Anybody can buy guns from the Gun Runners. The NCR Military just their biggest contract.

My point was in terms of military strength the Enclave was most advanced. They don't need to buy guns because they can outfit themselves. So, I'm speaking in terms of self reliance, and scientific discovery.

Not doubting the NCR ability to buy guns, or that GR can make them. If country A makes guns and country B makes better guns, country B has the edge on guns. Which is one reason of many I give military edge to Enclave, taking into account factions at pre super hero interventions.

More like Colt pr Remington. Lockheed works in avionics, but the point is still the same. /smile.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Here is my 2 cents on the subject the Enclave were the strongest military faction in the wastes because once you have air superiority it's game over for the enemy. The Enclave were the only ones to have air vehicles besides the MWBOS and there hot air balloons. I think people also underestimate the Enclaves numbers do you know how many COG bunkers would of been operational in 2077 I am guessing a lot I am thinking the Enclave have numbers in the 5000's or maybe more. For all we know the Enclave in Chicago could be cloning soldiers no one knows what the outpost in Chicago is for. Some people make me laugh with the Enclave's numbers being only in the 1000's 200 years is a long time to repopulate.

Not going into real life examples but I would say it's been conclusively proved that ground superiority is more important than air. Air combat is support for the ground combat but doesn't win wars on its own

How if you have air superiority you can cripple supply lines much easier if the Enclave went to war with the NCR and bombed gun runner factories no more weapons how they gonna fight throw rocks. It's one of the reasons the Germans lost because their factories were constantly bombed.

Them being on the run may have put a damper on making new members. Also cause some of them being old too.

Strictly by the book the NCR should have ground superiority as well. They have trucks. They have power armored forces. They have energy weapons. This is the [censored] that beat the Chinese in China. In any situation except the one presented in Fallout: New Vegas the NCR's armed forces would effortlessly destroy the Legion within a few weeks.

Err I didn't think the NCR PA was functioning. It was salvaged. But, I never get that far in the game because I am PS3 and it lags/freezes.

However, it is combined forces assault.

You can compare FO world warfare to WWII more than comparing it with current times.

PA units are basically a combination of mechanized infantry and tanks.

There is limited artillery, but devastating heavy weapons units(which by the way is advantage BoS and Enclave. How many Str 9 and 10 Troopers are in NCR?)

NCR has canon fodder, BoS and Enclave have elite troops.

Enclave and BoS have tech edge. Enclave has verts, which would not only allow them to use in support of land ops, but deploy troops behind enemy lines and allow them to strike at strategic and possibly poorly defended logistical positions.

Sadly, I don't think many current Obsid or Beth writers played many strategic warfare games like Hearts of Iron or Panzer General, or if they did, they were not very good at them. Because the strategy portrayed in the game is awful.

From the start of NV, Legion is setup in perfect position for a sweeping flanking maneuver, which the NCR is totally vulnerable to. Helios is a prime target that 5 BoS troopers could take back. Gannon killed all the NCR there while I watched...

How in the world NCR took Helios to begin with is a mystery, as the BoS had the advantage being in a fortified defensive position with better tech. It is wide open around Helios with one mountain range. If you fortified the roof of helios with gauss snipers and heavy weapons units it would be a massacre, and calculating the casualties would prolly not make it worth the effort.

This is why I don't like being told what happened instead of gaming it myself. At least then, my actions are what decides who wins or loses, and not a story that makes no sense.

Not like FO3 is any better, however, the one thing FO3 does better is not have a previous battle. What we have is a mystery of why the Enclave didn't wipe out the BoS earlier. Imo it comes down to casualties. The Enclave felt they could accomplish their goals without directly taking on the BoS. Note, an effective military strategy is bypassing enemy strongholds. For example, the germans bypassing the maginot line.

I would almost say that FO3 is a more realistic view of warfare, as there is really zero reason for the Enclave to attack the citadel, because they didn't need it. Their goal was the purifier, which, they took, and then fortified.

Well if we're bringing up real world examples, Vietnam? US helicopters didn't really help much there. Germany's loss I'd say was more to do with overcommitting themselves to a two front war (especially invading the Soviet Union and failing to conquer Moscow quickly, before winter set in), poor military leadership from Adolf Hitler, who emphasised his troops fighting on to the last man instead of retreating, leading to the capture of 330,000 men in particular. Yes the Allied bombing was important, but in the First World War, there was a time when Zeppelins would regularly fly in to bomb British cities, Britain still kept fighting. Ground superiority is so much more important.

It has come to the point where you are just thinking of only one side now, which then upsets you.

I mean you're just taking Helios 1 and throwing it out the window because it isn't what you wanted. The people you think are superipr lost, oh no!

If you are going to tell me a story, like the NPCs do in FONV, I would like it to make sense.

NCR, majority of troops who walk around with service rifles and are bumbling idiots, defeated a superior military force. K.

The only explanation was "It was tough! But we finally won!"

I can understand the taking of Navarro, and in I believe VB it was BoS + NCR vs Enclave, dunno if that will remain true or not, the NV info is not very detailed in regards to that battle.

Just have it make sense, NV basically has it that the Keystone Cops took Helios.

I thought the ones with poor equipment are the soldiers just out of boot camp as told by the former soldier giving things to them at the 188th. The guys with better gear are out doing other "important" things in other parts of the NCR since Oliver just wants a standing force. The Mojave campaign isn't seen as a priority by the ones in charge since the first battle of hoover dam, then until later in the game when they start sending in the elite rangers and armored infantry.

The NCR doesn't have countless elite troops. When asked how many rangers are in the Mojave, a NPC states one or two dozen. Can't remember exactly.

That is my point. You wouldn't want to throw your elite troops at a fortified defensive position where you are going to take a lot of casualties. Especially when you do not have many of them. It easy to sit back in a game where life and death doesn't mean anything, and just shrug. They just did a very poor job of explaining it. Not to mention, if it was so important you think they would have taken better care of getting it online and defending it.

Minus the mobility.


NCR has cannon fodder and elite troops. Even without going to the Rangers you have NCR heavy troopers who have excellent protection and heavy weaponry close to the level of the Brotherhood and Enclave and the quality of troopers can vary quite a bit. Based on Fallout 2 standard NCR forces had combat armor and good weaponry. Hell the NCR's police chief was carrying around a Gauss rifle which can punch through power armor like tissue paper. You're oversimplifying this.


In Fallout 2 Vertibirds were unarmed, fairly short ranged and have a very limited carrying capacity . Based on Fallout 3 they are even susceptible to ground fire. More importantly if you can point to a single nation state defeated by what would essentially amount to commando raids I'd love to hear about it. These attacks would be nuisances.


Agreed. Of course the game makes a point of telling us that Caesar is more concerned about a propaganda victory at the Dam to wipe out the shame of the first battle than he is about picking the best strategy so this is explained. There's also the possibility that shifting the entire army or even a significant force to the west bank of the Colorado might not be so easy to pull off undetected given all the Ranger stations watching the river which would expose the Legion to a devastating counterattack or simply allow Oliver to shift his forces to meet the new threat. Caesar's a bit of a twerp and I've long argued the Legion's strategy in the Mojave is terrible and would result in a Legion defeat if not for the incompetence of Oliver (which the game also beats us over the head with as being a really poor general).


This is true but in reality the NCR would just surround the place and wait for the Brotherhood to starve to death, surrender or be forced to fight their way out. So really the result is odd but in a realistic setting the NCR would still win. Attempting to defend a single fixed position without any means of resupply or reinforcement against an army that outnumbers you 10-1 and can constantly call in new troops is really only going to end one way.


Right but in Fallout 3 vertibirds are depicted as armed bombers. Why didn't they just launch a massive surprise attack on the Citadel from the air immediately after the Purifier was taken? You wouldn't completely destroy the Brotherhood but you'd cripple them.


Zero reason to occupy it. Plenty of reason to attack it once you've revealed yourself by taking the Purifier anyway and the Enclave repeatedly demonstrates this ability in Fallout 3. They just don't use it for no reason other than the plot demands it not to happen.

There is no radar system that is uber in FO world. Either way, when deploying troops in FO world the verts don't need to travel 400 miles. They also do not have to travel low to ground, and they can do it at night.

They also are not jist dropping off troops with service rifles. But light tanks in APA. I would say this could be a lot more than a little nuisance.

In regards to a real battle, closest thing is paratroopers. German paratroopers were very effective in I believe battle for Norway. Of course allied paratroopers important in DDay and Market Garden. Again, key difference is you not just dropping in troops, but the FO equivalent of tanks.

In regards to Helios, the BoS didntjust have Helios, they had Hidden Valley, which the NCR didn't know about. Not to mention NCR couldn't just siege forever, as the Legion was coming.

It is possible to survive a siege. Was it Bastogne during Battle of the Bulge?

And if sieging, BoS could get Archimedes online and well, adios NCR. Fact is, it wasn't a siege, they attacked and won. Doesn't make sense.

There is a story. The NCR had overwhelming numbers and ran the BoS out of supplies. Dialogue through BoS members tells you that they ran out of ammo. So all the NCR had to do at that point was just keep shooting at them which would make them stumble around through a hail fire of bullets.

Funny you should say 400 miles since I believe that's about the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Navarro being some distance north of San Francisco and Los Angeles being a constituent state of the NCR. I'm not saying the Vertibirds will get shot down, although again if we assume they are vulnerable to small arms fire that is at always a risk, but simply that given the limited number of Enclave troops and equipment and the size and scale of the NCR it's impossible for them to have sufficient force to ever defeat the NCR. They can torch a depot or terrorize a city sure and then what? Maybe 2 or 3 Enclave soldiers get killed, a Vertibird crashes due to enemy action or simple mechanical failure and the Enclave has suffered heavy losses while the rest of the NCR is still going to be coming at them.

If the Enclave was willing to compromise with the NCR they could almost certainly force a negotiated peace (but then they wouldn't be the Enclave) and they could make the NCR's inevitable advance to Navarro a long and costly slog but they couldn't defeat the NCR militarily without the Curling-FEV.


Right and in a real war situation paratroopers were always reliant on relief forces coming to assist them. Relief forces the Enclave doesn't have because there simply aren't enough of them. Paratroopers winning a battle on their own happened exactly once at Crete because the British mistakenly thought the Germans were coming by sea and had their forces deployed ineptly and the paratroopers suffered losses so massive that Crete marked the end of largescale German airborne operations. And again this was Crete not most of California and there were many more German paratroopers than there are total Enclave citizens. The Enclave can't afford losses, the Enclave can't roll in relief troops the most the Enclave can do is harass. They could do that very well. But you can't destroy a nation by harassment.


I doubt the Brotherhood had enough troops to split between Helios and Hidden Valley and still be effective at both positions. There is no indication in game that there were any substantial Brotherhood forces at Hidden Valley they all seemed to be concentrated at Helios.

This is again their major weakness and the reason the NCR is so much stronger than them. Even if they did that's basically a one-trick deal. After they get hit by a Brotherhood relief force the NCR will know the Brotherhood has a second base somewhere. When they return, and they will because again the NCR can afford to lose lots of men they're going to be actively searching for a Brotherhood base assuming they didn't already figure out it's Hidden Valley based on the direction of the Brotherhood attack which if found will simply be similarly locked down and ready for an attack against from the outside. They'll have suffered a bunch of losses in their defeat which they can easily afford, the Brotherhood will have suffered some losses which they can ill-afford in their victory and the situation will still not be in the Brotherhood's favor.

Neither the Brotherhood or Enclave have a sufficiently massive tech advantage to overcome their gross disadvantage in numbers compared to the NCR.

Also did either the Brotherhood or NCR know the Legion was a threat by that stage? I was under the impression they didn't and either way it changes nothing about the Brotherhood's inferiority to the NCR by itself.


Of course. If you get relieved from the outside. Relief that isn't always going to be coming for groups like the Brotherhood because there simply aren't enough of them. But barring relief or being able to break the siege yourself you will eventually lose.


The one shot per day glorified artillery piece? Yeah it could but again the Brotherhood has no trouble winning tactical victories but overall they stand no chance against the NCR. A single nice "superweapon" isn't going to change that.

It's unlikely but it can certainly happen. For a clearly knowledgeable guy who stresses real world military examples the fact that you think it makes no sense that a theoretically superior military force could manage to lose a battle in which they possess many advantages seems very strange to me. Brotherhood forces were being led by Elijah after all who was a scribe not a soldier. Maybe he didn't want to risk losing any part of the facility to the NCR and so had Brotherhood troops deployed in an inept perimeter defense. Maybe the Brotherhood simply ran out of ammunition and was overrun. There are plenty of ways in which the Brotherhood could've lost to a NCR assault.

All BoS go through combat training. Including the Scribes. They are all soldiers.

The NCR wouldn't know Archimedes was a once a day weapon. Just like the Japanese didn't know America only had two nukes.

Energy cells can be recharged. Heck, Veronica can do it in the field.

NCR doesn't have unlimited supplies.

Enclave send 4 verts to drop off say 24-30 troops in APA on top of Tandi's head, and your NCR president, vice, etc all dead. What was once Shady Sands is now rubble. Then they march to pre-determined extraction location, and you have just struck a very demoralizing blow. Could do same thing as a surprise attack on a NCR General, as they are usually not on the front lines. It is very effective.

But back to helios, BoS doesn't have to attack. They can defend. It is much harder to attack, and if the NCR just sat back, the BoS has time to work on Archimedes, and/or plan a their own surprise attack. Need to assume HV and Helios could communicate and thus coordinate an attack.

But I would have to look up more on the battle. My beef isn't that it happened, but that it was poorly explained.

Yes but whereas after that combat training those who become paladins will start serving in combat positions and eventually commanding units in the ongoing war with the NCR those who are scribes likely spend most of their days in a bunker cataloging and researching tech. So those scribes are unlikely to become the most competent commanders when thrust into command positions particularly when they're more concerned about trying to activate a superweapon rather than winning the battle they're fighting.


They might figure it out once the Brotherhood never seems to use it more than once per engagement. But regardless this would likely just trigger the assault that ended up defeating them anyway. My point was it is not unrealistic in general terms for the Brotherhood to be losing to the NCR even if a particular engagement may seem unbelievable.


At a ratio of 1:4 you're still going to run out of ammunition it will just take a little longer. And that's assuming that the recycling process is actually something that can be done relatively quickly in the middle of combat. I mean it's obviously not actually instantaneous.


Not unlimited just so superior as to seem unlimited compared to what the Brotherhood or Enclave can produce. There's a huge difference in scale of production and resources between a nation-state of hundreds of thousands of people and tiny exclusive military organizations that the Enclave or Brotherhood cannot overcome.


So your plan is to drop 30 troops right onto the NCR's capital city? I mean yeah you'll probably win but how many of those 30 men do you expect to come back after they've been dropped straight into a urban battle against the capital's garrison, its police force, any surrounding NCR forces they may be able to call in (I'm willing to wager there is some NCR military presence around its capital city and northern frontier), the Rangers and any locals who don't appreciate surprise terror attacks on their cities. And after this single attack you've lost the element of surprise. Killing its leadership (assuming every important member of the NCR government was in the city at the time which is unlikely) won't make the NCR, which is after all a union of sovereign states just roll over and die.

Again you launch raids until the cows come home, or actually until your very limited manpower pool has been bled white by inevitable attrition and there's still hundreds of thousands of pissed off mainlanders coming for you, but you can't really destroy a country that way. At some point you have to seize and hold territory and the Enclave simply can't do that.


Well yes you're right in the Helios situation that the NCR couldn't afford to simply lay siege my point was in general terms this is always how a situation like this is going to end. The Brotherhood being defeated is the expected result not the unbelievable aberration you're treating it as.

I don't see any way it was poorly explained. The Brotherhood was defending Helios One when a vastly superior NCR force attacked and overwhelmed them forcing the survivors to retreat to Hidden Valley. What more explanation is really needed? Again a technically superior force holding a defensive position being overwhelmed by a far more numerous if poorly equipped attacker is hardly one of the oddest or most unprecedented results in warfare.

Seeing how the NCR doesn't engage in guerrilla war, but conventional warfare, has there ever been a technological inferior and lesser trained force that has ever won a war?

The thing is it isn't like the BoS is hurting for ammo or power armor. We don't really know much about their production ability. Elijah sure is pretty handy, as is Veronica.

Likewise it isn't like the NCR is some industrial giant war machine.

Also, people say well they had heavy troopers and buncha rangers there.

Well...then where are they? If you have such few troops, that you deploy your elite troops, then you have to redeploy them somewhere else, when war is eminenr and battle could come at any second, then imo your military str is weak.

I'm supposed to believe you had all these troops and your elite troops fight BoS, then you fought Legion, then, with Legion still there, you pull your elite troops out abd send them who knows where...durp.

I'm not saying it is impossible. But somwthing like this falls into the realm of luck.

On a side note I been playing new XCom and it makes me long for a FO Tactics 2 and or reboot fo1 and 2 with updated graphics.

Both World Wars (well European theater anyway the Japanese were pretty badly outmatched). Italy's first invasion of Ethiopia. First Boer War. Iran-Iraq War. Toyota War. Israel in 1948. Russia in 1812. First Schleswig War. Russo-Japanese War. Russian Civil War. There's plenty of examples.


We know for a fact the Brotherhood can't make new power armor. Both they and the NCR are limited to what they can find and salvage. The Brotherhood can make weapons and very good quality combat armor but to pretend that their scale of production can compete with a nation of hundreds of thousands or more likely millions of citizens by the time of the Brotherhood-NCR war defies belief. Furthermore no matter their manufacturing capacity they're going to have a hard time taking advantage of it once their supplies of parts and raw materials have been greatly restricted by the fighting and more and more of the Knights are going to be needed on the front lines simply to replace combat losses.


Again compared to the Brotherhood I would argue the evidence argues strongly they are. Again this is a relatively modern nation state whose population probably numbers in the millions that has standardized arms and equipment for a conscript army and is laying new railroads. The Brotherhood is a few thousand guys (being generous) in bunkers. They may produce higher quality gear but they can't compete with the scale of what the NCR can make. And even if they could again it's meaningless since the gross imbalance in numbers would prevent them from taking advantage of that.


By definition elite troops do not comprise the bulk of any army? I don't get what conclusion you're drawing here. The NCR's best forces can't be everywhere at once therefore the NCR is militarily weak?


The Legion was in complete disarray after the first battle. Why is it surprising that the NCR would withdraw many of its better forces for service elsewhere once the threat appeared to have receded? It's not like the veteran Rangers and heavy troopers never come back to the Mojave. I really don't know what this has to with anything anyway. I'm certainly not arguing the NCR's high command is known for their competence and forethought.

Because of logistics.

FO world has pre-WWI logistics and deployment. Assuming of course NCR has just a rudimentary RR and very limited verts.

If they had to pull their elite troops out if the Mojave, with a Legion threat still there, ans they were there, that tells me they have very limited elite troops.

It is a also a waste of resources to continuously deploy and redeploy troops. It is one thing giving some R&R, pulling them out of the theater of engagement is just hmmm.

Unless those troops are very rare, which personally I think they are.

Alao, don't understand your technology inferior victories in WWI and II. For the most part, especially in the beginning tech was basically the same, then edge Germans, then edge Allies. Fin.

I voted New Vegas. Because they have Mr House and endless Securitrons.

But the NCR has the second most chance of winning. They have the most sustainable system.
They are as close to prewar life and systems there is, next to New Vegas.

Yes of course elite troops are rare. They're elite. That's the definition of the word. I still don't get what you think this proves unless you think only elite NCR troops have any hope of hurting the Brotherhood which we know from both the game and any realistic appreciation of warfare to not be true.

I'd certainly say on the whole that the Imperial German military and Wehrmacht were qualitatively superior to their opponents yet they still ended up losing. You can disagree if you want there's plenty of other examples some of which I noted above.

This is a good point I've been waiting for someone to point out.

There are a many forms of warfare, but a many times winning a war is dictated by the amount of training, the technology, & the numbers of each force.

A large force that lacks tech can be quite powerful merely with its numbers. As where a small force with superior tech/training can be lethal to a large extent.

Its a pro/con situation that reverts back upon how each force is used.

The tactics of each force is what dictates what they do. How the mass numbers are used or how highly trained personal are used can dictate a battle.

For instance, 300 Roman Legionaries battle 10,000 barbarians. Not one Legionary has been lost due to the superior tatics & training of the Legionaries to the numbers of the enemy force that has no tactics what so ever.

TL;DR

Tactics dictate who wins firstly, technology & numbers are the second dictator of the victor.

P.S.

Good sue of the Imperial German army. Did not expect anyone to actually use a good example such as that.