Great. They do get upstairs somehow and eventually but it's more a matter of teleporting around it seems.

[LowPolyOWG]

Weird path-finding and glitching around makes it even more difficult to control those settlers. More than just a few times I found people standing on rooftops and other elevated spots they're not supposed to reach. Meaning, I can't get to them easily. What is also annoying is how they're "using" stairs. They tend to assemble in front of a stairwell and a few might take a few steps but then they're locked in place and don't know what to do so they idle around blocking everyone, including myself. Great. They do get upstairs somehow and eventually but it's more a matter of teleporting around it seems.

That's every Bethesda game in a nutshell.