I agree that the Minutemen faction needs some work. Hopefully it gets addressed in some DLC.

Regarding the flare gun though, the backup comes from whichever settlement is closest. If you have fully armed and armored people at the Castle, but the closest settlement is Somerville Place, the assistance is going to come from Somerville Place. If the settlers at Somerville Place aren't well armed and armored, they're not going to do so well in combat. This is why I horde all of the combat armor, army fatigues, military fatigues, and army helmets that I find. I'm slowly working on decking out all of my settlers at all of my settlements with (mostly) matching outfits. Collectively I have over 100 full suits of standard combat armor, and around 50 full suits of sturdy combat armor. I have 3-4 full suits of heavy combat armor, but I'm greedy with that. I haven't equipped any settlers with it yet. I'm also greedy with the combat armor helmets. I have 6 of them, including a couple of legendary versions of the combat armor helmet, but none of my settlers are equipped with them. The combat armor helmets and the heavy combat armor are really hard to find, so I don't want to chance losing it. I do equip my companions in the best of the best though.

Kind of went off on a tangent there...lol

Wait, so do the settlers i assign as guards in a given settlement that is closest act as the reinforcements? If so, then that is really cool.

I do completely agree that the Minutemen faction needs more of a feeling of growing and getting stronger. I'm 250 hours into the game at level 66 (still haven't completed the main quest), and I just saw a Minutemen patrol out for the first time like two days ago. I didn't even know that they went on patrols in the first place until seeing them. I'd love to see more of this. I'd love to be able to assign patrols to go secure areas. I'd like to be able to assemble caravan groups to go clear the loot out of buildings after they've been cleared. This would give the Minutemen a much greater feeling of really being a growing militia group. I'm the general...but aside from farming I still have to do all of the grunt work myself? This is a little silly.

I'd also really like it if the settlers recognized me. It'd be great to have more comments like "Hey General, how are you doing?" or "Thanks for helping us out, General. I knew joining the Minutemen was a great move."

Not "Are you with the Minutemen?" or "We've decided to join the Minutemen" for the sixth time from a settlement that joined the Minutemen an incredibly long time ago. I get tired of the "I don't like the looks of you. Hope you're not here for me" comments. Dynamic and evolving dialog with the settlers would be great. I'm not even asking for much. I'd be content with there being a small handful of scripted settler dialog lines, but it would be a huge improvement to have pre-general and post-general dialog lines. Once you become the general, settlers switch to slightly different scripted dialog options to show the recognition. That's all I ask as far as that's concerned.

I'm not sure if it's necessarily just the guards. But I'm pretty sure it is just from whichever settlement is closest. I haven't directly tested this. An easy way to do it would be to give a settler a gun named after their settlement. Call for reinforcements and check the gun to see where they're coming from. I might have to do this sometime.

I think it's also worth pointing out that you can recruit some 'special' settlers, although they aren't necessarily 'special' in the sense of being particularly skilled in combat. There are the various vendor stands that you can build in your workshop. There's the trading post, weapons shop, armor shop, clothing shop, medic station, and the bar/restaurant. Normally you can only get up to a level 3 trading stand, but there are named NPCs that you can recruit to your settlements, and some of them have a built in perk that allows them to effectively be level 4 vendors. They carry a greater baseline amount of caps, earn more money, and carry higher level items including some legendary items.

These settlers include the Vault-Tec Rep, who you recruit in Goodneighbor and is a level 4 vendor at the general trading post. Anne Hargraves, who you can recruit at the WRVR Radio Station is a level 4 clothing vendor. There's an NPC named 'The Scribe' who you can meet in a random encounter and recruit as a level 4 armor vendor. There are several others as well, including level 4 vendors for the medic station, weapons shop, and the bar/restaurant. You can get more than one level 4 vendor for some of these vendor stands. I haven't found them all yet because a lot of them only appear in random encounters. The three that I specified above are the only ones that I've found, but I've heard of at least 4-5 others that can be recruited.

This isn't quite the same as seeking out a person who is skilled in combat to recruit them for the Minutemen though. I think this would be awesome.

I'd love to be able to assemble some kind of chain of command. I'd love to have my Colonel's Piper, Cait, Curie, and MacCready, Major's Preston Garvey and Ronnie Shaw, and so on with the general settlers just being Privates. Some of the hypothetical 'sought out' soldiers could take the role of some of the commanding officer positions. I don't expect a fully comprehensive chain of command with subcategories within each rank or anything like that, but a three tiered rank system below the general would be awesome. I'd love to be able to command MacCready or Preston or whoever else to take a battalion out and handle the various "raider problems at _______" and "kidnapping at _________" radiant quests, with the risk of losing some of the "Private Settlers" during the combat. Sometimes the fighting could get too rough for them, and MacCready (or whoever else) will have to contact me over radio and say that they need backup, in which case I can come in for an assist.

A similar scenario could be put in place for assembling caravan groups to go and clear out the loot from newly cleared areas.

Something like this may be asking a lot, but it would make the game so much more immersive and realistic.

Yes i know about the special traders, essentially what i would like can be almost as simple as that. Some special minutemen that you can put to work. While i would also love a better chain of command, im not sure how doable it is, but who knows. The main thing that i want i guess, is to have some minutemen do the leg work for me from time to time, because I have read from other people as well, that you don't really feel like a general or a leader.

While i have always liked the different factions in Bethesda games and the fact that you can join them and even work your way up the ladder, i think one serious weak point in all of Bethesdas games is when you become the leader of a faction, it usually means your work is done and you move on to another faction. You never actually lead or deal with issues that leaders deal with. One reason of course is that it is overall quite difficult to give the players a true leadership position in a game and make it work with the rest of the narrative. Unless that is what the story is focused around and it is not in Fallout 4, which is totally fine.

Still i would like to see the Commonwealth Provisional Government idea be brought into play again. When it was mentioned i remembered Fallout 2 and the different moves that were being made between the NCR, New Reno and Vault City. Bishop, Moore and Westin. Forming and expanding the NCR was dirty business for the greater good. Deals were made, people were potentially assassinated, raiders were involved. Lots of meat for great stories.

I'd love if they added a new kind of radiant quest that asked you to go and try to bring back former Minutemen to the cause. Like, named Minutemen. With personalities and stuff.

I ignored the minutemen so badly I don't really know how much they are supose to svck or why people hate them so much.

Personally they're my favorite faction, I just understand they don't really have a lot of unique and interesting characters like the other factions. Unless you assume that every named NPC you can bring to your settlements, and named settlers at Abernathy Farm and so on, are Minutemen.

I don't hate the Minutemen, i love them and the idea of them, i just feel like they are underwhelming. They have so much potential and they need to be fleshed out more. I might remember this incorrectly, but i feel like they are the first faction that is kind of the player's faction in all Bethesdas games. Sure they were established before, but we as the players essentially bring them back to life and build them from the ground up.

When we add the great Boston setting and the themes of American Independence it feels to me that they should be more, there should progression from the rag tag militia and the emerging settlements to something more coherent.

I am personally from Europe, but i have always found the history of America fascinating. I love all history, but that specific era is one of my favorites. And i also love post-apocalyptic themes, so to me the mix them both in this game has been

a real treat and for that i must really thank Bethesda.

I love the setting and the themes, please do more with them.