How Come Sacramento Isn't in Fallout 2?

Thanks for the link Vault Maker, its really useful I'd been looking for something like that...

I think TomJ's explanation on why Sacramento or Sac-Town wasn't implemented in F2 (lack of developer oversight/timing issues) is probably the most realistic reason why. To reconcile, in my Fallout universe Sac-Town suffered more extensive nuke damage than the other cities and not much developed, thus the Chosen One had no need/avoided traveling there (yes I know the CO didn't need to visit half the cities in F2, but they were smaller cities with less reputation).

Also I think it's definitely plausible that NCR attacked Navarro after F2, TomJ basically outlined all the reasons. Also I think NCR would definitely have more military stations/outposts around their boundary perimeters, as they probably see taking the entire West Coast as some sort of Manifest Destiny. With that in mind, I think the Enclave is a much weaker force after F2, i.e., they wouldn't have much offensive capability thus it would be primary the Shi against NCR. However, F:NV doesn't talk about this much, so in my Fallout universe things have settled into an uneasy truce between NCR and the Shi, with NCR concentrating on the East and the Legion...
 
Vault Maker said:
NCR is well north of Bakersfield. The Fallout 2 NCR location at Shaver Lake is 35 miles NE of Fresno. The Fallout 1 Shady Sands location is slightly east of the Sierras. Navarro is near...Navarro, just north of Point Arena at 39N 123.40W. Some mapping info here.
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As someone who has lived in Mendocino County, using the village of Navarro would be a strategically bad place to but an airfield. It is surrounded by trees and at the narrow end of a valley. A more likely place would be the county air field about 15 miles north outside of the town of Little River. Why build a new airfield in a strategically bad location? Using the name Navarro just sound better than Little River so, what they hell? Thought game developers, there are only like 50,000 people in the county, no one will notice if we use inaccurate names.

zowmaster said:
Thanks for the link Vault Maker, its really useful I'd been looking for something like that...

I think TomJ's explanation on why Sacramento or Sac-Town wasn't implemented in F2 (lack of developer oversight/timing issues) is probably the most realistic reason why. To reconcile, in my Fallout universe Sac-Town suffered more extensive nuke damage than the other cities and not much developed, thus the Chosen One had no need/avoided traveling there (yes I know the CO didn't need to visit half the cities in F2, but they were smaller cities with less reputation).

Also I think it's definitely plausible that NCR attacked Navarro after F2, TomJ basically outlined all the reasons. Also I think NCR would definitely have more military stations/outposts around their boundary perimeters, as they probably see taking the entire West Coast as some sort of Manifest Destiny. With that in mind, I think the Enclave is a much weaker force after F2, i.e., they wouldn't have much offensive capability thus it would be primary the Shi against NCR. However, F:NV doesn't talk about this much, so in my Fallout universe things have settled into an uneasy truce between NCR and the Shi, with NCR concentrating on the East and the Legion...
Click to expand...

Also part of my assumption is that the Shi and the locals they would have convinced to side with them would have assimilated the Enclave personnel that survived and didn't flee east. Mostly because the Shi are calculating and opportunistic. They would have not cared so much about the Enclave's genocidal plans and wanted their knowledge. I figure they'd have the coastal areas from Monterrey to Southern Oregon as a buffer zone and maybe as far east as Davis, which is just outside of Sacramento.

As for Sacramento, some of it would have survived, but since it isn't an "iconic city" it wasn't worth putting into the game like San Francisco was. Cities like Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose, Santa Rosa and Eureka didn't make it into the game and they all have over 30,000 people in them. Hell San Jose has about 1 million and is larger than San Francisco. It would be fun to go to Eureka as a side thing, seeing a big abandoned lumber town with lumberjacks, rednecks and hippies making up the population, and maybe some Enclave that fled the oil rig.
 
Vault Maker said:
NCR is well north of Bakersfield. The Fallout 2 NCR location at Shaver Lake is 35 miles NE of Fresno. The Fallout 1 Shady Sands location is slightly east of the Sierras. Navarro is near...Navarro, just north of Point Arena at 39N 123.40W. Some mapping info here.
Click to expand...
Note to self: Remember this link; it's awesome!

Note to self: REMEMBER this link; it's aaaaawesome!!!

NOTE TO SELF: REMEMBER THIS GODDAMNED LINK; IT'S FUCKING AWESOME!!!!!

What? Don't mind me...
 
zowmaster said:
Thanks for the link Vault Maker, its really useful I'd been looking for something like that...

I think TomJ's explanation on why Sacramento or Sac-Town wasn't implemented in F2 (lack of developer oversight/timing issues) is probably the most realistic reason why. To reconcile, in my Fallout universe Sac-Town suffered more extensive nuke damage than the other cities and not much developed, thus the Chosen One had no need/avoided traveling there (yes I know the CO didn't need to visit half the cities in F2, but they were smaller cities with less reputation).
Click to expand...

Agreed, the fact that a location doesn't appear in-game shouldn't rule out that there is something there to explore for future games/mods/fanfic etc. Just like how the "NCR" location in FO2 wouldn't really have a few dozen people in it, even though that's all that are depicted in game. If you had Sac being untouched by the war, with a huge population, and home to a significant faction...that would be hard to explain, unless you just decide to branch off from the canon.

TomJ said:
As someone who has lived in Mendocino County, using the village of Navarro would be a strategically bad place to but an airfield. It is surrounded by trees and at the narrow end of a valley. A more likely place would be the county air field about 15 miles north outside of the town of Little River. Why build a new airfield in a strategically bad location? Using the name Navarro just sound better than Little River so, what they hell? Thought game developers, there are only like 50,000 people in the county, no one will notice if we use inaccurate names.
Click to expand...

I lived there too (but a really long time ago). Ever learn to speak any Boontling?

The Navarro game location is a bit funny, it's more like midway between Manchester and Navarro Head. And most of the grid square is actually in the ocean. And the San Andreas fault runs through it. But other than that... You have to take all the "real" locations with a grain of salt. But many of them seem to have been thought up by people who knew the region's geography, then sometimes shifted things around the worldmap.

The backstory for the base is that it's an oil terminal and/or refinery for Poseidon Energy, where they were bringing oil pumped from under the seabed at Hydropolis (aka the Oil Rig). The only oil around the north coast that I know of is around Petrolia, so that whole thing is fictional. Then would you have a pipeline taking the oil somewhere else? Who knows? There's no deep water ports near there, though maybe the oil facility was floating on barges or somesuch.

There are several real sites around there that might be useful to the Enclave:
* Early warning radar site just east of Point Arena
* Coast Guard base and Loran navigation system beacon at Point Arena
* Major undersea phone cable at Manchester, connecting to Hawaii and Japan...phone system junction is east at Cloverdale Peak
* Former Civil Defense and FEMA facilities for Region 9 (CA, NV, AZ, HI) were at Santa Rosa

I'd say the Shi have a geographic advantage to resist conquest. Any ground attack would have to work it's way up the SF Peninsula. The game's worldmap makes the bay side look like it's reverting to marshland (impassable water areas where there is currently fill) so that means slogging through ruins, or along the hills. A defender with good quality weapons, made up of small numbers of well-trained troops, could exact a heavy price almost every step of the way. More likely they would come to a mutually agreeable arrangement with NCR. They coexisted with the freaking Hubologists, so a deal with NCR could make sense.

SnapSlav said:
]Note to self: Remember this link; it's awesome!

Note to self: REMEMBER this link; it's aaaaawesome!!!

NOTE TO SELF: REMEMBER THIS GODDAMNED LINK; IT'S FUCKING AWESOME!!!!!

What? Don't mind me...
Click to expand...


HAH! Thanks. Now I should get off my ass and get the FONV and FOT parts cleaned up.
 
Still doesn't explain why we can't go to Tijuana, San Diego, San Pedro, San Jose, The Sillicone Valley etc...
Well, you can't be everywhere...
 
Naossano I agree with you completely, that was kind of my point about Sacramento. At least make up some in-game b.s. about why the main character doesn't go to the past main metropolis' if you're not going to implement them into the game.

At least San Diego is mentioned in the lore (Dayglow mentioned in F1), they should have done that with all the major pre-war metropolis'...
 
zowmaster said:
So I was recently looking at a Fallout world map from the Fallout Wiki of the Western USA and saw how Sacramento was basically in the middle of the Fallout 2 world map (sort of mid east of the middle point between San Francisco and Navarro).

This led me thinking on why Sacramento wasn't implemented or even talked about during the 2nd game. I mean Sacramento is/was the capital of California with over 2 million population metro, you would think (as all the major cities would be) it would definitely be a major population/gathering center for survivors...

Does anybody have any inside scoop on this (i.e., maybe one of the lead designers really hated Sacramento?) and how do you guys reconcile this fact (or do you at all?) that Sacramento is not even mentioned during your playthru's of Fallout 2?
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Because all main towns were nuked to death? It wasn't like in stupid literation of Fallout by Beth to have top1 city (to be nuked) in almost intact state. (or at least, main spots).
Look at Fo1. Everything is just one big ruin. From Bakersfield to LA.
 
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Languorous_Maiar said:
Because all main towns were nuked to death? It wasn't like in stupid literation of Fallout by Beth to have top1 city (to be nuked) in almost intact state. (or at least, main spots).
Look at Fo1. Everything is just one big ruin. From Bakersfield to LA.
Click to expand...

As for cities being intact, well at least DC was based off blowing up Megaton, the nukes were a few time more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. On bomb in Megaton blew up like 2 square miles. Springvale and surrounding ruins weren't even touched, hell raiders and Moira survived in Springvale. If they had nukes as powerful as ours, all of DC would have been leveled by like 3 or 4 bombs, even Big Town was mostly intact and I figure a bomb hit Bethesda, Maryland which wasn't that far away.

naossano said:
Still doesn't explain why we can't go to Tijuana, San Diego, San Pedro, San Jose, The Sillicone Valley etc...
Well, you can't be everywhere...
Click to expand...

Lack of time or thought. For San Jose/Silicon Valley, it could be that since there wasn't a computer revolution to the same extent in the Fallout world, than the South Bay was just a giant suburb like it was in our world before the first tech revolution. Which means that other than the downtowns, there would have been mostly wooden homes and buildings that would have been heavily damaged by a bomb dropping, no matter how weak compared to ours.
 
DC had to be targeted (not the same thing as hit) by a lot of weapons. in FONV, Mr House says the Vegas area was attacked with 77 bombs. Maybe he isn't a reliable source, but there's a lot more to attack in DC, or Sacramento, than in Vegas.

According to a US "targeteer", when asked how he would target DC, his answer (based on how we targeted Moscow) was "about 100 bombs". That included several on the White House and Pentagon each, then others on targets of interest around the area.

Strategic nukes typically available in the cold war ranged from 135 kilotons to 10 megatons. When hitting a lot of weak targets (houses), you can wipe them out with about 6 psi (pounds per square inch) of overpressure, and a large bomb covers a large area. When hitting multiple hardened targets (Pentagon, White House...more accurately the bunkers under them) you want maybe 100 psi or more. A larger bomb isn't necessarily going to damage both, hence you use separate bombs on each. Then figure factories and powerplants need to be hit with 20-25 psi. It starts to add up to a lot of weapons.

For high priority hard targets you might aim 2 to 4 identical bombs at one spot, if you weren't sure they would all make it. Typical probability that a missile is operational (not torn down for maintenance), launches successfully, flies on the correct path, goes through booster separation, and the warhead detonates successfully would be maybe 85-95% for each step, so 45-75% chance the bomb goes off on the target. There's more bombs.

Medium priority targets like factories might be targeted for 25 psi from one bomb, and an overlap from another of 10 psi. If #1 goes off, you have total destruction, if only #2 does, you get severely damaged buildings, with some salvageable machinery buried in the wreckage. That's still more bombs to get the overlap effect.

To experiment for yourself, try Nukemap!

Most real war scenarios topped out at about half the population killed. Do you know the line in Doctor Strangelove about the survivors getting back to the prewar gross national product "within, say, twenty years"? Kubrick didn't need to make that up. Many economists predicted the US or the Soviets pulling that off in 5-15 years after a "fully executed" attack.

The Fallout world is on track to make that well past the 200 year mark. We can assume the war in Fallout was a whole lot worse than any real world nuclear exchange.
 
Another thing I just learned about the South Bay/Silicon Valley is that back before computers, there was a strip of air craft designers and manufacturers between San Jose and Oakland. That could have been a target as well as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
 
I live in West Sacramento and Sacramento would actually be a city full of survivors and this due that there actual Fallout shelters not vaults per say but bunkers made of Concrete and are actually in real life.But most people here are ignorant say Sacramento is a ghost town but more just a underrated city
 
SnapSlav said:
Also if you look at the map, much of the space between Redding and Navarro and SF is taken up by a GIGANTIC crater. That area was probably hit directly by a nuke, so it would explain why MUCH of the West Coast of California is devoid of the bustling metropolises that compromise it in real life.
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That's the central valley?

Also, the NCR has problems supplying the Mojave because of the Divide. It wasn't that hard beforehand. Gameplay blocks the route from Area 51, and apparently the Divide isn't near to the Mojave (as I had assumed), so those variables don't translate well for a push north.

As for the Shi, it goes either way; you can have a small, withered NCR that's basically just Southern California or have a huge NCR breaching Oregon that swallowed everything in its path, Shi, Enclave, Reno included.
 
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