Did they ever show video of "sabotaging economies"? It is encouraging that we have seen actual gameplay of settlement building.

No.

Nope. But he did very much tout that during an interview.

Building the settlement is only part of the process. What happens subsequent to that is where I am interested in exploring and finding out. Like I said, I won't know until November so I may be vastly too concerned over nothing.

Yeah The Todd messed up on that for sure! I too am curious about settlements and their impact on the game world. Can we sabotage other "farm" type areas to make ours look more appealing to settlers and traders? Time will tell!

For a purely optional bit of content, I'd assume not.

Good point.

Never been a fan of the sims, or sim city. But so long as they aren't forced on you, or made where you prettymuch have to use them, or the rest of the game got short changed because too much development time was spent on that feature iI'm OK with it

My only fear is how they'll work when I'm not there protecting them. If I'm on the other side of the map and a settlement gets raided.. what happens then? There's a lot of ways this can be really fun or really annoying. Do I get a simple alert that the settlement is under attack?.. do I gain control of the settlements defenses? Do I lose gear and building or people who live there if it's not well defended? Will I be forced to drop everything and go defend the settlement every time one is attacked? If it's like skyrim and has some goofy timer related to how often attacks occur and they only occur when you're there... . does that mean every time I go back to the settlement I"ll have to deal with an idiotic raider attack? (I did not like that in skyrim.. every time I went back to a house I had to deal with wolves, giants or a dragon.) Lots o' questions on how it'll work.

I'm really looking forward to building settlements.. but depending on how they work, I might end up saving them for last as to not have to deal with too much silliness.

I am not that interested in this feature and I hope that it doesn't or is intended to be a big part of the game.

You have to deal with an attack everytime you travel back to your settlement in Skyrim?! Man, I only get one every now and then in my game.

I didn't really go back to the houses that much thanks to the exploit that allowed me to make boots that could carry an almost infinite amount of junk around with me. .. There was definitely some sort of attack timer tied your houses or something.. Could have simply been the respawn rate. It was as bad as the vampire spawn rate in Riften after the dawnguard dlc. . That got old pretty quickly. Riften was a ghost town by the end of my game. Just a bunch of guards protecting nothing.

Yeah I hate the Vampire attacks. Like you said, ghost towns.

The only thing I can offer to this is...Don't build a settlement. It's an entirely optional feature, with no bearing on the actual game. You can build a well protected stronghold where other people live, or a little shack you visit just to drop stuff off between boutes of heroic murder hoboing. Or don't build anything at all and vagrant the whole affair.

Your choice.

I trust it will only occur if you're in the immediate area. Skyrim did this with bandits/giants spawning outside of your front door when you traveled to one of your custom hearthfire homes.

Or in my case, the weekely eviction of the necromancer back behind my place.

I TOLD him the rent of 250 gold a week, and I'm not allowing freeloaders up in this.

...And then there was that weird occurrence where I DID evict him...his head came off...Went into the house...Came out...and his head was on my doorstep...

I killed him by the lake behind the house.

Who dares.

Bethesda games have done this since like Morrowind.

The game overworld is split into cells, only the like cells you are standing on, or immediately around you, are loaded at any given time.

Settlements cant get attacked while you aren't near them because they aren't loaded into the game memory.

My fear is that if I have a few settlements and Im far away and they get attacked. Will I get some message that is telling me this. Basically like get there now or your going to loose so and so and such and such. I hate stuff like that.

Ill be in the middle of exploring and dont want to deal with that crap every hour.

Also if some of the best gear is sold by merchants specific to these then that basically makes these mandatory. Unless your ok with not having the best geat. Your not though.

No it it wouldn't be a good addition at all, not at all...put your house on a player online share depot maybe....But even then I'd rather not because that's how multiplayer starts you give them some leeway to player interaction and then people just want more.

They will not.

Again, unless you are directly near them, the cell will not be loaded into memory, and thus the people in that cell cannot get attacked.

Of course, they can track special things moving through the game world (like the caravans in Fallout 3), but it's still not actually loading the cells or interacting with them - a wandering caravan can't get attacked by nearby enemies unless it happens to intersect the active radius of cells around your character.

So I suppose they could make some system that says "hey, there's an attack at your settlement!" and then either just hold that until you respond, or calculate out a generic result if you don't show up in time. We'll see in November.

Yes. The buildings that required it were things like merchant stalls which I assume would lead to people joining your community.

Hmmm, oh ok. That must've been what I was remembering.

I'm going to build a 1 room outhouse with every single turret and auto defense the system has to offer...hundreds of them if I can...that way I can read and do my "business" in peace.

I personally like the idea of settlements, I liked making my homes looks cool decorating them in previous games. And since it's optional, if you don't want to do it you don't have to. I probably won't even make a settlement, just a really nice house

Yup that's probably one of the biggest concerns out there for people that do want to build a settlement. I would love it if I can put in the extra time and effort to have a settlement that is very well defended without me and therefore not have to personally defend it all the time, but games rarely let you do that.

However they've of course thought about this problem when designing the game, it's such an obvious potential problem, so we'll have to hope they did a good job of balancing it, keeping it from getting annoying, etc.