Local leader is mostly about giving you abilities that you SHOULD start the game with, imo. With dozens of settlement locations, supply lines are only common sense, and since I'm ordering all of these people around from day one already, why can't I give this one essential instruction?

Crafting stations are common as dirt, and I'm positive that everyone who crafts has a home base where they do it. It just doesn't happen that someone wanders across some random crafting station and stops to do some mods with whatever they've picked up, does it? I finally gave myself the perks with the console because I wanted to build extra power armor stations to display my power armor. That's all I wanted to do, and it was going to cost me perk points. Just for that.

Sure, trading posts could be game breaking if you started with them. But other perks are required to build those anyway. Just up those requirements to make it an effort to get them.

It just seems to me that mostly, Local Leader is about fixing an artificial inconvenience, not really adding something to your gameplay.

Na, I disagree to an extent. I think supply lines being exclusive to it is fine - I'm writing up a revamp of the Perks system though and may make a mod. Long story short is that perks in SPECIAL trees will give you alternatives e.g. one of the ranks in Strong Back makes any junk that weighs less than a pound weightless, Scrapper would increase the amount of material you obtain from scrapping things and the second rank guarantees workbenches start off with all the basic necessities for a settlement - food, water, material for a generator and beacon, some resources for a bit of defense, and so on. The idea is to give the player different options to supply lines.

I do agree about the stores and crafting benches. I think only high level stores should require local leader and only some benches - if any - should need it as well.

Another solution that I think would be great is unlocking supply lines once you get a settlement up to a certain level of happiness or maybe defense or maybe have it unlock once you've done enough "ghoul/raider/mutant/kidnapping help" quests.

Supply lines requiring a perk makes sense to me. I can see the reason behind the shops needing local leader level 2 as well. However the crafting stations should probably be unlocked by their relavent crafting perk (Gun nut for weapons, etc.) maybe at rank 2.

Personally however I'd probably have merged local leader and the Cha 1 perk (Cap Collector?).

Call it something like "Caravaner", and it'd be:

1. Better prices with merchants

2. Supply lines / unlock smallest shops

3. Invest in venders / unlock mid-sized shops

4. bigger discount / Unlock largest shops

For anyone serious into settlement building, Local Leader is practically an essential perk. It is way too high up the perk tree though, should be Cha 3 tops.

It should really be swapped around with that bartering perk

Not even sure why Lone Wanderer needs 3 CHA either. Some of the perks are ranked strangely.

Disagree. I think this is a nice way to keep choice and distinction in builds present and important. Charisma and the Perks acting as the cost for managing settlement resources easily.

The charismatic and appropriately experienced ("perked") wasteland would know carrying stuff settlement to settlement can be delegated.

Or you can amp up your strength and do the job yourself.

Unique character builds require opportunity costs.

To be fair you would need high charisma to lead vast numbers of people across a state and order them around, essentially making them your private militia.

I agree that in terms of gameplay it can be frustrating as the settlement thing is almost forced on the player and is largely present, so if you want to take full advantage of it you need a lot of perks, not just Local Leader. I had an idea for a cool character for my second playthrough but now I have to "shave off" perk points elsewhere to get Local Leader, as this character wasn't mean to use charisma much.

That being said, some people manage to play just fine without touching settlement and I'm sure I might eventually play without doing it with special builds in mind.

You can easily get by without, focused at one place but shops and crafting stations are necessary to build in the one place you want. There are eventually enough points to get it and its not that great. There's no reason to be crafting out at croup major either and u can pick up everything and go somewhere.

There are maybe three perks total that affect crafting, which is fine by me- I love crafting and losing three perk points to be able to do everything is fine. If you don't like crafting, on the other hand, you might not want to spend three points. I think they made the threshold low to make the system accessible- too many perks being needed might turn some people off to the idea of crafting altogether.

Having all the crafting abilities cost nothing, on the other hand, would have made things less interesting to me. Making you have to commit those points, and have high enough base stats to make it possible is both appropriate from a game mechanics standpoint and gives you a sense of progression.

Outside of the raw Settlement-related perks, there are also other skill upgrades to crafting that open up more options at the crafting bench, which I find awesome as well.

I have no problem with this perk as it is the main attraction for people to put points in charisma. The placement is fine because you need to be charismatic to be able to order people around and organize a community. I do wish crafting stations did not require it though, because even people who aren't interested in base building would want to be able to make themselves a crafting station to customize equipment.

Thing is, you could argue that about a lot of abilities. But we still have to unlock stuff, otherwise.... how else do we gain in ability with levels? Just like you can play a game like Mass Effect or half the fantasy games out there, where you're supposed to be a Trained Badass already - but you're level one, with crappy skills.

...that said, I would love to see the crafting benches put under some other category (like Armor crafting skill lets you build armor benches, etc). Because I'd love to be able to make a personal base that's got useful workbenches in it, but I don't care about settlements / trade routes / vendor stalls / being a Local Leader.

Well, presumably you'd need that Charisma to get people to show up wanting to live in your settlement as well, but all it actually takes is building a radio tower. Only the maximum number per settlement is capped by Cha, and no perks interact with that bit at all.

For vanilla, I think the current system is fine. But mods will create all sorts of interesting alternative dynamics.

Thing is, if you change one or two things, you might well need to change the whole damn perk table, along the lines of a "Perkus Maximus" system. If you only change one or two things, you might make it even more unbalanced.

Some things I look forward to in mods:

1. ammo with weight.

2. Stimpacks that do not heal crippled limbs

3. Need to sleep, eat and drink water else you suffer the consequences.

4. Companions who can die

5. More enemies everywhere you look

6. Less buildings that are boarded up.

7. Some sort of camping system that basically allows you to ignore settlements completely and just use workbenches you find in random locations.

8. An alternate start mod.

9. A SkyUI style interface for PC users

10. A Monster mod that adds any of the nasties from previous versions that got left out.

11. Protagonist voice alternatives (those may well take a while, or they may never emerge, but I'm hopeful).

12. Food that does not heal, but does give other benefits.

13. Adjustments to the spawn rates, pre-placed enemies etc. that make the game really challenging on Normal difficulty, i.e., so that the game is challenging even though individual enemies have a realistic chance to hit you, do a realistic amount of damage and die after a realistic amount of damage. Actually, anyone know if the "Normal" setting is pretty much parity between Player and enemies or it is Hard for some things?

That is just to start with!

Hurry up on that GECK Bethesda!

Good suggestion- or maybe when a setttlement's big enough, or maybe just a limited number of supply lines without the perk. There are many ways it could've been done. I'm just not very keen on having to spend perk points on what feels like a basic function any player should have access to.

I like a lot of the suggestions here, and I can't help but wonder- how many meetings have been held, how many hours spent at Bethesda hashing this sort of thing out while a game's being made? And all the while, knowing that, whatever they do, people are going to say "why didn't you do it THAT way instead"? The mind boggles...

I don't really agree. I think it does take some charisma to get someone to take on the role of provisioner. Getting someone to come to your settlement by offering safety, food, water, and other settlers to make a community with is a lot different than convincing one of those settlers to leave all of this behind to run a supply line to another settlement through a wasteland that's inhabited by raiders, gunners, super mutants, deathclaws and whatever else you can name. It's a dangerous job, and I have indeed come across my provisioners out in the wasteland on numerous occasions and found them being attacked. I equip my provisioners much more thoroughly than my other settlers. The provisioners mostly get sturdy combat armor and some kind of good mid-level gun. Usually a combat rifle or something like that. Some of them have various laser weapons as well.

I do somewhat agree that the numerous crafting stations all over the place are unneeded, but I don't think they're necessarily put there for you to use. I think in part they're put there simply to show that this was an established settlement being used by the raiders, the gunners, or whoever else. I have never once actually used one of these random crafting stations. The chances of me having the supplies that I need on me when I run into them is kind of slim. Although depending on how you play, they could be useful. Not everyone 'returns to home base' every day within their game. Some people are spending the very vast majority of their game time out wandering alone with Dogmeat and sleeping in a different bed (or sleeping bag) every night.

edit - On a side note, why isn't crafting a portable sleeping bag an option? It would be cool to be able to just bring your bed with you all the time. Unroll it somewhere out in the wasteland to sleep for the night, roll it up in the morning, and then move on.

Some of it seems like it was briefly discussed over lunch...

The Local Leader 'tree' (I call it that since it calls for so many perk points dotted around) seems to be one of the few interesting builds in the game. I've got four characters right now: one melee, one Luck, one cheat (Dogmeat duping) and one Local Leader. You'd think that they would all feel very different but in fact it's my Local Leader who has the most interesting development, because he has so few perk points left over for utility/combat perks.

There's very little 'sacrifice' in the game and sacrificing individual power for your settlements provides a nice challenge.

the only problem i have is that with my idiot savant build INT: 1 it locks me out from some settlements upgrades its not nice and i wish the Dev had did that some other way.

as for local leader i dont have a problem with it being a bitfurter in the perktree