Eh, I side with the Brotherhood because I see them having the potential to do what the NCR is doing, making life more bare-able for wastelanders. BoS protect people, BoS gave out water for free, BoS has all the qualities to help make the world better just like the NCR. Hell, NCR made life so much better for the people in the west that having to carry a gun on your person all the time is no longer needed, settlements don't get attacked hard unless they're on the frontier like the Mojave.

Expanding into territory where only a handful of people live, people who don't have much in their life and live in constant fear of being murderer by their next door neighbor or a raider gang because they have resources said people want. Institute doesn't care to protect people, if they had it their way they would spend all their time underground with the only communication being sending up synths that act more like watchers or people to do experiments. RR doesn't care about helping people or stopping raiders, they only care about freeing people and the MM is only strong if they have a charismatic leader or the castle is still up.

BoS has the potential to help more people out then any other faction from what I've seen, sure MM may have good reasons and may be a good choice but their entire structure is dependent on a central core or a strong leader. RR may want to free people but after that they don't care what happens to said people or what those people turn into and Institute is happy playing "no one's home, go away"

Yes expansionism can be seen as bad but you know what's worse? Starvation, raiders, dehydration, living in fear. I'd rather be under a country that can hold it's own and may be expansionist towards land that is largely unused or uncivilized then "whoops woke up with a knife in my chest and all my possessions gone, screw me I guess"

Ummmmm....no

Minuteman have most potential here. BOS is just a cult with high-tech weaponary

The NCR is a democratic republic with a strong rule of secular law, so it's at least reasonably possible for the populace to deal with corrupt leadership; the Brotherhood is a purely military organization, and as such, any territory it purported to rule would be a military dictatorship, and thus inherently vulnerable to the nuerous disadvantages that plague dictatorships. While I narrowly think that letting the jerkassery of Kimball and Oliver slide might be for the best for the Mojave in any case, as the NCR is somewhat better to the population as a whole than House, the Brotherhood doesn't possess the same governmental apparatus that the NCR does; all it has is military force, which can be easily reproduced by the Institute and only narrowly more difficultly produced by the Minutemen. I believe that a strong and self-reliant inter-settlement trade network is the most important thing for the long-term prospects of the Commonwealth, and I believe that such a thing will have an easier time working with an Institute with more ethical Directorship than it would Maxson's Brotherhood.

I'm not completely opposed to a Minutemen ending that destroys only the Institute, provided that the Brotherhood is willing to submit to the will of the Commonwealth's people while it's present there, but I'm somewhat doubtful that it would.

My guess is The Brotherhood wouldn't directly govern The Commonwealth like the NCR. I imagine it'd be much like The Midwestern Brotherhood's MO in that regard.

Recruits and resources are sent as tributes from individual townships, and in exchange The Brotherhood offers military protection. Individual townships would largely be autonomous and left to their own devices, provided of course they do nothing to interfere with Brotherhood operations.

Minutemen have died out completely before and the result? All settlements became targets, many were destroyed and a lot of lives were ended. Why? Because they didn't have a strong leader or a centralized location that suited their needs so instead of trying to take back Castle or build a new central hub they decided to just break apart leading to some joining the Gunners, others becoming raiders, some dying and others just giving up and going home.

That is in the past. Why don't people look at the MM as opportunity for the future? The SS could create a strong army to support a state government in the commonwealth with a bill of rights.

Because it could happen again. What happens if the SS dies and Castle is overrun again? The entire organization will fall to chaos again. Groups like the BoS or the Institute don't rely on that, hell there have been BoS chapters that strip their elder of their rank. Take for instance Elijah, he was stripped of his rank by his own chapter then branded a traitor by the BoS. The Institute has always had a director and since they're actually smart they probably have a very simple way to elect a new director in case the current one dies without naming an heir.

Minutemen depend on a strong leader and a central hub otherwise the entire group falls apart and they fall apart really hard, that's kind of the problem with an army that isn't tied to any government, non-militant leader and is entirely volunteer.

What happens if Nate doesn't choose the MM? They're 100% dependent on him resurrecting and saving them

Elder Maxon can't see the larger picture, he is obsessed with the destruction of all synths. When he finds out that his best paladin is a synth, he orders you to kill him.

It says pretty much all about the man.

Synths like humans can be good or bad, loyal or traitors. History is full of examples with loyal advisor turned traitors, or trusted professionals who went whistle-blowers or just spies. So, being a human is no guarantee. Humans are not perfect and it is the same with their creations.

In fact Danse had one of the best records of loyalty and bravery, but after it is found out that he is a synth, the whole BoS dismisses him. Sad.

The BoS in this game is portrayed as a weak factions. Patrols are being destroyed by ghouls or raiders, vertibirds fall like bloatflies, they are a mess. I don't see the power of Elder Maxon, nor his genius. They even look desperate by giving you the title of knight so easy.

BoS should be mighty, tough, like the Enclave felt in the previous games. If you saw the Enclave, you would hide or run. However, in this game, the BoS is more like raiders with power armour. Even the Gunners have better patrols and seem better organized. The Gunners have TWO vaults and the Plaza, while the BoS have one small police station and a ruined airport!

We still have to see how the BoS will support the people. Will they provide water, food, technology to rebuild?

As someone who beat the game with the BoS, no they aren't portrayed as weak, they're actually portrayed as the strongest military faction of the four. BoS patrols don't die as easily as you make them out to, they actually have a higher survival rate then Minutemen patrols and while vertibirds may get destroyed easily I see that as nothing but a gameplay mechanic to make taking out BoS vertibirds for anti-BoS players or Gunner vertibirds that spawn around the edge of the glowing sea easier, realistically the vertibirds would be hard to take down.

The BoS aren't "more like raiders in power armor" they're a powerful force that can hold their own. Hell, play the C.I.T. siege for the BoS and don't fire a single shot during the scene where Liberty Prime is scanning the C.I.T. ruins. The BoS is more likely to take out all the synths teleporting in without one member dying, that's what I've seen from doing the mission three times to see how doing nothing during that scene goes out.

You are vastly underplaying the BoS and it's showing.

Senyn,

And yet, In my BOS play through the people sing my praises for my victory. In my Institute play through, I just get chewed out for winning.

Also, in DC after the BOS victory, you will run into rather sheepish knights indicating that they were sent to DC to 'mingle' with the people. Clearly Elder Maxson wishes good relations with the people of the Commonwealth.

The Vertibird fragility is a Bethesda issue, just like the joke dragons in Skyrim. I use a mod to fix that, it's particularly enjoyable if playing opposed to the BOS.

You have also failed to remember that the seat of the Eastern BOS power is in the Capitol Wasteland, not the Boston Airport.

Personally, I say that if the people of the Commonwealth want to hate me for not nuking a city, then let them hate me.

The Brotherhood are easily the strongest military faction in the game, to be fair they are actually the only professional military faction as well. The Railroad are more an armed resistance group, the Minutemen are a homeguard/militia and the Institute is heavily dependent on the teleporter, without it they would not be able to keep their base hidden, wouldn't be able to strike at will and of course without it the Brotherhood and the Railroad wouldn't have to sit on the defensive only able to react to the Institute without the player's assistance.

The use of nuclear explosions as problem solvers, is way overused in this franchise. It is particularly bad writing in FO4. I have already said that I will not use Bethesda's poor storytelling, or gameplay balance mechanisms, as a means of judging a faction. So the 'nuking of a city' is completely immaterial to me, since it makes no sense based on the ideology of the faction.

The BOS would more logically, loot useful tech, then destroy the Synth creation equipment, shut down the reactor, and collapse the facility with conventional munitions.

Mods to fix these issues can't come soon enough.

Fair enough. Though if I use this standard, I can easily claim to not need to wipe out the Railroad, as I've thought of a few ways that I should logically be able to bypass it already.

The Brotherhood have destroyed both Raven Rock and the Mobile Crawler in Fallout 3 without securing them. So it does fit their MO. They're uncompromising, and believe that occasionally some technology just has to be wiped off the face of the earth.

I mean, you can pretend it doesn't happen. But it does. I'd very much like to pretend that The Institute doesn't release mutants on the surface for no apparent reason, or continue the FEV program for no apparent reason, but I don't.

If we can't judge a faction by what we see in-game, that pretty much leaves us to come up with whatever we like.

Agreed I prefer to see the factions warts and all, rather than pick a favourite and refuse any criticism.

The Brotherhood are over zealous and have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.

The Institute is playing god and is to blame for most of the crisis unfolding in the game.

The Railroad is locked into an ideological struggle and is willing to let innocents suffer for their cause.

The Minutemen are pretty damn useless.

All of the factions are flawed in some way, if they weren't there would be no need for the player to arrive to save them.

If we judge by what we see, turning Maxson into a martyr guarantees the railroad's / the institute's annihilation. Maxson came with a token force; if you think DC will just oblige the commonwealth after killing The Father To His Men (tv tropes it), you're being naive as all get out.

Yet without the Prydwen or Liberty Prime, and a large number of their vertibird fleet, their ability to do anything is basically nil. And that's assuming Maxson didn't bring the majority of his hard-core loyalists, leaving those less loyal behind in the CW. I truthfully find it hard to believe everyone in the Brotherhood is completely gung-ho Maxson. Lyons undoubtedly still has admirers.

Kells confirms that until the Prydwen was built, the Brotherhood didn't have the ability to rapidly deploy and mobilize long distances. Without it, they'd be crippled to effect any kind of real second-wave attack.

That also opens up the question of what happens to the Capital Wasteland if you destroy the BOS? Have you condemned the Capital Wasteland to return to anarchy? Wonder what all the BOS haters think about the fate of the Capital Wasteland.

There's a holotape called "Maxson was right" where some women says she was still somewhat loyal to Lyon's ideals until they went to the Commonwealth, haven't got the transcript but it talks about buildings that nearly touched the Prydwen (thinking New York). She says that only seeing them full of mutants and freaks was what comvinved her that Maxson was right and that all the Old World had been destroyed by tech ran amok.

Might indicate that some back in Washington haven't had that same revelation;

We have zero percent reason to believe that the people back in DC aren't loyal to him specifically because he has been written as the great unifier.

Okay. Why?

In my game, Maxson is the disgruntled BoS leader who stands in the Citadel day after day brooding about how the Brotherhood should have been the ones to take down the Institute, not the Minutemen that weren't even thought to have the firepower to even do so.


But the general of the Minutemen, aka me, am the one that is making everything happen while he stands there weeks later, same spot.


I deserve to be the leader of my great land, not Maxson. He can go svck a lemon.


Actually, what he doesn't realize is that the Brotherhood was in fact the firepower I used during the infiltration but maybe perhaps due to a glitch, the Brotherhood's role in the entire plan wasn't acknowledged. So yes, I did invite my brothers and sisters to the party and they came to it, but just don't have any memory of it.


Which is fine, who cares? The Minutemen are the tough guys in my game and I'm the general...hmm how did that happen anyway? Oh hey, you, mystery vault dweller - please be our general?! shrug.

No one calls Joshua Graham bad writing, and his story is way more over the top incredible than either Maxson's or the Lone Wanderer's.

Eh, I see what you're saying but the LW basically single-highhandedly storms a base of Enclave, saves the Capital Wasteland, and ends up taking part in various plots in The Pitt, Point Lookout, Mothership Zeta etc.

Joshua Graham's most incredible feat was surviving Caesar's punishment. Which, while seemingly miraculous, isn't impossible.

I don't necessarily mean actively disloyal, just not hard-core loyal enough to risk lives and limbs to cross country by foot to The Commonwealth in order to seek vengeance.