Why build power and water plots

[Sriep]

Confused new user.

A typical Sole Survivor will have a Cha of 2, for a max of 12 settlers. So you can only use 12 jobs to spread around industrial commercial and municipal plots. So residents are a viable asset.

Why would you ever build a power or water plot and use up one of your settlers when you can build vanilla power plants and water-generating stuff with no settler cost?

You are only going to have about one or two of the twelve settlers to assign to Municipal activities. One of these settlers will be taken up by a caravan, so on which other municipal plots is it worth using up a settler?

 

[yaugie]

You never have to, but a high-end Power or Water plot produces quite a lot of their relevant thing - maxed out Water plot is something like 150 Water generated.
The real 'balancing factor' is the SS2 function of "Maintenance Costs", which is switched off by default for most people - this makes the vanilla generators, pumps etc all cost a daily amount of resources to keep running - a plot requires less of said maintenance cost per point of resource generated.
It's the same for Agricultural - sure they start out barely equal to vanilla crops per person, but a maxed out Ag plot can be making ~70 Food per person eventually while the vanilla crops are restricted to 6 Food per worker. This means a lower ratio of people needed to be farmers by the endgame, thus they're "freed up" to work those other jobs.

 

[Sriep]

Ah! After a bit of rummaging, I think I worked out why you might build a power plant plot.

Communication has as one of its consequence

max settlers becomes tied to number of beds instead of Charisma

As a requirements

2+ Settlements, 1 Level 1 Advanced Power Plant, 5 Level 3 Industrial Plot

The requirement for an Advanced power plant

5 Level 3 Basic Power Plants, OR Archon's quest, Pure Energy, Skilled Settler (Intelligence 5 or higher)

So I see where building power plants can be useful. But which requirements are settlement only and others game wide. Having five level 5 power plants in one statement seems a bit much. But I am guessing the max settlers tied to beds is per settlement or is it global?

Still have not found a reason for water plant plots.

 

[yaugie]

The "unlock requirements" are global, you need 5 power plants across all your settlements. The change to population cap is per-settlement, though.

 

[Captain LaserBeam]

With the exception of the Vault-Tec DLC workshop items - the basic water and power plots are going to produce way more than anything else you can build that doesn't require a settler. You may not see the logic now, but wait until diseases hit, or you need to feed an army, or you need to power HQ - you're going to need all the water and power you can get. A high tech water plant with a high perception settler will get you hundreds of units of water. Same with a high tech power plant. When you can have settlements at that high-tech tier they can support outposts and multiple other settlements.

Also, if you play with maintenance costs on for non-plot objects, then spamming the settlement with water pumps/purifiers and generators actually ends up being worse than building basic power and water plants in terms of the maintenance costs. The truly good stuff (fusion generator, industrial water purifier) also requires you to provide lots of scrap, whereas the plots are built and upgraded using virtual resources, or it requires perks which mean you have to build your character a certain way. The plots don't require any of that other than for you to climb the settlement tech tree and build an "industrial base" of industrial plots.

You can turn off diseases, maintenance costs, dynamic needs, HQ construction costs, play on basic "scrap" difficulty without components or even cartegories etc. - and yeah you'll probably be fine. But if you have any of that stuff on you're going to want those water and power plants. Maybe not right away, but definitely later.

 

[yaugie]

Yeah, my last save that made it to the end of Chapter 3, I had a +3 hand pump and a +40 Water Purifier of the vanilla objects in every settlement, High Tech Water plots in just about every non-military settlement. Total network production of Water was definitely above 1000 total, probably 1500, and it still wasn't enough between the army and the HQ research and all the high level Residentials/Stat Training plots across the state.