Its the character of people in the Minutemen which led it to ruin in the first place though. Quincy, Libertalia etc.

Lest we forget The Minutemen's fall was due to internal squabbles and Byzantine betrayals. The MM themselves brought it down.

And you can't do anything in-game to prevent a repeat of these same events.

Preston is the last remaining Minuteman and he was saved by pure luck and a granny who can see the future. Oh, and if you got just half an hour later, Preston might have committed suicide.

But luck and grannies are a horrible thing to depend on.

If the minutemen failed because of ONE incident, it would be understandable. But they had many unrelated incidents that led to their failure, many of which are embarrassing.

you're the sum of your experiences.

Precisely. If someone came along and erased everything that makes you you, you essentially cease to be. yes your body is still living and breathing, but you become someone else.

You're also more as plenty of people have emotional connections, contexts, and knowledge beyond their memories.

And again, amnesiacs in real life do not identify as someone new.

Given the memory-wipe is VOLUNTARY, it says people in the Institute REALLY hate their lives.

No, the Minutemen would have failed without you. Preston was suicidal and in a death trap. Even if he had gotten out, he never could have rebuilt it.


You seem to not understand the problem, though. The Brotherhood is comprised of soldiers. Fighting is what they do. They have a clear and well understood chain of command. When an officer gives an order, people follow them.


The Minutemen are a militia. The vast majority of them are farmers, settlers, merchants, etc. They are weekend warriors. A leader in the Minutemen is a leader because they want to be and because others are willing to follow. There is no chain of command. Each group has a leader that wants to lead and a general that directs them. Orders from the general are not absolute. Leaders follow only if they choose. People who seek to lead others often have strong personalities of their own. That can lead to rivalries and such between groups. A strong leader is needed to keep them in line or in check.


This is why the Minutemen failed the first time. They had a general with the charisma and strength of will to keep everyone working together. When he died, the following general wasn't up to the task. Rivalries and disagreements came out to the surface and ripped them apart. Then a call went out and all but one group chose to not to respond.


This is the fatal flaw with the Minutemen. The structure is exactly the same as before. They follow you because of your reputation and charisma. When you die, they will probably not have that reputation or charisma. Rivalries and disputes will surface. People will stop following the general. The Minutemen will rip themselves apart all over again.


The only chance the Minutemen have is to evolve as an organization and become something more than a militia.

allegedly. desmona seems to want to kidnap synths who don't want to leave the institute. hard to do that if they retain the personality that doesn't want to leave.

the rr is despicable. program,ming synths to want to escape. wiping who they are -- if they are infact people as they preach.

the rr is one giant bag of hpyocrisy and it falls to me to bring them to justice for all of their very many crimes.

Or perhaps they just want to forget that they're manufactured.

The idea of a fresh start without any of the baggage knowing you're a created construct has got to be appealing.

I've known a lot of serviceman in my life. Many of them are honorable, hardworking, and loyal brothers-in-arms; basically guys I would want at my back in a fight. A lot of them are not. Some of them are just plain idiots. I don't think you understand the difference between a soldier and a warrior. The BoS can train as many soldiers as they want, but who knows what those men and women are actually worth in a fight and otherwise.

But I digress. I think it is a little disingenuous to assume that I don't understand the thrust of your argument, at the least. I get that a lot of people think the saving grace of the BoS is their military structure, but if you think that makes them less susceptible to leadership problems, I think you are insane. They are completely at the mercy of their leader, because they are instilled with the discipline to not question orders, which is a recipe for disaster if your commander is incompetent or insane, a fact which can be attested by any number of historical blunders in large scale conflicts. As I said before, leadership problems can do harm to any organization.

Overall, I believe in the capacity of each person. A militia formed by brothers with honor and integrity can form a more powerful group than a bunch of soldiers trained to jump on command. Don't trust that training is going to give the BoS the edge either; people living in the Commonwealth are like settlers on the frontier. Learning basic survival skills and how to shoot a weapon are probably second nature to them at a young age. I think the biggest boon the BoS has is simply all the crap they have. Having access to arms and armor on a massive scale to outfit people is an obvious advantage compared with people who have to use what they scavenge. The BoS are basically just better funded, but if you want to talk about them being superior as a group, that I don't buy. The people who survive in the Commonwealth are more than capable when united as one.

spawn three farmers and one bos knight.

report what happens.

The memory wipe says no such thing. No person is capable of receiving that memory wipe. Only toasters clearing their memory cache. Wonder how many gigs of memory they have though.

Indeed. Simple farmers stood against the British empire with all their soldiers and ultimately won the day. Hah!

This is not a case of amnesia which operates on a much different level than a synth wipe, everything about that synth is erased including their old designations and such. So much so that when awakening to their "new life" they go on to do in some cases, some pretty questionable things, completely unlike their former lives,

The problem here is that the majority of Minutemen are neither soldiers or warriors. The majority of them are farmers. Sure, they're people that have answered the call to defend their neighbors, but they are still just farmer.


As for leadership, certainly no one is immune to idiots in command. My father was in the navy and has plenty of such stories. However, in the Brotherhood, command positions are typically given based on merit. In the Minutemen, command positions are given to whomever decides they want to command and can convince enough people to follow them. Maybe I'm just cynical, but it seems to me the chances of getting an idiot in charge would go up exponentially.


Honor and integrity is good, but it is typically not enough. The farmers' frontier skills might make them crack shots, but that is typically not enough. We really don't even need to speculate about this. There are historical examples to look at. During the American Revolution, militias were notoriously unreliable. Their lack of training and lack of discipline resulted in them breaking and fleeing before the regular soldiers. Although they frequently fought alone side the Continental Army, commanders knew that the militias could not stand up against trained troops and could not be trusted anywhere vital.


The Minutemen might work well against unorganized raiders. They might even do well against super mutants. However, against a more well organized and disciplined force, they'd probably crumble, just like real militias.

You know, someone borught up that the farmers of the common wealth could stand up for themselves because they're used to raiders and super mutants etc always raiding them

but they never stand up for themselves because they can't. They can't defeat them at all, ever, without your trained help.

so no. they aren't trained and they cannot defeat the Brotherhood without you.

Well good thing we can change that then.

Well good thing we can change that then. As the NCR has demonstrated, even an army raised from farmers and the like can overcome the Brotherhood of Steel. True, at that point the NCR was a major power, but they were also going up against the full might of the Brotherhood, not just an expeditionary force from one chapter.

So they should be denied free will and a chance to begin again because, like humans, they might choose to do bad things with it?

I never said anywhere to deny free will, only saying that the procedure to grant such free will involves obliterating who they were, death in essence. A rather unthinkable thing to do when we are dealing with trying to humanize these beings. Things going rough for ya? well then, flip this switch and immediately erase everything. Humans can't voluntarily do this on a whim, we often have to deal with unpleasantness on a daily basis and push onward. Even in the face of things like injustice and discrimination which continue even in our present world. This loophole so to speak is a tactic that is wholly possessed by synths in this dynamic, reprogramming them like microwave clocks. If the Railroad truly wanted to help synths be who they are, they would do more to help alleviate the fear that the populace has towards them, do they do that? nope not really... They reprogram synths then hide them among the populace, in an environment where there is already mass paranoia over who exactly is a synth. This is even more baffling when we see the RR has synths working for them who are wholly aware of who and what they are.

It's just difficult to see what their end goal is, probably since they do not really have one besides "liberate" more synths, not actually consider what this is doing for the commonwealth and what consequences it may have.

The synths that had their memories erased chose to go through with it. They didn't have to lose their memories, but that's what they wanted. And either way, given the technology we've seen in Fallout, I wouldn't be surprised if the technology existed to erase a human's memories and implant false ones.

Whether the synths chose it is neither here nor there, as it's a self defeating cycle is what i am saying. Doing nothing to ultimately aid their goals and again, add to the paranoia of the communities they insert themselves into. It's liberation through pretending to be something you aren't. It's not advancing the synth cause because in large part it's not about helping them to be themselves, it's helping them to be what they aren't. Yes, they chose it, no one is denying that, one can say that a sentient being should have that right, and that's fair, but I just don't see what this organization ultimately accomplishes.

I wonder how they choose which memory to implant. Danse was pissed because of how his memory was being constructed. They didn't even bother to give him any happy memory or a loving family. With a loving memory of family and loved ones, some of these synths would probably wouldn't have become rebels or raiders. I'm questioning the RR's method of replacing memories. If they want a synth to have a new life, give them some happy memories.

This is exactly what I take issue with in regard to the Railroad's methods. It's like they have a box of random personality chips, and they just shove whichever one they happen to pull out of it into a given synth's head. A bar singer? Ok. A widowed soldier? Sure. Hitler? Why not. Next please. This directly results in cases like Gabriel, in mental breakdowns like Danse, and like it's been said generally only adds to the atmosphere of looming threat, suspicion and prejudice. If they honestly wanted to make sure the wiped synths were well prepared to lead normal, peaceful human lives, they should have at least made sure they were given the right memories and personalities to do so.

The way they are now, the Railroad are a bunch of irresponsible holier-than-thou synth terrorists whose actions cause more harm than good.

Because Preston was the last minutemen...when a group consists of one member its easy to keep the coals burning.


If you do the recruit mission for the Institute you see how little the member of the MM follow your orders.


They straight up tell you this isn't a military and they done follow anyone's orders.

That's a terrible comparison. By the time the west coast Brotherhood went to war with the NCR, they were already an established nation. It was comprised of several large communities, controlling a large territory and population. It was stable and a growing economic power. By the time of war, they would not have been reliant on militias like the Minutemen. They would have had an established, trained and equipped military. The Brotherhood they fought was stagnating and xenophobic. They did not recruit from the outside like the Midwest and east coast Brotherhoods. Even then the NCR's victory was not an easy one.


Comparing what happened on the west coast to what might happen in the Commonwealth is like comparing apples to oranges. If the Railroad wins they destroy the only two organized and stable groups in the Commonwealth, leaving at best (assuming you even built them up at all) a poorly organized and poorly trained militia to hold things together.

No, but I also think that, if they go off the rails like Gabriel, that the infrastructure of the Institute should exist so that they can be captured and reset. It's just a more efficient form of police work/imprisonment.