Obviously a lot of Thesh's ideas are impractical, but a lot of the naysaying also seems pretty ignorant of how the game already works or of what Thesh meant.
Koa wrote:Thesh wrote:Anyone can be permanently killed in an attack, or while on patrol, in a caravan, or scavenging (you better make sure you give them a proper burial!).
This is a massive problem because there's not much of what I'll call OOC (out of cell) aggregations or abstractions to calculate combat that you aren't there to witness. You can make it just a flat percentage chance of death but given all the other suggestions about combat and death I don't think you would find it satisfying.
As Thesh suggests later, a percent chance of death for OOC stuff is probably fine, as long as it accounts for relative level and arms and armor.
Thesh wrote:Everything requires resources.
Doable with special scripted bins for the extra resources I imagine. Count the required fuel for the generators and remove fuel from the bins on a timed loop. Add fuel to the bins from worked stations on a timed loop. I'm not sure about UI support but I should also note that developing all the supporting windows and menus for all these things is deceptively time consuming.
Why is additional UI support needed? "Just" add those things to the timed loop that already transfers food and water from one settlement to another. If you want to add a travel delay do whatever the
Salvage Beacons mod does to move stuff from a container to the destination workshop.
(Note: I don't know how accessible this and some of the things below are to modders. There are things I've felt like should be straightforward and popular mods, like triggering a regular settlement attack event or seeing the total stats for all your settlements together, whose nonexistence (or at least nonexistence on the Nexus, which for me amounts to the same thing) suggests that either I'm a huge outlier in ever wanting such a thing or that it's actually harder than it should be to accomplish.)
Thesh wrote:Setting up trade routes allows you to trade surplus resources in respective communities, but these need to be protected. That protection requires ammunition, and your people will get killed and lose gear, which needs replacing over time. Not to mention that they need to eat. Anything your community sells to another community is done so at over 100% of value (subsequently, they lose out on the trade by an inverse amount). Surpluses of value (caps) are what keep your citizens happy. You can tax them, which makes them less happy (and hurts local business if you don't reinvest!). Supplies that have to be purchased from traders are always purchased at a loss to you.
Excessively complex. Surplus trading between settlements isn't going to work out so well with all this complexity to required resources. Actual trade lines with NPCs links back into the OOC problem. Autopurchasing supplies and taxes... Ignoring that a tax system could be a large mod upon itself it seems like settlements could fail, in which case you would need to have some sort of failure state which also doesn't exist. With how all of these features seem to link into one another, diagnosing a problem with a settlement would probably be very difficult. Liberal application of Murphy's law. Your chemist dies and you don't notice, no fuel so the generators go down, and then gradually everyone in the settlement dies. Then this settlement was a supplier of a resource which starts to kill another settlement and so on. What a nightmare. This needs a lot of interface QA for what would be a gigantic interface overhaul.
If generators go down, the workshop view from the DATA tab of your Pip-Boy will show insufficient power. Then you go to the settlement and check whether the problem is broken generators (there are already mods to put quest markers on broken settlement objects, if you've got a ton of generators) or insufficient fuel (just look in your workshop inventory).
Obviously no one would opt for this hypothetical mod if they didn't like micromanaging settlements in the first place, so needing to go there to find out the problem wouldn't be an undue burden on those players.
Gear loss and replacement wouldn't even be that much of a problem if settlers and provisioners just took it from workshops automatically. (I've seen videos suggesting this is already the case, at least for weapons, but I haven't paid enough attention to verify it for myself.)
Thesh wrote:Advanced fabrication facilities, requiring multiple positions including scientist, engineer, and fabrication technician can produce power armor parts and high tech (and low tech) weapons, with in-house designs reserved exclusively for members of the minutemen, which provide free security by recruiting members but requires sacrificing a high level character with good combat-related stats.
Doable I suppose, but would be a big mod unto itself.
Contraptions Workshop already has machines to build gear with workshop inventory. It doesn't seem like it'd be too hard to make those into assignable workstations. I'm not sure if all generic NPCs actually have SPECIAL attributes (to check to make sure someone is capable of manning a particular crafting machine), but generating a set of 7 small integers along with all the other stuff that's already assigned to them (such as appearance and gear and possibly even names if you have
the right mod) doesn't seem like it would be a particularly performance-hurting addition.
Thesh wrote:All mechanical equipment must be maintained, so the larger the community, the larger the maintenance staff, and you must make sure you plan out your sewage and irrigation system. You are going to need a lot of water, and a lot of fertilizer. All communities must be built on a water source. Staff must work in shifts, with guards and maintenance at work at all times. Gear can be assigned to particular postings, rather than individual settlers. So guards can be assigned power armor, and they will take it off and exchange it at shift change. Shifts can be 2x12, 3x8, or 4x6 hours; there is a production penalty for a 2x12, and a production bonus for a 4x6, where production bonus means higher output for mechanical equipment from maintenance workers, and SPECIAL bonuses for guards.
I almost feel like I am being generous when I say that I don't think this is anywhere near within the scope of feasibility. Sewage and irrigation system too?
Water sources/sinks can only be built in particular places, and crops and toilets only work within a certain distance of water pipes (which would obviously need to be added) the same way other things need to be near power conduits.
Shifts could have a default which is configurable from a terminal the way spotlights, turrets, and other
mod-added settlement features are. Make the shifts affect happiness and use the existing relationship between happiness and productivity.
Thesh wrote:Large communities will have to be sectioned into districts to simplify resident management.
Ignoring the massive amount of work to predefine the districts for the hundredish settlements, I don't think it's technically possible. If they're not predefined then it's probably even less possible. It's like adding a tenth floor and an elevator to a three story building with foundation damage.
There are 37 existing settlements, including the 7 added by DLC.
They're already full of world objects which were a hell of a lot harder to choose and place than some lines dividing each one into districts. Vault 88 even already has multiple workshop areas (and NPC behavior in there is currently messed up by the immense size of the place, which could probably be alleviated by first assigning settlers to just one section or another).
Thesh wrote:At no point is your community safe from attack. If at any point it is taken over, many residents will be killed, while others will flee. If it is taken over, you will need to go in and clear it out. The longer you take to respond, the more they will fuck your shit up with looting and redecoration. Fleeing residents will relocate to other communities, or wander the wastelands as a group if there is no room, until their community is cleared with security restored to somewhat higher than when they were kicked out.
OOC problem big time here. Spending computational cycles for fleeing NPCs still existing and moving around in the world, NPCs who are essentially in limbo and wanting to go back to their original settlement... Sounds like an easy way to clog up and crash the game given how this would interact with all of the other things. And to what benefit?
Wandering as a group would be hard to run continuously, but you could have a random encounter with refugee settlers if one of your settlements has been taken over. There are already
radiant quests to resettle Institute refugees, so it doesn't seem overwhelming to add your own fleeing settlers to the possible beneficiaries of that quest.
