I would have made it a 1,000 caps. If they had, though, it would have resulted in a lot of players taking him up on the offer.
What's the problem in that ? The game was advertised as "you get to be whoever you want". What if I want to endorse child slavery, instead of just hating newspapers ?
Raider culture as established in Nuka World shows that Raiders very much do have a basic desire for money as well as other needs being met. Food is precious in the post-apocalypse world but caps themselves are a major source of need. The Capital Wasteland Raiders actually appeared to be killing to survive if all those corpses hung around and "Iganua on a Stick" was actually Strange Meat as in Fallout 1. Here, it seems these individuals are bandits in the Jesse James and Old West sense.
I didn't play Nuka World, so I'll trust you on that. Jesse James' example though, the guy was mad because of the secession war he had lost. The whole political background justifies the presence of such bandits : people who wouldn't admit the defeat, people who lost their homes, people who were promised glory and were deceived, cannot get back to their families because of the marshals waiting for them there, people who are so broke they can't even pay attention etc.
In Fallout 4's case however, there is no such context that would justify a raiding system. The war's wounds are two centuries old. There hasn't been a recent event that would cause social disorder (a plague, a war, whatever) There's nothing left to raid. The targets are either too poor or too rich to be good targets anymore.
As the Master pointed out, the superior results for dipping in FEV come from doing so with unradiated Wastelanders like those who come from Vaults. The experimental subjects of the Institutes are all wastelanders who grew up in the Glowing Sea storm subjected Commonwealth. In other words, they're abyssal candidates for Super mutantdom and it's no surprise they're all as dumb as Harry. Of course, Virgil is no Richard Grey either and the fact he came up with a retrovirus which reverses FEV mutation but didn't figure out you need pure DNA to make Super Mutants who aren't as dumb as Strong never occurred to him.
The Master didn't have access to vaults citizen, and yet, Vault City pocket guide for travelers clearly states that Broken Hills is made of hundreds of mutants. And from all we see, they are all sociable, they formed families, accepted private businesses, operate a mine and obey the rule of law. Marcus, the Lieutenant and Gamorrhin were all mutants from the Unity, and the three of them are very smart.
Secondly, the Master already made two dippings with vault citizen. One with himself, another with a vault dweller named Talius. Neither of these dippings produced super mutants. A third dipping made Harold -not a super mutant either- but the Master is probably unaware of this one.
Basically, I don't think that the "smart super mutants require vault citizen" idea is absolute. Fallout 1 and 2 show that the Master already had hundreds of smart super mutants before he could get a grip on an intact vault. True, we encounter the idiotic grunts, but guess who they are : door watchers at Necropolis. Nothing hints that they are representative of the "master race" the Master intends to create, since the only people from the army we meet are Marcus and the Lieutenant. Aka, the strongest and the most eloquent NPCs.
Vault 111 is, unfortunately, pretty much as useful a Vault as Vault City's in that it's best used as a storage area. It's a tomb of a bunch of extremely specific frozen corpses with no remaining supplies or equipment for growing food, water, and other vital Vault material.
It's safe, secure, it has an intact door that no explosive could open, and it's shielded. No risks of radiation, the electricity is still running after two centuries and from what we see, the whole machinery is intact. Computers could serve as educational elements for the new generation etc. Clean up the corpses, and you've got a base that could protect any settlement. You could grow food with ultraviolet lighting, use the water purifier etc.
Funny when Preston says "hell, maybe we'll even have some electricity" when there's a functional base running with a fusion reactor one minute away, and yet, you are building makeshift aerial turbines to light on TVs which don't work.
I'd be interested if you think there's a better place for him to hide.
Easy. If I had to fix Fallout 4's script, Virgil wouldn't be in the commonwealth anymore. Travelled to Ronto or another faction. First of all, it would hint that there are functional societies around the commonwealth, societies which accept super mutants as regular citizen, and rescue them as war refugees who fled the Capital Wasteland. It would give shades of grey to the super mutant situation.
Secondly, you would have to lure Virgil out of his safespot, basically like in Witcher 3 for the man who can change his face (always forget his name, sorry). You don't find him, you make something big to get his attention from far away. For example, distress signals because of escaped test subjects, carrying a specific kind of plague, roaming free. Or something else Virgil worked on, I don't know. You'd have to work hard, reach radio towers, elaborate a scenario etc.
And he won't show up before a while. And when he does, he'll send the children of atom to speak on his behalf, because he doesn't want to expose himself too early.
Then only, you could speak to him directly.
Elder Lyons did an investigation of the Midwestern Brotherhood of Steel and didn't find anything of them while remaining in radio contact with the Western Brotherhood of Steel until they went silent. Until proven otherwise, they're either dead or simply want nothing to do with their brothers.
Radio contact would require functional antennas every 40 miles from the west coast to the east. Even powerful factions like the NCR or Caesar's Legion wouldn't have enough men to keep such networks working. Radio waves are basically radiations, and radiations travel in a straight line... but the earth is curved. And the longer the distance, the greater the curve. Radio contact is simply not possible.
Underground cables is a functional way of keeping contact, true, but the same goes. They are 200 years old, took nuclear warheads and weren't repaired. Unless you can dedicate hundreds of engineers all over the continent, they don't work anymore.
Then, there are satellites. True. But if the brotherhood had access to satellite communications, hell, the midwest brotherhood could have contacted HQ right away. Would have taken them a month to find and repair a communication tower.
And they're not dead. Caesar mentions that they have scribes east of Colorado.
It could also mean the Brotherhood of Steel surrendered or came to truce. The problem with Fallout, as much as I love the games, is they tend to confuse victory and genocide. Are we really going to assume the Brotherhood is going to fight to the last squire?
Well, they are few, they are zealots and they have waged war against the NCR for years from their bunkers, not hesitating to committ terrorist attacks on civilian towns. If they wanted to surrender or make a truce, they had the opportunity and didn't take it.
The Brotherhood of Steel has some flexibility in its doctrines. Not much but some. In the case of Elder Lyons, it took an extremely large amount of crappy leadership and Codex-breaking behavior to get the Outcasts to rebel and even then the Elders at Lost Hills didn't remove him from power.
Not that much, really. He ignored the main objective of his mission to focus on the protection of civilians. As far as we know, the outcasts clearly say that once they'll find a way to contact the elders, they'll probably sentence him to death for high treason. As far as we know, they are probably right, for Lyons did commit high treason on every level.
"Boss, we found Liberty Prime, but instead of fixing it, Lyons decided to dedicate all our forces to protect a DJ and a machine that nobody needs, for the sake of peasants who don't even live there. He lost dozens of good knights doing so, boss, and now he's waging war against the Enclave to decide who will press the button first. Oh, and he says he's gonna educate the young Maxson real good, boss
"
The situation for the Outcasts wasn't exactly working out very well for them. They failed to gain the Operation: Anchorage cache, they were being hunted by the Regulators, Elder Lyons successfully confiscated the Enclave's treasure trove, and they were pouring over junk in their base. The Outcasts rejoining probably happened as soon as Lost Hills appointed Maxson Elder.
But then again, how could Lost Hills appoint anyone at this point?
I reviewed that story and Curie says the panacea requires ingredients which are now extinct. Hence why only one dose of Mole Rat cure.
It's a luck that the Environmental Protection Agency exists in Fallout's lore and used to have bases with every single plant known to man.
Take a look at their racism.
With the given context, hardly racism. That's the same reason why the parallel between the mutants and the jewish people in the Xmen movie never fails to make me cringe. Jewish people couldn't manipulate the laws of physics, shoot lasers with their eyes, run at 1/10 of the speed of light (you realize that if Quicksilver falls, he'd provoke something like a nuclear explosion?), manipulate the mind of presidents, have a machine that can kill every single citizen on earth, train child soldiers, go through walls and they didn't have a fight with world destructors every year. In this context, the people have every reason to be afraid of mutants, and the parallel with the innocent, human, regular jewish people simply makes no sense.
Same goes for Ghouls. Hard to apply a current definition of racism in this situation. For all the BoS knows, Ghouls are rotting corpses with no future, who instead of socializing, lurked in sewers while eating the flesh of their fallen comrades. They carry radiations in lethal doses while lurking around ground water and the only sociable ones they may have heard of committed a mass slaughter of civilians in their own homes before taking it over, and imitating the previous owners (the tenpenny tower). For all they know, ghouls are the creatures from "the descent" and hell, it's kind of hard to argue with that.
That has nothing to do with the racism we know of, where you don't like someone because he has a different skin color. Here, they don't like them because all they know of them is, indeed, pure monstruosity and horror.
Same goes for all kinds of popular stories which love making parallels between oppressed minorities and fictional minorities. Harry Potter wizards constantly bitch about how "humans would be afraid of them" etc, but in reality, humanity would have every reason to be suspicious of them. Guys are waging a civil war in the middle of England, have a medieval inquisition thing going in the middle of today's society, they use child soldiers, their bad education created a noseless hitler, they condemn children to become either cool, nerds, racists or hufflepuffs before they've grown pubic hair and then, they don't teach them history, mathematics or anything. That's maybe why they don't know about the real world's problem, which they could easily fix, like climate change or deforestation. OF COURSE people would be afraid of them. Given the context, that wouldn't be racism, that would be common sense.
Drawing a parallel between the suspicion towards them, and the one towards homosexual or ethnical minorities has always bothered me. It just doesn't work.
