I didn't find the Enclave evil. Some of their actions were ridiculous, but others were necessary in a post-nuclear world. The Enclave is just like any other group though.

But what about deserters in the Whermacht? And the people who tried to overthrow the British Government in the 13 colonies? They were a bunch of terrorists!

They aren't evil and they aren't even misguided. From the beginning the Enclave, like Mr. House, saw that Nuclear War was going to happen and took steps to continue civilization. They knew that communism was one of the most ill-moral and ineffective economic/political systems known to man and wanted to surive afterward to respread democracy and freedom. If it wasn't for the Enclave many research vacanties would of been destroyed and the research within them also. The Enclaves long term goal was to colonize another planet (like Mr. House) and the reason the Valuts were so sadistic was to test humans valiability in long term space with MANY different problems that could arise. Believe it or not but traveling to another planet is a risky adventure and there was NO test data on how human societies would react to long term time spent in closed/altered environments. IF the enclave were to go to space the Valut experinments would be extremely helpful.

Of course something happened and space colonization was a no go, so the Enclave had to focus on rebuilding Earth. Once the Enclave came to Cali. and saw how horrible things had gotten they decided all mutants must go. As far as the "genocide" issue goes, lets be practical, the wastelanders are genetically different than the Enclave, to what extent is arguable. There is no telling the amount of birth defects that have occured from the raditationand FEV in human populations, the amount of unneccscricy suffering. Plus considering raditation has different effects on humans in the Fallout universe there may be serious problems with the long term viability of non-enclave, non-valut, humans. Someone is probably going to say that them using Valut 13 and Ayarro was wrong but I would argue that experiments were needed.

As far as the Genocide plans goal I would say they were noble and justified. No one would of predicted the NCR would delevop in a way that it did, and that's far from a perfect society. And lets get real without the Enclave funding the Valuts the NCR wouldn't exist, nor the boomers, etc. And it's no guarnette the NCR and it's democracy will stand, considering the threat of the Legion, restored Khan empire, and unknown from Baja under some NV endings, hell slavery can still be the future of humanity.

Now that's the West Coast brotherhood, I don't think any other faction (even the BOS), has as much tech nor resources to rebuild. Of course the days of the WC Enclave are over, but they would of been the most effective in rebuilding the world, and ending all the mutantation that stops delevopment. You can't tell me that all of those geckos, super mutants, giant ants, giant scops, etc killed wouldn't of been worth killing off the mutated humans. Honeslty the East Coast verison should of followed Colonel autumn and learn to live with the mutants. Not because its the right thing to do but becasue they don't have the resources to spread FEV effectively anymore.

Well done sir, an excellent post. :clap: Nobody ever seems to properly appreciate that they're birth defects, to most mutants = Ghouls and such; Enclave are nazis etc,

Somehow I'm reminded of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEle_DLDg9Y when discussing the Enclave, I mean they really don't help themselves in the way they dress.

What I don't understand about the Enclave is why they didn't focus on simply gaining back territory. After more than 200 years the Enclave have been defeated again and again and they hold very little land. Ceasar on the other hand had virtually no technology and few allies to start out with; but he was able to create a massive country that covers several former states 86 different tribes in only a few decades.

I also don't buy their explanation of the wastelands being beyond saluaging. The attempted genocide was most likely out of fear of the wasteland, not any kind of science. Mr. House, one of the smartest people in the series, never mentions anything about the possibility of people in the wasteland being a problem. If there was a genetic problem he would probably just find a fix for it later on. His plan for the survival of civilization- laser turrets to take out some of the bombs, securitrons to keep order, and alliances with the tribals- is also much more logical and stable. In contrast the Enclave seems almost childish in their antagonistic and over-the-top attempts to revive society.

You can't just take medice to turn people normal again; the United States Army after the war has only a few hundred soldiers, nobody in the wasteland even respects the authority of the Enclave and if they did have the Enclave is in no position to enforce it, even the NCR has a large group of raiders very close by and they number hundreds of thousands of soldiers and probably well over a million citizens.

The Enclave wipe out all the wastelanders and then start rebuilding in a perfectly lawful world where there is only one faction, them. Please tell me how it is illogical and less stable than trying to domesticate the tribes and the raiders.

So wait, the Enclave justify their actions of genocide with the intention to bring order to the world? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iumEGAUceDg#t=1m15s...

Well what did you think their genocidal plan was for in the first place? Teh lulz. I don't think that it's really the same thing either seeing as how they aren't exactly lying to the wastelanders before killing them, they're just killing them. Besides the Enclave are democratic.

Hitler was elected.

Through a total abuse of the political system before then abolishing it and establishing a totalitarian dictatorship, the Enclave are democratic.

Mugabe was Elected.

GCSE History doesn't cover that

Mr. House has the medical knowledge to keep himself alive for hundreds of years, yet he never mentions anything about there being a problem with wastelanders, or that they need to change in some way. Remember, this is a man who has humanity's future planned centuries in ahead. If there was actually something biologically wrong with people, something so serious that at one point the former government tried to kill everyone because of it, he would have said something.



Ceasar had literally no soldiers when he began, and few if any weapons. He was able to gain power through a few old books and leadership abilities alone. The remains of the US government would already have the leadership abilities and even justification to retake land, and whatever soldiers they would have left would be much better armed and trained than anyone that they have contact with.



Empires are built by conquering "less civilized" people. It's hard work, but killing millions of people is not an acceptable alternative. Plus how could the people of the new United States trust their government after they just killed almost everybody? The Enclaves genocide was basically just a sci-fi version of the Nazi Lebensraum idea- that they need to destroy the population of a certain area so they can colonize it with their own "superior" people.

Yeah because House was an engineer, genetics and remaining alive indefinately by a huge machine are two different things. The Enclave both mention and their experiments prove it so the wastelanders in someway are genetically inferior, this fact is another "pro" as far as the Enclave are concerned to their whole genocide plan.



Caesar won a tribe over with knowledge and then crushed an equally sized but very much inferior tribe & then bullied all the others into joining him, the possibly over 1000 Enclave citizens versus the whole NCR with it's hundreds of thousands of soldiers which have no intention of giving up their power to a remnant of the past regardless of any leadership abilites the Enclave may have.



What are you arguing, the Enclave did consider it an acceptable solution and so did all of the Enclave citizens aboard the Oil Rig. How would they trust them? Well in all honesty they're brought up with a bit of propaganda and national pride, ever noticed how the Enclave grunts and such really hate you, it's because they believe that they are fully justified, reagardless of what you in real life think.

Well yeah essentially, they wipe everyone out and then everyone from then on lives a good productive life and everyone from then on are all unified in the goal of restoring the United States.

It's essentially the easy way or the hard way.

The Enclave (easy way) just kill everyone and start from scrath but with massive ethical costs and it'll take a long time to get anywhere near real population levels. But the Enclave is essentially a pre-fabricated civilisation, just find them the land and unpack and there-you-go.

The hard way is just to let everything rebuild itself which will take longer but will eventually come about.

Genetically inferior in what way? I doubt it's anything that couldn't be fixed (or even needed to be fixed). We have some amount of genetic engineering even today, with Fallout technology I can imagine them being able to alter genetics in any number of way. The wastelanders might be genetically superior in some ways. Ghouls, as deformed as they are, have much longer lifespans.

As for Mr. House, for him to stay alive he would need extensive knowledge of human biology, medicine, and genetics. His medical technology is far beyond what even the Enclave has, and yet he finds no problem with the post-war humans that he's been surrounded by for 200 years. It seems much more likely that the Enclave was simply wrong, or they overreacted to biological problems that are minor at best.




Right after the war there was no NCR, and no raiders or tribals. There was just a bunch of frightened people looking for some kind of stability or safety. In a disaster (especially one of this scale) it is the obligation of the government to provide support. Everyone in the United States directly after the war would have followed the orders of someone claiming to be the government, they would have no reason not to. The purpose of a continuation of government is to continue government. If the Enclave doesn't even try this at all then they lose their claim to being the government. Groups like the NCR were made out of necessity, because the old government abandoned them.



How far would the range of the poison be though? Even if they could kill everyone in the former US (which is doubtful) they'd be leaving the new US incredibly weak. Other countries would eventually want to see what happened to the US, and (while they would be hurting from the war as well) they would find the new US to be nearly uninhabited. Eventually people would try to repopulate it, and the relatively small Enclave would be swept aside and destroyed. They may even actively hunt them down after what they did. The poison plan would only work if it killed almost everyone in the world, which would be impossible. Also, while the current Enclave generation would agree with the plan, eventually their descendants would be horrified at what happened, and the government would most likely be overthrown.

Well for example, the people from Vault City who have been experiencing radioactive contamination via water polluted from a nearby powerstation, everyone in Vault City now suffers from fertility problems and people are born with chromosal damage and Vault City had the finest medical technology in California, just like in real life, radiation in Fallout can cause realistic birth defects and mutations as seen here. Even decades after Chernobyl people are still been born with them and a similar situation will have happened in the Fallout universe where the contempory wastelanders still carry genetic abnormalities from the original generation during the war. House's machine could do any number of things, I doubt that he personally built it. Besides House worked with the Enclave before the war and turned REPCONN into an energy weapons manufacturer for them, REPCONN built those plasma rifles after House's takeover. Gannon says, "I've read about REPCONN, they did some work for the...... for the government before the war." Obvisouly covering up the fact that he was a member of the Enclave, take him yourself to the REPCONN headquarters. If House had it then I think it's pretty much certain that the Enclave would no, the Big Empty , according to Elijah, has hibernation chambers, statis pods, whatever you want to call them which I would imagine work in a similar if not better way than House's machine which was designed to keep him alive but also via that headset thing in constant connection to all the computer systems in the Lucky 38. Statis chambers are not unique to House and if a highly advanced pre-war, inhuman laboratory like the Big Empty was building them it's pretty much certain that the Enclave must have been involved or surely know. The Enclave are not wrong, their entire virus plot needed to be tested on pure-human stock from Vault 13 and the freshly mutated people from Arroyo, the pure-humans experienced much longer and more excruciating deaths than the mutants.



Actually there were lootings, mass hysteria and a complete breakdown in society if that Ghoul in Underworld is too be believed along with infernoes which burned for days. The Enclave was not technically the government and it all depends on what you envisaged them doing before the war, the Enclave was a secret cabal of power brokers, military leaders, politicians, media and such who usurped their positions in some kind of common agenda; when it became aparent that nuclear war was approaching, the Enclave decided that it would use all it's power to ensure that the government survived after the war. What could have happened was maybe the President was a member, or the Vice-President whatever, after the war they still have authority and if the President died during the war then the Vice-President would become President until time came to hold elections, through someway which may even have involved re-writing the constituation (or maybe they official acknowledge that the mainland is no longer America?), the wastelanders are not American citizens as can be observed from the Fallout 2 Enclave Patrolman dialough, "You are an enemy alien". The Enclave now are the decendants of the pre-war Enclave.

There was no centrilised authority after the bombs fell, the Enclave isn't respomsible for every police, fire service etc. for example the German Town Police department tried to help people on there own because there was no communication from anyone, even non-Enclave government, they had a refugee camp for a while till everyone died of radiation posioning. Still what is your point? The Enclave retreated to where-ever and when they decided it was time to see if everything had settled sometime in 2170's they saw a lot of [censored] in California and decided "[censored] it" basically, the situation was irrideemable. The fact is they waited too long on the Rig and things slid beyond what they had any realistic power to control.



It was a virus and the range was global, the President explains it, it will be relised into the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream which will carry the virus just like radiactive fallout itself around the globe and kill all those who contract it. Other countries are in no state to come en masse to the US and pick a fight and if the Enclave is as powerful and commanding as you say then surely any remnants of the American people which survived (though none would as previously stated) would keel beneath the Enclave's military superiority. Why would the decendants afterwards rebel over a genocide which was in the past, what would they overthrow and why? They overthrow the then contempory government over actions in the past even though the then government would also be comprised of people who weren't even alive during the actual genocide.

Besides they planned for near global genocide, this isn't F3 with the water plan, the virus is airborne and will be carried by currents across the world, viruses can survive extended trips on the sides of satilites so I can only assume that the Enclave engineered the virus to be able to survive the extreme conditions of being swept around the globe.

None of this explains why the radiation and contamination of humanity would warrant anything close to mass genocide. The last 200 years have proven the Enclave wrong. People are still reproducing and surviving, even thriving in many places. There are still problems, but it's not anything that can't be fixed. You could argue that they wouldn't know that things could turn out better, but they would have no reason to assume otherwise. The plan for genocide was an overreaction based on fear of the wasteland. As for Mr. House, he may not of invented the technology but he has been using it for 200 years, and he's had the time to improve or modify it.




I'm not saying that the Enclave should have handled everything in the country, all they had to do was take and hold a small amount of territory and expand slowly from there. Fear and paranoia is what cased them to retreat to an oil rig. Even before the virus plan they made virtually no progress in gaining back any of the country. They have no excuse for "waiting for things to settle" for as long as they waited. Civilization just after the war was in such a shattered state that they could have easily gained control of a significant amount of territory without much trouble. Mr. House was just a powerful business executive but he was able to at least control a city.

No government would completely ignore the necessity of controlling territory and manpower like the Enclave did. Compare the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave to Ceasar's Legion. The Enclave and BoS are have plenty of technology, and have been around for a long time at this point. They are so stubbornly insular though that they almost don't even matter anymore. Yet a middle aged man with a few old books created an empire that could trample over the Enclave and BoS ten times over at this point. The BoS is getting better with the Midwestern and Eastern chapter, but the Enclave hasn't learned its lesson, and it's basically too late for them to do so.



Any government willing to kill the entire world couldn't possibly last very long. Law and order is largely based on morality, and a government that is as morally bankrupt as the Enclave would have no problem repressing or abusing its people in many horrible ways. The people who actually caused the genocide would die eventually, but the precedent is still there, and it would influence the actions of the new government. Revolution would certainly be on the way. When the only civilization left is one that caused mass genocide, the future of humanity would be very bleak.

Also... having the threat of a doomsday event after another doomsday event doesn't seem like very good writing... but that's just my opinion.

None of this answers what I said, the Enclave believed that it was enough for them to justify the genocide.



They have a small amount of territory on the mainland (or did) and would probably have slowly have expanded from it after the Project when it's location no longer had to be kept a secret. They retreated to the Oil Rig because of the imminent nuclear holocaust, they waited for too long on the Oil Rig and realised that the situation was irredeemable. Civilisation was so shattered that it would have been impossible to enforce, no other vestige of the government (non-Enclave aware) survived as far as we know, the Mayor of Washington didn't get the National Guard together to keep the peace and set-up refugee camps, in a matter of 2 hours the entire world collapsed, the Enclave didn't have an army before the war, regular grunts weren't in the Enclave; the Enclave were politicians and military leaders, if pre-war Enclave wanted something military doing then a high-ranking member of the US Army who was a member of the Enclave would lie and make-up an excuse to get it done. If the Enclave wanted to control anything immediately after the war then they would simply have got the National Guard (I'm not really sure what the NG are being British) or the Army to keep peace but for whatever reason they didn't and seeing as how nobody else in any authority did either I think we can assume the situation was pretty dire. Even before the war they're were food lines, energy shortages and riots along with possibly mass-inflation if the price for a car on the advert in Fallout 1 is to be believed, every was hard to control and civil unrest was rife even before the bombs.

House planned his despotism for Vegas 15 years in advance and he doesn't control a city he controls a street, the Strip and even then he had to recruit the three tribes to hold the Khans off and even in 2281 the NCR patrol it too; House has little influence outside of the Strip.



Well the Enclave did, the virus genocide wasn't planned before the war but after when they saw and decided that the mainland was like it was. Caesar's Legion weren't held back by the need to keep their genetics that of pre-war levels, besides what's your point, an army then controls all of Arizona can crush a population probably equal to that of a Control Vault? Are you trying to say that the Enclave are failures or in denial because they aren't the largest, most powerful organisation in the world? Well actually if the Chosen One hadn't got to the Oil Rig they would have won a few weeks later so yeah, I bet nobody in Caesar's Legion could engineer a perfect microbial genocide.



Have you ever read Nineteen Eighty-Four? Back on track, the Enclave citizens are heavily indoctrinated with loyalty to the government. As the Enclave moved away from being a secret thing on the Oil Rig to an actual government over actual people on the mainland things would become a lot better gradually I think. The Enclave wouldn't need to gun wastelanders down or even be immoral at all really, once they resettle the mainland they will be building farms and finding places to mine for resources and such and maybe after a century when the population levels have increased there could be towns and mayors and such again.




Well that's not really my place to say, nor is it really connected to this discussion.

What were they doing on an oil rig for 150+ years? I can understand them wanting to wait out the storm a bit for a few years or even decades, but why so long? If they started to rebuild civilization on California earlier they also wouldn't have to deal with the NCR.



What's impressive about House's position isn't necessarily power he holds, but the alliances that he made. He was able to civilize and work with the three families, creating a functioning city. He was also able to make a truce with the NCR. He also might end up ruling over the whole Mojave region, as the House ending of New Vegas suggests. The Enclave on the other hand doesn't seem to have a concept of diplomacy, they make enemies wherever they go.



My point is that the Enclave had numerous advantages over everyone else, yet they squandered all of them. They're society is made up of people who are supposed to be part of a government. They have an abundance of old world weapons and technology. They're also the only organization that has an actual claim to being the remains of the US government, which would allow them to justify taking back any amount of former US land (many people also may have been expecting the US gov to come back and try to restore order at some point). Despite all of this, they accomplish almost nothing in the time before they develop the virus. An anthropological scribe though creates an entire civilization in just a few decades. Also the Enclave began with the equivalent of a Control Vault, but the Legion begin with one man.



The virus is largely irrelevant when it comes to nation building. Of course your society is going to be the largest if it's the only one that exists. If you join a boxing tournament and poison everyone's water, that doesn't make you the best boxer.



Just because they wouldn't need to be amoral doesn't mean they'll stop. A brutal regime doesn't suddenly become nice once their enemies are destroyed.



I just think that the "save the world from destruction" theme doesn't really fit well into post-apocalyptic fiction. It should be more about the struggle for survival and how to rebuild society, not how to prevent another apocalypse.

I can write an entire essay about why the Enclave is evil. But since there are already so many postings and threads on this forum on the topic, I will try to explain the reason for my conclusion in the simplest and most direct way possible.

If your philosophical beliefs and political ideology lead you to the conclusion that it's acceptable to commit genocide on a global (Fallout 2) or regional (Fallout 3) scale, that your beliefs and the organization who upholds them are immoral and evil. It doesn't matter if your goal is to rebuild pre-war glory, give the America government a re-birth, or to preserve pure human genes, committing mass murder just because people doesn't share the same type of DNA with you is not acceptable. That is all.

I think the Enclave is evil.

They came up with the sick experiments in the vaults. That is foul.

They made the vaults, not to save as many people as possible, but to save some and make a new world with them.

They made the Forced Evolutionary Virus. They try to kill all mutants. All people who are from the wastes. Their DNA could not be that diferent from prewar humans.

What John Henry Eden says in the Eyebots is not a bad idea. If he could implement those things it would be fine.

Maybe he truely means those things.

Not got that far yet.

But that is surface stuff.

Th Enclave is evil, sick and foul.

it was to make super soldiers for the war against china and the encalve didnt make it west trek did (i think)

If you refuse to acknowledge what the Enclave actually does and would have done whatever. Their DNA was different but that is not the point, the Enclave aren't just OCD or whatever, there are many genetic traits and abnormalities created by radiation and passed on. Also it was not the only reason why they killed everyone, the original intention, before they realised how out of control the mainland was, was to simply re-establish the government.