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Suggestion Caps rebalance for Raider faction and perhaps other conquerors for flavor reasons

TheKeviebear

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I tried out the raider conqueror faction with Jammer and it was really fun to play through the quest (superb voice acting, writing, etc.) but I have a huge flavor issue with the gameplay in that it is a huge drain on the caps and money was really tight even though Jammer promised I'd be swimming in caps.

The main issue for me is that the default setting on no vassal control is a huge disadvantage for running your Raider outfit and that is how I want to play a Raider playthrough. With no vassal control you can't collect the tax from the plots or the passive output of the commercial plots, you can't take the resources to sell, and you can't optimize the space/output of the city (this last bit doesn't matter too much for the money issue since even if you were able to build more plots you still can't get their workshop output). These compound to really limit the amount of money you get compared to a normal playthrough and coupled with the fact that recruiting soldiers costs money, the amount of caps your settlements produce for you is greatly reduced. City plans also constantly have many useless martial and recreational plots (as far as I know: happiness isn't a thing for vassals because morale is what you care about, control is all that matters for keeping control and defense doesn't count for vassals, and you don't get income tax caps on these plots in vassal settlements unless you have control over them) which reduces their output and of course they don't upgrade so "prisoners-with-jobs" don't have that many plots to work in (which is more of an issue for RWE, but I like being limited by RWE). You can mitigate this slightly by putting commercial plots in your outposts but then if you want to get equivalent caps production to a normal settlement, you have to spam commercial plots in your outpost which is something that you might not want to do (and even if you do end up going this route your raider outpost has less resources in the workshop for you to sell the traders so its mostly the passive income you are relying on).

For other factions this might be fine with me, for the Brotherhood of Steel or say Children of Atom playthrough would feel just fine being a bit low on caps, but for the Jammer quest line and other conqueror factions which are all about putting the boot down on settlements and squeezing them for caps it feels really bad that I end up with allot less money siding with Jammer than with Preston even when the quest is literally called "In it for the Money".

I would like to see some way for Raiders in particular to have some way to monetize vassals, not just with RWE tributes but with actual caps as well. Maybe an option to have each civilian in a vassal settlement pay 5-10 caps per day (which I think would be balanced with no vassal control and no vassal upgrade), perhaps an optional action to extort tribute from your vassals that makes them pay up caps but tanks their morale and has a chance to spawn a revolt (which would allow you to trade RWE and soldiers for caps, reminds me a bit of creeping in Warcraft3). Perhaps an acquire loot assault type on non-player settlements where you do the fight but at the end you don't annex the settlement but get paid caps instead, would be really cool if this can be implemented in a way that turns plots into ruins (probably some random generic ruin plot) and it takes time for them to regenerate and if you attack a settlement the amount of caps you earn like this is based on plots and ruin plots reduce your income so you have an incentive to go around with your army raiding settlements and leaving a ring of destruction around your outposts and walking away with hiking bags full of caps.

Either way when I'm playing as an evil selfish character I want to feel like I have the perks of being evil and selfish like how I felt in Skyrim with the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild, sure other factions have quests that also give out good pay but the main quest line of these 2 factions ended with a massive pay out you were working for and their repeatable quests were both satisfying in terms of tone of what you were doing and the payout itself. I also really like the fact that those 2 guilds offer repeatable quests that always pays better than a Jarl's bounty (100 gold to kill a dragon/bandit leader vs 500 to steal a family heirloom) so you have something to compare it to in-game and an evil character can logically always decide to do the evil things cause they pay better. That kind of design makes the good-evil choice an interesting one and makes the role playing feel natural, the reason I ultimately dropped my raider play through was because in-character in my head I realized directly managing a settlement made me more caps than running around with these raiders (which I had to pay to recruit) so in-character I chose not to interact with raider mechanics as much cause my character just wanted to make money and the raider gang didn't deliver as much money as I was hoping for, which just turned me off the entire playthrough.

Granted my focused raider playthrough was a few patches ago before the entire quest line was released and I don't know if there's a huge payout at the end or if there's a tribute chest unlock or something like it added in later (or maybe one of my many mods is causing a conflict that stops me from tapping the income from conquerors, though I doubt it) which pretty much nullifies most of my post, except maybe can we get that earlier in the quest line cause I tried to run a Raider playthrough with a greedy and selfish character on this patch which, because he was greedy and selfish but also smart and charismatic, helped out both Preston and Jammer (more friends = more money and connections to find Shaun) and after setting up 2 outposts and a vassal I just lost interest in it and dropped Jammer like a rock (both literally and metaphorically, again due to my character realizing Preston's Minutemen settlements produce allot more resources) and swapped to a full Minuteman Liberator and turned on vassal management.

On that note: Can we also have a holotape option to convert player settlements directly into vassals so that a Minuteman Liberator faction interfaces better with Preston's quests.
 
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