So, what do you think of the fact you cant complete the game w/ one of the Main Factions without killing kids?

Good decision or bad?

http://i.imgur.com/nZ4zdcl.jpg

If Maxson didn't want innocent lives lost he shouldn't have brought children to play war.

Brotherhood's a touchy case. While those are children, they don't look any younger than 10. Considering that survivability in Fallout is less generous when you're not a player character/Bethesda-built NPC, child or teenaged soldiers might not seem too morally reprehensible for them. They do seem to consider themselves as soldiers in some regard, even if it's just on-the-job traineeship.

I like to think they made it out of the institute before I blew it up, since I activated the evacuation sequence on Fathers terminal....

On a related topic it is weird how few kids there are in the game. A key part is how few there are in your settlements. Just speaking from an immersion perspective...

I did notice while attacking the BoS that your companion will actively engage the squires...

It would have been nice if you could have given some sort of evacuation single as you can in the Institute that possibly impacts your relationship with Danse or is at least commented on...

I imagine it's because your Settlements get shot up a lot.

I'll just echo what another poster said. If Maxon didn't want to risk their deaths, then he shouldn't have brought them with him; he should've made them stay at wherever their main HQ was.

I wasn't aware, kids are killable. Or do you speak in a more general sense of them being automatically included when wiping out a faction?

it is implied...

When I left the airship on my RR play through only Squires where left standing..

then the airship blew up...

Also for the Institute attack you can assume that the kids all got out if you gave the evacuate signal for the Institute but it is not like you saw them escape and that was a mighty large explosion...

Well, I mean. You went ahead and murdered off an entire faction. Did you expect *NOT* to have killed kids?


Because any survivors would probably be hellbent on murdering the crap out of you when they grow up. Just sayin'

As far as I know, you have the option to at least solve some conflicts without resorting to Genocide. Also, the BOS isn't eradicated, when you kill their Boston detachment. They still have a presence in other regions. I've seen no kids with the Railroad, so there's that.

And what faction am I missing?

Non-combatant casualties are always a tragedy, but in this case, the laws of war dictate that Maxson was in the wrong for bringing children into a war zone and keeping them on an obvious military target.

I think that's mainly because kids are less useful from a gameplay perspective. Due to the laws of some countries and general moral panic, you can't show the death of a kid in games without some serious region locking. Bethesda makes kids unkillable game-wise because of that. Since they are unkillable, but it is desired to have as few unkillable characters as possible, I'm guessing Bethesda factors that in to their choice to have less kids overall. A few are added in the various towns and settlements to give the impression that kids are around, but not enough to get in the way. Factor that into the overall resource budget with the understanding that kids are generall less useful for gamplay (Ie, aren't going to fight, run shops, give many quests, work various jobs, ect). Granted we get a handful of kid quests for spice, but kids can't really offer much in the way of rewards other than the 'awwwww I helped a kid'... so it's a rare thing. When you can only pack 20 or 30 NPCs into an area for performance reasons (except for us a med to high end PC users who can go nuts) it makes sense to limit the town kid budget to 2-4 kids, letting you have 10 guards, a bunch of a shop keepers, and a bunch of a citizen quest givers. With all that, I'm not surprised by the lack of kids... although I agree it does seem odd when you question it.

It's also odd that all kids are apparently about the same age. In the Commonwealth, fertility acts on a 10 year cycle apparently. There are no babies, toddlers, or teenagers around... I lie though, there are a couple NPCs with advlt models that are portrayed as teenagers (Abernathy daughter). They have their skinny/fat slider set all the way down. Obviously it's an art budget issue. For each age group, they'd have to add new models and textures. They pulled off teenagers in Fallout 3 though...at least in the vault. You didn't see many outside (were there any at all?).

Laws of war died with the pre-war world. S'why we can use nukes and missiles on fleshy personnel without feeling bad about it, can fight in and cause material harm to hospitals, churches, and places of cultural value, and can actively fight while dressed as civilians or the enemy. Not like any wasteland is a signed member of any existing treaty - they do what they can to survive. With an expected high mortality rate, starting to fight during or around the start of puberty does not seem unreasonable. The squires seemed to be undergoing training as combatants, and not just boy scouts.

Pretty much yeah, but we don't have to feel good about it. You'd expect your pre-war character to still be a bit horrified at the idea of kids going into combat. The BoS doesn't seem to directly send kids out to do any fighting, but the squire training missions show they're willing to send kids into a fight to get experience. I only ever did one of those missions and it creeped me out. What kind of faction sends a kid into a den of supermutants to watch a Knight fight? It feels prudent to teach kids to fight as soon as they can hold a gun...considering the world they face, but to actually send them into danger is just too much of a trial by fire for me.

I love the scene in Vault 81 where you get to teach class for a few minutes and tell a story.