Well, you also have to take into account that when the defender is fighting from a powerful defensive position and has a huge advantage in firepower the attacker has to be signficantly larger, and even then it is no guarantee (150 British stopped 4000 Zulus at Rorke's Drift). In the Mojave, if you can't seize and hold the few strategic strongholds, all you control is empty desert, which in a sense nullifies many of the asymmetric advantages the Legion posseses. They took a few isolated outposts in the Southeast of the map, and while it certainly hurt NCR morale, they really had no impact on the war as a whole.

Yes, they allow them to raid on the other side, which does excactly have impact on the war, just not anything to affect the garrison at the Dam, cause (sit and wait) Oliver is an [censored]

It is Caesar that is [censored] cause as you pointed out he can attack at any time he wants. All he has to do is flank the dam to invade the Mojave, yet he doesn't. He attacks the dam head on for a second time with his main force. So Oliver is smart to stay where he is with the bulk of his forces.

They are both stupid. Caesar has he′s reasons for not attacking the Dam from the west with he′s outposts across the river, cause he only uses them as raiding outposts and to diminish the NCR morale, which is stupid, but i dont think he has them planned for anything else. They are supposed to mock the NCR by taking territory and sitting there raiding once in a while. Caesar isnt really worried.

While it's not spit out like in the case of TES people forget propaganda exists in the FO world at times. False info can be gotten if you depend on a single source. Some more obvious than others, by FO2 if not 1 most knew the government was clearly lying to the populace. And this exists after the War as well from the outlying communities.

Fallout 2 is a game I place mistrust on because Avellone and Co. put a deft of errors not to mention the Fallout Bible(Not to the extent of discounting it as canon. 3 is canon too. And obviously if Bethesda wanted to they have the right to retcon all existing lore other than FO1.)

While I always believed more in VC's numbers by New Vegas it seems NCR's early propaganda was true about the 700k+ number. It's canon as per Obsidian.

But is it viable? In my opinion by FO2 I'd believe more in around the 200-400k range. People seem to undermine exactly how strong the nuclear launches and yields were, although so do the FO games. And we don't have a true frame of reference to know how it'd go in our world when it's taken thousands of years for the natural world to get very little shift in state it's in currently.

I do think 2 and NV boosted the growth rate even for a relatively unscathed vs the East part of the U.S. but I can see in the course of wanting each game to be interesting the need for it.


It undermines how blistered 1 set the world as but it seems due to largely everyone but the core team being involved in games after, the nuclear arsenal launched isn't as destructive as you'd expect, thus the very high survival rate than you'd expect.


Of coarse this is why factions like House and Legion are introduced, or atleast the lesser thought reasons. Having a 3 million+ nation with a strong army continue further would very much continue on a predictable course and repeat to the nation that was.

And finally, the games themselves can't fully present populations either. Worlds created in games like FO or others obviously have more people but as a game you can't have or afford thousands of NPCs per city to speak to.

Propaganda dosen't always mean lies, it can also be highlighting positive aspects while playing down negative aspects (or vice versa) which requires at least some semblance of truth. Even in totalitarian societies, propaganda has to have some inkling of truth (as horribly distorted as it may be) in order to maintain crediblity and I see no reason why a figure given by a harmless recruiting poster would be that far from the truth. You have to keep in mind that in real life, census figures take so long to compile that by the time they are released, they are out of date. So even if they gave the most accurate figures available, they would still not be telling the "truth". And the unfortunate truth is that in works of fiction, we generally have to believe what is said to be lore unless it is otherwise disputed or its crediblity thrown into doubt. Fiction has to make sense, but reality does not.

Propaganda can be very far from the truth. What is the mystery to me is 150 years after nuclear destruction, some people still have a sense of propaganda as a tool for government. Seems to me that in a long absence of government, propaganda would be a lost art.

In a democracy, propaganda is much more needed than in a dictatorship because you actually need your people's good opinions, although propaganda is more of a common thing in dictatorships where it really isn't that needed since the leaders can do what they want anyways. The differences here is that the propaganda in dictatorships can be complete lies, whereas in democracy I reckon they need to stay to the truth somewhat more since the people there have the right to question it and their government without the risk of getting executed or "never be heard from again". In a democracy, there could be people that read "700,000 inhabitants? That sounds like an extreme exaggeration!" and then they go out and fund a census, aquire different numbers and confront the government publicly with "Hey, are you morons? You say our population is 1300% bigger than it actually is, that is quite the exaggeration! If you can lie about something like that, how will the people trust you in other matters?". And if an independent census agency can't write that in some sort of newspaper or flyers without being imprisoned for life for being a threat to the republic, it isn't really a democracy, is it?

Who is gonna fund a census in fo world? Or even care to discredit something? I would put that far from the top of ny priorities.

But, there has been some crazy propaganda in USA in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. Seeing how FO world is a 50s style thing... it is just interesting they even know what propaganda is. I can see the Enclave knowing. Wastelanders? Proper use of propaganda is an art. If you are good, you can just about make people believe anything.

Durrrr, this is the NCR we are talking about, where people have tap water and laser cannon defences and street lights among other things. If Arroyo turn to look like http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20051106131148/fallout/images/4/4f/Nar.jpg without being in the NCR, imagine how cities of the NCR look like. Or well, you can see Shady Sands in Fallout 2, that's pretty good living conditions I'd say, and Vault City and most likely San Fransisco joins them too, and the living conditions there are really good too. And people have done weirder things than funding a census in the Fallout world.

http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/6942/screenshot9x.png

There are more then hundreds of thousands, they are about, well atleast one million, some are saying 2 million which could be true for all i know. NCR numbers were 750000 in fallout 2 and we are in the future right now, year 2281, 30 years after fallout 2, which should increase the population most likely. I think their army consists of about 50000 soldiers or so, along with a few vehicles and even fewer vertibirds only used for special missions (thanx to very limited fuel).

But the propaganda works for NCR just fine, and they really know how to do it well, hell i believed them first, until i started talking to House and the people of North Vegas.

Funny, cuz that is still same thing said in FO2.

Tens or Hundreds.

They do not want to commit to a number. It just a writing tactic, something to say until you make up your mind. As soon as you comit to a number, you are bound by the rules of logic/common sense, or your story turns to garbage.

That is referring to their military though, so if it is that size the populations must be pretty large.

Aye, she's refering to their military, since I hope they are not fighting the entire NCR population. She's talking about their war in that screenshot.

It would help if we knew how many people were in the military, and with the war with Caesar's Legion I'd say it is larger than usual.

Now I will just take a complete wild guess and say 5% of the population is part of the military which is pretty huge, but the conditions would call for that. And if she is on the edge of tens of thousands and a hundred, I'd say the military could have 90,000. 90,000 is 5% of 1,800,000 so I think it is a reasonable estimate.

People, you can't always take things literally. People often exaggerate in conversation and make things colorful. When you talk, do you give 100% exact detail to everyone you converse with? Are your conversations with friends, not different than strangers?

Now, I am not saying she is exaggerating, what I am saying is in war I have heard people say they are at war with "insert entire population here" usually followed by or preceded by a few derogatory remarks.

So, just saying need to take nost things with a grain of salt.

According to the Fallout wiki, in 2241, the NCR population is over 700,000. Now, they're an agricultural civilization and has surplus food growth for a growing population. How much is hard to determine and doubling is a very crude way of doing it. However, an infrastructure status that's about the same as the United States (I'm guessing because of Vault City), it gets a bit easier.

The highest growth percentage in the United States post 1950 I could find was a 1.67% change in 1959. Plugging that in: you get 1,869,000 people. But you have to plug in the tribes that were absorbed into NCR during its expansion into Baja and other places, which puts the population at about 1,900,000 people. Remember, the tribes aren't big enough to beat one million.

I want to subtract it because of the Brotherhood War but that wouldn't do much considering only a few hundred people die per battle, even in the First Hoover Dam Battle.

NCR Soldiers? Since it's the largest standing army in the Core Region and on equal or at least similar footing with Caesar's Legion, which has every able bodied man as some sort of soldier, I can't really say. I don't know how many Legionaries that Caesar has. I know it's way more than a hundred thousand, considering that Caesar has every able bodied man as a soldier and has enough soldiers to secure Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado.

So I'm putting my money as 200,000 soldiers and only a fraction are in the Mojave.
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As for New Vegas, I'm putting it at 5,000 people. Stretching it is about 7,000 people that are registered New Vegas citizens, not actually living there at one time. Reason being is that the NCR had about a hundred years of massive expansion while New Vegas sprang up from out of nowhere in about 2277.

I think that's a very reasonable population estimate. However, I'm going to argue that the armed forces is a lot smaller. About 100,000 smaller. As I said earlier, 5% of a population is the percentage that could be considered a reasonable size for an armed force. Most modern countries have around 1-3% of their population in a military, but I made it max to account for the conscription and the fact they're in a long-term war. Anywhere between 75,000 and 150,000 is what I would consider acceptable.