I want to try to understand if building a community will transform fallout 4 into a more like Mayor Simulator

It just works.

From the little we seen its basicly Fallout shelter, just in 3D and you built junk sheads instead of rooms in a vault.

It's only a mayor simulator if you do it while wearing a fancy suit and hat.

i think the closes we can get is the mod from skyrim that let u build a town, u arent really the major, u just make sure the place survive and u can unlock vendors that have really good stuff.

I think its similar, but a bit more complex.

My questions are,
1) What happens if raiders hit while you are gone and forgot defenses. Or will they only happen if you are there? Do they kill everyone?

2) How do you populate your town? Do you kidnap and force people to work for you like in metal gear? Do you invite people? Do people just wander in?

for what they said on the E3 video ppl just move there when your settlement grows.

1. If I get it right stuff will only happen when you're in game. If the game is shut down nothing happens.

We'll probably get some prompt that we are being attacked. But it was said they can get in and steal valuable stuff so it'll be interesting. If you leave it undefended, then that's your fault lol

Yes im sure if you log off the game will not continue. I meant what happens if I built the city then go visit the institute. Can everyone die while im gone?

Well you definitly aren't building a city. From the looks, there is a size limitation and that will make it more of a village or settlement. And yeah, if you don't have proper defenses in place and leave, everyone could die (speculated using common sense)

my theory is they only attack when you yourself are within the cell of the settlement, set to a random trigger/timer with your presence being the condition to engage the event.

Don't see what the point of all these defenses we can build then. Unless we're going to see much larger raider parties than we have previously. I think max I ever saw was 10? That's hardly a difficult thing to defend against a medium levels. Now if it's 20-30 sure, extra defenses make sense. But I think we're putting them there to also protect when we aren't around. I hope at least. Otherwise it'll be one of those "oh I went back to my settlement, gotta fight some raiders right away"

I think it's better than the alternative, when you return to an empty settlement with empty storage and nothing to tell you what happened

Vampire raids all over again

But that's the thing. They've already mentioned terminals and that we can get info from them when not there. Just like any other game that has similar mechanics, we get a warning to go save the settlement and if WE choose not to, we suffer the consequenses. Sometimes, in the middle of a quest, what you're doing might be more important. I doubt we'd lose everything. They mentioned some stuff gets taken. That doesn't seem like we're gonna get cleaned out

Depends on the maximum size of each settlement area. Besides cities in Fallout are pretty small like Rivet City which is an aircraft carrier and Diamond City which is Fenway Park.

As I understand it they can attack when ya not there, hence why it's important to set up npc guards and automatic defenses so ya don't need to waste time personally dealing with each attack.

Yeah I was talking about the size of what is actually classed as a 'city'. Rivet City wouldn't have even technically classed as a town. Size and population density are what really determines that. Rivet City is a name. From the looks of it Diamond City may be much closer to that definition. Wouldn't know till we get a better look at it. And I'm sure we can't build something to the size or complexity of Diamond City in the vanilla game. Everything we've seen looks like decent sized single structure + shacks

I simply typed city because I did not feel like spelling out settlement.

I have no doubt the max buildings are under 20 and the max population is under 40.

The real question is how "realistic" will raider attacks be.

Because face it, if a bunch of psyco sadists with guns and machetes attacks and are not able to be stopped they will kill everyone and you would return to smoking ruins.

But, from a gameplay perspective having such a huge negative seems strange.

Im assuming most of the people will somehow not die and the raiders will take a % of your resources.

The footage we saw, they mindlessly ran over a small bridge directly at mounted guns lol I don't think they're gonna be super intense/difficult

Can't wait to see the different textures the modders come up with for this.

I wonder if we're also able to build down as opposed to up, making an underground ant-hill like community would be interesting, far safer too as it won't be as visible as if it was a settlement built at ground level.

I'm holding out a tiny hope that they improved the AI since then. Probably not, but I hope. I also definitely don't want this to be the way hearthfire bandit attacks were. Honestly it felt like the being attacked feature was an after-thought that was tacked on at the last second.

It'll add more random combat events, which means you will have things to do even after finishing all the quests. Sounds good to me.

Hopefully some modders will do things like expand the areas we can take over and rebuild on - I'd like to be able to build in a city area and use some of the old city building models as well.

If they do the raids right a total fail event might result in your NPC merchants being murdered, buildings destroyed and population leaving town, till you add in better defenses.

Maybe modders will be able to change raider AI a little so they're smarter, or swap human raiders out for other things like ghouls, or something else.

Another good thing about this is we can trade between towns (set up trade routes at least), so I expect raiders will attack the trade caravans as well. Way I see it this gives us tons of things to keep us busy in the game.

From something I read it looks like we can't yet destroy the ground, so won't be able to build down. Not sure any modders could alter this either, though I'd love to be able to do this too.

I saw a mine in an interview video, maybe a modder could add in or repurpose an area like this -

http://s4.imgload.info/7622hm7m8295wug.jpg