It looked in the E3 showcase that settlement dwellers can be assigned to defense and help out against a raider attack. It really would be cool if the people staying in your settlement could be assigned tasks like gathering supplies, patroling areas, defending strategic points. It would add another level of customization to this part of the game.

I don't know if you can assign settlers to different roles, but they definitely have varying tasks. I don't know how much of a city building simulation BGS has done, but I guess it's a safe assumption to believe you are more or less the mayor of your respective settlement. What I think would be amazing is if settlements could actually be destroyed and you'd have to rebuild them.

Yes, and your settlers could die and be buried in a near by graveyard.

Settlers could even get upset and leave if they feel they aren't cared for or are unprotected. There is literally so much flexability and area to expand for this feature!

The fact that while they were making Fallout 4, they decided to make fallout shelter says quite allot.
There is likely going to be some level of parallel in the games, my guess would be this Fallout 4 is much more about recovery and rebuild.

But like in the other fallout games we influence the world and one of the options is, we help rebuild settlements as we know this is an optional part of the game. The fact its optional show they have increased consequences for Fallout 4 of player actions. I assume if we don't help the settlements, they either don't get built or are just places we can visit. But if we invest time into them they become a resource for us in the game.

I never liked the fact there was always ammunition lying around, but no one makes it.....and 200 years on this would be very unlikely.
Hopfully this is a sign of a bit more realism in the game, that we are no longer relaying on food that's 200 years old to eat, and we are producing clean water, the fact the crafting system now uses real world objects to make weapons is a good sign that we are still not relying on 200 year old weapons...... So my vote is if we don't make it it doesn't exists. We can steal it from others like a raider or we can help people that are producing it.....

technically we can only make mods, not new weapons, those will still be stuff from 200 years (with a few exceptions, like the pipe pistol and the laser musket, which are clearly post war builds) because you still need a full scale factory if ya gonna build reliable guns of the grade we saw pre war.

I must admit, I'm trying to main a healthy dose of skepticism towards this feature (as I don't want to end up disappointed from it), but I must say, I am very, very excited to see the limits of this.

I'm even more excited to see how they apply this feature to TES.

Or maybe it would be better if they focused on the remains of actual Fallout, but that's just me.

I was personally hoping for variety for what type of dwellers we could place. Wouldn't it be nice if we somehow had cities full of automated robots or just a big kennel full of attack dogs. Maybe they could make it a bit like state of decay where each survivor can be given a task or would help in the retrieval of items...Getting swarmed? just call in a hit squad. Your nearby village hears your distress and comes in blazing. I'm looking forward to seeing how they implement it.

These things are not mutually exclusive, they were under no pressure (that I can see) to announce the game was ready.

I see no evidence of: 'You get feature x, so you can't have feature y'...

especially consider the dev time, having spent more or less 7 years on the game. If this had been ya typical dev time of like 2-3 years I could understand the concern, but this is the benefits of beth long dev time, each aspect can be given lots of time to be fleshed out.