u/OnlyHereForComments1

SO, horses, we know they basically don't exist in Fallout (yes there's the alleged Avellone email but that's not backed up firmly by actual people, with general statements being more 'implementing them would be technically difficult and raise questions so we didn't).

Except.

Well, in Fallout 3, Broken Steel...terminal entries from the poor bastard running the show repeatedly mention mules.

You know. The sterile offspring of horses and donkeys.

Which would imply the Capital Wasteland has horses and donkeys. Somewhere.

Either that or mules exist and somehow became fertile (or something. Look radiation is weird).

I dunno, I just was wiki-crawling and found these entries and now it's a hilarious complication in one of the oldest lore bits generated pretty much entirely from two lines in a random terminal entry.

So I've been doing a good bit of reading on pre-modern agricultural societies for funsies, and ironically the more I read, the more I think that within its limitations, Fallout 4 actually does a pretty good job modeling something close to what would 'actually' emerge in the setting it builds. So I'mma ramble about it.

Fallout 4's Commonwealth, allowing for the whole 'everything is shrunk down to fit into a game world' part of playing any actual game like it, is heavily atomized, very agricultural, and very much in the middle of a societal breakdown. While you can somewhat conclude that there's a lot of 'missing' stuff like settlements, 'civilian' populations, and way too many raiders and super mutants versus the people they're preying on, the written intent is definitely a 'things are pretty bad since we lost the local militia guys who helped us but nobody is starving to death yet' kinda situation. This is fine, but it warps the setting from 'IRL' in that it displaces 'find or grow enough food' as the biggest problem.

Instead, the Commonwealth has one major, overriding concern, and that's security. Even family farms are a target for extortion by raider gangs (or being eaten) and this seems to put an effective ceiling on how big or wealthy most places can get before their wealth outstrips their ability to defend it and someone burns it down, whether that the mutants, raiders, or the Institute deciding you have a shiny gadget they want. You get stories from most companions about how so and so place got taken out after they left it fairly often. So what you typically see is people moving pretty far in order to find an abandoned, relatively safe place and set up shop in it on their own land (Taffington Boathouse, that one guy by the reservoir, Drumlin's trading post, Warwick Farm, the Atom Cats, various empty locations with dead settlers who got bodied by environmental threats, et cetera). There's just not that many people to farm the land period, and you don't see the generational seasonal cycles of IRL agriculture where peasant families sit down and farm the same plots for as long as possible, but they're pretty good at getting started on it on their lonesome, and this seems to be common enough that your settlements attract a HUGE population of drifters and semi-nomads. You, however, don't find a lot of intact settlements that aren't secured by the player, at least bigger than single families.

IRL, past a certain point of conglomeration, you see the emergence of what you'd call 'Big Men' - the guys who, by happenstance or ruthlessness, control a lot of agricultural land and rent it out to subsistence-level peasants in exchange for their cut, usually using the extra wealth and power they get to provide for some level of security and maintain power - usually through a personal retinue that becomes part of their household and is thus expected to be their buddies in combat in return. These people mostly don't exist in the Commonwealth, because any settlement big enough to maintain them runs headlong into the 'ah shit. Institute/raiders/mutants' problem and gets taken off the map. (or the Gunners problem, now, but they're a recent addition). The closest we got was the Minutemen, whose Colonels were essentially roving Big Men who extracted support (food/spare bodies/weapons) out of the local population in general but weren't tied to any local area in particular, and who are taken off the map anyway by the time the player walks in. (the Minutemen are also a good breakdown of how the General was essentially the guy having to keep a lid on local magnates and influential Colonels, which is pretty accurate to how militias worked, but that's a different topic. Same with how raiders acting as local warlords is also another model of 'Big Man' tactics but without the veneer of legality and 'providing for the community' IRL rulers in this model put forth)

There are, however, three major exceptions to this paucity of established rulers: Bunker Hill, Goodneighbor, and Diamond City, each of which has solved their security needs in different ways.

Bunker Hill has paid off the raiders to provide security. Kessler has emerged as the 'Big Woman' of there, taking her cut and allowing the caravan trade to proceed unmolested due to that. Add in their walls and solid history and they've managed to remain stable enough to not be troubled. Kessler essentially takes hold of the caravan trade and uses the raiders she's paying off to keep herself in power (playing power games to take out non-cooperative gangs in the process). This is...probably not very sustainable, since the raiders themselves hold the actual power rather than Kessler, but she's managing it and Bunker Hill is quite safe and seems to be the engine of the local economy thanks to running the caravans.

Goodneighbor, for its part, has always been run by gangs and local enforcers to some degree, and is mostly a well-fortified urban enclave of sorts. It primarily runs chem trades and other thrills. Hancock has also emerged as the leading figure, enforcing his own rules with the 'Neighborhood Watch' and either killing off or absorbing the other gangs, but notably Goodneighbor has a history of kingpins doing so. By providing defense for the local drifters, he's managed to do fairly well for himself. The game doesn't dive into how Goodneighbor supports itself, but presumably the chem trade and cheap muscle can do plenty in a pinch and Hancock gets his cut.

And then there's Diamond City, which is the best-fortified and, correspondingly, the best-off. With the stadium to provide pretty hefty security and their own militia outside the walls, they've managed to build an extremely wealthy enclave (by Commonwealth standards) that's pretty self-sufficient, educated, and functional. What's notable is that by doing so they've actually departed from the 'low society' Big Man model and begun on the next usual step of civilized agricultural society, which is building a small city-state. They've got their own government, elections, upper and lower classes of standing (the divide between Lower Field and Upper Stands residents), and a civic identity. They don't necessarily need a singular guy who owns all the fields and charges people rent for it, because they've built enough of their own security and wealth that one guy and his buddies aren't a requirement to not be killed. Instead they elect their mayor, who does run the city pretty much as a king (no local council or government beyond him) but MacDonough doesn't directly use a client-retinue system to provide security, he has hired professionals (DC Security) who work for the city, not for him.

And then enter the player.

Because the second the unkillable murder machine that is the player character enters the game and starts building settlements, the Sole Survivor becomes the biggest of the Big Men, choosing and equipping local defenders, ordering the peasants (settlers) to labor, gaining the allegiance of local groups, maintaining security, and claiming new regions to turn into agriculture. You can do this without being part of the Minutemen at all, running settlements in that case becomes your personal whim, and you start taking your personal cut of food, resources, and currency for providing such things to the community. This is, functionally, the warlord model - you and the guys you gave weapons to are able to defend and hold these places, so you're in charge and everyone owes you stuff for you graciously allowing them to live on your land.

This is basically how agricultural society ends up organizing itself from first principles IRL. I don't think Bethesda intended for that to be the case, but it's funny that it's pretty close to workable.

Before y'all kill me about this, I know CA's stated intent thus far is that the heavy cavalry guys are available in dismounted and mounted variants. And I kinda think this is a mistake of sorts. Sure it's an oldy from M2, but the tech has moved past it and they're not needed.

Knights might dismount for a specific fight, but they're not going to be completely horseless by and large, their entire job is to fight as shock cavalry. Thus, from the campaign level, they should be recruited as cavalry.

I think that dismounting them before or during a battle instead should be how things work, because then it forces choices on you. How many of your knights should be fighting as infantry to stiffen your main line? Committing all of them to cavalry may be the optimal play in most situations if your micro is good and you want to fight aggressively, but what if your own infantry won't hold or you are confident you can out cavalry them with a reduced force? Or if you are facing an enemy with a lot of pikes? Your men aren't suicidal, no normal commander is going to order a cavalry charge into that. Get off the horse and go stab them in the face on foot.

Letting them be able to dismount (I'd go with something where the pre-battle dismounts leave their horses behind maybe, or have them just kinda vanish from the field, since the Empire/Napoleon/Shogun 2 versions I've got on the brain are fairly awkward at leaving a pile of horses doing nothing on the battlefield) would also allow you to defend sieges with them more effectively, and if they're exclusively just a straight mounted unit, it also makes it simpler to balance their elite nature. Of course there's going to be a lot fewer of them, they're cavalry units, and them dismounting to fight as heavy infantry can be balanced around how good they are with those few, highly-equipped men, versus the stinky peasant levies.

Am I making sense here?

I never liked painting the map as required by DA but I do like stealing and 'collecting' all the species and everything else in the galaxy. So I figured I'd see how a Driven Assimilator Nomad run would work. I get to be a plague upon the galaxy like the Borg, periodically wipe out nations, and generally get my Reaper on.

Imagine my surprise when instead of just. Assimilating the groundbound meatsacks. Like an Assimilator. My subject completely obliterates them. I don't have a setting to simply hold planets for assimilation, they just eat everyone.

Am I stupid? Is there a busted species setting? Is it a bug? An intended interaction?

Played DL2, I actually liked it...and then the enshittification and microtransactions started. The thing I hated most is ironically what a lot of people wanted originally, the return of volatiles to nighttime. I felt Techland screwed up the implementation by making night in Old Villedor...basically undoable during the extended prologue that is said Old Villedor. I tried it again, it sucked, it's not for me.

So I stopped thinking about it until I heard DL2 was breaking itself even harder. I'm reminded of the parts I liked (the parkour combat) and I'm thinking about rolling it back to the old pre-Volatile-spam days, wondering how to do that. But it honestly sounds like I'd be going through a lot of work just to have a worse game overall.

So. DL1. More optimized, more intentional in its design (it won't just have a Volatile every other rooftop at least and probably won't constantly add live service nonsense), pre-enshittification mostly (though I see that entire pile of microtransaction packs) and they won't really make it worse. Should I just wait for the inevitable massive Steam sale?

What's y'all's advice?