NCR in New Vegas

U

UncleSlappy

First time out of the vault
Does anyone else think it's odd that the NCR in New Vegas isn't cut off from California as they were planned to be in Van Buren?

Everything from their incredible lack of resources to the utter spirit of demoralization to why they have to tiptoe around House and the Strip would make far more sense and you might also have a real reason to support the Legion (established and expanding empire versus the isolated forces of a nation that might not even exist anymore).

It just seems really strange you wouldn't stick with that plot element when it fits perfectly with everything you're trying to portray. Instead I'm supposed to believe the NCR, a nation of hundreds of thousands of people with a significant industrial base and advanced technology, can't scrounge up enough troops and equipment to defend the region against a bunch of Roman wannabes?
 
If I am honest I didnt liked how they deployed either the Legion nor the NCR. THough if I would have to choose the NCR made a more authentic picture then the Legion which you always just "hear" but only very rarely see ~ regarding their few men on the NCR side of the colorado river.

Maybe its just me, but the constant talking about "fighting" and "frontlines" is really trying to build some tension unless you arrive either at what they call the "frontline" (just 2 camps sitting next to each other with maybe 20 people ?) and the Hoover Dam which I found somewhat dissapointing. Particiularly the "last finall fight". Anything else between the start and end of the game was really good, those small communities (not always making sense, but well who cares) and NPCs which did feelt nice with the writting add a lot to the game.

But the fights in the end and those camps sitting next to each other ... only the Legion camp with Caesar inside was somewhat impressive as it feelt REALY like some huge outpost with an army behind it (just that Caesar as person was ... surprisingly dull). But the Hoover Dam was such a huge disapointment for me personaly after you hear it all the time in the game, the fighting at the dam, the fighting in boulder city, throwing out the legion from there etc.

~ [spoiler:8295476737]You know the part when the NCR President starts this "show" on the dam with 5 people in front of it ! What. The. Fuck ! : /[/spoiler:8295476737]

I am not sure why but somehow the confusing situation with so many camps feelt a bit ... to much with to lidle men. You just dont get the feeling of the NCR size when walking in to those camps. Particuilarly at MC Namara (or what the name was). I mean I know the engine has some serious trouble with many NPCs ... but well I just expected something "more" something more closer to a real frontline and war situation.

Instead I'm supposed to believe the NCR, a nation of hundreds of thousands of people with a significant industrial base and advanced technology, can't scrounge up enough troops and equipment to defend the region against a bunch of Roman wannabes?

Exactly the point ! To me personaly it just feelt like they tried to really do a huge dramatic situation but the engine/game simply has not the power or size to show that effectively. Thus it always feels extremly small.
 
Instead I'm supposed to believe the NCR, a nation of hundreds of thousands of people with a significant industrial base and advanced technology, can't scrounge up enough troops and equipment to defend the region against a bunch of Roman wannabes?
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I have to admit I'm fairly surprised by the NCR's inability to fight off a bunch of Roman LARPers given the fact that the Legion is so insistent of using bum rum melee charges against enemies 95% of the time.
 
The Legion melee oriented tactics is actually explained in game. The theory being that they can ambush you with such speed and ferocity that the enemy will not have time to react and even get a shot off.

There is some ring of truth to this, on Very Hard difficulty in the Dam at the end of the game those 4-5 packs of Legionaries can kill you in a few seconds if you let them surround you.
 
yes but only cause in a "game" head shots and rifles dont mean the end to everything while on a realistic scenario you will not go very far with a meele oriented army against well armed forces (using automatic weapons that is), even if you have 10 times the numbers, as shown countles times in the african desert when small groups of armies would destroy almost a whole nation by moving down the attackers with their machineguns. And here literaly a handfull of soldiers killed and defeated whole armies with a few thousand people as they had not more then shields made out of skin/wood and spears. Now runing with those in a MG isnt the best thing to do really ...

I never bought the legions explanation that guns "jam". Maybe thinking about a indidivual soldier, yes having some meele oriented training is a huge plus. But on a whole with a army of several thousand men you dont want to go with just close combat weapons in to a conflict when you have guns available. As simple as that.
 
The Legion melee oriented tactics is actually explained in game.
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True, but ambush style tactics would only get them so far. I just wish they'd have a more diverse force tactics wise.
 
USA can't take care of bunch of cave dwellers in Afganistan either. It's unpopular war waged far from home by idiots like general "let sit on our buts"Oliver so what you can expect. NCR troopers don't even have automatic weapons BTW. While Legion do use boomstics and even arty when tacticly nescesery they just don't rely exlusivly on them like NCR do.
 
True, but ambush style tactics would only get them so far. I just wish they'd have a more diverse force tactics wise.
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I wish they used some real Roman Legion style tactics. Metal shields and armor can be really effective against regular bullets.
 
To be fair, I think the lack of NCR in the area had a reason I think, because they're so stretched along the NCR's borders, they can only afford to send of that many troops. Whereas I don't understand why the isn't that many Caesar's Legion troops though, they're meant to have a massive army of slavers, but yet there's only about 100 of them on the line, not even that maybe.

The NCR I understand, it's the Legion that confuses me.
 
NCR repeats the mistakes of every other government. Once an idiot like Kimball gets access to nuclear bombs, he will gladly bomb the other side "for the good of NCR". Like his idiotic predecessor Richardson did (well I know he didn't do it himself but - his thinking was along that line - bomb/eradicate the other side (mutants) for the glory of U S). And should the other side also have access to the bombs, the history will repeat itself again.
 
The NCR has other fish to fry, then sending a large force out to a unpopular war in the desert.
 
And how long will the land remain a desert?

NCR will finally turn into another US. ANd meet with a country that has risen from the ashes of China, unless we believe China was completely annihiliated. And what will be then? Happy-annexing politics will be suddenly stoppped?

I don't think so. It will end up with another war. Again and again and again. Humanity in Fallout Universe HAS failed once and proven that's how current governments end. What will stop NCR from following? they already do follow the Enclave, sort of.
 
DForge said:
And how long will the land remain a desert?

NCR will finally turn into another US. ANd meet with a country that has risen from the ashes of China, unless we believe China was completely annihiliated. And what will be then? Happy-annexing politics will be suddenly stoppped?

I don't think so. It will end up with another war. Again and again and again. Humanity in Fallout Universe HAS failed once and proven that's how current governments end. What will stop NCR from following? they already do follow the Enclave, sort of.
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No, the NCR won't last that long. I'm sure there whole organization would end up devouring itself in a bloody revolution. They only have a few more years.
 
[spoiler:cfe0d0d6cb]What I found a bit of a shame was that you couldn't tell the NCR at HELIOS One about ARCHIMEDES2.

It would have been an interesting quest development if you could tell them about it and that they now want to use it to wipe the Caesar's Legion of the face of the Earth.[/spoiler:cfe0d0d6cb]
 
Requete said:
USA can't take care of bunch of cave dwellers in Afganistan either.
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Actually, we kinda did... the Legion isn't an insurgency that can hide in the population. The real invasion part of both Afghanistan and Iraq went very well. Rooting out individuals is hard. When you have superior firepower, fighting armies is easy. The Legion is a standing army, not an insurgency.

It's unpopular war waged far from home by idiots like general "let sit on our buts"Oliver so what you can expect. NCR troopers don't even have automatic weapons BTW. While Legion do use boomstics and even arty when tacticly nescesery they just don't rely exlusivly on them like NCR do.
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The average NCR trooper was roughly equivalent to a US/Korean war soldier. The legion is a very mixed bag. But too many rely on charges that just don't work against anyone armed with anything better than a musket.

The bigger problem with the legion is societal. It cannot last even one generation. A society that consigns every woman into back breaking slavery doesn't work. The high ranking officers will have daughters, and they will not want that life for their daughters. Even the worst of the Taliban doesn't do this. They perpetuate it by instilling the idea that they are "protecting" their women, so even the powerful members of the society want to protect their own daughters. Caesar's Legion has no such rationale.

Moreover, they treat even their own people terribly. Desertion rates should be off the charts. The Legionares have no motivation. The roman armies had significantly stronger carrots in their arsenal, most notably citizenship, and even they had issues with desertion. Caesar in FNV has nothing to offer. Caesar's destruction of the old tribal bonds actually increases the likelyhood of desertion. The legionares aren't fighting for their families or homeland. Caesar stamped that out. As long as Caesar was vastly superior to everyone he was fighting, it could stick together, but as soon as he met an equal force and was beaten back, then stalled for years, his army would have been wrecked by desertion. With their homes and families destroyed, they had no roots. Once outside of Caesar's direct willpower, there was no reason for a Legionaire to follow his orders.
 
thing is as someone mentioned in the game (dont remember anymore who) that the "legion" is les about the legion but the person Kai-zar. Kill him and the Legion will fall apart in no time. Thats the problem with a dictatorship focused on a single persona when he dissapears it all becomes useless. I actualy like that describtion, if oh well if Kazar would just have been a interesting personality :(

The Dutch Ghost said:
[spoiler:dda7337fa5]What I found a bit of a shame was that you couldn't tell the NCR at HELIOS One about ARCHIMEDES2.

It would have been an interesting quest development if you could tell them about it and that they now want to use it to wipe the Caesar's Legion of the face of the Earth.[/spoiler:dda7337fa5]
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Yeah, now that as you mention it that is kinda surprising me as well :o
 
I wouldn't judge how the whole NCR is doing by the picture you get in the Mojave.
I mean you shouldn't forget that they aren't that long in the era and it's not a really stable area there with the legion at the front door.
So it might look quite a bit different in areas without an enemy army on the other side of the river.

So how inefficent are they? They held off the Legion at the dam, otherwise Vegas and all the guys who say "Well should rule ourselves" would now be dead bodies being nailed to some cross.
Also if you take a closer look to a lot of things the NCR does.
-Fixing the railway system or building a new one.
-Fixing water supply lines
-Repairing power supply lines
-rebuilding some concrete plant
and so on and so on...

And what about the 'freedom loving' people from New Vegas?
What did they built?
The pump in Freeside isn't from them. None of the farming seems to be coming from them. Sure Goodsprings and some other communities out in the desert seem to have some farming, but as far as my memory reaches they aren't the ones who really damn the NCR that much.

So sure the NCR isn't perfect but for the given circumstances i guess they are better than any other option (i mean pacifists don't seem to be a real option when there are quite a few enemies out there).

And if the NCR will fail or start a war with a nation on the other site of an big ocean is another question for me.

-edit #2-
What i really didn't get was the whole 'Ranger Unification Treaty'.
So the treaty said the NCR should protect the dam and the 'desert rangers' - but it doesn't seem as if the desert ranger came from the NV region, which makes the whole thing a bit strange...
 
Thats the problem with a dictatorship focused on a single persona when he dissapears it all becomes useless.
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And despite his persona being vastly different, the same is true about House. Sure, he managed to make his life longer than normal, but he won't live forever.

So the treaty said the NCR should protect the dam and the 'desert rangers' - but it doesn't seem as if the desert ranger came from the NV region, which makes the whole thing a bit strange...
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The Nevada Desert Rangers were incorporated into the NCR Ranger ranks.
 
considering the circumstances around House beeing between 2 factions, one can assume that his life will end one way or another at some point. I mean without the courier either Benny or the Omertas or some other group might have tried and succeeded eventually with an assasination on house.
 
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