Fallout: New Vegas/Headscratchers/Archive 1

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Caesar's Strategic Decisions

 * Caesar doesn't really live up to his namesake - at least in terms of tactical military genius. The NCR has deployed most of its forces and commanding officers - including General Oliver and Colonel Moore - to Hoover Dam, leaving their side of the Colorado dangerously undefended. Outside of the Dam area, the NCR armies are overstretched, lack proper equipment and are poorly trained. The Legion has already taken Nelson and Cottonwood Cove, and from these positions, it has been able to attack Camp Forlorn Hope, plant a dirty bomb in Camp Searchlight and raze Nipton to the ground. There is even a forward raiding position right next to the highway that connects New Vegas to California. Why doesn't Caesar simply ignore the Dam and cross the Colorado? Within days, the Legion would overrun Camp Forlorn Hope and Novac, and from there, they could seize Camp McCarran and Camp Golf and the Mojave Outpost. Without any supplies or instructions coming from California, Caesar could then wait out the NCR forces in the Dam until they were forced to make a break-out attempt, at which point they would be annihilated. Besides, Caesar is more interested in New Vegas than Hoover Dam, and he could let them rot for years while he annexed the rest of the country. You would think the Conqueror of 86 Tribes and the Son of Mars would know the importance of not letting yourself get bogged down over a prestige symbol, Stalingrad-style.
 * Logistics and strategy demand that Caesar take Hoover Dam. It's rather very simple: the Hoover Dam is important to Caesar because it acts as a bridge - over which you can supply your armies, and not because it generates power. This is a key factor in supplying an army as big as the Legion. Without the Dam, the Legion can only travel across the river in fairly rickety-looking rafts, running the risk of being sunk, drowning, not being able to carry much across, etc. The Courier even points out to Legate Lanius that the Legion would destroy itself trying to hold New Vegas, because New Vegas itself gets most of its supplies through trade with the NCR, and wouldn't be able to support the Legion's needs. As for the forward parties, they don't actually hold anything except small outposts at Nelson, Cottonwood Cove and the Searchlight Airport. Searchlight and Nipton are destroyed, with no Legion staying back to try and hold them.
 * The attacks against Camp Searchlight and Nipton are only small scale covert operation attacks carried out by a platoon at most. If you want to send in anymore troops to establish a full invasion, then you will need to have a way to maintain a steady supply line. Hoover Dam serves as a bridge that will be able to support a secure invasion.
 * The Colorado isn't exactly treacherous. At Cottonwood Cove, Caesar could simply move across his forces and supplies over the course of several days, and then begin the attack. The nearby Ranger outpost could be preemptively wiped out to keep the build-up secret; after all, there was no NCR response when Ranger Station Charlie was massacred by a Legion raid. And even if the NCR learns about it, what can they do? Camp Searchlight is irradiated and Nipton is a collection of burning ruins, so they lack a defensive position. Furthermore, NCR forces are already stretched as is, so the NCR leadership would have to relocate forces from the Dam - thus weakening its position. Considering General Oliver has so far displayed a total disregard for the rest of the Mojave and is fixated on holding Hoover Dam at all costs, such an event would be unlikely. Sure, the NCR would be able to muster up some troops, but nowhere near enough to hold back an assault. And the Courier was bluffing; New Vegas managed to survive by itself before the NCR arrived, and since Legion occupation strategy is essentially "kill pretty much everyone and enslave the rest", they wouldn't even need to worry about keeping the local population in check.
 * It's clear that the Courier is not bluffing, he's pointing out the logistics of supporting a city with very little hope of being self-sufficient in the middle of a desert (which is what Vegas always was). You're basically just ignoring the fact that New Vegas is now bloated with people, and wasn't exactly a paradise before the NCR and House showed up. Benny even tells you that things weren't great until House showed up. There's been attempts to help fix the place up a bit more and make it more self-sufficient, but there's issues. The nearby NCR sharecroppers are trying but aren't producing food because the groundwater is irradiated. And that's before all the tactical and strategic elements aren't taken into account. You're basically saying that the Legion can swim across the Colorado river over a matter of days (with Ranger Station Echo watching) and make a 40-mile march (the real world distance from most anywhere meaningful on the Colorado River to Las Vegas, compressed thanks to the game map) with armor and weapons, through a desert, on foot, and being mostly unopposed and undetected (which is completely unlikely). And that's after they destroyed the nearest settlements that might have the supplies they need as they go - as you said, Searchlight is irradiated, and Nipton's been burned to the ground. Who will carry the food and water? The troops? Not really, they'll need their strength to fight. Slaves, most likely, and if the Legion wants water and food of any meaningful amount, they'll need lots of it to maintain a working offensive. And I don't know if you noticed, but most slaves are overloaded and don't move very fast, so that's going to be slow going. The only forces you see west of the Colorado are small bands who can be self-sufficient because there's only a few of them. All this is academic, of course, if you're also assuming that Mr. House and his Securitrons are not a factor, nor any other factions, nor anything else that requires electricity is not used against the Legion in any way. All that considered, it would actually be smart to take over a bridge so you can just walk your supplies across instead of having to worry about all that other stuff.
 * Yes, it is a bluff. There's a reason why you need a high Speech skill to pull that one off. Do bear in mind that Mr. House took over New Vegas long before the NCR showed up, and it was perfectly self-sufficient. New Vegas' population is bloated mostly by NCR migrants, who would obviously flee to the West along with the NCR military. Those sharecroppers are there to produce food for the NCR, not New Vegas. And besides, it is made obvious in one of the endings that the Legion simply slaughters the population of New Vegas, anyway, so finding enough food to support them is irrelevant. As for getting troops across, you're missing the obvious fact that, in the final battle, the Legion are able to concurrently attack Camp Golf, Camp MacCarran and Camp Forlorn Hope, so they obviously have some method of swiftly transporting troops across the Colorado, since you don't see any build-up beforehand. As for logistical concerns, the Legion has more than enough slaves to carry supplies, and even if they didn't, they could simply sack everything between them and New Vegas to keep the army sustained. If the Legion had such massive logistical problems, they wouldn't have been able to move against Nevada in the first place.
 * Let's start with the 'high Speech' skill. It's the BARTER checks that remind Lanius that he nearly lost the battle of Denver because of logistics, and not Speech checks. Last I checked, Barter wasn't for bluffing. As for the other attacks, you're not seeing what's already there, again. "Don't see build-up"? There's much more than you seem to see. You're already forgetting that Camp MacCarran wasn't an assault by the Legion, but by the Fiends (It's all that's talked about in the Fiends' ending - they are allied with the Legion and are part of the offensive). The other two Camps are 'soft' targets, and it's very obvious where the troops came from, long before the Battle of Hoover Dam. Camp Forlorn Hope is situated right across a battlefield from Nelson. Nelson is FULL of Legion, and that's the whole point of the quests in that area. Camp Golf is where the under-performing troops in the area have been sent, including the Misfits. They even say, that despite being behind the front lines, they're still susceptible to sneak attack. If you do Boone's quest, the Legion is able to get across Lake Mead and strike at Bitter Springs with no problem (it helps that Camp Guardian has been wiped out) and so it would be easy for troops to cross Lake Mead from the Fort undetected - as they would have plenty of time and opportunity well before the Battle. It's not exactly 'rapid deployment' if they're already sighted in that direction before Hoover Dam, nor can it be a particularly large squad of Legion troops if the Misfits are able to turn the tide of battle. That said, why doesn't Caesar just send more troops north across the Lake? The Logistics and necessity of taking and holding Hoover Dam. Furthermore, Robert House has only been around for a total of seven years (2274 is when House recruits the Three Families and installs them in the casinos), and that's the same year that the NCR moves into Hoover Dam, and House arranges the trade agreement with the NCR. Before that? Vegas in fact was not particularly self-sufficient. New Vegas was a bunch of tribals living in the ruins without power or anything of value, hunting for scraps (verified by Benny and the other members of the Three Families and other citizens of New Vegas who existed before the NCR).
 * Also, it's an important long term goal against the NCR as well. Hoover Dam is one of the biggest power sources for the entire NCR region. (Obviously not the only one, but a large one.) Destroying that would be a major victory for the Legion in their quest to wipe out the NCR for good.
 * Hoover Dam is important as a matter of pride and not actual tactics. To General Oliver (NCR) despite being the man in charge is not respected, even his troops call him "General Wait-and-see." This has given him an inferiority complex and a burning desire to prove himself and overshadow his more competent subordinates like Chief Hanlon, who led the NCR to victory in the first battle. Hanlon, at first lost the Dam but won by staging a tactical retreat and luring the Legion in a booby-trapped city and having their officers sniped from a distance. As a result Oliver wants to prove that he is better and can do what Hanlon couldn't, beat the Legion at the Dam. For Caesar he wants to take the Dam because it was the location of his greatest and only defeat. Both could easily circumvent the Dam and besiege the other ones position. However, nether does it because there convinced that the battle must occur there.
 * There's a failure to understand the strategic importance of a river crossing. It is basic strategy to control bridges to ease the flow of supplies and troops and equipment from one side of a river to another, just look through history. As for Pride, the non-NCR endings can prove that Oliver is a soldier who does seek honor and glory and is willing to die for the NCR, but at the end of the day, he's not incompetent nor is he willing to throw away the lives of his soldiers just for victory. This is about the Hoover Dam, after all, it's the only working power generating facility that supplies as many people in California with power that isn't Gecko. And the First Battle of the Hoover Dam, the whole reason why Caesar attacked the Hoover Dam in the first place was because it's a major strategic asset and river crossing. If Caesar dies, Lanius attacks the bridge anyway, because he knows its the best way to attack New Vegas - he's not dumb. He knows it's strategically important. Look at history and look at how many battles have seen trying to control a bridge or a crossing as an important event. In the Vietnam War, the US bombed every bridge they could find in an effort to slow down the movement of supplies and troops, only to find out that the Vietnamese were rebuilding the bridges faster than they could be destroyed. In World War II, major battles were fought over bridges, so they could move troops and supplies and equipment across. The Entire point of Operation Market Garden was to capture as many bridges as possible to help speed along Allied advancement, and it failed because they were slowed down by the destruction of many, many bridges all across the area. And those are relatively modern wars where you could just bypass rivers by floating boats across or flying over them. Ancient battles would be fought over bridges and landings over water. You -HAVE- to control a secure crossing like a bridge or else you slow down and get stuck.
 * I understand your point and the value of Bridges. However, Caesar states his main objective is New Vegas, he is seeking a Rome for his Empire. It's very odd that since his defeat he hasn't developed any other transportation routes. In the four years he could have easily build a bridge or a port or something. He could have easily moved forces down from Utah and pressed downward. Furthermore Lake Mead is defended on two Ranger Stations, which are poorly defended and can easily be taken over. In the case of Ranger Station Charlie a single raiding party takes down the entire station. The fact that they routinely cross the Colorado means they must have a naval capacity. Caesar could easily have crossed Lake Mead circumvented the Dam, overwhelm the local forces and press right into Vegas. Or land on the other side of Hoover Dam and besiege the Dam from two sides. The Lake isn't mined and there would be no way to stop the landing. The fact that he's trying a frontal assault again, which failed the first time means it's a matter of Pride. As for Oliver he only surrenders when surrounded by hordes of Securitrons. In the Legion Ending you can get him to reveal he has a hidden tunnel and does sick waves of soldiers on you to die, presumably buying him time to escape. NCR masses it's forces at the dam as a posturing tactic. Placing your main base right next to your enemies is a strategic nightmare. Camp McCarran is much better fortified and farther away still the High Command and the majority of their forces are based with in striking distance of Legion Howlitzers. That's why I believe it's a matter of Pride not tactics.
 * Caesar, whose major holdings are in Arizona, hopes to take the dam for both matters of pride and convenience. However, any plan to build a reliable mode of transport across the river would have met fierce NCR resistance. House, who bid his time for ages, decided to gather up some tribes to act as his minions. He did this when he saw the NCR coming in. Aside from the robots taking care of it, New Vegas wasn't up and running until AFTER the NCR got there. As for Oliver... I took his opinion on the situation to heart.
 * Caesar states "All of Arizona and New Mexico most of Utah and Colorado are mine." Dead Sea the Commander of Nelson came from "The shores of the Great Salt Lake" and Vulpes Inculta is also from Utah. Given that both are in their twenties, it's an indication that the Legion has held it for some time. Yes their capital in Arizona, Flagstaff, and they did arise from there, but that's not their only location. With regards to force the major NCR locations on lake mead sans Hoover Dam are Bitter Springs, which is poorly defended and Ranger Stations Alpha and Beta which I stated before can be taken easily. The NCR concentrated it's forces at McCarran and Hoover Dam. The rest of the wasteland is barely defended. Second the Legion had infiltrated the NCR military and were fully aware of NCR troop movements and strength any serious attack they could avoid or better prepared for. The Legion could have concentrated it's forces there and besieged the dam. The only place of serious resistance would be Camp Golf. Finally your right about Vegas, except the appeal was it was a city that hadn't suffered any major nuclear damage an extreme rarity in the fallout world. My argument is given his options, that fact that he's repeating the same tactic, which not only failed, but one had had to have realized the NCR would be prepared for, means his motivation is pride. On Oliver, even in the House/Independent endings you have to meet a high speech/barter/science check to convince him to back off, otherwise he does attack you and is CUT down. Presumably after, the remaining NCR troops are attacked, meaning he throws away his men for nothing.
 * It's not about pride, it's about control, and it's simply an answer that no one is keeping in mind. Power and control of that power. What is Hoover Dam? It's the last major electrical generating station in Nevada, and provides most of the electricity in the NCR (no word on what happened to Gecko). The NCR needs it, that much is made clear. Oliver is basically sent to defend the Dam. It becomes clear that the Legion needs the Dam intact as well. Why would Caesar want a city of sin as his Rome without power? If he goes around and tries to conquer New Vegas without the Dam, the NCR could just pull the plug. The proof that the Legion is interested in having electricity is pretty obvious at HELIOS One. If you kill all the NCR by activating Archimedes' security protocol, guess who moves in afterwards? The Legion. Suppose everyone is right, and the Legion can just skip across Lake Mead or the Colorado with impunity in enough numbers to assault New Vegas itself, what prevents the NCR from just moving over and assaulting the Legate's Camp and the Fort while the Legion is buy trying to attack from behind? And if they don't? NCR troops can catch the Legion in a pincer between their two largest bases, right? Oliver fights tooth and claw for the Dam, because that's the power source of the NCR, and his duty as a soldier is in the defense of this one resource. Caesar obviously wants the Dam intact because he could just as easily sabotage the place with explosives (I mean, the frumentarii put bombs everywhere else but the generators), and the quickest way to get rid of the NCR is to blow the dam. Without the electricity, the NCR wouldn't stick around. But it seems, without the dam and its electricity, Caesar would have himself a Pyrrhic victory.
 * Wait, what? Caesar would be perfectly happy to have New Vegas' electricity shut off. He doesn't support technology, remember (except for technology that he uses himself and gives to his favored lieutenants; the main thing is that he doesn't want mass power given to everyone). So it doesn't make sense that he's taking the Dam to use it. I personally think that it's symbolic; the Dam falls, the Mojave falls. (And practically, if the dam falls, the NCR cuts bait and gets out of the Mojave.)
 * What he is against is the reliance on technology, not destroy it, but he's more than willing to use it for his own ends or to augment his goals, or prevent others from using theirs. As you note, he keeps some technology for himself (he's even armed with a fairly technical punching device). He has you destroy the robot army under his Fort because he doesn't want robots fighting a war of men, but he also keeps things like howitzers because it evens the playing field for him. He also has you ally the Boomers with him, who are only good to him for their firepower and technology. His Frumentarii are also trying to purchase energy weapons from the Van Graffs. The simple fact, again, is that he doesn't try to destroy the generators or the dam itself. Whether it's for the electricity, or that the dam is a bridge across the Colorado, he doesn't try to destroy the one thing that the NCR wants and needs and, if destroyed, would begin the end of all presence of the NCR in the Mojave. Caesar says it himself, New Vegas is his Rome, and the Colorado is his Rubicon. What good is taking and holding New Vegas to him and his Empire if the only reasons why you'd go there are eliminated? Just to defeat the NCR? Like I said, take away why the NCR fights, and you demolish their purpose, and weaken them so you can invade them with impunity. And again, if you kill all the NCR there, the Legion holds Helios-One, and they leave Fantastic to continue work on it (they kill Ignacio, on the other hand) - not something they'd let him continue if the Caesar's goal was to destroy all technology. He wants to control the dam. He wants to distribute the power as he sees fit. He doesn't have to share it with anyone, nor does he want to. It's his way of proving his ideology - taking away what the democracy of the NCR wants, and using it for what he wants.
 * Wow this is going into thread mode, I agree with the OP in that nether side really uses what they have. The NCR knows that the Legion in on the other side of the dam, there can even see them from Camp Guardian and they have Howlitzers. Why don't they just shell The Fort and the area to prevent built up. Also they have an Air Force, why don't they use it.The only reason the NCR hasn't attacked them outright is they are understaffed and under equipped. Also close quarter combat with the Legion is suicide. The Legion never crossed before the battle because they lacked the troops. Yet by the battle they had regained their strength. Caesar does not live up to his namesake because he ignores his tactical advantage. He under value the Frumentarii, he should have had them release Dirty Bombs and all major NCR Bases it would have crippled the NCR and the Legion would have won easy. He had strong holdings in Utah he should have grouped he forces near Lake Mead making the NCR think he was going to attack there. This would have left the dam understaffed he could have poured over it. He could have built a lot of boats an launched an attack across Lake Mead. He had many spies in the NCR hierarchy, near key military officials, he could have had them killed before the battle, crippling the military force. The fact that he committing the majority of his forces to repeating the same plan he already tried and LOST means its a matter of pride. While they did co-currently attack Camp Golf and Camp Forlorn Hope, the major force was attacked at the dam which was stupid. The NCR knew they were coming that way and had a history of booby trapping. In-fact it's possible to activate the turbines killing most of the advancing force. Yes bridges are vital to invasions and yes the fact that it's an important power source is important, to his plans afterwards but not to the battle. He had no contingency plans in case the NCR rigged it to explode. He should have assumed the NCR would have prepared something in case they lost. One could argue the brain tumor caused him to hold and Idiot Ball, but in reality he just want to win at the one place he failed. Thus he fails to live up to his namesake because he motivated by pride not tactics.
 * This again is not in keeping with the NCR - Hoover Dam is the NCR's entire reason for being in the Mojave at all, Vegas itself is just a byproduct of holding the Dam against the Legion. Many of their commanding officers - Colonel Moore and General Oliver both say the same thing: they are willing to lose New Vegas but not Hoover Dam. Camp McCarran is even secondary to the Dam. The military has no love for Mr. House or any of the residents of New Vegas. Remember this is an unpopular "foreign war" in the NCR, held together only because they have been successful in bringing electricity and water from Hoover Dam back home. If they lose the Dam, their interest in New Vegas vanishes practically overnight (Primm loses its protection if you had the NCR back the town, Vegas is abandoned, etc.), so it makes no sense for the NCR to booby trap the Dam. Destroying the Dam or the generators is definitely what Caesar should do if he just wants to get rid of the NCR, but that would also put himself at a loss because he will need the Dam if he wants to take Vegas. Vegas is Caesar's ultimate goal, and remember, he's not doing the same thing he did four years ago. He is attacking up front, but he's changed his tactics (or rather, Lanius has changed the tactics - Lanius seems to be a much more intelligent leader than his reputation implies), this is part of a plan that also calls upon simultaneous attacks on other outposts, and a sneak attack through the Dam's lower levels. While Joshua Graham was going to commit to a wholesale slaughter of his own men when he over committed and ran into the trap at Boulder City, Lanius is more cautious and is not willing to destroy this army if he senses or is alerted to a trap.
 * What I think you forgot is that both sides are - after all - dealing with limited ressources. So if Caesar wants to take an invasion route via Searchlight/Nipton, he has to pull off troops from Hoover Dam which in turn would free NCR ressources/soldiers to defend the southern portion. Due to logistical problems, as mentioned, that would probably turn out to be good for the NCR. Which leaves us with the possibility of bluffing - Caesar tries to convince the NCR that he changed his mind by invading the south to let them divert their troops and then launch a full scale attack on Hoover. Or hope that the NCR call his bluff when it isn't one and invade this way. He clearly holds the initiative, so he can try misleading the NCR. But if that goes pear shaped, he lost. So it's a matter of opinion whether gambling on a bluff is a strategic mistake. To put it shortly: status quo is a standoff, it's Caesar's decision whether to end it one way or the other with a gamble or wait, but he can lose as well, and easily.
 * Remember that the Legion has only been able to have the successes around Searchlight, Nipton, and Nelson because they've been operating covertly with small numbers of personnel; Nelson and Cottonwood Cove are their biggest strongholds, and those are honestly nowhere near as defended as they could have been, primarily because the Legion knows that it cannot hold territory anywhere near as well as it can take territory. Legion troops work best as light insurgents, hitting and running. If they assemble lots of troops around Cottonwood Cove or another landing point, that will be very noticeable. The sheer number of boats needed to support troop movement and logistics across the Colorado is going to draw attention, and the NCR is going to respond to such a large force with an overwhelming attack; the only reason they haven't retaken Nelson and pushed the Legion out of Cottonwood Cove is because those locations have such minimal strategic value compared with the Hoover Dam. And we know what happens when a large force is facing an attack while their backs are to the water. A concentrated Legion force moving across the river at any point other than the Dam is going to be attacked, trapped against the river, and destroyed.
 * As far as I'm concerned, Caesar stopped being a cunning strategist when A: you remember he is celebrated as the conqueror of 86 tribes, as in tribals, as most advanced tech owned by them was probably a sharp stick, meaning he goes straight from conquering borderline cavemen to launching a war against a close to modern army, and B: he actually use ressources to kill Kimball. Seriously, no, Kimball alive is borderline useless if not a near foil to the NCR war-effort. Kimball dead could be a martyr for the soldiers to assemble around and unite. House know that, and he is not a warlord, he is a buisenessman. If Caesar really wanted to hurt the leadership of the NCR army, he'd need to start picking off more minor leaders, the like of Hanlon, Moore or Hsu, which is exactly how the NCR beat Graham troops the first time.
 * A couple things wrong with that. Caesar is a cunning strategist -because- he is taking on a modernized army with little more than sharp sticks and simple firearms. It's a self-imposed limitation, and he makes up for it by training better soldiers. This goes back to parallels with the more technologically advanced Western armies taking on far-less advanced troops in various conflicts, and the more advanced armies losing. As for the NCR military leadership, there's a hierarchy. If Oliver dies, Moore is the one who takes his place, if Moore dies, someone else takes her place. As for the minor officers, like Hanlon and Hsu, that's what the Courier can do. The Courier can take the initiative and kill a lot of NCR officers. Caesar doesn't need to order the deaths of minor officers, he concerns himself with heads of state like House and Kimball.
 * Second, the Legion's failure at Hoover Dam is a result of a failed Zerg Rush, compounded by the loss of field officers being picked off by sniper fire. NCR doesn't fight the same way, even if it sounds like Oliver just wants to slug it out. For Caesar, Kimball is a far more valid target than the hundreds of "inferior" NCR officers who oppose Lanius (who is not repeating the tactics used by Graham - he is changing them, remember) at the Second Battle of Hoover Dam - Hanlon, Moore, and Oliver present or not. Kimball is the figurehead, a symbol for a nation that is fighting an unpopular war with his own people. Hanlon is an officer, not the one in charge of the defense the first time, but took up Command at the end. It was Graham's responsibility to handle that matter, and he failed at that. If Kimball dies at the place where he sent countless soldiers to die hundreds of miles from home, the repercussions back in NCR will be extraordinary, with the people of the NCR losing faith in the government and army and, thus, weakening the support and resolve for New Vegas' occupation. It's more of a political and ideological win for Caesar, showing that Caesar is both the god-king of the Legion whose ideals are superior and that the NCR is too weak to defend their leader.
 * I agree with the notion that Caesar's cunning doesn't extend to military strategy. As a general, he's no better than Oliver (motivated by a sense of pride and prestige rather than well thought out tactics). It's much more apparent in how he has been able to create an entire society which follows his ideals unquestioningly and fight a war against a 20th century era (in temrs of technology anyway) power using only 'sharpened sticks' as the above poster puts it. He's manipulative, but not as intelligent a tactician as he likes to think he is.
 * Tactics are the responsibility of Caesar's Legate. Joshua Graham was self-admittedly a terrible strategist and tactician, who mostly got by on sheer combat prowess and brutality. His job was originally just translating Caesar's orders (which worked while uniting the 86 tribes), before he took on more responsibility and started leading the troops into battle (the "up front" approach ended poorly for him at the First Battle of Hoover Dam). Lanius, on the other hand, seems to have a good grasp of warfare - his plan for the second Battle of Hoover Dam involves spreading out the NCR's defenses and attack in different areas like Camp McCarran, using artillery to soften up the NCR, and invading through the water ducts at the Dam. It's a good strategy, only affected by the Courier's involvement. Caesar's strategy of taking Hoover Dam is necessary, for the reasons already stated above - logistics and psychology.

The effects of killing Caesar

 * Murdering Caesar really doesn't have much of an effect on the game when i expected to get major brownie points with the rest of the non legion aligned Factions. Many armies held together by egotistical generals almost immediately fell apart when his legion which had a leadership designed specifically to work under him haven't caused it to fall apart.
 * Firstly, just because some armies fall apart once their leader dies, doesn't mean they all do.
 * Unless that leader is a charismatic military genius who created the entire Legion from the ground-up, and to whom the entire army were beholden to - as it is made clear that Legionnaires are more devoted to Caesar than his ideals. Caesar is to the Legion what Adolf Hitler was to the Nazi Party pre-1933 - the cement that held it together. At the very least, you would have thought his death would have caused the Legion to delay their assault on Hoover Dam, since launching a major military operation following a leadership crisis isn't exactly a good idea.
 * Presumably Legate Lanius took over whatever remnants of Caesar's Legion still existed, since you can't fight him until the end.
 * If you ask Legate about this when confronting him he will say something about how the Legion follows "Caesar's will" even if he is no longer alive.
 * Also, if you go Ides of March on Caesar with Boone and talk to him afterwards he says that NCR intel found out that Caesar established a full line of succession after his death.
 * Crap that's a lot smarter than I thought he was!
 * It really shouldn't be that surprising if you've talked to members of the Legion and especially to Caesar himself in any length. While their behavior bears more than a passing resemblance to the Raiders, they are probably closer to Ashur. They do NOT want to be just another petty warlordom springing out of the chaos: they want to be the ones to create the lasting civilization to reemerge from the nuclear war., and pretty much everything they do is geared towards achieving that. And considering the scope of this project, it isn't surprising that Caesar has set up his state with an eye towards long-running operation (including naturally orderly lines of succession).
 * It also helps that 'Caesar' itself is a title that gets passed down. Caesar was brilliant: he knew that Caesar's Legion will always need a Caesar, and also knew that he was ailing.
 * Isn't it a family name?
 * Caesar was a title and form of address for the Roman emperors. The German "Kaiser" and the Russian "Tsar" titles are derived from Caesar. Apparently it originally was named after Julius Caesar, though.
 * I posted that in my first playthrough where I went NCR.
 * Too bad the Legion is very brutal toward women, using them as nothing more than cattle.
 * Caesar wasn't commanding the Legion's military actions in the Mojave, Legate Lanius was. The battle plan didn't change with Caesar dead, the army was still there and Lanius was terrifying enough to keep it together. That said, with Caesar and Lanius dead and most of the forces they sent west routed, the Legion held lands to the east will probably fall into disarray rather quickly. Caesar's death is a big deal, it just doesn't resolve the rather pressing problem of thousands of dudes in red gearing up to mob the dam.
 * Some other characters in the game (House especially) mention that Caesar's death will have serious long-term consequences, most likely the complete destruction of the legion due to infighting and such, but in the short term not much will change. The Legion will keep going on momentum under Lanius' rule and will probably even fight harder than before, seeing victory as a way of honoring Caesar's memory, but once everything has died down (whether they win or lose) some factions will start making power grabs and so on. You can even see some potential foreshadowing for this with the captured Legion officer in McCarran; the Legion isn't nearly as unified as they want everyone to believe. That said, from an in-game point of view, basically nothing changes after killing Caesar and yes, it really is quite a let down (especially given the difficulty of doing it in the first place).
 * And besides, would Lanius really tell the rest of the Legion Hey, our god-king died. Sorry about that. Don't worry, I got this shit.. It's not unlikely to say that Lanius masked it from the rest of the Legion by saying that Caesar doesn't want to talk right now or something along those lines. At least until he gets crowned the new Caesar, it's probably smarter not to tell the rest of the Legion about it. I doubt they'd be happy.
 * Probably not, considering literally everyone in the Mojave, no matter what backwater, obscure little slum they live in, know about Ceasar's death the minute he dies. Not to mention the Legion member Karl (the one at the Khans camp) also knows about it, and says he'd attack you if you weren't on Khan soil.
 * Graham did think the death of Caesar would mean the end of the Legion, and since he is one of its founding member, I'd trust him that.
 * Yeah, I agree. There have been many governments and ruling powers that have established a line of succession, but that has never stopped countless wars over who takes the throne; we even have a whole trope for it. Besides, it's mentioned that ranks in the Legion is decided by strength rather than something more concrete than alliances or blood, where it's fully possible for one warrior to challenge another for his position. That is very shakey ground for a successful line of succession.

Benny's reasons for digging a grave after shooting the Courier

 * Why does Benny&co even bother to dig a grave for the Courier? A shoddy joke of a grave even. Were they fearing the CSI: New Vegas crew?
 * Benny has the Affably Evil persona down pat. Burying his enemies is just part of his faux-mob-chivalry style.
 * Part of his plan involved the disposing of evidence. He didn't want you reporting to Mr. House (as he stated in 'All Roads'), hence why he killed you, and burying you would buy him extra time to enact his plan. Leave your corpse, and House launches whatever contingency plan he might have because he knows someone has the chip. Bury you, and your arrival appears "delayed" for days, possibly weeks before House even suspects something is up.
 * It would've worked too, if House didn't have Victor follow you around in case such a thing happened.

Lack of romantic options with Veronica

 * Veronica doesn't have enough lines she was my absolute favorite character in the game and I even started over the game as a woman in the hope that she could become a romance option. Yet she doesn't say much stuff when you enter most regions and in general doesnt effect the game.
 * Heh. I wish Bioware handled the inter-character relationships in every game.
 * Veronica's a member of the Brotherhood of Steel initially, a group that very rarely attempts to have any significant influence on anyone unless it is to acquire technology. If you do her quest and you should know exactly why she doesn't have much influence over the game.
 * Bethesda appears to have a policy of no character love interests in their games, which contrasts to bio-ware's apparent policy of stuffing every game full of them. As Publishers I think Bethesda would have enough influence to keep romance down to a minimum, and heck in fallout 1 and 2 most relationships really didn't get much past the friends with benefits stage. So not having such an option would make a bit of sense given the companies and the franchise.
 * To be fair Knights of the Old Republic 2 also didn't have much of a romance option (Obsidian have better things to do than to make a "lights out" cutscene between you and your companion going at it and the companion making a comment on what happened last night between them, cue Boone musing about how you almost reminded him of his wife). Guess they don't want that to detract from the gameplay.
 * This is a post-apocalyptic, pessimistic, cynical game world where prostitution runs rampant almost everywhere. Virtually any quest revolving around two characters in love ends very poorly (though there are a handful of exceptions). It should not be that surprising they don't throw a happy love story with a companion into it. No matter what the setting, Bioware games tend to be overall optisimistic. Black Isle and Obsidian tend to be very dark humor oriented and love stories don't work in dark humor unless they get severely twisted in the process.
 * Umm is everyone forgetting that Christine from Dead Money is Veronica's soulmate and Veronicas still hurting from the breakup caused by Elijah's influence over Christine.
 * "Soulmate" is taking it a bit far; all we really learn is that they were romantically linked in the past.
 * Not even; it's never confirmed ingame that it was Veronica and Christine, just hinted at and implied.

Benny disappearing from the game after you freed him

 * Where the hell does Benny go after you free him from The Fort? I tracked this guy across the whole damn wasteland and now he just up and disappears?
 * Presumably he fled due to fear that Legion Assassins would hunt him down. Kinda shit, I wanted to rule side by side with the most awesome character in the game =<
 * I was disappointed, too. I had to reload three times before I successfully saw him safely out of the Fort. I was hoping he'd be somewhere, but nope. :(
 * It seems that when Bethseda makes WRPGs they have a habit of just disabling (PC Console Command) NPCs when you free them i.e The Survivors of Mothership Zeta.
 * What's worse is that he had offered to work with you, though he then sends his goons to kill you before fleeing. Especially after reading 'All Roads,' I wanted this awesome character to stick around.
 * Except Benny is both a compulsive liar and has the mindset of a child: he wants Vegas and he's not going to share it with anyone else, least of all you.
 * Originally, if you rescued Benny from The Fort, he would later ambush you in an attempt to steal back the Chip, and sneer at you about how being such a little goody two-shoes has finally come back to bite you on the ass.
 * Benny managed to either provoke or double cross most of the major factions, including his own Chairmen, at that point. It isn't shocking that he would choose to leave the area. Even if the Courier had forgiven him, it doesn't mean Legion, NCR, Mr. House, Chairmen, every other New Vegas family, the Great Khans, Mojave Express, and just about everyone else he came into contact with would probably want him dead.
 * Maybe this sets up for the next installment, it would be pretty neat to stumble onto Benny in some future game.
 * That's really doubtful. There is only one, highly specific way to prevent Benny from dying. Based on past history of canon endings, one of the steps required to be in the position to free him would be dodgy to have the Courier perform. If it ever gets acknowledged in canon, he is almost certainly going to be dead.

The source of bombs and fuel for the Boomer

 * Where did the Boomers get the bombs and fuel used at the end?
 * They built the bombs and the planes are nuclear powered.
 * The planes are not nuclear powered. They use alcohol for fuel, there's a still just by the workshop and museum.
 * That's not all; the sheds out in the cornfields have bio-diesel production plants.
 * Nellis is also an airfield. The bombs were already there. You can even see them when you're clearing out the ants. I imagine they also had fuel, too.
 * Everthing else in this setting is nuclear powered and the setting itself is very Atom Punk they very well could have a nuclear powered planes.
 * No, that's not true. That was a shoddy detail added by Bethesda because of Rule of Cool that only appears in Fallout 3 so they could use things like vertibirds and not explain the massive amounts of electricity in use. Virtually nothing in the other games is nuclear powered. It is not unrealistic for an airfield to have enough fuel to allow a bomber to fly a few times. There was also an active oil well until 39 years before New Vegas and there is some fuel stockpiling as a result. Vehicles are fuel powered or electrical. Power generation tends to favor renewable sources, but there is one nuclear power plant (Gecko) and the Vaults.
 * Objection. The car in Fallout 2 was nuclear. Not saying the bomber would be nuclear (that makes no sense), but Fallout was definitely Atom Punk from waaay back in the Black Isle era.
 * Objection Overruled. The Highwayman in Fallout 2 was Electric, as evidenced by the parts that you can acquire for the vehicle, as the materials you use to recharge the vehicle are used as batteries (either microfusion cells or small energy cells used to charge the engine) than nuclear fuel cells.
 * Further overruled. The Gecko plant proves how impractical nuclear power is within the Fallout world. The radiation levels are so high that only ghouls can be in close proximity to the plant and it is a significant danger to nearby settlements.
 * Lastly, the Great War was fought because over the last oil reserves on Earth (the whole of Operation Anchorage is because China invaded Alaska to take the oil pipeline). If oil wasn't the resource of choice for commercial and military vehicles, why are we supposed to believe China would invade the US for it when they could just build nuclear engines? They have nuclear capability afterall.
 * The B-29 Superfortress that the Boomers rebuilt was a World War 2-era bomber rebuilt and refitted with parts from a museum piece. As it's quite unlikely that a museum would keep a piece of history that's been heavily modified with modernized engines, the likelihood of the new engines being anything other than combustion dwindles quite rapidly.
 * Yes and no. Fallout is an alternate history line, so similar technologies are not required to have the same mechanics. However, vertibirds have combustion engines, so it is unlikely a Superfortress would have anything more advanced.
 * Definitely yes. Fallout's history diverges at the end of World War 2, which ends with the invention of the atomic bomb and the harnessing of nuclear energy (this much is even said during the introduction to Fallout). Again, the B-29 was designed as a combustion aircraft well ahead of the implementation of the atomic bomb. Remember that Fallout is based around the concept of what the Nuclear Age would have thought the future would look like. World War 2 is history for that era. And specifically, the "Lady in the Water" is most likely a -real- B-29 that crashed into Lake Mead.

Lack of romantic option with Arcade

 * It just bugs me that I'm totally in Arcade's Friend Zone. Prostitutes are all well and good, but a guy wants some stability. With someone who knows Latin. ;)
 * Prostitutes could be better for us, ah, Confirmed Bachelors. I don't find Santiago very fabulous, I gotta say.
 * Recruit Old Ben (by the North Strip Gate) instead. Much better.
 * Unfortunately, due to a bug, if you recruit Santiago before you recruit Old Ben, you are unable to use Old Ben's "services" or have any further dialogue with him. On top of that, you need to pass a Speech check for him. However, there is also Jimmy in Casa Madrid, whose an improvement over Santiago and will even give you a discount if you have the Confirmed Bachelor perk.
 * Same here with Veronica. Felicia Day as a companion? A gay companion? Aweso- oh wait, I'm in her friend zone. You're teasing me game, aren't you?
 * You want a leggy brunette, Veronica? But my courier is a leggy brunette! D:

Cleaning up the Lucky 38

 * I know it's a very careful, conscious visual design, but it just bugs me that everything is in such disarray. I went around  putting all of the bottles and empty ashtrays into garbage cans. I suppose having to scrape by day to day means you're not overtly concerned with tidying up.
 * The lucky 38 is inexcusable but the rest is justified especially in houses there being an ashtray or two.
 * Maybe the Lucky 38 was closed and sealed up tight the morning the bomb fell, and stay that way until Victor unseal it. Much like the Sierra Madre, there was utterly no one in it to clean up the garbage.
 * Ashtrays were a bad example, but, like, the scads of papers on the floors. Why does no one put their bent cans into a waste basket. Come on, fellows. Pick up your trash. The first step to reclaiming the mantle of humanity is not living like animals... ;)
 * No, the first step is having reliable food, water, and shelter. Once we have dependable farms, clean water, and buildings that aren't going to collapse in a couple years, then we can start talking about trash etiquette. :P
 * Damn you for making so much sense. :P
 * But they do have dependable farms, clean water and buildings that aren't going to collapse in a couple of years.
 * Let's wait a couple of years and see if the buildings are still standing shall we? Besides, how about we try to survive against the deathclaws, raiders, cazadores, NCR & Legion, slavers and a lot more before we grab our brooms?

Why the Wild Card ending is considered to be the best outcome?

 * Why is the Wild Card Ending considered the best? The NCR ending seems perfectly equal to it, if not better in a few respects.
 * I'm guessing the idea that the Wild Card ending is "best" is someone's opinion masquerading as impartial fact. YMMV Trope and so on... it's a complicated story, I don't think there's any way to measure what outcomes are "best" in anything but the broadest terms, and that's all still subjective as hell.
 * But I think we can all agree on what is the worst ending. Victory for the Legion is pure Nightmare Fuel for everyone living in the region.
 * Wild Card is considered the best by many as it allows you to NOT have to be a Kingmaker for someone else. Especially refreshing after the railroaded ending of Fallout 3.
 * Well, if the normal Caesar is still alive, the Legion's rule is brutal, but it creates order. NCR becomes somewhat of an occupying force, and it's implied throughout the game that they're already overextended and thus need to tax the living hell out of their new territory. The Wild Card ending is the best provided you upgrade the Securitrons and make nice with most people. Otherwise, anarchy descends without the NCR MPs to help the Securitrons keep order.
 * Basically, my personal opinion on the gap between the NCR and Wild Card endings is not unlike the meeting of Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuale at the end of the Expedition of the Thousand, where Garibaldi turned over control of the conquered Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in order to pave the way for Italian unification, with the player naturally being Garibaldi. On one hand, handing power over to the NCR allows for it to continue expanding East and thus have a better possibility of reuniting the US into a functioning nation (and making New Vegas more sustainable by reorganization into the whole) run by fairly decent people on pretty damn good principles that often aren't implemented to the degree they should be at the cost of forfeiting your right to control it and guide its destiny. On the other hand, refusing to hand power and becoming the ruler of New Vegas means that control is now in your hands (for better or worse) to develop New Vegas as you see fit rather than in the hands of some fairly untrustworthy politicians and Bureaucrats on the coast at the cost of it being surrounded on all sides and now having to stand up and become sustainable on its own with threats on all sides. In the end, it really comes down (IMHO) to exactly how you think your character will govern and how New Vegas will fare in either case and how badly you want to see the US reunited.
 * The "best" ending is subjective, especially without a significantly longer epilogue of the events.
 * NCR is overall a fairly idealistic country with potential for unifying a large part, if not the entire, country under their rule. However, they are inefficient, overextended, and have some bureaucratic corruption.
 * Legion is incredibly pragmatic and has the best chance at unifying the country into a single, civilized society. Their brutality in the game is more to do with the fact they are attempting to integrate New Vegas into their society, which requires stamping out any other tribal or national identities in the process. Very brutal, but somewhat justifiable because the exact same strategy worked for Rome. It might be difficult to sympathize with them due to their tactics, but for the most part, they aren't as arbitrarily evil as most people seem to think.
 * As long as conquered peoples paid their taxes, the Roman Empire left conquered provinces largely to their own devices where customs and beliefs were concerned, as long as these practices didn't contravene Roman law. Caesar's Legion is taking it a step beyond, forcibly extinguishing local customs, languages, and so on. The Legion's platform is culturcide. The actual Roman Empire was more measured, inasmuch as they recognized the value of both the carrot and the stick, showed the people that they were better off under Roman rule, and let natural assimilation run its course. I don't disagree that there are many many shades of gray in this game, but drawing such an exact parallel whitewashes Ceasar's Legion a good deal.
 * Except the Roman Republic and Empire lasted for a long time and did not use the exact same standards for conquered people. Yes, in some situations, they left conquered provinces alone, but this was primarily pragmatic than policy. Those regions that were left alone were too far out there to be reliably supported in the event of a revolt. In addition, the Romans were very well known for committing genocide and culturcide. Caesar in particular is notable for using genocidal tactics, his campaign in France is particularly notable. The current French civilization has very little connection to the original inhabitants of that area.
 * Unless the Legate takes over who turns it into a "warrior's paradise" where only bloodthirsty warriors (unaddicted ones at least) prosper and survive. Compared to Caesar's rule, the Legate's conquest shows even less mercy.
 * House is pretty practical option. He'll keep New Vegas running, but has no other goals beyond that.
 * You might want to actually go through the conversation trees. House has extremely ambitious goals; he intends to use the tourist revenue of New Vegas to expand his infrastructure to research and build colony ships that will take the species off their nuclear-blasted, ruined homeworld. If you believe he can follow through, and if you believe him when he says he has no intention of oppressing the individuality of people, siding with him is a very attractive option indeed. He makes a very good argument against the NCR [paraphrased:] "If you want to see where democracy takes you, you need only look out the window."
 * Well, if you choose the ending, House ruthlessly oppresses the people of New Vegas. Anyone who expresses dissent mysteriously disappears and his Securitrons brutally suppress any organizations against House. Indeed, the best option seems to be the Courier taking over New Vegas, as with the upgraded army he maintains order after the NCR and the Legion are driven out and turns Vegas into a paragon of independent freedom in the Wastes.
 * Independent is potentially the best or worst option depending on the actions of the Courier during the game. The Courier is the only "faction" leader that can be completely evil (if the player chooses him to play in that manner), which means it is not automatically the best option.
 * Yeah, Independent seems to be the most role-play-ey option of the four. It really relies on the player to just imagine what they build as the future of New Vegas based on how they wanted the game to play out. So in theory, it could be the either the best or worst ending depending on your imagination.
 * There's only that little problem of Yes Man becoming more "assertive." So you've just put Vegas into the hands of a possibly psychopathic AI (remember how he never questioned the morality of your choices?). Yes Man is in control. You are not.
 * AI can go either way in Fallout, but I'd remind you that Yes Man is Yes Man. Question your choices? He keeps reminding you that he can't criticise you. That gives him something to be bitter about, though.
 * Well, this troper's courier has killed his far share of robots, one more? That'll be at best, a foot note.
 * You may be a level 50 {soon as the last two dlc are released} Courier but as Yes Man says if you talk to him about killing you and destroying him. his personality will move to another securitron even if you destroy one. say you maxed your science and try to write a virus to destroy him he can seriously screw you up if not with securitrons, self destruct sequences, or blowing up your dam.
 * There's also the implication that Yes Man is learning from the Courier. He goes along with whatever he's ordered to do, and in the end become more "assertive" - which is exactly what the wild card ending is about! The Courier is the goddamn mailman, yet you decide that the Platinum Chip falling into your hands(the ability to decide the fate of the Mojave) brings with it the right to use it to your ends. And when Yes Man discovers coding in the Lucky 38 databases granting him free will, he decides that that brings with it the right to use it to his own ends as well. Yes Man is following in the Courier's footsteps! If you're a vicious asshole in conquering New Vegas, Yes Man will continue in that vein, leading the Securitron army on a conquest of Earth. If you're pragmatic, just out to consolidate power for your own ends, Yes Man will turn New Vegas into a fortress town. But if you hold to "the ideals of independence" and go out of your way to save as many people as possible, Yes Man will maintain New Vegas as a utopia!
 * Word of God has now confirmed that the 'assertiveness upgrade' just means that Yes Man will only serve the courier, not just any shmuck that comes across him. So that means the future of the Mojave rests on just how good and competent the courier is. And if a player did everything they could to make the Mojave a better place, then who's to say that's not the best ending?
 * For the Mojave, anyway. One could argue that the NCR is in a better position to bring civilization and democracy (dysfunctional democracy, but still democracy) to other areas of the former US (including Arizona and Utah, should the Legion collapse)... but that doesn't the Mojave will be better off than in the Wild Card ending. Indeed, under the Courier the Mojave might be one of the most important areas of the former US, while in the NCR the Mojave would merely be one state amongst many (an important state, to be sure, but no more than Shady).
 * The Wild Card ending, I found a bit...contradictory, the first slides saying the Securitron MK 2 quickly put down the Chaos with minimum bloodshed, only to have the following saying the mess got worse than ever (Freeside, a safe haven!?). What.
 * The "Freeside a safe haven" thing is probably intended to suggest that NCR citizens are not looked on kindly in the rest of New Vegas (Freeside is pointed as a safe haven for NCR citizens, and only if the Kings and the NCR made peace), rather than Freeside being safe for average people, compared to the rest of New Vegas.
 * It's explicitly stated that NCR citizens are generally not welcome in other parts of New Vegas. For example, most folks who venture into Westside tend to disguise the fact that they're outsiders, for instance, as locals have had to protect themselves from outsiders, no thanks to the NCR or Mr. House. Stuff like that has lingering resentment. On the other hand, if the NCR and the Kings patch things up, it becomes a safe haven as NCR citiznes aren't targeted for violence by locals or vice versa. Nobody said an Independent New Vegas was a Happily Ever After situation, just the best they can do.
 * If you do all of the peace treaties with NCR, you do manage the get most of the tech-heads (including the Office of Science and Industry I suppose) in the Mojave under the same banner and cooperating (the Boomers doing trade, natch), and the Followers get security and resources to expand healthcare and education. Wildcard is Wildcard, though, so as far as we know Independent Vegas can end up anywhere.
 * Hell, that's pretty much the whole point; maybe the Mojave will prosper, maybe it will turn into a hellhole, but at least it has a chance to decide its own destiny rather than have it chosen for them.

Companions staring at you as you have sex with prostitutes.

 * Why are all of the companions creepy voyeurs; every time you hire a prostitute they just sort of stand there watching you. It creeps me out when I have Lily there. Couldn't they just wait outside?
 * Worse when you sleep with Sarah because the second you go past a certain spot it immediately stops you from being to influence the game.
 * You can just ask them to wait somewhere else, then go back and get them when you're finished, you know.
 * Eh at this point I don't stop them because it is hilarious to have all the companions in the game (I'm on PC and have a mod) standing there watching.
 * That and a voyeuristic Felicia Day is Fetish Fuel to the nth degree.

Lack of information about the other couriers.

 * Who is the person who turned down delivering the Platinum Chip once he saw the Courier's name on the list? Benny? No, why would he do that? Besides, he doesn't seem to actually know anything about you. House? But he only seems to take note of you after you manage to survive a gunshot to the head and tracking Benny all over the Mojave. Nash seems to think it's someone who knew the Courier beforehand.
 * Yeah, that thread is just left hanging at the end.
 * It is particularly bothersome if one happens to stumble across the "Canyon Wreckage" location west of Primm. Whole place is covered in graffiti directed at Courier Six (i.e. you). Set-up for some DLC? Holdover from a dropped plot line? In-universe example of Nothing Is Scarier, leaving the Courier wondering about some unknown element in the Wasteland that knew what was going to happen? Yes? Arggghh...
 * The Dead Money DLC heavily foreshadows two future DLC packs will address this very thing, right down to a Courier vs. Courier battle
 * Rumour has it that it was Ulysses, the cut companion.
 * It's DLC foreshadowing. If you look on one of the pieces of wreckage, you see 'Lonesome Road' written. Lonesome Road is the name of some upcoming DLC. In addition, there's also 'The Divide', which is mentioned several times in Dead Money.
 * It's now confirmed that Ulysses was the original Courier Six and that Lonesome Road resolves that.

The absence of an NCR run radio station.

 * We know from Fallout 2 that one of the reasons why the NCR managed to expand peacefully most of the time is because they have a very good propaganda department that wins over the hearts and mind of the population. And in New Vegas we can see that the NCR has nailed up propaganda posters all over the place so we can think that the republic plans to do the use the same trick to gain the support of the people in the Mojave Region. So why didn't they set up their own radio station in the area? Radio can be a very effective way to get the support of the locals and increase the moral of their troops. It isn't like that they lack the money or resources to do so, they can easily broadcast from one of their military base or their embassy. I can't think of a reason why they haven't done so.
 * Maybe they're not allowed to per their treaty with House? It would make sense, since House would logically forbid such a useful tool in their propaganda machine.
 * Yeah. House has near complete control of the Strip as is, and the NCR presence is only there because he allows it, and even then he forbids them to have weapons. Anything resembling laying the groundwork for a takeover would result in House giving them the boot.
 * If they ever decide to NCR Radio should have surfer music or something equally "Californian".
 * Yes walking through the Mojave while The Beach Boys "Surfin' Safari" plays, certainly would fit Fallout.

Why do people consider the Bitter Springs Massacre to be NCR's fault?

 * The entire situation with the Great Khans just bugs me a lot. I know the Bitter Springs Massacre is suppose to make us feel sorry for the Khans and question the NCR. But the Khans feel more like an Asshole Victim instead of victims of NCR rule. Just look at the Khan's actions in the older games. They are NOT good people! The Khans has been enemies of NCR before the republic was even founded. If it wasn't for the Vault Dweller's intervention in the first game, they would have wiped out the NCR in its early years. Even after the republic was founded, the Khan have spent years trying to overthrow their government and sabotage them from within. Sometime after Fallout 2, the NCR finally got strong enough to kick the Khans out of California and into Nevada. And what do the Khans do? They cry about how they were being 'oppressed' by the NCR. Seriously, do they expect a group of people that they have been repeatedly bullied and attacked for more then a century to treat them kindly?
 * After the NCR expansion reached Nevada, what was the Khan's first reaction? "So, the NCR is moving into the area, this is awesome! Lets rob, murder, pillage and rape their civilian settlers as they struggle to get a foothold. Just like we did in the good old days! On top of that, lets sell highly addictive drugs and make the wastelands an even worse place to live!" But to the Khans surprise, the NCR refused to just sit there and take it like they did back when they were still Shady Sands. They fought back and attack their main settlement. The battle resulted in the deaths of some of the Khan's children and elderly (Which was an accident that the NCR actually feels sorry about). And even if it was a deliberate attack, it was just like what the Khans has been doing to the NCR for more then a century.
 * Overall, the entire situation is a major Kick the Son of a Bitch moment for me. NCR's actions were at worst, an example of Pay Evil Unto Evil or to show us how Good Is Not Nice. But in no way were the Khans sympathetic at all.
 * The NCR's actions were regrettable, and disgusting if they were deliberate and not the result of miscommunication, but as for the Khans... The children were innocents and it's deplorable, but a society that lives by the sword, dies by the sword. Behave as the Khans do and they shouldn't be surprised when innocents get caught in the cross-fire. I don't feel zero sympathy for the Khans, but you can't make a decision to be raiders and thugs and cry foul over the consequences. Not much sympathy at all.
 * I think you're mistaking the fact that we have the option of hearing the Khans' side of the story for meaning we're supposed to feel bad for them. We're not supposed to feel anything in particular for anyone present. Yes, the Khans' feel wronged by what happened in Bitter Springs. That's because the people you're asking to tell you about Bitter Springs... are the Khans. They're not going to go, "Oh, yeah, we totally deserved that awful massacre because we're HORRIBLE ASSHATS. Have I told you how evil I am today?" Ask anyone involved in an event and his opinion will be biased by which side he's on. That doesn't mean you're supposed to agree with him. That's just his side.
 * Have you guys ever talked to a NCR official higher up about the Khans? They knew most of the Bitter Springs victims were innocents and ordered their troops to kill them all anyway.
 * That was Lee Oliver who is genuinely off his rocker.
 * The fact that it was a veritable war crime is only reinforced by people who aren't Khans showing hatred for the NCR after Bitter Springs (Manny mentions this). For most of the Wasteland, it was like the 'Battle' of Wounded Knee. It didn't matter if the Khans were a belligerent organization: the NCR still rolled into one of their biggest settlements and slaughtered it.
 * The Great Khans are a splinter faction of the original Khans, not the same group. Presumably the more belligerent ones would have joined the New Khans. Granted, they were by no means an innocent group, but they weren't as aggressive as the actual Khans either. So it can go either way.
 * On one hand, the NCR had no real way of differentiating between the Khans and Great Khans, so it is only natural they would try to wipe them out as soon as they could.
 * On the other hand, the Great Khans probably would not have attacked the NCR as a whole like the actual Khans. They relocated to Bitter Springs to get away from the NCR. It could be taken as a bit mean spirited to wipe them out at that point.
 * It's not mean-spirited, it's good tactics. When you finally have an enemy on the run to their safehold, you don't give them time to recover or regroup their forces, you take the chance to defeat them once and for all. And that worked well - except for the tragic discovery that kids where there.
 * Talk to Bitter-Root, a former Great Khan who was there at the time of the "battle", and he'll tell you that the group got what was coming to them, even if his adoptive father and everyone else thinks otherwise. Read from that what you will.
 * Granted I haven't played any of the previous Fallout games, but the Great Kahns...didn't actually seem that bad. They're not your usual raiders who kill you on sight for your 50 bottle caps and clothes. (If paid by Benny, but not for 50 caps and your clothes!) They're actually talk to you and civilly too. Yeah, their initiation ceremony is cruel, but Jerry is an example that it's not "Join Or Die". And Bitter Springs was a horrible event, the Mai Lai of the NCR that proved that thier faults were doing more than getting thier own troops killed, they were getting innocent civilians killed too. Talk to Jack and Diane, and you'll see a deep abiding love within the group.
 * Did you talk to the leader? He explicitly tells you they attacked the NCR as soon as they showed up near New Vegas. At best, they are Affably Evil about the situation.
 * True, but they've been driven out of the NCR before, they probably weren't interested in taken the NCR's new arrival sitting down.
 * But the reason why the Khans were driven out of the Republic was because they started the war on the NCR in the first place. They repeatedly attacked their original founding town, kidnapped and possibly tortured their most popular president when she was still a teenager, and even tried to over throw their government in its early years. So the NCR have ever reason to think that the Great Khans are no different from the original Khans. If they really want to change, couldn't they at lease send out an emissary to have peace negotiations with the NCR? But no, they just attack random NCR civilians the moment they showed up. Honestly, the Khans have no rights to cry about their brutal treatment anymore then ex-Nazis have about getting hunted down by the Mossad.
 * Actually, we don't know who really started the conflict between the Khans and the NCR as it predates either group. Both (Along with the Vipers and Jackals) are descended from different factions in the Vault 15 Civil War. Also your comment makes no sense. THE ORIGINAL KHANS WERE BAD SO THERE'S NO REASON TO THINK THE GREAT KHANS ARE DIFFERENT. Plus, I mean, Nazi War Criminals were alive when the holocaust happened. They were actually culpable. The current crop of Khans? Not so much.
 * The Nazi comparison is invalid. The Nazi's were always a minority in Germany. Virtually every war crime was exclusively committed by Nazi paramilitary and military groups, but some units never actually participated in them. The term "Nazi" can refer to non-combatants, but the German military was mostly made up of people who were not members of the party.
 * On the other hand, all the Great Khans are waving around the same logo as the original Khans, except they added the word "Great." They attacked the NCR as soon as they entered the area, which actually marked them as the most aggressive variant of the Khans from the point of view of the NCR (the original Khans weren't that aggressive and the New Khans spent a lot more time plotting rather than actually attacking).
 * Also, keep in mind that the Great Khans would still be culpable for their raids against NCR settlements, which means, they also almost definitely killed, murdered, raped and captured non-combatants and children.
 * And they have a trading alliance with the Fiends, ensuring that they can be drugged-up enough to commit all their horrible atrocities. Even Diane, who seems pretty okay, is upset that a horrible bastard like Motor-runner is dead because he was a great customer; nevermind that his Fiends slaughtered every innocent person in Vault 3.
 * The morality issue isn't that the NCR attacked the Khans in retaliation for the Khans attacking them, it's that they knowingly (well the people giving the orders knew, the ones actually carrying them out didn't know till it was to late) slaughtered innocent women and children while doing so.
 * During Boone's side quest, he points out what is actually kind of obvious in hindsight: the Great Khans are all combatants. They're trying to be a Proud Warrior Race - they only give someone a name after they've had a "beat down," they pick a fight with anyone they don't trade with, and their raiding parties have just as many women and boys as they have men. Just look at Bitter Root - he was a child at Bitter Springs, and had not only enough rage built up from his violent treatment to turn on his own parents, but the physical and psychological ability to kill them. A bunch of female and young-looking Khans running at you does not make you think "don't shoot," it makes you think "shoot faster."
 * Furthermore, if you talk to Bitter-Root, he will tell you that his father taught him how to shoot a gun via taking potshots at NCR civilians -- including children. Karma is a bitch?
 * Isn't it because the NCR is supposed to have the moral high ground, being the de facto "good" faction? I mean, yeah, it was possibly a big case of Kick the Son of a Bitch, but the "good guys" aren't supposed to cut civilians down in swathes, regardless of who they are.
 * I'd just like to add that If you don't remember any of the stuff from fallout 1 or 2 or tactics or vanburen or the bible or anywhere else involving the khans. The story has a familiar ring to it. Longhouse and teepees and an "evil" governmental organization bent on screwing them every which way but lose. When you hear stories about white men raping indian women and stealing their land and giving them diseases and such you start to see the great khans in a similar light especially considering the fact they are a tribe. and colonel moore says if you manage to ally them with ncr "And if we need to kick them out and take their land later" You really pity the great khans. This troper has native american/indian relatives but I remember that the khans and other groups were all from Vaults according to the intro. And why should we weep for them considering all the dead people who didn't make it into vaults
 * Also we probly shouldn't take Bitter-Root's words as 100% true, half the things he says comes form the fact that he had crappy parents and the fact that he keeps insistening the khans are to blame seems to be more of him trying to cope with the truma was seeing dozens of people being cut down and the fact he started killing them too. Look how messed up Chance, another Khan who was there, was. Also a few of you seem to forget that the Khans's arn't like the Raiders form Fallout 3 or the Fiends they don't rape and murder for the lulz for the most part they try to avoid needless killings (no one will trade with you). Which is why people, even members of the NCR don't seem to mind them that much. So in the end what really happen was the NRC shows up, the Khans start harassing there carvans who came too close to Britter-Spring in a "don't come here" matter and NRC goes "mess with us again will yeah?"
 * What are you talking about? You clearly didn't play this game well enough. NCR has always hated the Khans because they were drugged-up raiders who have always been historically vicious and brutal and hateful. Prior to the Bitter Springs massacre, way back in Fallout 1 - yes, the Khans were exactly like drugged up raiders, raping and pillaging. Fallout 2, even the survivors, the New Khans, were completely devoted to the idea of destroying the NCR over the destruction of the original Khans. Why do you think the Great Khans started attacking the NCR in the Mojave? The Great Khans had taken to raiding NCR outposts, and killing caravans, out of spite against them. The NCR attacked Bitter Springs as retaliation and to put an end to the raiding against the NCR. The -trauma- was for the NCR soldiers to open fire on women and children, who would be non-combatants in civilized conditions. The Great Khans are not civilized, and women and children would take shots at NCR women and children just as much as an adult male combatant.

The abuse that the FOA have to suffer through.

 * Can the Followers just not get a break? I mean at best they get to be an extension of the NCR's goodwill, one of the things they hoped to not be. Other options are an 'encouraged' withdraw by the NCR, a permitted retreat by Caesar, annihilation by the Legate, regulated by House, or swamped due to Independence. Not to mention how the Brotherhood slaughtered a group because Veronica DARED to leave, and how Benny exploited and used one of them to make Yes Man, the Kings treat them like an annoying little sibling, and the only people willing to help them are the Garrets who are pretty much part of the problem!
 * Nope. In Fallout, wry cynicism permeates every narrative thread. Blessed are the cheesemakers! No feel-good, Kumbaya Gene Roddenberry shit here. *sigh*
 * My problem is that the NCR had no fucking reason to push them around. They provide medical assistance and teach the people who live in your country and you don't even need to pay them so what do you do push them around.
 * I think it's an issue of loyalty, if the Followers decide to be good little NCR subjects and heal and teach who the NCR wants, then there's no problem. If they continue to stay neutral, and help anyone and everyone (For example, how they hook up with the Khans in the Northwest in one ending) then the NCR isn't going to want them around, plus let's not forget that Caesar was a Follower, maybe a little resentment there.
 * There's also the issue of the Followers obstinately demanding more independence for New Vegas, which they prioritize over anything else - even stability. Hell, one of the Followers even murders an NCR Corporal because he discovered that the Followers were re-routing NCR water supplies to Westside, which was undermining the NCR farms. The Followers and the NCR share a similar outlook; they'd get along fine if the former would just stop whining all the time.
 * On the contrary: if Caesar wins, he allows the Followers safe passage from New Vegas out of respect for his origins, even if they themselves are ashamed of having produced him. The NCR allows them to stay (maybe), and they do fairly well under the Wild Card ending if you upgrade the Securitrons to keep order.
 * And to be honest, the NCR offering an olive branch to the Followers is a sign of things getting better for them, with more resources means they will be able to do a lot more than usual. They can't expect to save the wasteland themselves but every bit of help is good for them. Even with strings attached.
 * The Followers' good ending (involving the NCR) is just bugged due to bad scripting. Kind of like Fallout 1 and 2! Thankfully, it's easy to fix.
 * It's not really just the Followers getting picked on. They are pretty much the definition of Good Is Dumb, taking absurd stands on issues on principle, no matter how obviously moronic it is. On top of that, Good Is Not Nice members are also rather common, which is really bad for a group that is primarily pacifist. This tends to make situations they get in worse. As a whole, the NCR isn't that much less idealistic than the Followers, since the FOA had a big impact on the founding principles of the NCR, but, and this is the reason the NCR does much better than the FOA, the NCR leaders are smart enough to realize when they need to be pragmatic about certain issues.
 * It shouldn't be surprising that using all their resources to fix short term issues ends up causing the group to fail over the long term.
 * The Followers are essentially most successful group in their field in the mainland of the NCR actually they are the group that trains almost all of the doctors in the entire NCR it just so happens that one mission is not to successful due to the war making it harder for them. How is that failing?
 * That's a not quite accurate assessment of that situation. They are training almost all of the doctors in the NCR, but virtually every doctor leaves the Followers immediately after they finish training. These doctors are in no way contributing to the Followers. At most, the Followers are partially successful because one of their goals is to help the wasteland, but their more important goal is to spread their ideals, which the doctors they train mostly do not.

The lack of option to unite Veronica with her lover.

 * Why couldn't you reunite Veronica and her nameless former lover or romanced her that would be a big crowning moment of heartwarming that as The Woobie she could sorely use.
 * Because she's in another state.
 * Not exactly...although she's not in the Mojave, but she's not one who will voice much of a complaint.
 * Actually, it's implied that her lover is Christine from the Dead Money DLC. However, since she chose to stay there, it's pretty unlikely that you'll ever get to reunite the two.
 * She was a brotherhood assassin, send in to kill Elijah, who Veronica considered a mentor figure, maybe Christine simply do not want to be reunited with Veronica, and that's before you factor in how messed up both the Think tanks and Dean Domino left her.
 * It bugs me that you couldn't even ask Christine about Veronica. You can connect the dots and figure out she had a lover in the BOS, so why couldn't you ask her? Even if she said she couldn't go back, for whatever reason, at least you'd know why.

The NCR Ranger Combat Armor.

 * So about that NCR Ranger Combat Armor. It's plastered all over the promotional material, it's on the cover of the game, it was even one of the first things you saw during the Teaser Trailer (aside from Victor and the city of New Vegas itself)!!! Obsidian MADE you want that armor, MADE you try to get it as one of the first things you did upon starting the game. But three things made it slightly not worth it: First, you couldn't get it until you were at least 17, because that's the level the only people wearing it (NCR Ranger Veterans) spawn. Second, said Veterans don't spawn until you've progressed significantly far in the Main Quest (long after you've finally visited the Strip). And third, wearing it counts as an NCR disguise, so you can't wear it all the time lest you have people shooting at you when you're trying to be allies. But still, it's not only the most powerful non-power-armor armor in the game, but it's also (arguably) the best-looking one, too. I just wish they could have made it easier to obtain.
 * There is another, easier way to get it. In Novac, there is a character called Ranger Andy in one of the bungalows. He sends you to check on a nearby ranger base
 * the corpses are probably wiped clean by now in my game, but I'll keep that in mind.
 * Nope. You find Ranger Medium armor, or at least that's what this troper found. It's basically combat armor, but not the Badass Longcoat and riot gear that the promoted Ranger gear is.
 * Checked again. Shame on me...
 * The game has the player make their own character. What else were they supposed to use? It was either that or using Power Armor for yet another cover.
 * Also, contrary to popular belief, its not particularly useful armor. The higher mark Combat Armor provides equal to better protection and can be cheaply and easily repaired with requiring the Jury Rig perk.
 * It's not that the Veteran Armor is particularly good, it's that it's freakin' badass while providing a decent protection. The Veteran Ranger Armor's FO3 equivalent, the Regulator Duster, provided 10 less protection so it was rather Awesome Yet Impractical. The Regulator Duster returns in New Vegas, but unfortunately it has a DT of 0...
 * The NCR Ranger Armor definitely qualifies as Awesome but Impractical. It provides 2-4 more DT than high end light armor you can easily get before it even shows up, while having essentially the same effective weight as heavy armor or power armor (technically, they weigh more, but the +Strength most have increases carry weight). You could take light armor with barely a noticeable drop in DT, which is lighter and has special perks tied to it. Or you could get easier to find, more effective power armor. Even if you have to use medium armor, higher end combat armor has the same DT, is significantly lighter, easier to find, and much easier to repair without Jury Rigging. Oh, and all of those don't count as a disguise, so NPCs won't shoot you on the principle because "shoot person in NCR disguise" trumps your actual reputation.
 * I found the NCR Ranger Combat Armor to be Awesome Yet Practical. No light armor in the game comes close to providing as much protection except the Sierra Madre Armor, Reinforced, (18 DT compared to Ranger Combat Armor's 20), and your not likely to get that armor until near the end of the game since your likely at least level 20 by the time you start Dead Money. Also, it provides very high DT, so much so that Legion and raider enemies shooting you with anything smaller than an Anti-Material rifle pretty much do 20 % damage. It's pretty easy to find early even if you do side with the NCR (like I did). Take the Abilene Kid LE BB Gun. Go to Camp Forlorn Hope after destroying/activating the Securitron army. There should be 4 sniper nests scattered around the camp. Go in the nests. There should be an NCR Veteran Ranger in each one of them. Get behind the Ranger, crouch and move until 'hidden' (extremely easy), then shoot the NCR Ranger in the back of the head. Rinse and repeat for all four of the nests, and use the armor to repair each other. The Rangers also happen to have 150 .308 rounds (each), and all carry sniper rifles. So with one visit to Forlorn Hope, I had fully repaired NCR Ranger Combat Armor (the best non-powered armor in the game), 600 .308 rounds (also used by This Machine), which I had just gotten), and a fully repaired sniper rifle (essentially 3000 early caps). With the armor and This Machine, I just went around killing everything. It was really easy, I hardly took any damage. And yes, this combination looks awesome.
 * Another quicker and easier way to get the armor is to just power level your NCR rep as fast you can, once you hit idolized you get a key to the NCR safe house that has a set of the armor stashed in it.
 * There's (Or at least there should) be a trend here. Brotherhood Power Armor was the cover star of Fallout, and actual usable suits of that was rare. Enclave Power Armor was the cover star of Fallout 2, and actual usable suits of that was rare (Heck, if you had a fair amount of followers with you, some still had to put up with Advanced Brotherhood Power Armor while you and your bestest friends hogged the few suits of Enclave Mk.II). Tactics... Well, the trend falls apart here to the point where everybody and their dogs had their own family set of Power Armor in the closet (I couldn't have been the only one that reversed-pickpocketed the entire Lyons squad with Hellfire Armor for the assault of the purifier). Granted, NCR Ranger CA isn't Power Armor, but anything that makes a player pick up the box thinking "I want that" ought to be pretty damn rare.
 * One of your complaints is partially rectified in the Honest Hearts DLC. A personalized version worn by the Desert Rangers, the NCR Ranger's precursors, can be found in a cave near the Sorrow's camp. It has an arguably cooler reskinning, no faction affiliation, and is a couple of points higher in DT than the normal armor. It's still hard to get if you're underleveled, though.
 * Fully solved in The Lonesome Road -- full Riot Armor and helmet are available -- the stuff the NCR looted for designs.

Chief Hanlon's goal of sabotaging the defense of Hoover Dam.

 * Okay...so in 'Return to Sender' what exactly was the goal of  As far as I understood it, he thought that Gen. Oliver was a moron who's battle plan for the dam would get a lot of NCR soldiers killed. (True.) So, why exactly was he
 * He thought that he could rattle things up to tip the scale of the fighting in someones favor.
 * He also thought that a drop in morale caused by the erroneous data would help convince the NCR to pull out of what he thought was a hopeless fight. If you let him continue,
 * I have to add onto this. Why the hell was his data so stupid and childish?  Who would believe this crap?
 * The Deathclaw remark was a reference to Fallout Tactics and wasn't meant to be believable. Legion Super Mutants Caesars Legion are huge fans of martial prowess Super Mutants are giant hulking monsters that could kill a man in a punch Caesar's Legion was never going on about purity just destroying the cultural identity thus they would probably become Elite Mooks for the legion if they joined.
 * I took the dialogue with him as an implication that he is both very tired of the war and not completely clear of mind. Heck, with his possible suicide in mind, and the fact that no speech option exist to convince him to stop the bullshit (it take the death of goddamn Caesar to do that), I believe he was in fact seriously depressive.

Arcade's combat lines

 * Petty petty petty but one of Arcade's combat lines is "I should have stayed in NCR" without an article and it hits my ear like a sledgehammer every time. "I should have stayed in the NCR", right? I mean, there are cases where one says, for example, "US" without a "the" but not in that construction. A lot of characters say "the NCR". But this is a small quibble and it's not grammatically incorrect, I guess, because geographic names and articles are governed by all sorts of precedents and vary from language to language anyway... It Just Bugs Me.
 * The capital of the NCR is simply called NCR in Fallout 2, and it's never referred to as Shady Sands by anyone else.

Lack of a flashlight.

 * I felt this in Fallout 3 as well, but...a flashlight, a flashlight, my kingdom for a flashlight. Or rather, my Pipboy for a flashlight. I died a solid three times of radiation poisoning in Vault 34, having depleted all my RadAway and even taken a few Rad-X, and was eventually reduced to running, howling with rage, through the vault, trying to find some way out through the already maze-like structure made all the worse by all the damn cave-ins. But worst of all was how dark it all was: the Pip Boy illuminated whatever was a few feet in front of me, which ended up inevitably being whatever wall or debris barrier I'd run into. I finally got out, with the contents of the armory, but Jesus H. Christ. It was a whole lot of Fake Difficulty along with a Dethroning Moment Of Suck that almost ruined the game for me. And all because the developers decided to irradiate the entirety of this pitch-black vault.
 * Did you try using your Pip-Boy map of the area?
 * Turn your TV/monitor brightness up a couple notches. Seriously, I had no trouble at all seeing in Vault 34, or in any other part of the game.
 * I didn't have a problem with the darkness either, though vault 34 was incredibly maze-like and confusing, and I don't even use my pip-boy light because it's annoyingly bright.
 * It's dark in that vault? I left my brightness and gamma on default settings and the entire inside had a lot of red light everywhere. If you have a problem seeing you might want to stock up on Cateye (or just turn up your damn brightness.)
 * you have a flashlight, just hold down your pip-boy button for a few seconds to turn it on.
 * Even limited to just the supplies in Vault 34, you should be able to last hours in the vault. Also "I went storming into the radiated vault without supplies" is a player created issue. You can clearly tell the Vault is irradiated even if you completely ignore the Geiger counter due to all those glowing barrels.
 * Also, you have the Pip Boy light, a perk that improves your vision in the dark (albeit you could only use it if you entered the vault at night), a drug that does the same thing, and several weapons with night vision scopes.
 * Pop a Catseye, or take the Friend of the Night perk. Problem solved.
 * And after Old World Blues, don ye old Hazmat Darklight Cowl.

No Legion/Khans friendly companions.

 * I was annoyed we didn't have a Legion friendly companion, a Khan/former Legion soldier who is now working with the player and has an amiable relationship with the Legion's soldiers and the only one who the Legate treats as an equal of sorts. The idea is that he is the only one who would benefit from a Legion Ending while suffering under House or NCR's rule of the wasteland. A bloody good shame. Hell we didn't get a Token Evil Teammate while we have a companion who gets pissed off if we have low karma. Why not a companion who won't join if you have high karma
 * Why can't it be a high karma member of the Legion who is incredibly cynical and believes Caesar is a better ruler than the NCR.
 * Most quests with the Legion involves massacres in some way, there is very little room except for the Courier to have a Legion member to be high Karma.
 * That would have been cool. Maybe a Legion member who you really, really impress once your standing with them is high enough, inspiring that fanatical loyalty that they have for their commanders. (Characterized nothing like the Biggest Fan dude from Oblivion of course.) You could have been given a kind of... honorary rank in the Legion. And this guy could have been your right-hand man or something, always ready to do whatever you commanded.
 * Apparently there was a Pro-Legion companion, Ulysses. He's on one of the cards coming with the Collectors Edition, and his suit is the same as other Legion members, though he was cut from the game for unknown reasons and may return in future DLC.
 * Other than sharing a suit with Legion, there is no indication he has even interacted with them, let alone is actually loyal to it. Legion is the most likely antagonist to the player. Ulysses is designed to be antagonistic to the player. That alone might be why they shared a suit.
 * Ah, cool. Hope he makes an appearance in some DLC.
 * As much evidence there is that Ulysses was Pro-Legion, I can't see it happening. He's extremely loyal and patriotic to pre-war America, not the Legion. Which could make him the survivor from Vault 11...
 * He's mentioned in Dead Money, where he's apparently something of The Rival/Arch Nemesis to The Courier. Honest Hearts hints that he's a member of the Frumentarii.
 * Word of God is he was the Legion-friendly companion, but they ended up having to cut him out. The recycled Ulysses of the DLCs... has another outlook on things, though he used to be a Frumentarius.
 * Or, perhaps a Legion deserter who's lost faith in the doctrine but feels like he has nowhere to go because he doesn't automatically believe non-Legion civilization is any better than he was taught, whose quest involves convincing him otherwise or, if you sided with the Legion, convincing him to go back and/or turning him in to be punished. Maybe a modder will see all these ideas...
 * Possibly someone who has been with The Legion for a long time, supporting Caesar, but has lost faith in them as they are becoming less focused on creating order and now instead causing more chaos. Perhaps a True Neutral character who believes that order must be created, but sees that The Legion are way too extreme and has since left.
 * Anyone fitting that description would be executed. Even minor infractions result in execution. Silus not killing himself immediately after being captured gets him executed.
 * Or Kicked Upstairs after being deemed "Too Bloodthirsty" by the Legate, seeing as someone trying to upstart him as a master of Atrocities as after he had single-handedly killed a village of tribals, he took his slow time to feast on their dead remain and then ordered several legionaries who did not achieve a single kill in their name to eat with him. A Legion Friendly Companion would have been someone who wanted to join the courier in a path of bloodlust and hopefully redeem himself in the eyes of Caesar by helping him do what Graham failed.
 * You know, I really thought Silus was leaning in this direction when I was interrogating him at Camp McCarran. (High INT, tricking him into thinking I was sent to assassinate him before he could talk.) He eventually shows some cracks in his devotion to Caesar (if not the Legion). It seems like a great jumping-off point for a mod or something.
 * Though you probably won't think it counts, my sister had what was sort of a legion companion...when you do the quest for the Kings that give Rex a new doggy brain, one of them that you can get (My sister's preferred choice, since it had the better effects) was Lupa's brain, and Lupa was a legion dog. So my sister had Rex following her around with a legion brain. This also did make her doing the legion ending easier on him...
 * As well as Raul who admits the Legion while brutal at least managed to maintain order where the NCR had failed to deal with the convicts. Lily would have been ideal for Legion players who wanted a Legate Legion.
 * It's been hinted at that Joshua Graham, Caesar's Legate before Lanius, could feature heavily in a future DLC. Maybe...
 * Except Joshua Graham in Van Buren (which still seems to be his current characterization) would be hated by Legion and the Khans. In Van Buren, you wouldn't even be able to interact with either faction with Graham in your party.
 * With the new DLC, it is safe to say Joshua is as anti-Legion as Boone was, hell he wants to disconnect himself almost completely with his past in the Legion. He thinks the NCR was better than the legion (not by a long shot, he finds the greed of NCR's citizens a problem and would start another war)
 * Rex was Caesar's old dog. It's more of a connection to the Legion then any other companion. And giving him Lupa's brain would be a bonus.

Gamblers at Old Mormon Fort

 * What are gamblers doing at the Followers' Mission? Have they lost all their chips and the keys to their hotel rooms, so they're crashing at the Old Mormon Fort? Do the Followers provide a 12-step program to break people of their dice addiction? I know the Followers are Wide Eyed Idealists who have love and a smile for all of God's shiny-coated creatures, but when you've got chem addicts and slaves limping in and gunshot victims littering the streets, it's odd that gamblers make up about 40% of the patients we see at the Mission.
 * Two words Gambling Addiction its a huge problem in modern Vegas and probably is a problem in New Vegas.
 * It's even funnier if you talk to one of them while they're sleeping in a tent and they still say that they're living the high life. If you say so, bud.
 * Aren't they just drunk or injured?
 * Perhaps because most of the people in New Vegas that needs help are gamblers that are down on their luck? And the FOA does have doctors that specializes in physiology.

Pistols being under powered

 * I understand stats are more important this time around, but why does it feel like pistols are so weak no matter what? I preferred them in Fallout 3, but this time it seems to force you to use nothing but rifles.
 * If this was a deliberate choice by the designers, I'd say it's for realism. In reality, it's pretty rare for a pistol to outclass a rifle in anything but portability. Old Military Proverb say, "A pistol is a weapon you use to fight your way back to your rifle." Another one, as far as accuracy and power goes, simply states, "Pistols are pistols, and rifles are rifles."
 * Outside the obvious, realistically pistols are inferior to rifles as a combat weapon, there is another issue with the complaint. There are numerous pistols in the game that outclass the vast majority of rifles. That's without factoring in the SMG's.
 * The latest patch balances some of them out a bit more. The whole idea was that pistols were weaker, but allow you to run at your full speed and maintain full mobility, while rifles and other two-handed weapons slow you down but are more powerful.

The real meaning behind Mr. House's comment on democracy.

 * House's line, as mentioned above, "If you want to see where democracy takes you, you need only look out the window." Fittingly cynical sentiment, but devoid of much actual substance. I thought it was, you know, the Great War that got Fallout 's world where it was. (A war fought because of a clash of both political and economic ideology, and the natural propensity of humans to engage in dick-waving competitions.) A more accurate summation would be something like "If you want to see where human nature takes you, you need only look out the window." Am I misinterpreting House? Perhaps he's talking about ... the fact that the Mojave is nominally under NCR control but still a mess?
 * House is actually talking about free-market economy, which pretty much goes hand-in-hand with democracy. The weakness of the free market is that while it allows for unfettered growth based on human ingenuity in both business practices and invention, you have to pretend that the non-renewable resources used to accomplish these things are unlimited (or you would have to deny growth in the name of conserving them) and hope technology will make it as such before they run out. If technology doesn't solve that problem, the inevitable result is conflict over those resources as they run out, and the Great War in Fallout is explicitly the final stage of a long and bloody resource war, as the intro to the very first game spells out. The timeline on the Fallout wiki also has quite a few bullet points about various dates where the world got worse in various places specifically because of resource shortages. We could have a long and bloody debate on whether or not this interpretation of how things work and will work in reality is actually valid or not (it's probably obvious at this point what my view is) but it doesn't really matter, it's what House believes; your choice is whether or not you agree with him on the subject.
 * I think it is highly unlikely that Mr. House was talking about free-market economy, he himself is a self-made capitalist and the free-market economy is the only reason why he managed to to achieve the wealth and influence that he has. Also, if he is against the free-market economy, then why did he govern New Vegas in a mostly Laissez-faire manner? He is actually talking about the pre-war US government. Which he sees as a system that can easily be taken over by extremist (the Enclave), extremely in effective, and cannot even control its own population (the riots and civil-disorder right before the Great War).
 * The problem is that he tells you to your face that he intends to rebuild civilization as an autocracy (this is actually the word he uses) that he can rule. We know he predicted the bombs falling with a 24 hour margin for error years before it happened; he planned to rebuild the world as such before it even ended in the first place. If he was ever a believer in capitalism, he simply changed his mind when he started seeing where the world was going and realized current methods of economics were to blame and methods of government did nothing but encourage it. If anything, capitalism was just a tool for him to get into a position (getting the needed resources, etc) to set his plan in motion. An autocracy under House wouldn't be a free-market, because he intends to specifically manipulate the economy so that he'll get the money and resources he needs to achieve his ends.
 * However, my point is that although democracy equals capitalism (or at lease the private ownership of property), capitalism does not equal democracy. For example, look at Singapore in real life. The Singaporean friends that this troper have once admitted that Singapore is more like a dictatorship then a real democratic republic. However, their economic system is in every way capitalist. My understanding of Mr. House's plans for New Vegas is like an extreme version of modern day Singapore. He and his inner circle (the Courier) will maintain absolute control over all military and and political matter, but the citizens will be allowed to have economic freedom, protection from the wasteland and social benefits as long as they pay their taxes and not become a political opponent to Mr. House. On a final note, assuming that the entire world got stuck in the 1950's way of thinking in the Fallout universe, then China never gone though the market reforms under Deng Xiaoping during the 1980's in Fallout's timeline. Therefore China was still operating under Maoism politically and have a centrally planed economy by the time the Resource War and the Great War took place. It seems like planed economy was just as responsible for the Great War as capitalism is.
 * Or another possible interpretation of the statement is that he is talking about the anarchistic state that most of the pre-war world is in. He might be one of those people that considers anarchy as the ultimate form of democracy. Therefore he sees the terrible living conditions that most people in the wasteland is having as 'proof' that anarchy (and by an extension, democracy) doesn't work.
 * There is also the NCR to consider, it's attempt to bring things like Democracy and order to the Mojave failed quite spectacularly. Unable to keep it's convicts in control as well as causing one PR disaster to another since Hoover Dam, this was proof House felt the Democracy was a failure. Even the Legion can maintain order back home while NCR is fighting a drawn out war against slavers and raiders.
 * A simpler explanation is that Mr. House, knowing that The Courier has no idea that by the time the Great War rolled around, the United States was pretty much a democracy in name only, with The Enclave running things behind the scenes. Mr. House, being the CEO of Rob Co, had to have at least known of The Enclave's existance, if not been one of it's many business affiliates. He doesn't actually believe democracy is what caused the war, he just lied to The Courier in order to get win him/her over.

Can't be friendly with the NCR in the Yes Man ending

 * I am disappointed that there wasn't more possible options for the Yes Man path. I feel that there should be an extra pro-NCR option in which you use your Mk. II Securitron army to help the NCR defend Hoover Dam and defeat the Legion. Afterwards, by using your new position as the ruler of New Vegas and the dominating military power in the area, you negotiate favorable terms of annexation for the Mojave and get yourself a sit in the NCR Congress. If you are a good karma character, you will introduce legislation that fights corruption in the Republic and eventually become the new president, bring a era of peace and prosperity to everyone. If you are a neutral character, you will keep things as they were and finally retiring from politics with lots of money and political connections. Finally, if you play as an evil SOB, then after a few years in the Congress you will start a coup d'etat and ruthlessly take control of the NCR, abolishing democracy and transforming it into a military dictatorship.It just feels much more satisfying if you can make a large difference for not just the Mojave, but the entire West Coast in the end. Plus it just feels silly for a pro-NCR character to just leave the Mk. II securitrons in a basement instead of putting them to good use.
 * I know, after I did a whole bunch of NCR supportive side quests to the best of my ability (Everything at Camp McCarran, Camp Golf, and Forlorn Hope) I'm a little peeved as to why despite my good karma character, most of the NCR is forced out of New Vegas. Why can't I take control of New Vegas while still allowing the NCR to keep the power it has. Basically it'll be like the agreement they had with Mr. House, only with even more freedoms for them and their citizens. And if they ever think of trying to seize power from me, I'll have to remind them that I have control of a sizable, upgraded, army of killbots.
 * There's still room for these options in the future, just not under President Kimball's administration. This is also why the dialog for Mr. House and the NCR to remain friendly was probably removed. Mr. House says that the only reason why the NCR agreed to a treaty in the first place was to prevent adding another element to their fight with the Legion, with the idea that the NCR was willing to fight the Legion, but not willing to fight the Legion -AND- House's Securitrons. Otherwise, the NCR's administration would probably invent a reason for the NCR to simply try and take New Vegas by force. It's important to remember, even though you kick the NCR out of Hoover Dam, you can still tell General Oliver that you're willing to share the electricity and remain in a trading relationship. With your new position as leader of New Vegas and the Hoover Dam's electricity under your control, you now have the economic leverage to make the changes suggested in the original post, without the threat of military action from your robot army. Otherwise, what's preventing the NCR from saying you're a terrorist, too, and ordering another war and causing suffering for all?

The harsh treatment of Arcade for being born into the Enclave

 * In one ending, the Followers find out Arcade was once affiliated with the Enclave. So the Followers kick him out. Yeah, I'm sure they're just overrun with highly skilled doctors willing to hike it to the arse end of nowhere to live up to his knees in the dregs of society. Ungrateful bastards. I mean, dude makes it clear he never agreed with the Enclave. Navarro fell when he was quite young. It's like branding someone a Nazi and persecuting them for having been a (mandatory) member of the Hitler Youth in 1945. When they were like six. Now, I can see the NCR getting pissy about the Enclave armor, and the way their system works his incarceration was probably at least partially politically-motivated ... but the Followers? Jeez. They're apparently a bit Knight Templar, at least when it comes to self-policing.
 * This is mostly politics if the word got out that the followers allowed Ex-Enclave members to work for them the NCR would probably look very harshly on it. Think about it this way if you went to a hospital and you found out your doctor worked in a death camp would you not complain. Im not trying to invoke Godwin's Law im just saying its the same principal and the Enclave was inspired by the Nazis.
 * I understand what you're saying. No need to worry about Godwin's Law, the parallel is deliberate. :) My point was Arcade's situation is more analogous to the millions of German children who were members of the Hitler Youth, not someone who worked in a death camp. One of these ex-Hitler Youth is current Pope. However, you make a good point that the Followers would fall under intense NCR scrutiny. I'm not sure it's exactly justice that the Followers didn't keep it stumm, but, well, one can hardly fault transparency and honesty ... so many shades of grey, I guess!
 * What i had meant was that people would believe that if there is one then they could all be former Enclave members and thus paranoia would set in and they would be mistrusted.
 * And remember that despite being an independent organization, the Followers still needs the NCR's approval in order to operate. Their main headquarters is located in the LA Boneyard (a major city under NCR control) and if the NCR really wants to, they can just outlaw the FOA and force them underground.
 * That's interesting. I finished another play-through and went the NCR route, and at the end they forced the Followers out of the Old Mormon Fort and Freeside... but simultaneously the slide for the Kings told me that "The alliance between the NCR and the Kings blossomed into a full relief effort for the people." So the NCR is on the one hand telling the Followers to piss up a rope, and on the other is doing basically the same thing as the Followers with the help of the Kings. Who staunchly refuse to submit to NCR rule, according to the end roll. What is the NCR's problem with the Followers? You'd think The Kings + the NCR + the Followers == even better relief effort for the people, but no. *grows more confused every day*
 * That is just one of the bad endings for the FOA. There is a good ending for them in which the NCR allows them to stay in Vegas and provide aid to the poor in thanks for the medical aid they gave the NCR during the Battle at Hoover Dam.
 * Also there is a major difference in the two organizations. The Followers are a more established group with a long antagonistic relationship with the NCR. Whereas the Kings are based around the King. All they need to do is get into his good graces and there will win the hearts and minds of Freeside. So when the King dies, they will be able to slide into power effortlessly.
 * Look how much damage the Remnants are fully capable of doing when motivated. It isn't surprising most factions are very, very wary of them.

The Brotherhood not having an issue with a pro-NCR character

 * How come the Brotherhood of Steel doesn't have an issue with a pro-NCR character joining them? I understand that Hidden Valley was at a state of lockdown when you first arrive there, but after you complete the scouting missions for them they should be able to get some intel on your dealing in the wasteland. I was surprised that a hard-liner paladin didn't confront my pro-NCR character and say something like, "I found out that you have been working for and NCR and are best pals with them! How dare you work for our enemies! You must be a spy!"
 * Also, why didn't the NCR's network of informants catch wind of you working for the BOS? You might say that it is because they can't even get close to Hidden Valley, but they could somehow find out that you have been working for Yes Man. How does that work?
 * Er...Because you have your discussions with Yes Man right out in front of The Tops?
 * True. But the same can be said about you working with the Brotherhood. After all, wouldn't the NCR spies get curious about what you are doing around an area that have frequent reports of their scouts disappearing?
 * McNamara wanted an emissary someone who could put a good word out for the Brotherhood your better suited to the job when your in the NCR's good graces.
 * How about a hard-liner like Hardin? Why didn't he had an issue with you being good friends with the NCR? And why didn't the NCR have an issue with you working for the BOS before the peace treaty was negotiated?
 * A true hard-liner BOS like Hardin is not anti-NCR. He would be neutral. Hard liners don't care about other factions. Assuming the NCR-BOS war from Van Buren is canon, the Elder that started it is not a hard-liner.
 * You never say you are working for the NCR or BOS at any point in the dialogue. There is no reason either group could definitively identify you as working for either group. NCR scouts die if they go near the BOS. The BOS scouts are not keeping tabs on you.
 * If you where NCR faction armor into Hidden Valley, the Brotherhood will open fire on you. Vice-versa from Brotherhood Power Armor and NCR territory.
 * The Brotherhood doesn't have the NCR's massive network of informants. The NCR, meanwhile, really aren't that anal-retentive, at least at this point. If you're an individual mercenary (who happens to command a mid-range power equal to the Remnants or the Boomers; details details) who isn't actively stepping on NCR interests, the NCR won't care if you take jobs for the Brotherhood. Actively signing on with one side or the other and putting on their armor? Yeah, that marks you as an enemy.

Victor digging you out of the grave slowly.

 * In one of the teaser trailers, you see Victor digging you out...very slowly. Um, Victor, I don't mean to seem ungrateful for all you're doing, but I kind of need to breathe, you know? Also, when you return to your grave you see Victor dug a rectangular section of earth. Did he just dig around me while I was laying there is serious need of medical attention?
 * Maybe Victors AI has OCD syndrome and has to dig up the grave or else he thinks the fabric of the universe will be misaligned.
 * Point, I mean, he was programmed by someone based off Howard Hughes.
 * If you examine the gravesite more closely during the opening cutscene of the game, you can see a shovel. Presumably Mr. House contacted him and informed him that digging out the sand like that is not the best idea, so he got a shovel from the local store and dug him out with that.

Why did Caesar choses to name himself Caesar?

 * Why was Caesar called Caesar. Out of all the effective Roman leaders Caesar simply was the first with the best being arguably Trajan the third and last emperor to be Deified after death and the only emperor that later Christians agreed was just as good as the Romans thought he was.
 * Because Caesar is the single most recognizable figure in Roman history. Caesar has been the subject of numerous works (including a Shakespeare play), he wrote a few things himself (beginning Latin students often translate selections from his Commentaries), and his name is synonymous with authority all across Europe (every Roman emperor after Augustus added his name to their titles, and it has been adapted into multiple languages - kaiser, czar, etc.). By contrast, Trajan is known only by a small group of people and mainly remembered for putting an awesome column in the middle of a plaza in Rome. One might well make the comparison that although James K. Polk was the only U. S. President who actually accomplished everything he promised, everyone remembers George Washington because he was "the Father of His Country."
 * Caesar was probably just being used as his title.
 * Let's not forget that there isn't exactly a wealth of knowledge on the pre-war world left, either. Remember the museum in Rivet City and how the NPC running it honestly thought the Declaration of Independence was delivered by plane? Knowledge about the Roman Empire post-war would be incomplete, at best. They could think Pompeii was abducted by aliens. The Legion isn't meant to accurately reflect the Roman Empire, just what they think the Roman Empire was.
 * Wait you mean Pompeii wasn't caused by Aliens?
 * That's certainly true for the rank and file Legionaries. Caesar himself, though, was educated by the Followers, who are headquartered in the LA Public Library. Presumably large portions of the collections there would have been lost during the initial disaster and in subsequent looting and such, but there's still a wealth of knowledge available. Caesar (and Arcade) are very well-versed in Roman history and know exactly what titles like "Caesar" and allusions to the Rubicon and the Roman Civil War mean, even if the everyday Legion troops and most other people wandering around the post-apocalypse don't. I agree that Caesar is probably sacrificing accuracy for convenience, though, with a side order of A God Am I. In answer to the original OP, he's using "Caesar" because it probably rings a bell in at least a few people's memories, and his goals are closest to those of Julius Caesar: unite a fractured society, quell chaos, and bring strength to a decayed body politic. At least, that's his story.
 * Becuase Caesar wasn't basing the name off Julius Caesar directly, but becuase Caesar was also a title given to the Roman Emperorers following Julius.
 * Or perhaps because just as Caesar (in-game) has subjected the tribes of Arizona and created the Legion, Caesar (Julius) subjected the tribes of Gaul and Caesar (Augustus) created the Empire.
 * I always took it as a sort of jokey reference to Caesar's Palace. Obviously, Obsidian took the idea and REALLY ran with it.
 * This is what I always suspected, other well-known casinos like The Sands and The Stratosphere are represented, it wouldn't be a stretch to say Caesar's Palace got represented in the most literal way imaginable.
 * Or he just liked the title Caesar, We don't know how much informaion the LA public library. Julius Caesar full name was Caius Iulius Caii filus Caii nepos Caesar Imperator/Gaius Julius Caesar son of Gaius, grandson of Gaius, Imperator. Caesar wasn't his title but his Cognomen, a second last name to identify which branch of the family. In this case the "Caesarian" branch of the Julius family. Also could have served as a nickname as Caeso was given to children born from Caesaran Sections. Another possible meaning is caesaries which means hairy. Anyway Imperator meant Emperor not Caesar. Caesar was part of his name as successors being relatives took the name Caesar and it eventually became a title. However it signified Heir not reigning emperors. So Caesar as a title is more akin to Prince than Emperor.
 * More or less, it's probably because the books Edward found included Julius Caesar's Commentarii. This led to him developing a massive hard-on for conquest.

Who are the "Battle Cattle"?

 * Ok, this one has kept me up at nights, had me playing for hours, and all around driven me crazy so I need to know! Exactly what are the "Battle Cattle"?
 * Brahmin.
 * They could also be the legion, since Tabitha also says to watch out for the "two-headed bear people".
 * Can't be the Legion, the NCR are the ones represented by a two-headed bear flag.
 * Legion's flag has a bull on it. If Tabitha is referring to the NCR by the animal on their flag, presumably she might do the same with the Legion.
 * It's almost certainly this.
 * Possibly the Bighorners?
 * Doesn't she out-right state that the 'battle cattle' are humans? Reprimanding the 'dumb dumbs' for running away from a human. The way I figured cattle is a term for humans and the battle cattle are the Brotherhood of Steel with their powerful weapons, and their power-armouring, and all the killing for technology.
 * Tabitha's broadcasts make mention of the 'two headed bear people astride battle cattle', so it's unlikely that it's humans. It's possibly NCR cavalry, as horses exist in the Fallout universe as evidenced in the canon comic "All Roads". Since Super Mutants may not have any experience with horses, they might mistake them for some strange one-headed variant of brahmin who are only ridden into battle. Of course, brahmin may be a much more likely candidate, with the attacks at the McBride farm being the work of a lone Nightkin who is killing Brahmin because his schizophrenia makes him believe the brahmin are working inside his head. This belief may extend to other nightkin like Tabitha. Again, crazy people thinking crazy isn't unheard of.

The differences between the NCR Rangers and Desert Rangers.

 * Can someone explain the difference between NCR Rangers and Desert Rangers? I mean, after their treaty did the Desert Rangers just become a higher rank unit in the Rangers or something?
 * They have been fighting for longer.
 * The Desert Rangers are an elite unit within the NCR Rangers (which is the elite of the NCR military). So basically Desert Rangers are the elites of the elites, the best of the best for the NCR army. Being in charge of the most dangerous or important missions.
 * Ok, I get it now. But does that mean that the Desert Rangers also answer to Chief Hanlon?
 * Chief Hanlon is the leader of all the rangers.
 * the original Desert Rangers were a seperate group of elite peacekeepers in the Mojave, after the unification treaty (the statues at the NCR camp in the SW of the map are commemorating it.) they became memebers of the NCR Rangers corp.
 * Additionally, the Desert Rangers (which pre-date the NCR) were first mentioned in Fallout1 by Tycho, and are a reference to a Vegas-based organisation in Fallout's spiritual predocessor, Wasteland.

Caesar's choice of his successors.

 * Caesar's taste in successors is a bit questionable. Why choose Lanius, a cruel and brutal man who does not really understand your higher goals, and generally behaves like the Stalin to your Lenin?
 * Asskicking Equals Authority?
 * You can ask Caesar this question in person. His answer is that Lanius only loyal to Caesar himself out of respect, and not loyal to the Legion. Meaning that Lanius is not afraid to sacrifice the lives of the Legionnaire to achieve what he thinks Caesar wants. Plus, he is an effective military leader.
 * This is exactly what Lenin did when selecting his successor. He supposedly chose Stalin over Trotsky because Stalin wasn't afraid to do what was neccesarry to get the job done. Trotsky on the other hand was too "bookish". I guess leaders believe that brute force is the only way to keep their subjects in line.
 * It would be exactly what Lenin did, except it wasn't. Far from choosing Stalin, Lenin warned the rest of the Soviet leadership about him in a will released after his death. Trotsky looked like he would easily replace him, but he was out-maneouvred by Stalin. And I don't see how anyone could describe Trotsky as "bookish"; he built up the Red Army from scratch, led the Bolsheviks to victory in the Russian Civil War and was generally ruthless and brilliant in equal measures.
 * He could be trying to pull a Tiberius he will be remembered as the best leader of the Legion ever because the person who came after him was so cruel that literally anyone could be a better ruler.
 * Lanius is much more intelligent than the legend spraid by the legion let think. It does take a lot a speech and barter to convince him to back down, but the mere fact that he respond to intelligent arguments, he is a far better strategist than Graham, know more logistics than Caesar, he is a more reasonnable military leader than Oliver. All in one, he is a perfect choice to keep the legion going in one piece.

The fan's real life hatedom against the NCR

 * Perhaps this is just another case of Ron the Death Eater for the fandom, but why is there so much hatred towards the NCR by gamers in real life? So far on the both the Bethsoft & NMA forums, I have seen lots of people hating the NCR for various reasons, some even go as far as to say that it is the 'worst possible ending' for the game if you let them win the war. Augments that bugs me the most is that some gamers actually consider crucifying prisoners and slavery for women to be morally identical (in some discussions that I have seen, some even go as far as to say that they are most preferable and morally justified) then having to pay the republic's taxes. Seriously, I understand that the point of the game is that it is mostly grey vs grey morality. But can these people actually can't tell the difference between being ruled by a social contract under a democratic republic compared to being ruled by fear by a madman that likes to play roman dress-up with this soldiers. I can understand why many people will prefer the Yes Man/Independent ending even though personally I don't like it as much. But how can anyone honestly look at the situation from an outsider's perspective and think that the Legion is morally identical or even superior to the NCR? A real life example I can think of is the World War 2. It is like someone saying that Nazi Germany is the same as the Allies. Although the allies did engaged in some really morally questionable actions, they are in no way morally identical to the Japanese Unit 731 or the Nazi death camps.
 * It's because Fan Dumb thinks that Mr. House's line "If you want to see how democracies end, look outside the window" is some profound wise insight on the world and how "benevolent" dictatorship is better than democracies, rather than a power-monger trying to justify his reign.
 * I take offense at this. The reason many people (the non-Fan Dumb of us, yes, we who actually analyze the entire situation instead of fixating on single quotable lines actually do exist) who go for the other endings hate the NCR isn't because the NCR has some sort of bad evil nasty side, it's because the NCR doesn't sell itself to us as the better alternative despite its problems. You can list what you think makes the NCR a better choice as much as you want, but the key phrase is "what you think." As much as everyone doesn't want this to be true so they can call their ending the best ending, the game is specifically written so that no faction can be objectively called absolutely better than the others. It's not just the leaders' arguments, there are little signs of this everywhere. This is why there's dialog about how despite the NCR being OMG SO EQUAL by treating women no differently than men compared to the Legion's misogyny, the Legion is more accepting of homosexuals. That's not in there just to give you the funny Confirmed Bachelor dialog with Major Knight. Even the Legion has certain appeal depending on your values; does absolute safety trump equality and cultural identity? If you think yes, you should side with the Legion. Does a future planned out for more than the next few decades based on what's good for everyone instead of on the interests of economic and political elite trump the fact that you can never be completely certain a benevolent dictator won't change his views or leave someone worse as a successor? If you think yes, you should side with House. Does democracy as we have it today trump the fact that there will always be corruption in such a government? If yes, you should side with the NCR. Do you not believe for a moment any of these have a truly positive outcome and only serve the interests of the elite? You should take the independent ending. Also, let's stop pretending and downplaying the fact that yes, every faction does have disadvantages. The Legion's are pretty obvious; slavery, misogyny, and death of cultural identity. The fact that the Legion isn't a popular choice means that most players aren't sold on the idea that their absolute security is worth that cost. House is a dictator; he severely punishes anyone who isn't loyal to him either directly or by proxy, like levying heavy taxes or land-grabbing on groups who sided with the NCR before they're kicked out. Independence causes stagnation; nothing will ever actually come of the Mojave wasteland, it will simply stay stuck as it is with the Courier in House's dictatorship position, without plans for the future. And yes, the NCR, despite it's democracy, does have corrupt and incompetent people in positions of authority, where their corruption and incompetence tangibly hurts others who don't deserve it. The game spells this out. The reason some of us explicitly dislike the NCR ending is that we do not believe the NCR's democracy is worth that, especially considering the pre-war American government. Actually taking the setting into account puts a bit of a different spin on the New Vegas-era NCR; not only are the not as pure of heart, relatively speaking, as they were when they were smaller circa Fallout 2, they show parallels with pre-war America. Again, you can believe that it will better police itself at some point or you can believe it's repeating history; the game gives absolutely no evidence either way, it's up to the individual to decide what they think is more likely. And this is also where the Fan Dumb comes from; it's part of popular culture in America right now to rage against the government, but being part of pop culture means that many people do so in completely uninformed fashion without educating themselves on the actual matters at hand. Plenty of people who do this play video games, and plenty of those play New Vegas, so their natural reaction to the presence of the NCR is to hate the government without actually examining the larger picture just like in real life. It's still Fan Dumb to point at the NCR and say "DEMOCRACY SO IT'S THE BEST okay there are some problems BUT THAT'S THE BEST OPTION AVAILABLE." There is no best option. There is simply an option.
 * TL;DR
 * (From the OP) The usual augments that I have encountered on forums against the NCR are basically the following: (1) They are only concerned about protecting/feeding/empowering their own citizens, (2) The heavy taxation that they collect from their citizens are no different from slavery, (3) The NCRCF is slavery, (4) They goal is to annex the whole area, which is the same as slavery, (5) Keeping all woman as slaves and crucifying your enemies is the most effective way to form a government in a post-war world, (6) In the Fallout universe, democracy resulted in the Great War, therefore the NCR is just going to repeat the same mistake, (7) They are too much like the Enclave.
 * (Also from the OP) In responds to those augments, (1) How is that a bad thing? It is the responsibility of any government to place the needs of their own citizens first before giving out free handouts to outsiders. The FOA is perfect deconstruction for an organization that give out free hand outs to random people, (2) Seriously? So you would prefer to live your live as a slave instead of paying taxes? I am not a fan of taxation myself, but that is just stupid, (3) The members of the Powder Gang are actually dangerous criminals that deserve their sentence. They are not political prisoners like the ones in the Gulag. Plus the just of convict labour is legal even under real life international law, (4) The NCR ending stated that they negotiated terms the annex the area. And they are not anymore of a police state then Mr. House or the Legion. Plus the NCR is actually a democracy, after the region is safe, they will likely allow the people of New Vegas to select elected representatives to join the NCR Congress. Plus in world full of raiders, mutant monsters, and that everyone can own laser weapons, is there anyway to have a functional government that isn't a semi police state? (5) Things such as slavery and sexism failed in the past for a reason, it is because they are NOT the values in which you should found your nation on. (6) Not it didn't. Post-war US was much more of a Fascist police state then a democratic republic. (7) The NCR never claimed to be the successor of the US government, nor did they committed any genocide.
 * It is really sad for me to see that people who consider the Yes Man/Independent, Mr. House, or Caesar's Legion path to be the ‘best’ ending for New Vegas so desperate to find reasons to hate the NCR. So far on the Bethesda and NMA forum I have seen people making claims about how the NCR being communist, or that they are secretly using slavery, or how they are worst then the Legion by collecting taxes, and my personal favorite, about how the NCR is bad because everyone should become tribal and return to nature… etc. Anything that ranges from examples of Did Not Do the Research to Blatant Lies. Can’t the NCR haters find any legitimate points to support their debates?
 * (Not the OP) I'd like to add that the NCR ending is potentially the only one that ends well for all factions. The good Yes Man ending comes close, but that ending still has the Brotherhood harassing travelers, and the FOA being overwhelmed.
 * Most people never played the original games, which means they are less familiar with the NCR. Also, many Fallout 3 fans are also Bethesda fans and Bethesda is very much oriented to "these are the good guys and these are the bad guys." Any moral gray area tends to make them think that group is bad guys.
 * I dislike the NCR, mostly because the parallels that the game loves to draw between it and the beginnings of the U.S. and how characters comment that they "round up tribals" and "domesticate them". It just reminds me waaaaay too much of how the original colonies "rounded up" the Native Americans and "domesticated" them. Also when you talk to one of the higher-ups at Bittersprings about the Khan killing refugees and you're snarky about the massacre there she says something akin to "yeah, well we *let* them have the area up by Red Rock" to which I really wanted to respond "oh really? You LET them? Truly, the NCR's generosity knows no bounds." I realize it's sort of irrational, but that's just how it feels to me. Also I wouldn't trust anyone who hired Fantastic.
 * Yes they WHERE being generous for not utterly destroying the force that had over multiple times raided their trade caravans disrupted army movements and tried to burn down their home city that is actually very very stupid they shouldnt hold any NCR territory after that kind of action. They also treat the Tribals they bring in pretty well as can be evidenced from the planned town in the original planned Fallout 3 where Arroyo and the Vault 13 residents peacefully joined together and became a thriving settlement in the republic.
 * Your Mileage May Vary, but I don't think the Great Khans should be punished for what their ancestors did.
 * Even then they are allied with a group that the NCR is at war with and supply groups that are trying to kill an entire city they probably shouldnt be allowed to stay where they are just for those two things.
 * Then again, they joined up with the Legion only after the Bitter Springs Massacre, probably to try and get revenge (And they clearly didn't know the Legion very well if they were unaware of the stuff they tend to do to tribals). Selling drugs to the Fiends could be justified since no one else seems willing to trade with the Khans.
 * Again they started the conflict when they where attacking caravans because they where undefended thus after the NCR crushed them at Bitter Springs and the Khans retreated to Red Rock they joined the Legion in the hopes of revenge. Unfortunately that limited the groups they trade to to being just legion allies which there are very few of. They are ore at fault for their own situation and even the Khans know it.
 * The NCR attacked Bitter Springs after the Khans attacked the caravans.
 * It's worth noting that originally the game was set up to have Play-After-MQ. The specifics of how whatever ending you chose played out would be seen in-game. All that really survives is a dialogue with Colonel Moore that serves as an exposition dump for what happens after an NCR Victory. Moore, if you remember, is the bloodthirsty, vindictive Colonel who sends you to massacre the Brotherhood of Steel and the Khans. You know, the one who gets Anderson sacked if you make peace with the Brotherhood? She's promoted to Brigadier-General and placed in charge of the occupation while Hsu, the only decent Officer in the entire Army, gets passed over for the position because of The Fiends (in the accessible dialogue it's because he refused to take credit for killing their leaders, which the Courier did). So the worst elements of the NCR are the ones that come out on top, just like in Fallout 2. Also, I think fewer people would side with Caesar if a cut dialogue with Arcade where he breaks down exactly what is wrong with Caesar's Hegelian view of history were left in the game.
 * If I remember well, it was reinstalled by one of the later patch.
 * The issue with the NCR isn't about good or evil it's that their ineffective. They have had control over the Mohave since 2274, the game occurs in 2281, and have not only failed to secure the region, nether economically nor literally but have failed to improve it in any way. They are over extended and don't even have the man power to reign in the Fiends, Powder Gangers or the Khans. Who due to said negligence have come to control the Western half of the Mohave. In Legion territory things are so secure that caravans don't even need guards. Yes there are reduced freedoms but the stability, considering how fractured the Mohave is, is worth it. Finally not everyone is a slave, Dale Barton for example is an independent trader, Raul lived in Arizona and frequent remarks on how the legion has improved it. Finally the Courier has a coin minted in his or her honor for their contributions. Slavery is an industry it only works if their are people to buy and sell. Women do get the short end of the stick but it's probably a status thing, I seriously doubt high ranking Legion members allow their daughters to be sold into slavery. The Legion has shown to work with women, dealing with Jeanne May Crawford and the Courier if female.
 * Safe is a relative term. Safe for Legion patrols? Sure. Safe for sell outs like Dale Barton? Sure (Sorry if I'm being overly opinionated here). Safe for the children and women, who have no rights what so ever, especially given that Siri and Melody imply rape and paedophilia are accepted practises? Not at all. Some may argue that the abuse of slaves is not standard Legion practise, but either way that kind of dooms them. On the one hand if they do not endorse rape then it shows they're no less immune to disobedience and corruption than NCR, and since Siri implies its a pretty common occurrence, we can assume they're no better at ensuring safety than NCR. If they do endorse it, well, bring back the Super Mutants and radiation poisoning.
 * The historical precedent for Roman stability is debatable as well. Surprisingly enough, Caesar somehow neglects to mention the emperors who burned down their capital city while playing the fiddle, made their horse co ruler of the largest empire in the world and were murdered by their own bodyguards. Hell, it took less than 3 centuries after Augustus for the Empire to split in two. Oh, and of course that General who declared himself dictator for life, only to be killed by his own followers. Now, if only I could remember his name...
 * You forget to mention that Julius Caesar was killed by upper class aristocrats who did not care about the Republic, but rather their own personal influence in the political scheme of things. (though Brutus could be an exception) Also the fiddle wasn't invented yet for Nero to play as Rome burned and also you combined him with Caligula. And 300 years is a pretty long time for an empire to last. Basically what Caesar is doing is creating his own intereptation of the Roman Empire by looking at the positives and rolling with that. Surely after he conquers all that is to conquer he has a plan to create his own Pax Roma which would probably relax the brutality of the years of conquest. (Not saying he is going to release the slaves, but maybe allow them chance for freedom. And also they may give women more rights and be less sexist)
 * Sorry about that, I did bugger up about the fiddle, though I already knew Nero and Caligula were different people. Besides, Nero was to busy dealing with revolts caused by his men buggering Boduica, starting a rebellion that lead to the burning of multiple cities.
 * While you make some points you rely far to much on maybes and surely's. While Nero did not play the lyre while Rome burned he certainly looked pretty suspicious when he took over all the burned land and made the worlds largest pleasure palace over the entirety of the burned ground. Also the goals of Caesars assassins are unknown his assassins did not write down their reasons and after Augustus took power the records on them are questionable at best. The Roman Empire existed for over a thousand years but was only stable for two hundred with occasional resurgences like the ones during rules of Basil The Bulgar Slayer and Justinian I. Caesar clearly does not know very much about the Empire though, seeing as he mistook it for Sparta.
 * Another issue is Casear himself. With Ashur I good buy the mean justify the ends line of thought since he is clearly a good man and will likely try to do the right thing. I don't totally agree with him since I can't see him keeping his raiders under control well enough to make them submit whaen he wants to change things, but overall he had an understandble postion. Casear on the other hand? He may not be a complete monster, but he sure as Hell ain't no anti villain. While Ashur was a good man trying to acheive alturistic goals with questionable means, Casear revels in the violence and pain he causes. If you ask him to relase Benny he'll actively scold you for lacking sadism (Apparently he won't even let you have a psotion of power unless your a blood hungry psycho) and after the execution he contemplates on how few things can compare to destroying an enemy. If you tell him your done working for him he'll threatean to chop you to pieces for his amusement. Just compare Ashur's anguish over what he had to do in the holotapes compared to Casear's sumg bragging about how he wiped out entire tribes. Frankly I can't see things getting any better under Casear, not only because of sheer logistics (he is after all, one of the more agreeable members of the Legion) but because he wouldn't want them to change. Under a guy like Casear, life would likely be every bit as harsh and painful as it is in the Wastes, but now it will be enforced by law. Ironically, Benny's words on NCR sum up Casear and his goons perfectly, 'They just pass laws to make their crimes legal.' maybe the ends justify the means, but even then you have to keep in mind just how it will end.
 * NCR's held down by all sorts of rules and limits, and even that doesn't act as a full proof net against corruption. Therefore, why should we expect the Legion rulers to be any better without any sort of limits or controls? After all, Centurion Aurellius's cannibalism, smoking and drinking (the latter two are against Legion principles) show they aren't immune to corruption, and given that their power cannot be contested unlike NCR, the risk of power abuse from the Legion is likely even worse. Raul's reliability is shaky at best. He's a loner who rarely interacts with the outside world, so he likely has very limited experience on how the Legion treats people, especially slaves and women in most situations. Moreover, he has reason to be biased in favour of them given their ruthless stance against the gangs. Given what said gangs they did to Claudia, the only person Raul had been close to in possibly centuries, we can see that he'd be quite likely to be biased in favour of the Legion.
 * The NCR are ineffective in the Mojave because they are overextended. They are far more effective within their actual territory, as shown in Fallout 2.
 * Most of their elite troops are kept at home to guard brahmins by the cattle-barons. It's like saying the USA only sent some poorly equiped infantry to invade Irak because the tanks and aircraft were needed in the homeland to protect some cows. Now that some pretty baddass corruption. Either that, or the competition in the meat sector has become so fierce you'd need soldier with miniguns and stripped down power armor just to contain it.
 * Point of order: the Khans women are sold into slavery if Caesar integrates them, and the Khans let it happen.
 * Gonna throw in my two cents here as this is a debate I've had with my friends several times; the NCR is an expansionistic empire that annexes places regardless of their desire to be annexed providing they have something they want. Now I'm not saying they are as bad as the legion, and honestly as far as morality goes they're generally good people. But they have no right to march in and take Vegas. I support the wild card and House endings because they're the right things to do; insure the independence of New Vegas from foreign conquerors. House and/or the Currier have an army of securitions at their disposal, upgraded to extreme combat effectiveness with a range spanning the Mojave. They can insure its security better than the NCR could. House has plans to bring the old world back, and providing Yes Man doesn't go Skynet on our asses, the Currier will have access to those plans through House's records.
 * That... doesn't make any sense. Did you pay attention to the ending at all? Let's start with your accusation that they annex you whether you like it not. If you got the Kings to stop attacking NCR citizens, it states that they let Freeside stay independent, and if you didn't slaughter the Bright Brotherhood and installed Meyers as sheriff of Primm respectively, the ending also explains that Novac and Primm also stayed independent (despite the fact that Primm is a major trading post and therefore important to the NCR). So, you say the NCR have no right to march and conquer New Vegas (i.e. provide it with security, strong production, democratically elected leaders, and advanced technology), what exactly gives House or the Courier the right to conquer New Vegas for themselves? House is an unopposed, brutal, despotic tyrant who will do numerous cruel things out of spite (kill off the Kings unless they attack innocent NCR civilians, heavily tax Primm if they accept NCR rule instead of descending into anarchy, kill off the Brotherhood, etc.). The Courier can either be a good guy or bad guy depending on your playstyle, but regardless s/he will still rule as an absolute dictator, make New Vegas a more violent and generally unstable place (as explained in the Followers ending slide), and place control of the securitron army into an insane AI he just met a few weeks ago. As for the robots: this is exactly the same trap the Brotherhood fell into, and they are much larger than the Couriers/House's robot army. The Courier or House have, at most, a couple hundred robots. The NCR have a population of 700,000, and a large portion of these people are in the military. Sure, you've driven the NCR out of New Vegas, but Oliver himself said they'd be back. Bottom line, you have no of replacing your robots. They can always get new soldiers. Finally, about the robots providing better security than the NCR military: If you get the ending where the NCR allies with the Kings and Followers, it says quite clearly that Freeside becomes a better, safer place, whereas if you drive the NCR out, the ending explicitly says that, directly because of your actions, Freeside and the rest of the Mojave become much, much worse places. Basically, the NCR ending is good for everyone in New Vegas, whereas the House/Yes Man endings are only good for the people on the strip.
 * Yes, General Oliver said they'll back, but it would have been out of his Patton-esque character to say anything else. Once he get back in NCR proper, his ass will be on a grill with Kimball's. Can you imagine? Years of war, of occupation, thousand of lives lost, litterally tons of money burned down for utterly nothing. They just got their ass handed on a silver platter by a fucking delivery boy. That's not a PR disaster for Kimball's govermnent, that's a PR apocalypse. I wouldn't expect the NCR to military try a come-back for at least ten years in this situation.
 * One important thing you are overlooking is that New Vegas did not exist in the form you see it until after the NCR had already started moving in. Forming New Vegas in its current form was performed only a few years before the game started. It was basically a Hail Mary play by Mr. House to keep himself in power. It doesn't say exactly how soon, but it was recent because every full member of the White Glove are founding members and Benny became leader immediately after the Boot Riders, the tribe that became the Chairmen, encountered a Securitron. Also, in the flashback panels of All Roads, Benny is not noticeably any younger. Basically, the NCR was annexing a highly useful area that was in complete anarchy and Mr. House went "wait, wait, wait look, we are a city now, you can't annex us, we've been functioning like this since last Thursday, you can't just overlook that history." As much as he talks about how Vegas used to be, he was dormant most of the time between the war and the events of the game.
 * The NCR does annex the Mojave whether anyone likes it or not. Sure, the NCR ending might not be all bad, but pay attention to the NPCs. Many of them are angry that the NCR are waltzing in and kicking them off 'their' land, not respecting them or their way of life, or only helping ordinary people if they see a benefit in it. And on the other side, you can find some NCR farmers walking away from the Mojave in disgust and calling it a hell-hole, or others who think the NCR is wasting time trying to 'civilize' these people. The situation is more complex than what the ending slides say, and tellingly, the opinions of the ordinary person don't have their own slide; probably none of the big powers care what they think. Fact is, many people make it clear that they don't want the NCR ruling over them for a variety of reasons, but it's obvious the NCR doesn't give a shit. The Yes Man ending isn't the greatest ending, but it's an ending that actually has a shot of actually giving ordinary citizens what they want.
 * My two cents here: The NCR gets flak because a lot of gamers tend to be anti-authoritarian and suspicious of liberal democracy; I know I've got more than a bit of that, though I'm not going to call them "evil" by any means (it's Grey and Gray Morality, after all). The NCR are led by a bunch of jingoistic assholes, the Mojave is filled with homophobic hick conscripts, and their people want to have their cake and eat it too (have the Hoover Dam's cheap electricity without spending blood to acquire it). Also, the fact is that they are expanding their territory into an independent region, by means of a war of aggression, for the primary purpose of acquiring control of a power-generating natural resource, and they are annexing communities by force wherever they see it necessary, as Goodsprings learns to its sorrow; these are tough old salts who can take care of themselves and really have no use for the NCR. Ditto the Strip tribes, though obviously they deserve less consideration (setting the Omertas aside because they ought to be wiped anyway, they do need to be kept under control by someone or the Strip will go to hell till they learn to play nice). The NCR ending is good for taking care of people who can't take care of themselves; it provides infrastructure, aid and modern democracy, but brings along with it taxes, corruption, a bunch of half-trained soldiers who're pretending to be police officers, and all the pains in the ass that civilization brings. The Wild Card ending, meanwhile? It's an ending that supports the people and communities that can mostly take care of themselves. Traders get the benefits (open roads, low taxes, all the large bandit gangs wiped out) that the Legion would provide, and they get them regardless of whether they have a penis; Goodsprings' tough old sots get along fine, the Strip and the independent communities prosper, the raider gangs are wiped off the map. But the Followers take on way too much responsibility for themselves, the Brotherhood can't be kept honest without wiping them out (this is something of an oversight), and it sucks to be a junkie or a poor, sick guy without family or community (since there's no relief a-coming).
 * ...And leaving out the poor and destitute is good while leaving everyone else on their own is good? (1) The NCR Army is not composed of jingoistic, half trained hicks. That's pretty big evidence you've never talked to an NCR soldier in game, or seen them fight with the Legion. First of all, in an engagement with the Legion, the average NCR soldier will nearly always win against the average Legion soldier or Powder Ganger in random encounters (and that's the main thing they're trying to keep away), but more importantly, NCR soldiers are not hicks. They're not violent, they don't have funny accents, they're not sexists, racists, homophobic (that one throw-away line by Knight does not count since they're are actively gay soldiers like The First Reon Sniper, and no one seems to care) or rapists (that would be the Legion). They're just people who want to make the world a better place (in the case of Hsu, Jackson, Monroe, Hayes, etc.) or who are just doing their job. I would also just like to point out that you can do all those things in the NCR ending. Every community can stay independent except Goodsprings and the Strip, which joined the NCR by choice after negotiations according the ending (though, in Primm's case, allowing them to stay independent leads to them being policed by a real half-trained violent hick). (2) When you say War of Agression that implies that the war is against the locals, which it isn't. It's against the actual bad guys on the other side of the river. The NCR never actively attacks any of the locals, except raider gangs. They actually protect the locals from the Legion, and if the locals join them, random raider groups. (3) The towns of the Mojave are not "tough old salts" they're just ordinary civilians. When you start the game, all the towns in the Mojave (that are not destroyed) are under threat and completely incapable of taking care of themselves (Goodsprings is being extorted by the Powder Gangers, Primm has been captured by the Gangers, Nipton's been destroyed, and Novac is under threat from the feral ghouls to the north). They obviously have no way of getting by unless the Courier helps them, and the ending doesn't say the Courier sends securitrons as security to their towns, so what's exactly stopping them from coming under threat again? Even if you wipe out nearly every raider gang, there's no wiping out the Jackals or Vipers, who are very active on the road to Novac... (4) "Pains in the ass that civilization brings"? You mean medical care, protection, and advanced technology at the cost of taxes? I swear, why does everyone say the NCR is bad for making people pay taxes? Where do you think they get the money to outfit those soldiers who protect you? They are not half trained soldiers pretending to be police officers, they have better equipment and are moral then any other base grunt in the Mojave (Viper, Jackal, Powder Ganger, Recruit Legionary, Fiend, Khan) except Brotherhood Paladins and Securitrons (which, once again, don't protect anything but the Strip). (5) The Wild Card ending is not for helping the people. It's not like anyone asked some random Courier to raise a robot army, take over the Strip, and drive out the NCR. It's for helping the strip. The supposed benefits of having large raider bands wipe out (which is also possible and actually easier in the NCR ending, since the NCR will wipe out the NCRCF Powder Gangers if you don't) are negated by the fact that the ending specifically says Vegas turned more violent and anarchic (Followers, Kings, and Boomer's ending slides). I'm not sure any trader is going to want to go to a place like that. (6) Goodspring also gets along fine in the NCR ending. Really, it only ever said that a few old people moved out because they didn't want to pay taxes, and that's at worst a neutral ending, the only non-happy ending in the entire NCR ending. (7) What you say implies that the Followers and Brotherhood are a lost cause, which they aren't. It's easy to get happy endings for them in the NCR ending.
 * My reason for disliking the NCR is their sheer incompetence combined with their inherent illegitimacy as a government. Of their top officers in the Mojave, one is a jingoistic General Ripper, one is actively working to subvert the NCR's war effort and get the men nominally subordinate to him killed, and the last - the man in overall command of the forces there - bides his time while the Legion exploits the weaknesses the NCR's defense that he created. Their basic ground troops get a few weeks of training and are used as cannon fodder. They only win because of the Courier's intervention and are set to keep blundering East. Their Mojave campaign can be compared to the Vietnam war, and they will just keep entering into it again and again as they expand. And on top of it all, they aren't even a legitimate government outside of their home territories. No one invited them into the Mojave and they have no right to commandeer the resources and installations they control at the game's start. The Enclave has more political legitimacy than the NCR.
 * The only NCR officer in the Mojave that is actively trying to get the men nominally subordinate to him killed is a Legion spy (there is one other working to subvert the NCR's war effort, but his plan doesn't at any point kill the men subordinate to him, and in fact culminates with manipulating Oliver into placing those men in a position to cover a retreat), someone did invite the NCR into the Mojave (the Desert Rangers - who had been there for more than a century), and the NCR has a proven track record in one area of great import: rebuilding (they have cars back West). As for their "inherent illegitimacy", there is nothing inherent about it. If the expansion had been more as that of the early days of the NCR, there would have been nothing illegitimate about it. Even now, they still act through treaties, negotiations, and will grant representation to the people of the area. Besides, there is nothing illegitimate about capturing installations belonging to the enemy, so there is one installation in Nevada that was a perfectly reasonable target, Legion or no Legion.
 * The Desert Rangers don't speak for the whole Mojave. People in Goodsprings and Primm will talk disparagingly about annexation by the NCR, and elsewhere Primm is referred to as "giving in" if the player so chooses that route. The NCR actually creates more problems by setting up shop in the Mojave. The Powder Gangers wouldn't exist if the NCR hadn't thought to move in and, overextend themselves and start housing convicts without ability to properly secure them. As a government, they are illegitimate. No one in the wasteland elected them, despite Kimball's insistence that they are "spreading democracy" and few in the Mojave actually want them there. Further, the fact that they spread themselves so thin, make no allies but dozens of enemies, and rely on poorly trained troops to fight makes their conflict in the Mojave a bloodbath. However good they are at rebuilding doesn't mean anyone wants them to move in and start charging taxes where everyone was getting along fine enough. And for all their support of negotiations and treaties, they have no qualms about obliterating groups throughout the wasteland, supporting the idea that they are aggressively expansionist and imperialistic. Other individuals even comment that they "domesticate" tribals which, given their track record, would seem to indicate more wholesale extermination.
 * Which section of their track record turns "domestication" into "extermination"?
 * The Desert Rangers where the closest thing to a government with House still dormant so they effectively did speak for the whole Mojave. Primm has one character that is really complaining about joining the NCR and that was the deputy who lost his because they didn't think three months of experience as a deputy and one day as a Sheriff where useful to them, according to the ending they didn't like the NCR's taxes but where prospering enough for it to not be an issue, the only town that suffers problems from the NCR is Goodsprings which is a town with barely any people there. You keep saying that they are illegitimate despite the fact that there was no legitimate government other than the Desert Rangers who asked them to help them because Caesars Legion was coming, House didn't stop being dormant until the NCR was nearly at Hoover Dam and instead of fighting him they tried to work with him only attacking when they found out he was planning his own takeover of the Mojave. The NCR is probably the best trained army in the entire Mojave conflict, they have the best armor and weapons out of anyone else, almost always win against the Legion unless they use a huge Zerg Rush of troopers to overrun them. the NCRF prisoners are there fault but even if the Courier doesnt kill them the NCR destroys them fixing their mistake. On your point about them not bothering to make any allies, have you played any NCR missions? Every single one of their missions involves making allies. Also they weren't just moving in to take over they where also there to stop Caesars Legion who where the real violent and cruel imperialists who the no one in the Mojave wanted to take over and who would do far worse than tax the people of the Mojave, because the Legion was coming they where not "perfectly fine" they where weeks away from being enslaved and killed en-mass. I hate to also keep bringing this up but ''the NCR treats tribals well, Arroyo is still a tribal group who where integrated into the NCR peacefully and there is no reason to think they dont treat other tribes worse.
 * The Desert Rangers were not a government. They certainly defended the Mojave from various threats but they in no way governed the Mojave or its people. One might even go so far to say that they had no right to make the governing of the Mojave a term of the Ranger Unification Treaty. It's random dialogue in Primm for citizens to complain about being annexed by the NCR. Point of fact, there is no citizen in Primm that actually says they want you to have the town put under NCR protection. The situations in Primm and with the Powder Gangers were caused by the NCR in the first place. Whether or not the NCR cleans up their mess doesn't really matter too much to the people that were killed or who otherwise suffered because of it. Neither the Desert Ranger or the NCR - or House or Caesar or you - were legitimate governments in the Mojave. The Desert Rangers more so, because they were not functioning in the capacity of a government. Towns like Novac, Goodsprings, Primm and Nipton governed themselves. Whether or not the NCR military is the best in the Mojave is debatable. The backstory has them having won several major victories, but in-game it's stated that the basic grunts have little training and that they suffered huge casualties against both the Legion and the Brotherhood (and sizeable losses against the Fiends). Every NCR mission that deals with "making allies" has the option of exterminating them just the same, with no one apparently caring too much either way. In fact, it's Colonel Moore - one of a handful of senior officers in the Mojave, and implied to have capacity above Crocker - outright orders you to exterminate the Brotherhood and the Great Khans, and is less than thrilled if you don't. You even partake in the state-sanctioned assassination of Mr. House if you take the NCR path. Granted, he was planning a takeover of Vegas and Hoover (though that was only because he was sure the NCR was going to kill him; see above) but that doesn't change the immorality of the act. If asked, Colonel Hsu (the senior officer in command of the forces in New Vegas proper) outright states that the NCR intends to annex Vegas and that their only real obstacle is the Fiends and General Oliver's incompetence preventing the NCR from acting offensively, so they aren't just there to defend from the Legion. The Legion is the polar opposite of the NCR, granted - an overtly bad group with some good aspects under the surface, whereas the NCR is overtly good with bad aspects under the surface - however, each faction was intended to be fairly ambiguous. And even so, the presence of the Legion doesn't change the fact that the Three Families, the Kings, The Followers, Westside, Freeside, North Vegas Square, the Khans, the Boomers, the Brotherhood, Goodsprings and Primm don't want the NCR to annex the Mojave (nor do the Fiends, but I'd accept their opinions don't count). Or that the game makes a point of showing that the NCR's leaders are some measure of incompetent, with Hsu being the only reasonable commander of the bunch. Further, given the number of parallels drawn between the NCR's Mojave campaign and the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, one can also find many of the same complaints of the invasion apply to the NCR occupation.
 * The NCR in the end benefits every single city state in the Mojave from their occupation, had they not done anything the Legion would have taken over and then attacked the NCR but in a much better position where they wouldnt have to get through Hoover Dam to attack California, The NCR had no other real choice in the matter other than taking over, note how it is because of the Courier's interferance that Primm, Freeside, North Vegas, and the Boomers joined the NCR and for all those I mentioned they have the option of remaining independent but in a worse situation.
 * Whether or not these groups benefit doesn't affect the fact that the NCR's expansionism and incompetence a valid point of contention. None of the groups you mention wanted to be a part of the NCR. Also note how it's solely because of the Courier's interference that NCR are even able to take control of these places.
 * The NCR could have easily forcibly annexed all of the territory that can remain independent but they didn't the only group that I could even see the NCR having difficulty conquering are the Boomers but the NCR still has the force of numbers necessary to crush them and take Nellis so the simple fact that they are allowed to remain independent speaks to their urge to work through treaties and genuinely help the people that are part of them. I also dont see as much incompetence as you see there are two commanders in the Mojave who are of questionable, Colonel Moore who despite being a might makes right asshole was Properly Paranoid about the Brotherhood and Mr. House and whose offensive strategy probably would have been more effective than Lee Olivers "wait and see" method. Oliver is the one truly bad commander out of all of them, he has Colonel Moores outlook on the world without her tactical sense, Chief Hanlon wants to withdraw from the region and is trying to convince the leadership that its justified but with minimal loss of life, and Hsu was genuinely one of the best commanders in the region.
 * Oh and I just noticed this but the point about House depends entirely on who got it in their head the other was trying to kill them my money is on House because he is possibly the most paranoid character in the game besides No-Bark but a case can be made for the NCR planning against him first.
 * Every NCR quest comes coupled with the option to force a takeover. A few quests come with that as a preferred method. And, just for the record, one ending for the Boomers has them defeat every NCR attempt at forcible annexation. The fact that there is incompetence in command is made clear - in fact it would seem as though part of the "point" being made about the NCR is that they aren't led by the best of people. The only reasonable leader they have is Hsu, and even he admits that he's perfectly willing to follow his orders to the letter. Kimball is the hawkish warmongering president, Moore is the bloodthirsty kill-em-all type (note her willingness to fight the NCR's way through the Mojave, despite the instances where discretion would be the better part of valor), Oliver is outwardly a jingo but obviously a very poor commander (he's willing to stack his troops up in Hoover Dam like a boardgame, forgetting that this creates severe problems in logistics and security throughout the Mojave - as evidenced by the capture of Nelson, Nipton and Cottonwood among others), and Hanlon is actively trying to subvert the NCR war effort (which is akin to treason and absolutely will cost soldiers their lives). Just the fact that it's stated the basic troops receive a few weeks of training and that their victory at Helios One is implied to have been through sheer force of numbers shows that the NCR's military strength is in its ability to draw recruits. And none of this affects whether or not the NCR has the right to be in the Mojave, which was my original point. Each faction was written with the intent of being morally gray. I'll grant you that the NCR has a number of great qualities and that I usually side with them as a "lesser of two evils" deal, but that still leaves the fact that their whole attitude is a cross between Iraq and Vietnam. Kimball's "spreading democracy" speech smacks heavily of the rationale that led to both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War.
 * Perhaps a more appropriate parallel would be the Korean War (which occurred during the 1950s). Both conflicts have had a long period of a stalemate, with frequent skirmishes and battles. The NCR forces are spread very thin along the Colorado River in a stalemate with the Legion, much like the U.N. Forces were spread extremely thin along the 38th parallel (which allowed a "volunteer" Chinese force to easily repel them). Involvement in the War for the NCR is the Hoover Dam. Involvement in the Korean War for the US was protecting interests in Japan (which was within striking distance from Korea). Both wars are fought publicly for the purpose of "spreading democracy." The General in charge of the whole operation is ready to use tactics others consider wasteful and dangerous, while he himself was in a rather safe and secure area - Oliver wants to slug it out with the Legion at the cost of untold numbers of casualties and then even invade Legion territory, while he's locked up nice and safe within Hoover Dam (General Wait-And-See). In Korea, MacArthur wanted to invade North Korea and even China, while he himself was directing most of the war effort from Tokyo, Japan. One big criticism of MacArthur is that he never spent a night in Korea.
 * I don't think that the NCR ending means paradise for everybody, it is Grey and Grey like that. And of course they are an illigitemate government for the Mojave since nobody elected them to be there. That doesn't explain preferring any other ending, though, since neither House nor Caesar nor the Courier carry any ligitemacy with them as well. I would guess that preferring the Wild Card ending is inscripted in the blood of players, you get the maximum power and it is arguable whether the people suffer or prosper more or less under your command than with the NCR. But how can any of this defend Caesar's Legion as a good ending? You don't have to be a fanboy of NCR, but comparatively speaking, they're okay in this setting which is never going to be paradise in the near future. And not being a fan should differ from denigrating everything they do. Pointing out their flaws is okay, turning a blind eye to their good points and the flaws of the other factions isn't. And excusing Caesar with speculation that he might be nicer to the slaves after he took control (for which there is no in game evidence at all) is not a valid point in this discussion which has to rely on canon.
 * Freaking seconded. I've got no problem with people who have fun doing pro-Legion playthroughs, but thinking that the Legion being victorious is the best fate for the Mojave? Where there's a chance that a woman like me has a tiny chance at being treated decently instead of a Fate Worse Than Death? Oh gee, how generous! No. Any faction that says treating 50% of the population as lesser-than is a bunch of assholes, period.

Why do the Khans never die?

 * Speaking of the Khans, don't they ever die? I wiped them out in Fallout, I wiped them out in Fallout 2, I wiped them out in New Vegas, and the epilogue tells me they're still alive and kicking up in Idaho. What makes these brigands so resilient that being destroyed three times can't stop them?
 * So long as you missed some of them somewhere, they'll come back. You cannot feasibly hunt down and kill every single Khan. The people you're killing are essentially a small selection as a gameplay limitation. The Enclave were holed up on an oil rig that you blew up but it didn't keep them from crossing the continental United States and setting up shop elsewhere.
 * Canonically, at least a few Khans survived the Vault Dweller's massacre in Fallout1, who went on to lead the New Khans in Fallout2. By that time, the Khans (along with the Jackals and Vipers) have become huge organisations that stretch across the southwest - the Great Khans in New Vegas may be their Mojave outpost, but it's not the entire organization.
 * Nope killing (most of) The New Khans is canon, as its stated that Papa Khan took what's left and went to the Mojave. Also the Vipers and Jackals are stated to be nearly gone.
 * It is possible for you to wipe out the Khans once and for all by either helping the Legion win the war (in which case the Khans will either be culturally assimilated into the Legion or exterminated down to the last man) or get them to take a path of destruction and make a suicidal attack on Hoover Dam.

A female Legion character

 * Is anyone else bothered by the fact that you can play through the whole game with a female character, help the Legion to take over the Mojave Wasteland and that the game ends with you being rewarded with your face on a coin rather than by winding up in a Slave Collar? It totally flies in the face of the Legion philosophy for them to treat you as an equal in the first place, let alone honor you after you single-handedly lead them to victory and prove their whole philosophy of Macho Superiority to be a total sham.
 * I Gave My Word... and why put you in a slave collar? Both Caesar and Lanius are very pragmatic and would probably rather have you fighting any resistance to their regime.
 * In real life, there's many sexist people who believe a single woman could be very different.
 * I Gave My Word is not how Caesar operates. People who ally with him are, if they're lucky, annexed by force, and if not, slaughtered. That said, the pragmatist argument is valid. You and your companions represent a military force that's even more powerful than the collective Enclave Remnants. Caesar already said "let's not mess with these guys" when the Remnants got out of Dodge, so if the female Courier is a match for anyone short of possibly Legate Lanius, Caesar will accept her as his Dark Chick rather than probably get himself killed and his Legion shattered by trying to collar her. Still could have been better dealt with in-game.
 * I like the idea that since Caesar made the myth that he is a son of Mars, he could have spread a similiar myth that the female courier was sent by the gods themselves, either as a child of a god or a minor diety. Recognizing you as a powerful ally, it would suit Ceasar to set you up with a place in his little mythology, to honor one who serves him awesomely. Even your average incredibly sexist Ancient Greek male would bow down in servitude if he met a female goddess. So if God > Goddess > Male Mortal > Female Mortal then the equation can go Mars > Caesar > Lanius and Female Courier > Legionari > Slave > Profligate.
 * Look at it like this. That woman, nomatter how womanly and according to the legion inferior she is, is still the Courier and has still accomplished all the various feats in the main queast. Up to and including surviving being shot in the head and singlehandedly assassinating a man surrouded by a literal army of Protectrons. Considering that Caeser still fears the Burned Man, a person who has done comparatively far less impressive or badass shit than our Mojave-trotting hero, do you he'd dare try to fuck with her?
 * I find this point hard to agree with considering Graham is your basis of comparison. The dude survived getting sniped at least five times by 1st Recon, survived getting lit on fire, survived getting thrown into the Grand Canyon, and was a Legate renowned for his brutality. I'd say the Courier has nothing on him so far. Furthermore, Caesar dares to "fuck with" Graham, sending frumentarii, assassins and entire tribes after him. If he actively tries to kill a man as feared as Graham, what would stop him from doing the same to a woman he fears comparatively less?
 * Look at what happened in the game. The Courier accomplished so much BEFORE meeting Caesar. He even remarks on every bit of it. He knows how capable you are before meeting you, and you continue to prove it during his quests. You convince the boomers and the White Gloves to help him. Given that the stalemate is broken by the Courier's action alone, would it not be in the realm of possibility that Caesar would avoid crossing the courier because there's at least a chance she can escape, and either rally a force against him or whittle down the legion by guerilla warfare. (The former one being more probable since the boomers have a bomber, they can literally rain death on Caesar and his Legion at the Courier's bidding if she so chose.)
 * I do think it makes sense that Ceaser wouldn't want to cross the Courier if he can help it. He doesn't want to create another Graham, and he knows that the Courier has already survived certain death at least once, and has allies who are definitely not associated with the Legion backing her up. Betraying the Courier at best will result int he destruction of one of his most potent allies, while at the worst it will create a new enemy who has the ability to literally wipe out armies of Legionaries without trouble. Caeser's not a moron.
 * You this troper thinks that if the legion wins and takes over the whole political landscape, that the whole culture of Legion would start to really change into Caesar's image of a new Roman Empire. Maybe women would get more rights since there would be no more need of breeding stock and maybe there would be laws to allow slaves gain their freedom (you know? Like in Ancient Rome)
 * Caesar pretty much outright states that's his plan once he makes Vegas his Rome as right now he wants an army and the best way of replacing losses is using women as bady makers also odds are if Lanius takes over he would most likly make reforms seeing you has a Worthy Opponent.
 * When does Caesar ever say that "replacing losses is done using women as baby makers"? I think you're just Wild Mass Guessing or making stuff up here.
 * Women in Legion society are either breeding stock or caretakers. And historically, that's what women were expected to do in warrior societies - pump out as many strong warriors as she possibly could. You're outright told that women are considered lesser-than in the Legion; what else do you think they believe women are good for?
 * No, that's not what I'm saying. Caesar doesn't rely on children to replenish his forces (It would simply take too long to do so). Instead, he assimilates the outside tribal cultures who already have warriors, which he deems fit to replenish the losses on his campaigns, integrating them into his army. If Caesar relies only on childbirth, he runs into the problem the Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel have of having a limited supply of fresh soldiers who require some 15 years to grow and mature enough to start fighting for the Legion.
 * Caesar isn't interested in a real copy of the Roman empire. He gleaned off the bits that he liked (glory to Rome, slavery, militancy) and ignored the parts where he didn't (democracy, culture, medicine). There's no reason to believe that he'd try to change a society that, to him, clearly already works. And besides, it'd be a bit hard raising a whole army to see women and slaves as lesser-than and then suddenly try to give them rights. If that ever happened, it'd take generations.
 * Umm what the hell else do you think they use the female slaves for if not sex, the resulting kids may not be on purpose but they would definately happen after all a strictly tech free society means no latex for condoms. They have male slaves to do hard labor and so I doubt that that they are often specifically appointed for that.

How to pronounce Caesar's name

 * Caesar's name. Is it pronounced 'SEE-zur' or 'kiy-ZAHR'? Consistency is your friend, Obsidian.
 * This is lampshaded in the game with one of the first characters you meet. ("I'm not sure if it's pronounced Ceasar or Ceasar.") People within the game pronounce it differently depending on whether they're Legion or not. Legionaries use the correct Roman pronounciation. Except for Karl, who should know better but says "See-zar."
 * Not just Karl, but other minor Legionaire NPCs are prone to using the soft C, as well. The whole "kiy-ZAHR" business also Just Bugs Me, since how does Caesar know the proper pronunciation? We live in a world with far more common knowledge on Ancient Rome, and yet everyone - from academics downwards - tends to use "SEE-zur". So how did someone reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Commentaries manage to figure this out?
 * If you look in a Latin dictionary or textbook they have a pronunciation guide according to current academic thinking on the subject. Caesar trained as a linguist with the Followers, who probably had such dictionaries/textbooks in their libraries. He probably thus actually studied the language itself and is able to read and speak it, not just the obvious quoting most everyone else is doing. I don't think he just read Gibbon or something. (Arcade, too -- even though everything he says to the player is a well-known quote, I think the idea is he's fluent. Informed Ability, in a way? I dunno.)
 * Arcade claims to have learned Latin from, among other things, Gladiator movie holotapes. I doubt he's actually fluent, and just tells people he is because it's not like some random stranger is likely to call you out on it.
 * The Fallout Wiki says that he based the Legion off what he read of Gibbon's Decline and Fall and Caesar's Commentaries. It is possible that he had access to a Latin dictionary, but its not explicitly stated.
 * Point ceded, largely. I would venture in answer that knowing a language and knowing the history of its speakers are different things. If he was reading the Commentarii (title non-Anglicized) I would gather he had some working knowledge, but maybe not.
 * It should be noted that Caesar does pronounce all of his Latin in proper classical pronunciation. As a linguistic anthropologist and being well-read, it's implied he does properly speak Latin.
 * Direct word of god from a developer post on the Something Awful forum:
 * RE: pronunciation: I asked that all Legion folks pronounce Latin according to classical rules of pronunciation. Caesar learned Latin out of textbooks and would pass on those rules of pronunciation to everyone else (Caesar is essentially the tribes' only source for such knowledge). People who are not part of the Legion pronounce Latin using popular American (usually based in ecclesiastical/Catholic rules) pronunciation. Because Arcade learned Latin from various sources, both popular and academic, his pronunciation depends on how culturally mainstream the phrase or figure are. He says "see-zur" and "kay-to" but he also says "wee-trix" and "noh-wee".
 * Just as a matter of interest, Ceaser is the root word of the German word Kaiser (king), which shows how the English/Latin pronounciation has abandoned the hard-C over the past two millenia.

The condition of New Vegas compared to DC

 * Here's something I haven't been able to shake: According to in-game lore, Mr. House saved Las Vegas from 70-odd nuclear missiles. Not only is 70 over-kill, but you'd think he would have managed to save the surrounding area too. Instead, it's all a wasteland! Las Vegas itself is still mostly dilapidated buildings save for a few key structures, and the strip, which is REALLY annoying because of the huge deal that was made of "The huge, glowing city un-touched by the Great War". This MIGHT be Fridge Brilliance in that no one's been taking CARE of the other buildings in the last 200 years, but then why's there still mutated monsters and ghouls around? It's just jarring seeing "New Vegas", which wasn't hit, looking exactly like the Washington DC in Fallout3, which got DIRECTLY hit in SEVERAL places (maybe that's a problem with THAT game in that there's still structures standing at all...)
 * I think your problem may actually lie with Fallout 3 rather than New Vegas. The area surrounding Vegas is in pretty good condition for having little to no maintenance for the last two centuries. Washington D.C. is in ludicrously good condition for being hit by multiple warheads and having no maintenance for the last two centuries. Plus 70 nukes isn't that many considering how large an area Mr. House is reported to have defended.
 * Because the New Vegas area WAS hit by some bombs, just not many, House only managed to shoot down/redirect most of, not all, the bombs, because the war started a few hours early and he hadn't gotten the platinum chip yet to upgrade his defenses to the point they needed to be. And as for the amount and damage per bomb observed, the only real explanation, taking 3 into account as well, is that the nuclear bombs in the Fallout-verse were much, much weaker then current ones are.
 * The issue is with the Fallout 3 lore, not New Vegas. Washington DC should have been completely destroyed. There is never any explanation in Fallout 3 as to why Washington DC's level of destruction was less than what was seen in the much smaller, less strategically important areas used in the other games in the series.
 * Well, it's entirely possible that Washington had some sort of missile defence system also, though obviously not as effective as Mr House's.
 * I've always assumed that it's because, in the Fallout-verse, wartime nuclear warheads were far from the multi-megaton city-busters of the modern age, but smaller-scale warheads that could either be used for precision strikes or to blanket a whole area. Quantity, rather than quality. The Glow was created by a single nuclear warhead that punched a rather neat hole through the centre of the entire facility, and yet it was still explorable. A multi-megaton weapon would have obliterated the facility. And everything around it. Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved that kiloton nukes could do the job of crippling an entire city, and even in this age a few megaton warheads would be considered overkill for a single city. Returning to the Fallout-verse, remember that the entire world was prepared for global thermonuclear war, even if the actual event caught everyone by surprise. Defences against ICBMs and bomb drops would have been common, and the ideal counter to that would be to spam as many nukes as possible at the target to overwhelm the target. If you are going to throw nearly eighty nukes at a city, does it make better sense to send in eighty very heavy megaton nukes, or as many kiloton nukes that would do the same job if several of them hit but would be able to travel faster and thus stand a greater chance of hitting their targets? Quantity has a quality of its own.
 * This is actually the theory behind current MIRV's. Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren't good examples of the destructive power of nukes considering they spared most "hard" buildings in the vicinity (most of the destroyed ones were made of wood).

The lack of a peaceful solution between Mr. House and the NCR

 * Why isn't there any option for a peaceful solution between the NCR and Mr. House? If you look at it in the long-run, they goals are not really in conflict. The NCR doesn't really think that the Strip is really strategically important and Mr. House acknowledge that his entire plan depends on New Vegas being supported by the NCR's caravan trade and tourist economy. Why couldn't they work out some kind of a deal?
 * There is even a document in the game's files that seems to suggest that a peaceful outcome was intended to be possible. But it got removed in the final release for some reason.
 * Maybe they took it out because it wasn't very believable? I doubt the man would have painfully achieved 200 years of survival and preparation just to become a servant to a group that he can't stand.
 * But Mr. House himself admitted that despite their ideological differences, he doesn't actually mind the NCR that much since they are his best customers. Also, with his wealth and knowledge, by joining the NCR he could have easily dominated the republic's economy within a few years and within a couple of decades, become the unofficial leader of the NCR Congress by means of buying out and absorbing the caravan and brahmin companies into his business empire, becoming a monopoly of critical resources in the entire core region. His long term plan requires that the Strip remains open for business and the NCR tourist economy, but it doesn't really require New Vegas to remain independent. Especially considering that a single economic embargo from the NCR can destroy his entire plan. Wouldn't it be easier if he is on the republic's good side?
 * What House is afraid of is that once the Legion has been dealt a more convincing defeat, the NCR can fabricate a reason to remove House from New Vegas and simply annex the entire Mojave, levy it's laws on the land, tax the hell out of both him and the people to pay for it's war. Mr. House explains that his treaty with the NCR is one of both necessity and convenience. He knew his plan was flimsy from the start because of his own circumstances, but he had the advantage in that the NCR didn't want a two-front war over Hoover Dam. The treaty is essentially there for the NCR to be placated and give House time to put his real plan into motion (scouring the world for the Platinum Chip, to start). His plan is one to encourage trade without giving up control for his idea of New Vegas. With him in control of Hoover Dam, he will still trade with the NCR, and he'll have economic and political control of the region without real fear of an NCR takeover.

The Strip divided into three sections

 * It seriously bugs me that there are two very ugly metal gates dividing the Strip into 3 sections. What's the practical reason for that? It clashes with the bright atmosphere, and must have taken a lot of work just for nothing. Besides, it makes me have to load more screens.
 * To devide the NCR embassy away from the rest of New Vegas. Its to allow strategic superiority to the Securitrons.
 * From a tactical point of view, it makes the city more defendable when confronted with an invading army. There movements will be contained to only a single section of the city as the defenders fortified their position at the gate. Forcing the attackers to attack three fortified locations before they can overrun the entire Strip.
 * From a gameplay point of view, it is just to give you a shorter loading time for each section of the city.
 * There are no actual barriers on the Strip; they're just in there for loading time. In the cinematic intro, the Strip was one continuous road.
 * Engine limitations - most modern game engines would be able to load up the Strip no problem, but as it is (especially with the various NPCs wandering about) it pushes the engine to its limits. I'm just thankful that we only have split-second load times between the sections rather than full loading screens.
 * JE Sawyer says its because the Xbox and PlayStation 3 cant handle all the things that happen on the strip and only the PC version would have supported a single zone strip. They did try to do it though as a one-zone strip remains in the code, they just couldn't fix it.

The un-Roman-like behavior of the Legion

 * As someone who started FNV wanting to side with the Legion out of a love for Roman-ness, I cannot help but say that I was sad to find that I could not side with the morals of the Legion. If it had only been an issue of democracy and monarchy, I would have quickly embraced Caesar's tyranny. If only Caesar's destruction of tribal culture in favor of Roman culture had been an issue, I would have also embraced it. If slavery had been an aspect of their culture instead of one of its most important part, I would have cringed a bit, but accepted it, especially since it is an accurate representation of Roman culture. But the Legion's complete reliance upon slavery (when the Imperial period, in fact, saw a decrease in slavery), misogyny that goes far beyong Roman ideals of sex roles, and a culture that seems to be entirely martial, with nothing of real Rome aside from titles and outfits. There seems to be nothing good to come out of citizenship in the Legion - everyone is a slave, either to Legionaries or to their commander. The Legion's often lauded safety comes at the cost not of a lack of political freedom or even servitude, but complete lack of the self. We do not see the homefront, which could make me wrong, but I do believe we are informed that every man is either a miles (I don't know the term they use, so I'll use Latin) or a slave and, of course, all women are slaves or priestesses. Why couldn't Caesar and his Legion just be more Roman! Why couldn't Caesar have read Livy and Cicero instead of Caesar and Gibbon! In all, I can see why to pick every other path - NCR leads to modern democracy and a large, powerful state capable of defending the desert, Mr. House leads to a very stable dictatorship that is generally benign and allows for substantial freedom, independence either leads to the Courier's dictatorship or small scale democracy, but the Legion leads to everyone becoming slaves or soldiers who will be unleashed to the West to create more slaves and soldiers. The Legion is just makes no sense to me, which is particularly annoying, since, as stated at the beginning, I wanted to love them.
 * You could argue that Caesar is in love with superficial Romantic trappings, emulating the look rather than the spirit of the Roman Empire. Your level of disappointment probably depends on which one of those two things you find most exciting and inspiring. ;D I mean, if you love "Roman-ness" it seems fine to side with the NCR, because as the vestige of representative democracy and republicanism that comes down from ancient Greece and Rome, they're the true spiritual inheritors of Roman ideas? Depends on whether one thinks the anima of a society is more fully expressed in the style of their uniforms or the content of their doctrines. I tend toward the latter, thus the NCR seems more "Roman" to me than the Legion, despite Caesar's cute little Latin phrases and his declaration that he's descended from Mars and whatnot. Mostly I think of him as playing dress-up. Robs him of much of his malice, haha. Caesar's got his own interpretation of the Romans, but I'm not sure I trust his hermeneutic or his historiography.
 * Well, the idea that Roman republicanism is anything like French, American, New Californian republicanism is sort of... wrong. Don't get me wrong, the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did a good job using the Roman republic as a propaganda piece and as a precident for what they were doing. Roman republicanism was more about the interests of the warrior elite, at least in the beginning, and eventually ended up serving the interests of a political elite who were simultaneously war-like and cultured. Also, considering that the guy is calling himself Caesar and not Cato or Scipio, I sort of assumed it would be more like Imperial Rome, which would still have at least had the whole cultured, elite aspect to it. But you are right, he basically is playing dress-up.
 * Roman republicanism was more about the interests of the warrior elite, at least in the beginning, and eventually ended up serving the interests of a political elite who were simultaneously war-like and cultured. What part of that doesn't sound like what we've got now? ;D The Roman Senate was perhaps more similar to the House of Lords (not exact analogy obv.), the formula of balancing between the ruling agencies (of powerful, influential men doing their own thing), notwithstanding shifts in the Zeitgeist, strike the ear quite similarly. But, yeah, Caesar's model is not so much The Roman Republic as The Roman Empire.
 * The difference is that while the Roman Republic's elite fought with their soldiers and were schooled in philosophy, rhetoric, and history, a modern republic's elite don't and aren't (alright, maybe that's a bit too harsh ;D ). I would agree that the House of Lords was pretty similar to the Senate (though, not anymore, since voting has polluted it). And yes, Caesar's model was the the empire, not the republic, which is part of why I'm bugged, but there were still awesome aristocrats during the empire - Agricola and Pliny the Younger are the first that come to mind - who were still very important politically, socially, and militarily (the Year of Four Emperors could not have happened if they didn't exist).
 * The Legion is not intended to be an exact replica of Roman culture. Caesar's knowledge of Roman culture is limited and fairly superficial, which is mentioned by Arcade who has the same level of knowledge in Roman culture as Caesar.
 * I know, but that just bugs me, since I was hoping for something different.
 * Caesar seems similar to Mussolini in the superficial use of Roman imagery combined with a Fascist ideology.
 * Keep in he Caesar's Legion is also basically roving barbarians as well, I imagine Caesar envisioned building a capital with a grand palace, theater, arena, and other public works that would generally make FNV look more like the Oblivion, but for now he has to make due with tents and little huts made out of scrap.
 * Exactly if the Legion win and reach a point of relative peace and not constant warfare, then maybe Caesar will take the time to truly create his grand dream of a Pax Roma that might include the decreasing acts of genocide, sexism, and even give slaves chances of freedom. The legion at some point needs to settle down because once there is nothing left to conquer you are left with an army of disciplined beasts, just give the legionaries some denari and land to settle down.
 * Or maybe like with Sparta the only thing keeping them alive is war and when they finally stop fighting they find out no one is competent enough to run it in peacetime.
 * you could argue that Caesar is smart enough to realize the mistakes and problems in doing that and Caesar if he is alive would groom his successor in understanding how to run a state in peace. I mean Caesar is not some kind of hick, he is pretty intelligent and know doubt read books on infrastructure, which would make a fascinating DLC to go in Arizona to see how exactly does the Legion run not on the warfront.
 * I really doubt he planned on that this is the guy who thought Lanius would make an amazing successor, which is a lot like thinking Hitler would do an amazing job as the Prime Minister of Israel.
 * I don't think people give Lanius his due, sure he is a mass murdering blood knight, but he understands a lot about trade routes and you can show him the follies of burning and pillaging every city or village that the Legion comes across. No the Legion I think is a case of the And it worked trope, in which while brutal and cruel, the Legion does provide security and in the post apocalyptic world, surviving is more important than personal freedoms.
 * I'm sure there are a lot of women who would argue against what the Legion does.
 * Exactly. It's easy to just say that 'safety is better than freedom' when you've never been faced with spending the rest of your life being raped by violent assholes for the rest of your life, because there are things that are A Fate Worse Than Death. Especially since most of us already live in countries where people died for our freedoms. Those freedoms are not things to be tossed aside lightly just so an egomaniac can keep you 'safe'.

The light step perk

 * The light step perk. Sure, you can avoid to set off all of the enemies floor trap only to have your partner set them off about 5 seconds later, with you standing 2 feet away. Sure, it inflicts less damage BUT the "point" of that perk is so you DON'T take damage.
 * Waste of a perk, anyway. It's all around more profitable to watch where you're going and disarm traps of XP. Plus, as noted, your companions don't have it.
 * You can still disarm the traps even if you have the perk. It just makes it a little easier to do so.
 * This perk is also significantly more attractive for non-VATS users, since the perk list is much smaller after you remove VATS perks, perks related to different playing styles, and perks, like Swift Learner and Explorer, that give bonuses that really don't matter.

The blurry screen when drugs wears off.

 * When your jet/psycho/alcohol/Super Stimpack/ANYTHING wears off and the screen gets blurry and less colored for about 5 seconds. You can't see and that's REALLY inconvenient during a battle. Which is when you tend to use healing items.
 * Or more fun. On Hardcore mode, my absolute refusal to pay for a doctor has resulted in clearing entire caves/vaults/what-have-you with a crippled head. I may not be able to see you, but my Super Sledge can still hit you.
 * You could still use Doctors Bags.
 * That is intentional. The positive effects of those drugs are offset by negatives like addiction and inconvenient screen blurring.

Backup power for Vegas

 * During the Wild Card quests (I think it was installing the override chip at the El Dorado power station), one of the options Yes Man suggests is to wreck the Hoover Dam's turbines, making the dam useless to the NCR. What happens to Vegas if you take that option -- where does it get power from?
 * Helios One is supplying power to New Vegas, and Mr.House likely has contingincies in place for that sort of thing anyway.
 * Mr. House have two generators underneath the Lucky 38. The reason why he wanted you to install the override chip at the El Dorado power station was because he needed the energy to jump start the generators as a back-up in the event that the power from Hoover Dam gets cut off during the Legion's attack. But even then, they don't have enough power to supply both the Securitrons army and keep the all the lights at the Strip on. So the option of destroying the turbines at Hoover Dam is a case of sacrificing the Mojave's best chance of economic propriety and self-sufficiency to ensure that the NCR will not try to gain control of the region ever again.

Inconvenient location of safe houses.

 * It Just Bugs Me that my safehouse is in probably the most inconvenient spot in the game. I can't Fast Travel to anywhere inside of the Strip. So if I want to change Veronica out for Boone because it's time to snipe some Deathclaws, I have to Fast Travel to the Strip gate, probably get attacked by a suddenly-spawned Freeside Thug, wait for a loading screen, run to the Lucky 38, another loading screen, ask Victor to open the damn elevator, yet another loading screen, and then finally get to my hotel room. I seriously thought about just relocating back to my crappy Novac motel room with the blood stains on the carpet and the decomposing corpse of Jeannie May outside on the rocks; what it lacks in atmosphere it makes up for in being able to get there with three times less loading. I appreciate that they gave us somewhere to gather all our companions, but couldn't it have been a little more convenient (and maybe with a little less creepy wind noise)?
 * Freeside thugs get shot by Securitrons if they get that close, and most of the safehouses are not all that better. Novac is good but the water is irradiated, and the faction safehouses are surrounded by enemies half the time. The Lucky 38 may take a bit longer to get inside, but it makes up for it by having a ton of space to store stuff.
 * Want a convenient spot to store your stuff? Try the Goodsprings cemetary. No, really, you practically spawn right on top of a grave if you fast travel there. No hassle with multiple loading screens, and the worst you'll face is a couple Botflies, at best.
 * Umm sorry but this troper at a high level was collecting snowglobes fast traveled to the cemetary i forgot. and guess what was waiting.. oh it had wings and flew but wasn't a bloatfly. CAZADORS!!!
 * The latest DLC Old World Blues just solved this problem.

Were the BOS Paladins that massacred the Followers outpost rogue?

 * Were those brotherhood of steel paladins who massacred the followers outpost rouge? It seems so, as killing them does not effect your reputation with the brotherhood and no one else in the brotherhood bunker (including McNamara) seems to acknowledge that there was a horrific massacre of unarmed doctors.
 * I think it was made unclear deliberately. On one hand, the group of paladins that committed the massacre are clearly extremist that does not represent the entire Brotherhood. However, they did say 'In the name of the elder, we sentence you to death!' before attacking you and Veronica instead of something like 'For the Brotherhood!' or 'In the name of the Codex!'. So it does imply that they have some kind of authorization from McNamara. It is really up for you to intrepid it. My understanding is this, McNamara has known Veronica for his entire life and he knows that she will likely use her knowledge to help another group once she has left. He is forced by the codex to prevent this, yet he cannot bring himself to kill the young women that he once treated as his niece. Then he remembered about the group of extremist paladins as his solution to this problem. He ordered them to keep an eye on Veronica, fully knowing that they will very likely engage in some very extreme actions and kill her. This way, he never officially given them the orders to commit the massacre or to kill Veronica, but the logical assumption is that they will. So he and the Brotherhood at large can officially keep their hands clean.
 * This would be completely out of character for McNamara. For one thing his views are nearly identical to Veronica's, but he is actually responsible for his chapter and realizes the pragmatic aspects of the Brotherhood. He would have just ignored Veronica's defection entirely.
 * They're rogue. When you meet them just outside the bunker and first threaten you, you can ask if the Elder knows what they're doing, and they say something along the lines of "No, but his job is to follow the Codex, so as long as we do the same we don't need to ask permission." Basically they're assuming that either the Elder agrees with them or the only reason he disagrees is because Veronica has poisoned his mind with lies.
 * But the paladins did say 'In the name of the elder, we sentence you to death!' before attacking. If they are doing it without the elder's permission, why would they say that instead of 'In the name of the codex!'?
 * Doing something "in the Elder's name" is different from asking him for permission. They're using his name because they're sure that, if he had all the facts and was rational, he'd agree with them, so clearly they're acting for him. It's the usual Insane Troll Logic you get out of fanatics.
 * Actually there are real world parallels. For example, in the Catholic church the idea of demonic possession is cannon. Some Bishops, however, are often afraid to be perceived as superstitious or are themselves skeptical of the phenomenon and thus will not grant exorcism faculties (permission) to any priest in their diocese. There exists a sort of side step around this method that acts on the principal that, if the Bishop believes all the teachings of the church. he would authorize an exorcism in certain cases. Since the bishop is required to believe in all church dogma, it must be authorized. This logic is considered hazy at best by cannon lawyers, of course, as cannon law has no conception of Insane Troll Logic.

The unsatisfying outcome for the independents ending.
"Boomers End Narration: Though the wasteland became anarchic after Hoover Dam, the Boomers show of force... Kings Ending Narration: Following the battle of Hoover Dam, Freeside came to be known as one of the safer areas in New Vegas, unlike the other sections outside the strip, where resentment towards the NCR still lingers."
 * Why were the Wild Card endings for most factions so unsatisfying? The Brotherhood kills people for technology, the Boomers remain isolated, and the followers get overrun with patients. Why is there no way around this? What if my character was nice and reasonable, and as the ruler of New Vegas chose to use his pull with the Boomers to get them to trade a little bit (most players have "Idolized" reputation with them by the end of the game). What if I wanted to take the extra money earned from the Casio's to fund the followers? What if I wanted to use some of those hundreds of Missile launcher and gattling laser toting robots to keep order in Freeside (with help from the Kings, of course)? What if I wanted to trade control Archimedes II and the Helios power plant in exchange for the Brotherhood (which "Idolized" me) in exchange for stopping their attacks and keeping the plant (and Hoover Dam, if they had the manpower) running for New Vegas? Why couldn't I negotiate with the NCR to let their troops leave peacefully in exchange for the salvaged power armor for the Brotherhood? WHY?
 * Because the Wild Card is implied to be a pretty horrific ending. Yes, Man practically tells you outright that he, not the Courier, is in charge. It is also fairly strongly implied that Yes, Man uses the Securitrons to brutally put down resistance against him. That's why not upgrading the Securitrons leads to a long period of anarchy. The reason its negative is because you do not actually have control over New Vegas, Yes, Man does and Yes, Man turns out to be a lot less nice than he says he should be.
 * And to be fair, the game does give you a fair amount of warning that freedom and independents will not come at a cheap price. Mr. House and Yes Man did warned you that all their predictions point out that there is no way in which the Brotherhood will tolerate the idea of New Vegas becoming a center of technology defended by robots. The Boomers have their isolationist beliefs because that they were attacked as they originally left their vault. Without an organized government to keep order, it is likely that many people will try to penetrate Nellis Air Force Base since it is full of technology that is worth a lot of money. This will only serve to convince the Boomers that all outsider (other then you and Janet) are the savages that they were told since at a young age. When you deal with the NCR at Hoover Dam, General Oliver even calls you out for actually thinking that you alone will be able to build an entire nation by yourself.
 * The Courier does not have the resources that Mr. House and the NCR do. Yeah, you can take over New Vegas and Hoover Dam with your Securitron Army. However, consider this. The NCR has the manpower and money to build infrastructure in the Mojave, particularly when working with the Kings and the Followers, because they're the entire, mostly-rebuilt State of California. The Courier and Yes Man are essentially starting from scratch without even the NCR's military to keep the peace; they have neither the resources to help the Followers (who really have no business trying to help everyone like they do) nor the spies and manpower needed to patrol the Mojave or keep the Brotherhood honest. That said, it's really not a bad ending in general if you clear out the Powder Gangers, the Fiends, Black Mountain and the Brotherhood (and the Brotherhood really have it coming, before anyone complains about that). Look at the traders who prefer to deal with the Legion rather than the NCR, because the Legion keeps the roads safe and doesn't tax them to death. The Courier can do the same, without the Legion's more dickish traits, just by cleaning out the various uncooperative sorts and telling everyone else "Don't Make Me Come Over There." There's lots of prospering communities in the Mojave. Of course, if you want lots of relief efforts and a modern democracy, then why aren't you backing the NCR in the first place?
 * I did back the NCR, in 2 out of 4 of my playthroughs, but I decided in one playthrough to go for the Wild Card ending because everyone was going on about how great it was, and I was really dissapointed by how shitty an ending it is. I also did personally clear out the Powder Gangers, Fiends, Black Mountain, and the Vault 19 Convict Gang (not the Brotherhood though; I don't care what you see, jerkassery in a few members does not justify mass murder), that doesn't stop you from handing over money from the casinos (which make a ton and are completely loyal to me after I replaced their leaders, by the way), but this doesn't let me handle the issue with the Brotherhood peacefully, give just a little of my massive funds to the followers, or keep order in the rest of Vegas, since pretty much every part of Vegas outside the strip and the independent communities are completely screwed, according to the ending narration.


 * The only thing the ending does - the only thing it can do - is inform you of the situation after the Battle of Hoover Dam. The whole point of the Wild Card ending is that now it's all up to you, the player, to imagine how you'll tackle these problems. One player might, like you said, donate a lot of the Strip taxes to the Followers and try to fix up Freeside, or they might rule the Strip like a king just like Mr House. The game can't guess that kind of person you are. You've kicked out all other factions; it's your call now.
 * I do agree that there could have been methods to arrange for a peaceful alliance with the Brotherhood instead of solving the problem by superior firepower (if you so choose; personally, I find that this is a case where the Wulfenbach Doctrine can be productively applied), that the Boomers should be willing to come out and trade if you complete Volare, and that it's a bit silly to say that "the wasteland is more unstable and anarchic than before" when you've personally taken out or otherwise pacified all the organized raider tribes in the Mojave. On the other hand, you don't have enough boots on the ground to police the Wasteland as a whole, the Scorpions, Jackals and Vipers are still roaming the place, and with the NCR gone, there is no law outside of the various communities. Regarding the Followers, Being Good Sucks, and With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. Like Spider-Man, they're taking on far more responsibility than their resources and personnel can handle, and they suffer for it. Finally, I would disagree with your characterization of the destruction of the Brotherhood as mass murder; I consider it an act of law enforcement. If they're going to start kicking around wastelanders who use technology that they don't like, then they have to be brought under control, and at present the only available means of doing so is by eliminating them.
 * If you get them to ally with the NCR first, the ending says they "harass" people over their technology. Not kill, harass. Steal at worst. Last time I checked, the NCR or any civilized society didn't react to theft by locking someone in their family inside a bunker and blowing it up. Because it still is mass murder, no matter how hard you look at it. Some of the people in the Brotherhood Bunker are actually pretty nice. Yet they apparently deserve death like the rest? Also, the wasteland did get more anarchic if you went independent. The ending narratin says so falt out.
 * A: Yes, the NCR does respond to theft in the Mojave with summary execution; this is explicitly stated. Even if we ignore this (and the fact that it's the Wild West), "seizing" items (as it says in the no-truce ending, and please don't tell me that Elder McNamara will somehow be nicer about it and send patrols out to lecture people instead of taking their stuff) is armed robbery, which is not just theft, it's a violent felony (so they prefer to threaten you with their guns first instead of just shooting and looting, there's no real difference). So in other words, those nice scribes are still part of a bandit army, and they're the people who build and repair the power armor that Brotherhood Paladins are using to seize technology from travellers. So this is precisely the same thing you're doing with the Fiends and the NCRCF Powder Gangers: a police action against bandits. Bandits hang, and the fact that there's some civilians inside a military base doesn't mean you don't bomb it. War never changes. B: Yes, the narration says that New Vegas becomes more anarchic, I'm saying that, at least for New Vegas proper, that's extremely ridiculous (and I think we agree there; that's the point of the IJBM).
 * My real problem is the only solution was to kill them, when there is tons of other ways to stop them. Also, the wasteland got more anarchic because the NCR wasn't around, which makes sense, but I thought it didn't make any sense that I couldn't just have any interaction with any faction in the Yes Man path that would influence the ending outside of killing them or getting them to kill other people. There was no solution to send securitrons into Freeside, and if anything Westside should be doing better, since I annihilated the fiends and they were entirely self sufficient anyway. Also, yeah, the Brotherhood kind of deserves it, especially when you consider they have produced people like Elijah, but its still kind of Disproportionate Retribution, and I just couldn't bring myself to kill them all because it makes the ending for Veronica even sadder and it's kind of cold blooded considering that I'm a member and all by the end of the game. And yes, it is mass murder to kill all of them for armed robbery (which is not punishable by death, if the NCRCF is any indication, the whole "shoots at you for stealing tin cans" thing is just a handwave of the bad AI when it comes to that. Certain members deserve it, but the entire organization doesn't).
 * Handwave or not, even if the NCR didn't do it (and I don't think it's a handwave that they shoot thieves in the Mojave, I think it's Gameplay and Story Integration), it's still standard practice to kill bandits in any Wild West setting, which the Mojave (sans NCR or Legion) is. Anyway, obviously we have different opinions on the amount of force that is justified to put a stop to the Brotherhood, so I'll leave that for now. I agree that the Mojave Wasteland going anarchic with the NCR gone makes sense, though that would be counterbalanced by the fact that the Powderheads and Fiends (and if I'm running things, the Brotherhood; YMMV) have been annihilated, the Khans have evacuated, and there's multiple One Man Armies (Arcade and Raul, and Boone working as a caravan guard) policing the wastes. Outer Vegas turning anarchic, however, not a chance; in the House ending, House sends securitrons to maintain order in Outer Vegas, and since we already know that you can stop rioting on the Strip (with lethal firepower), policing the 'sides and the rest of Outer Vegas should not be a problem. Honestly, I think that the problem is that the game lacks a postgame sequence; when you go to Hoover Dam, the wasteland is stuck as you left it and assumes that you won't continue to build the peace.

Can't fill up empty bottles with water.

 * It's nice that I can fill Empty Soda Bottles with Cactus Water, although other empty bottles would have been cool, too. But why can't I fill them with water from, a tap, a well or a lake?
 * Gameplay and Story Segregation is the best I can come up with. It really wouldn't kill Obsidian to put it in. However, being able to make as many useable items as you have tin cans could be a Game Breaker in itself, which could be why they decided against it.
 * If they make that an option, that bottled water will effectively become useless. Again, it is an example of Gameplay and Story Segregation.
 * Problem solved. In the Old World Blues DLC, you can fill up empty bottles at a talking sink in your base. Turns out, a sink is the only one with the skills to do so.

The point of Yes Man becoming more 'assertive'.
Assertive people have the following characteristics: They feel free to express their feelings, thoughts, and desires. They are "also able to initiate and maintain comfortable relationships with [other] people" They know their rights. They have control over their anger. This does not mean that they repress this feeling; it means that they control anger and talk about it in a reasoning manner. "Assertive people ... are willing to compromise with others, rather than always wanting their own way ... and tend to have good self-esteem". "Assertive people enter friendships from an 'I count my needs. I count your needs' position".
 * What's the point, story-wise, of in which  says he's found  I realize that it's entirely logical for something like a, and it would be an interesting twist, but on the other hand...this occurs right before the ending. And since it's been confirmed by the devs that there's no way to play after the ending, all this essentially accomplishes is planting a seed of doubt in the minds of everyone going for the Independent ending, doubt that may or may not be justified, but there's no way to find out which it is seeing as the game is basically over. It really feels like the Wild Card quest ends with a sour note instead of a bang.
 * This is a bad thing? There's ambiguity in each of the other endings, and the Wild card ending would feel awfully idealistic without the possibility of you facing the same issues that the other leaders you've deposed to get where you are.
 * When you think about it, it actually make sense. By choosing the independent Vegas ending, you have effectively replaced Mr. House. And part of the price that you have to pay is that in order to maintain control, you will have to rely on Yes Man, an AI with an unclear agenda (which is very similar to Mr. House relying on you to make his plans work). You will never know if he is going to turn on you any second or start disobeying your orders and go after his own agenda. If the player made the choice of working with Yes Man because they want to become the absolute ruler of New Vegas, this is a final note to remind them that there is a heavy price behind that choice.
 * Then would be a good time to apply those Science skills to Yes Man.
 * Someone over at the Fallout wiki has suggested that this is a way for the developers to justify a given outcome if the Wild Card ending is treated as canon in later installments, independent of how the Courier is played. It can also be justified in-story with the upgrades being programs left behind by Mr. House to ensure the continuation of his plans in the event of his demise.
 * I don't why everyone is everyone is so horrified that Yes Man will become more assertive. To quote Wikipedia:
 * Sound like a pretty good attitude to have as far as I'm concerned. Unless Yes Man is completely lying or never opened a dictionnary (figuratively), someone will explain to me where exactly is the problem.
 * It could certainly be a euphemism for "out of the player's control." I guess it depends on the type of courier; if you played "No Gods, No Masters" because you really wanted an independent New Vegas, this is a neutral or good thing, if you played it to screw over everybody and be the next Mr. House, this is an unmitigated disaster.
 * If you pay attention to what Yes Man actually says, just about every conversation he has with you contains numerous ambiguous, Skynet-esque comments. For someone that is supposedly only capable of doing things under direct orders, he creates a very elaborate plan. The only part of his plan that he considers mandatory is installing him so he completely controls all of the Securitrons. Taking the "assertive" comment at face value rather than skulking in a dictionary seems the more logical way to deal with that.
 * Yes Man cannot lie, and he took the time to choose his words carefully in that scene. My guess is that there is something he is trying very hard to not say.
 * Also, don't forget that Yes Man isn't a human being, one that can be killed or reasoned with; he's an AI wielding a lot of power. Name one AI with that much power that ever turned out good.
 * ...Helios? Cortana?
 * Perhaps it might be better to look at artificial intelligences of science fiction closer to the era Fallout bases its SCIENCE! on. So, Multivac would be one example. There's also, to a lesser and perhaps more ambigious degree, the Machines (Of course, that was also Asimov).
 * When questioned about this, J.E. Sawyer stated that betrayal wasn't the implication that they were trying to go for with Yes Man, rather that he'd be capable of functioning by himself without some random schmuck pulling the same thing you pulled on Mr. House.

Traveling from Cottonwood Cove to Fortification Hill?

 * How did the raft get from Cottonwood Cove to Fortification Hill? Lucullus says that you'll be going "upstream" but there's no viable landing sites on the east side until you reach Hoover Dam, and I'm pretty sure you don't paddle over that.
 * Did you arrive at a dock? No, you just arrived at a gate. It's most likely you just sailed to a concealed zone, where you went up a hard-to-see pass until you arrived at the top. That could also be why you aren't asked to disarm until you actually get into the fort, as you could encounter beasties just outside the fort's walls that could attack you. Or it could just be that you teleported there, because it's something the developers assumed you just wouldn't think about.
 * If you look behind you when you are at the Fort, you will see that there are an endless sea of tents that you don't get to visit, meaning that the section of the Fort which you get to visit is just a small part of the entire camp. If you look closer, the parts of the camp that you can't visit extends all the way to the river bank. So it is Gameplay and Story Segregation that you don't get to see yourself first getting off the raft and walk all the way across the camp.

ED-E getting healed by stimpaks?

 * How exactly does using stimpaks on ED-E heal him?
 * Acceptable Breaks From Reality is in full force here. ED-E would be a lot less appealing as a companion if he couldn't be healed. Then again, he heals immediately after combat is over, so maybe he has some kind of on-board repair nanobots, which could be stimulated by the chemicals in a Stimpak. Mr. House says something like that when he talks about the onboard repair system on Mark-II Securitrons, which ED-E may have too.
 * Maybe he processes the the stimpaks and burns them to run internal repair? It would make sense for him to have something, but micro-circuitry was never very prominently researched before the nuclear war, though there's a lot prototypes in Nevada.
 * A lot of robots in the Fallout universe have biological components. ED-E is not a stock model eyebot, so his method of construction is basically unknown to the player.
 * WMG: ED-E is secretly a geth construct. I mean, medigel does work with Legion.

Using ED-E to fly around.

 * If Ed-E can carry up to 200 pounds, and I weigh less than 200 pounds (if being of a light frame and carrying minimum to no equipment) why can't I just hold on to ED-E and just fly around the whole game?
 * Gameplay and Story Segregation. What would even be the point? ED-E can barely fly above head level, and isn't even that fast. The developers didn't think of it, and even if they did, it wouldn't have been worth their time. Anyway, I'm sure there's a Game Mod out there that can help you.
 * That would look silly. Plus your arms would get tired.
 * ED-E travels slowly and, while more durable than his Capital Wasteland bretheren, still explodes when he takes too much damage. What would be the point when on foot, you are usually faster, better-armed, more durable, more agile, and are going to blend in better with the locals?

Why does the wasteland omelet require lakelurk meat?

 * Why does a wasteland omelet require lakelurk? In gameplay terms it means you have to haul in inventory an ingredient that's useless for anything else when the egg is already exotic enough, tough enough to get, and weighs 7 units. In story terms, there's no way the original recipe could've called for it; there weren't any lakelurks in the California valley.
 * How do you know there were no lakelurks in California? Just because they weren't seen in the first two games, does not mean they weren't there - you only explored a handful of settlements, after all. Besides, if mirelurks (which are almost genetically identical to lakelurks) can evolve on the other side of the continent, I'm sure lakelurks and their relatives could exist on the East Coast.
 * Maybe, but there definitely weren't any lakelurks in Modoc. The place was suffering a drought so bad that a glass of water was $1000.
 * All of you are overlooking a fairly simple explaination: The lakelurk meat is a substitution for things that can't be had in the Mohave.

The Karma system

 * Why do I lose karma for stealing from the legion? I don't lose karma when I steal from the van graffs? On a bigger scale why is It when I take something off some ones corpse 5 seconds after death no one bats an eye?
 * Most likely because this game is much more focus in Reputation instead of Karma, so that the developers just doesn't care or part as much attention to it as they did before.
 * That implies that they ever paid attention to the karma system... in truth, it's always been fairly broken. By its nature it assumes that certain actions are automatically "good" or "evil" regardless of context or motivation, which doesn't really fit with Fallout's Grey and Gray Morality. In Fallout3, karma essentially reflected your reputation with the Wasteland as a whole, but this is obviously now redundant thanks to the reputation system.

The small scale of the final battle at Hoover Dam.

 * Why was every factions contributions at Hoover Dam so small? The Brotherhood sends like 3 guys, the Khans send 4, and the Boomers only go on one bombing run. I know it's implied that the battle is bigger than what you see and that the factions are aiding each other in a battle that's actually happening across the map, but it feels like it should be more rewarding for getting everyone to cooperate, especially if you gurantee NCR victory.
 * If you listen to the NCR Emergency Radio during the battle, it mentions that the road to Hoover Dam was blocked, meaning that each side are only gets the few units that they have already stationed at the Dam to help without any reinforcements. Also, depending on how you handled some of the quests, the Legion would launch simultaneous attacks against Camp Forlorn Hope and Camp Golf, the Fiends would attack Camp McCarran, the Kings would start riots in the streets on Freeside and Westside, the Omerta would start a coup at the Strip, etc. Meaning that Hoover Dam is actually a small part of the entire battle for the Mojave.
 * But what if I killed all the fiends leaders (and most of the fiends too, for that matter), destroyed the legion outposts at Nelson and Cottonwood Cove so they'll have no positions to attack from, stopped the Omertas, and brokered peace between the NCR and Kings? Because I did that on every playthrough, it feels like it should have some sort of impact on the final battle.

The lack of a polite speech option in the quest "Debt Collector".

 * It's an extremely tiny thing, but it still bugs me: In the quest "Debt Collector", you have to collect caps from 3 people for the Garrets, one of whom is a homeless ghoul with a lazy eye named Grecks. There are only a few dialouge options with him, and all of them involve you treating him like shit. Why is there no way to say anything nice or give him bottlecaps? It just bugs me that the only interaction possible with him is to be an asshat, simply because the developers didn't think to put extra options in the Dialogue Tree.
 * True, but when you think about it, you are forcing a group of desperately poor people to repay heavy debts. That in itself isn't really a nice thing to do to start with.
 * Still, it feels like they were limiting my choices, which is the worst thing a Role Playing Game can do in my book. They already included an option to just pay for the debts outright from your own pocket, they couldn't have included a dialogue option with Grecks where you could be polite? Other than demanding money, all you can do is make fun of his eye. Also, in Fallout 3, even if you enslaved people, you could do it politely.
 * There are "polite" options for all three of them. You probably just didn't have access to them.
 * No, there's not. You can be polite to Jane ("Surely a lady of your stature has the money to pay her debts..."), but not to Grecks. The only dialogue option outside of demanding money is to threaten to kill him, demand he gives you everything else he has (including the clothes on his back), and making fun of his eye.

Where is Vault 3's GECK?

 * It was stated that Vault 3 is a controlled vault similar to Vault 8 in that it wasn't part of the Enclave's Vault Experiment and was meant to re-colonize the surface. If that is the case, then why wasn't there a GECK in their vault?
 * Vault 3 was overpowered and massacred by a mob of drugged out Ax Crazy raiders. Either they destroyed it, not knowing its true value, or sold it, seeing as they had little use for it.
 * Perhaps that is the case. I would be satisfied if there is a mention about it somewhere in a diary or dialogues with Motor-Runner. But the total lack if references of the GECK in a controlled vault just bugs me. Maybe the intended dialogues got cut out or something.
 * They might never have received one. Fallout 2 reveals that all of the events of Fallout 1, and, as a result, Fallout 2 originally started with a shipping error. Vault 13 was supposed to have boxes and boxes of water chips for backups, not just one.

Can't tell the Enclave remnants to fight for you or Mr. House.

 * The Courier, with a bit of work and the right ally, can gather up an old squad of Enclave remnants to throw their weight around in the final battle. Most of the remnants aren't actually too choosy about who they fight, being in it mostly for a "last hurrah" of sorts, and will actually leave the final decision on who they should back completely up to you. Your only choices are "Side with the NCR to fight the Legion" or "Side with the Legion to fight the NCR." Why can't a player going for one of the middle paths say something along the lines of "Fight for House" "Ally with me and my personal allies" or even something as simple as "Follow my lead and shoot what I point at''? Sure, there's a workaround of sorts in the fact that pretty much every non-Legion path considers NCR the lesser of two evils, but it just doesn't feel right...
 * The point is, if you are fighting for Independent Vegas/ Mr.House, the developers just automatically assume you want to decimate the Legion as much as possible since they are a much bigger and more agressive threat than the NCR. There's no real reason to be hostile to the NCR in the final battle, as they'll help you unless you specifically went out of your way to be a dick.
 * Why fight on two fronts if you don't have to? The NCR and the Legion are going to have a showdown over the dam regardless of the Courier's actions, because both want the Mojave and the nice juicy source of hydroelectric power. Better to throw weight behind one side, let them kick the hell out of the other, then deal with the weakened survivor. Of course, being able to undermine both sides' efforts at Hoover Dam so their forces fought to mutual extermination would have been great fun ...
 * But, if you mess up the override in the final battle, NCR troops will start shooting you, and at the very end, when confronting the General, it's odds-on that you'll end up shooting it out with the NCR. In both these cases, if you told the Remnants to fight for the NCR, they take this very much to heart and start shooting you. And given that they don't go down easy and can take you very much by surprise when you expect them to be on your side, they can quite easily kill you for daring to go against the side they plumped for mere hours before the battle.

Hoover Dam still in operational condition after 200 years

 * Ha, speaking of the dam's hydroelectric capabilities: I think it was in "Life After People" or some program about invasive species, but I remember it being said that Hoover Dam, thanks to an influx of mussels of some sort, if left without upkeep for more than a few weeks, the pipes and turbines and stuff would become so clogged with clams that the equipment would be unusable. Maybe such an invasion never happened in Fallout's world, or maybe the radiation killed them. *grin* Should've been a Wacky Wasteland feature. More dangerous than the NCR or the Legion? Clams.
 * The problem is that this is that would only be an issue under very specific conditions that the dam is specifically designed to never have occur. There is a difference between something being theoretically possible and every single safeguard to prevent it simultaneously failing. On top of that, hydroelectric turbines are not engines. If they get clogged and stop, it doesn't cause issues that couldn't be easily repaired (which often would just be removing the mussels from the pipes and turbine).
 * And it wasn't operational when they found it, simply intact. I believe (going by memory here) that one of House's conditions in the treaty was that he would help the NCR get it running again.
 * And only one or two of the eight turbines was even gotten running.
 * Actually, one of the eight turbines was running when the NCR got there. They managed to get six going at one point, and by the time of the game four are in operation. It's surprising that even one was running after almost two centuries of neglect, but I guess they made everything Ragnarok Proof in time for the war.

Caesar's Mini Battle Arena

 * This troper is still furious by the fact that just because she was a girl, she wasn't allowed to fight in Caesar's battle arena. I understand that the Legion view women in... a certain way, but could not believe that her gender got in the way of actual gameplay. In fact, this troper got so mad that she literally took Boone and her minigun and wiped out that whole area.
 * You pretty much just answered your own question. I've never played as a girl character (since I'm a guy), but I thought that that was a nice bit of Gameplay and Story Integration. But I guess it does not make much sense since they trust you to wipe out whole factions, but not to fight POW's and slaves. Maybe this didn't bother me that much since I never side with Ceasar's Legion. Oh, and I wiped out the fort too (who doesn't?). Used a good ol' ballistic fist.
 * Particularly surprising given that a female Ranger POW is set up as an opponent. Apparently this woman is tough enough to fight in the arena, but you aren't.
 * Thanks.
 * I just thought the double standard was worth highlighting. Honour can be earned by defeating a strong woman but can't be earned by a woman herself, no matter how strong. A peculiar distinction.
 * The woman in the arena turns out to be NCR Ranger Stella - and the reason she's there is that she was captured by the Legion when they attack Ranger Station Charlie. The Legion apparently decided to rather than kill her, have her fight to the death in the Arena for their amusement, but this backfired when she killed several Legion officers armed with machetes, including a Centurion - with her bare hands. I suppose that the Legion feels that she needs to be killed by a man in the arena so that the other women slaves don't get any ideas. (Though why they don't just execute her is rather puzzling.) Having a second woman with potentially equal skill could lead to a disaster.
 * I understand that the Legion view women in... a certain way, but could not believe that her gender got in the way of actual gameplay. Indeed. How dare the game actually reflect your gender by adjusting the experience!
 * Exactly. Male characters and female characters get different experiences. This is why male characters can get rocket thruster parts from Lady Gibson for free with the Lady Killer perk, and why women can flirty with Swank and convince him to give them some caps with Black Widow. It's also why female characters have an easy (and hilarious) way of taking out Benny, whereas Male characters don't, but they get to fight in the arena.

Christine's decision to stay at the Sierra Madre

 * After completing Dead Money, Christine decides to stay behind at the Sierra Madre. Cool. Um, but WHY? She has absolutely no reason to stay there. The only things left at the casino are tons of chips useless outside the casino, hologram security guards, and technology she can't utilize, and outside in the villa is a toxic cloud and violent Ghost People. Even if they do see her as a hologram, she'll just be stuck with them for the rest of her miserable life, slowly dying of exposure to the cloud. I could understand her trying to purify the area and make it safe for habitation/scavenging, but there's no mention of that in her ending slide, and even so, the Ghost People would probably prevent that. You'd think she'd try to do something productive with her life, now that she has her voice back, like rejoin the Brotherhood or go and reunite with Veronica, even follow the Courier back to the Mojave Wasteland. But no, she'll just sit up in the casino suites, alone and going steadily insane.
 * Christine was mentally, physically and emotionally abused for years and devoted her entire life to finding and killing Elijah. The ending also uses the term "warden," which might indicate she is staying there to make sure Elijah doesn't escape. It doesn't matter if the player kills him or not. If the player doesn't kill him, she could justifiably be concerned Elijah might figure out to escape. Elijah is crazy, but he was regarded as a genius when it came to technology. If the player kills Elijah, it doesn't mean Christine believes he died. Elijah already apparantly "died" twice before Dead Money occurred. She could also be concerned about someone accidentally releasing him.
 * Keep in mind the Brotherhood of Steel's policy towards technology is usually "if we can't have it, no one can," so staying behind to prevent people from scavenging in the area is a plausible motive, as well, especially since at least one other person survives and leaves the area.
 * This is further expanded in one of the conversations with Christine. The player can ask her why she wants to stay, and Christine "says" she's going to stay to protect people who wander into the area, as well keep the technology at the Sierra Madre from being used for more aggressive purposes. Elijah's plan was to use the security emitters to drop invincible holographic soldiers into the Wasteland against the NCR and everyone else, and Christine was sent to kill him and prevent such a misuse of that technology.

Vault 11

 * Alright, so after you fight off the robots and turrets trying to execute you, you get to hear the audio logs, you find out that the dwellers "passed the test" and were allowed to be released. So why, does the execution protocol still work even after the test was passed?
 * That area of the vault is only accessible when the trap is active. The trap might very well have been completely deactivated while the door was still sealed shut before you reactivated it, but there is no way for the player to legitimately check since the door is sealed.

Recharger Weapons
// I imagine that in most places, Energy Weapons are the kind of thing you see adventurers and merchants using, not soldiers. High-rollers who operate on their own dime, don't have a need for standard equipment, and who are generally speaking a lot more skilled than the typical footsoldier. In the NCR, footsoldiers need to be rugged, reliable, easy to supply and able to live off the land or improvise in a pinch, and that means conventional firearms instead of shiny lasers.
 * Recharger weapons seem pretty awesome, so why does no one use them? The recharger rifle, for example, costs less than half as much as the NCR's service rifle, does 5 more damage per second (though 50 % less damage per shot), costs half as much, is more accurate, is cheaper to repair, and most importantly, NEVER RUNS OUT OF AMMO. Think about how insanely useful that would be to the budget to an army as large as the NCR's. You don't have to pay a cap every time you fire a shot! The pistol is more expensive, but is a much better weapon. Couldn't the NCR have handed the pistol over to the Van Graff's or Gun Runners and said, "mass produce these, and preferably create a hybrid between the pistol and rifle". The pistol does 18 dmg per shot (90 a second), the rifle does 13 (51 a second) so maybe the new hybrid could do 15 (75 a second). I don;t know, just seems like it'd save a lot of money and increase performance...
 * Just because it may be economical doesn't mean it will be simple. Energy weapons are expensive and difficult to maintain, and given how rare Recharger Weapons are it's likely that that it is currently impossible to reproduce them. While gunpowder and casings are relatively simple to produce, fusion batteries and vaccuum tubes are not. Meanwhile, the standard issue Service Rifles are easy to maintain, mass produce, and use. Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better applies to New Vegas, so the NCR isn't likely to drop it's time-proven guns over some flashly lasers, no matter if they could save a few caps per person..
 * It would save much, MUCH more then a few caps. Soldiers go on long capaigns for years. Besides, how is it hard to use? You never have to reload, never have to recycle ammo, just point and shoot, and the accuracy makes sure any idiot can use it. It's cheap, and the Van Graff's sell it, so it's obviously not hard to make, as the Van Graff's are implied to make their own merchandise. The Van Graffs operate in NCR territory, and are probably on the NCR's bad side due to the conspiracy with Crimson Caravan, so I don't see why they can't work out a deal.
 * Could be a weight issue as well as a practical one. If I recall, the Recharger Rifle weighs nearly twice as much as the Service Rifle. IIRC, didn't the Service Rifle also have better range? Those two factors could mean the difference between life and death for a trooper. Real life weapon projects have been cancelled because they were too heavy among other things (The XM8, for example). There are also the fan-wanky answers, such as there may be certain problems that we don't know about (maybe they don't handle well in moist environments, maybe they explode if you drop it improperly, maybe the top brass and some of the soldiers are skeptical about using such experimental and exotic technology, et cetera). You could also factor in the chance that if the recharger rifle does break, your average GI-Joe isn't gonna know how to fix it. Even if he did, it could be an extremely long and delicate process where one screwup leads to the thing blowing up in their face, one that he or she would be too freaked out to attempt.
 * Walk up to a local repairman, pay 230 caps to repair a fully broken rifle. Done. Plus, maybe the new hybrid could weigh less? The Recharger Rifle was something of a prototype, the pistol is the finished project, so maybe they could create one that's more expensive, but has a larger capacity, weighs less, and is more durable? Plus, the recharger rifle is actually more accurate, due to the fact that lasers actually behave like lasers. In pure statistics from the wiki: The Recharger Rifle has a spread of 0.02 (i.e. almost perfectly accurate). The Service Rifle, on the other hand, has a spread of 0.55, good, but not as accurate as the Recharger Rifle. Nothing in game suggests that the Recharger Weapons will break in a bad enviorment, and they are extremely cheap to repair, AND you could probably upgrade them (like, make Recharger Rifle focus optics, giving it + 3 damage, and maybe something to increase the magazine capacity from 7 to 10. it does not seem like it would be that hard to make with minds as brilliant as the NCR's, especially since the Van Graff's could benefit so much from this trade). Also, weight does not really matter in game to NCR soldiers, since besides ammo and the occasional stimpack, their weapon is all they carry, and they have a 200 pound carrying capacity. Outside of gameplay, in real world terms, the weight would pay for itself when it came to carrying ammo everywhere. Not to mention that you DON'T NEED TO RELOAD THE GUN OR FIND ANY AMMO, so it is incredibly reliable. Stopping power isn't really a big issue either. The focus optics would be enough (15 damage and 60 damage a second) to fit the NCR's expectations of power, since the main soldier of your enemy army (the Recruit Legionary) is charging at you wearing football pads and wielding, at beset, a 400 year old lever action rifle. I do agree that without the upgrades I suggested, the normal rifle would be next to useless do to its low damage. The pistol, on the other hand...
 * Suppose the local repairman isn't affected by gameplay and story integration and doesn't know how to repair it, suppose he's off to get more supplies and is unable to do it, suppose he's too busy, suppose you just sent your military paycheck and can't afford to have it repaired, suppose the repairman gets a stray spear to the chest, and now you don't have anybody to repair it, suppose one out of many hundreds of things happens that renders you unable to rely on another person to help you repair your exotic weapon, then you're out of the weapon that's keeping you alive.
 * Weapon repair kits aren't exactly hard to make... plus one will pretty much repair a broken rifle.
 * Try to make a repair kit out of scrap metal and electronics, a wrench, glue, and duct tape, now use it to repair a complex electronic device you have while it's plugged in. Failing that, realize the potency of Gameplay and Story Segregation. It's easy for the player to make them because they're the main character. Even then, by the level of repair needed to make one seems to make the Courier an amateur mechanic. (at level 25 you're able to repair guns, 35 leaves you able to fix generators).
 * The NCR has its own mechanics (Major Knight is one of the only people in the game who can repair stuff).
 * Apply the repairman situation discussed above to the mechanic, and you'll reach the same conclusion. Bottom line is that a weapon that can only be repaired by exactly one person out of a camp of nearly 100, and you'll see it's impracticality.
 * Still, if the rifle is so cheap to both repair and make, I don't see how it would be hard to repair. Repairing a fully broken service rifle costs over twice as much as a recharger rifle.
 * Then the NCR would become the Imperial Guard, an endless swarm of men and women armed with infinte ammo lasguns.
 * Lasguns would blow the legion out of the water Service Rifle's are only good early game.
 * The theoretical DPS does not apply for these weapons due to how recharging works. In any long term situation, the DPS for the pistol is 18 and rifle is 12, making both terrible weapons. The low storage capacity for extra shots is too low to make shooting more than once per second a very common occurrence in a major battle. Sitting around and doing nothing for 7 or 20 seconds is just impractical when much lighter, cheaper, more effective ammo based weapons exist.
 * Good point. That problem is less pronounced with the pistol, which has a much larger ammo capacity, damage, and fire rate than the rifle, but it also costs 2700 caps, whereas the service rifle only costs 540, so unless each soldier uses over 2160 shots, then it's not really worth it, even if the pistol is a better weapon.
 * Energy Weapons take a highly specialized set of skills to use (game mechanics wise, their skill is different from Guns) and different technology to manufacture in large numbers. You'd essentially have to Army 2000 the entire NCR military force, not to mention retooling the entire manufacturing infrastructure of the state (the Gun Runners and Van Graffs can't supply a whole army), and the result would be far less flexible and able to adapt to a failure of the supply chain. When a service rifle breaks and there's no repairman around (and Repair 50 is NOT something you can find on an average half-trained grunt), you grab a pistol off the nearest dead legionnaire, and when it runs out of ammo, you scavenge bullets, hand-load new ones, or switch to your pistol. When a recharger rifle breaks, you hope there's another laser around (and there probably isn't; lasers aren't much more expensive, but that's due to low demand and not high supply). As for recharger pistols, no way in hell is the NCR going to even consider a 2700-cap outlay for a single machete fodder soldier.

The neutrality of Jacobstown

 * While I can understand that Marcus has no reason to actively participate in the battle for Hoover Dam, I am curious to just how long Jacobstown can stay it's own little place. While I guess that they'd be left alone in a House/Independent ending, the NCR and the Legion might not be so simple. Lanius especially seems like enough of a Blood Knight to be unable to resist the idea of taking on an entire village of Super Mutants and the NCR might decide to annex them them as well.
 * Legion probably would go after them eventually, but that isn't a guarantee.
 * The NCR has a track record which indicate they would not if you play Fallout 2. Broken Hills, another town Marcus was mayor of, was fully capable of interacting peacefully with the NCR. The reason that town failed was because the mine was spent and it had no way to economically support itself anymore.
 * And the town have very little military or economic value anyway. It isn't like that it is located in a strategically valuable location (Primm, Goodsprings, New Reno), or produce products that you can't get any where else (Vault City, Redding, Hoover Dam). So in the Mr. House or Independent ending, people will most likely leave them alone. For the Legion, they do have very racist views toward mutants, but they will be too busy preparing for the eventual NCR counter attack and eliminating local resistance to waste time paying attention to them. Finally, for the NCR, they will most likely send an emissary to Marcus, offering him terms for the town to join the republic in exchange for OSI scientist and medical support for the cure that they developed, plus citizenship for all the Super Mutants in the town.

Lack of Hair Stylists

 * Why is the otherwise more-developed Mojave so behind the Capital Wasteland when it comes to cosmetology? Fallout 3 had Butch, Snowflake, the robot butlers... Fallout: New Vegas only seems to have Sergio, and you can only use his services if you take a very specific quest option (which uses up the King's favor). Why is it so hard to get a haircut? It's not like they're unbalancing.
 * I know! How hard could it be just to get haircut? If there was just a perk that allowed you change your hairstyle in a mirror I'm sure it would be fairly popular. However, maybe in universe, Haircutting is a secret skill practiced only by a trained elite few, or robots who have machinery capable of replicating the complex process. How else could you go from almost bald to a huge, neon blue hair without some kind of complicated technique.
 * Is it really that big of a deal? For most of the game you don't even get to see your character's face, plus it doesn't even affect your stats or anything. The developer just didn't think it is really that important.
 * Well, some of us happen to use the third-person. Also, it's exactly because it's not that big a deal that It Just Bugs Me that getting one is so convoluted. It doesn't affect your stats or anything, so why not also have, say, a hair salon in the Ultra-Luxe?

The Legion Sustaining Itself

 * Okay, how exactly has the Legion managed to sustain itself for so long as to a threat to the NCR? To actually have an army big enough to fight the NCR, they'd have to be around at least as long as them, yet Legate Lanius will flat out state that they have no food production, relying on pillaging people who do. It's also strongly implied, if not outright stated, that the Legion have no factories to produce guns (unlike the NCR), since they shun technology. Why did the Legion not deplete all its ammo a few weeks after it was born?
 * Most legion soldiers don't use ammo anyway, the majority wield melee weapons with machetes being most common, the rest use guns and ammo when they pillage them from others which include raiders and such. The other part of the equation is that they trade. The presence of a free merchant in the Fort is proof enough that the Legion has some kind of resources with which to sustain themselves and resupply. The assumption is that the Legion pillages communities within their territory for what they need, then leave them alone until they need more. The actual logistics in practice is very difficult to imagine, however.
 * Actually, most legion soldiers use guns. Look around the Mojave, not that soldiers can have loaded guns exclusively by pillaging. If not, they'd all be curbstomped by the NCR. It just seems like the Legion should've been destroyed by a pack of raiders due to lack of production far before they came to rival the NCR.
 * You are thinking about how the Khans operate back in Fallout 1. The Legion is not just a bunch of raiders that burn settlements and kill random people. They do have a slave based economy similar to what the ancient Spartans had (Slaves doing all the farming and mining to support the warriors). Also, the Legion does have citizens that are neither slaves or Legionaries. They are allowed to go on with their normal lives as long as they follow Caesar's law and pay tribute to Legion in the form of slaves or resources.
 * I'm not sure where that's stated, but OK, that makes sense (are these civilians just middle aged healthy males? Sick people die due to lack of medical technology, kids are turned into soldiers and women are turned into slaves). But what doesn't make sense is how they have a bunch of guns when they have no way of producing them, using weapons they couldn't have scavenged from the NCR. And if they did take the weapons from tribals and raiders, where exactly did they get the guns? Those guns are over 200 years old, they guns should've fallen apart after being fired so many times with no one maintaining them.
 * Exactly, that is the reason why according to the Van Graffs, despite being larger then the NCR in terms of size, Caesar's economy is only one-third the size of the NCR's much more developed economy. The Legion doesn't have a prosperous economy, however, they are able to support themselves in a way that they are a functioning nation state.
 * The guns that the Legion use tend to be lower tech - pistols, lever-action rifles - these are weapons that use physical parts that don't need high-precision laser cutters to make like new. Even the higher level mooks use 'lower tech' weapons like antimaterial rifles and pieces of armor like the NCR Heavy troopers - they just use bits of heavy armor stripped of the servos. They're even trying to buy energy weapons from the Van Graffs, so yes, it's most likely the Legion does trade for some of their weapons and ammo, unless there's Legion Gunsmiths around as there are Legionary Blacksmiths.
 * Hell, the Legion's reliance on lower-tech weaponry is probably a smart move for Ceaser on the logistics side. Most guns can be hand-forged if you know what you're doing; there's entire troibal communities in rural Pakistan whose main source of income is churning out guns using nothing but basic hand tools and some simple machining equipment. Limiting his men to basic firearms makes logistics immensely easier.
 * Look at the ending where Caesar survives and the Legion wins. The Legion doesn't enslave or kill everyone they meet; in fact they usually more or less leave most of the towns alone so long as they pay their tribute on time. This tribute is what keeps them in guns and bullets.
 * The Legion farms and produces food. They do not tell Lanius about it because Lanius would kill them for not being warrior like. My theory, anyway.
 * Wouldn't be in keeping with Lanius' characterization. While the Legion believes him only to be a mindless killing machine, he's actually a much more responsible general than that. Logistics is important to him, and even he knows that being low on supplies is a bad thing. Without farmers and farms to provide, his great army would have much more trouble staying strong without supplies of food. Besides, how would you even keep that a secret?
 * Motive to keep it a secret still holds if they believe he'll kill them. And mainly through Rule of Funny, but also by keeping him on the frontlines away from the farms.
 * But it doesn't hold. Again, it's not in keeping with the characterization of either Lanius or the Legion. The stories about Lanius only illustrate his loyalty to Caesar. If Caesar wanted farmers dead, then it's Caesar who is to be feared, because it's not just Lanius, it's the entire Legion who would rampage if that were the case. Lanius is a boogeyman, a symbol for stories about those who oppose Caesar's Will - the reality is that if Caesar wanted to kill farmers, the farms and the farmers would be dead.

Forcing the NCR out

 * In the independent and Mr.House endings, how exactly does killing General Oliver and his 5 bodyguards stop the NCR from annexing New Vegas? I mean, I get how you stop the Legion; Their best troops and their field commander are dead, their leader has cancer and is going to die very soon, and the NCR presuambly destroyed all their remaining strongholds following the battle. However, the NCR is still in great shape, especially since the Legion is now destroyed. Maybe they'll leave after Oliver's death when faced with hundreds of missile and laser shooting robots, but they're going to be back, and Mr.House or the Courier will discover very soon what the Brotherhood discovered: The NCR has a lot of soldiers, no matter how badass yours are, they are no match for the NCR's numbers. I mean, Vegas has no apparent way of producing new securitrons, whereas the NCR always has more troops. It just seems that without effectively dealing with the NCR, you're just setting yourself up for failure. Might as well just join them, since all you're really doing is speeding up the process.
 * This was actually explained by Mr. House if you ask him about it. Unlike the Legion, the NCR is at it's very core a democratic republic, and modern democracies are very sensitive towards causalities in war. The only reason why the NCR was able to use human wave tactics against the Brotherhood and the Enclave was because in their eyes it was a defensive war and therefore the people will be much more tolerant about taking large causalities. This is not the case when it comes to New Vegas, especially since the Mojave Campaign is an unpopular war back in the NCR home states (The average NCR citizens are happy about getting extra electricity and clean water, but they are not happy about their children being send to die or their taxes being diverted away from the domestic economy). In the event that the NCR military is eliminated or forced to retreat from the New Vegas area, no sane politician is going to send the troops back there due to the massive backslash that they will get from the voters. Think of Vietnam for example, if the US really wanted to they can keep the war going. But as soon as you loss the support of your own people in the home front, the war will be as good as over.
 * However, it should be noted that it was implied that this will only happened if both General Oliver and President Kimball are left alive. If they survived, the NCR citizens will view them as being responsible for getting the republic into an un-winnable war. But if they died, they will be treated as heros who sacrificed their lives and the NCR will take revenge against you/Mr. House with at best, an economic sanction, or at worst, a military invasion.
 * Good point, (I always talked Oliver into retreating and saved Kimball) but doesn't the NCR still have to expand somewhere? They've never stopped expanding in the past. They'll probably be back, maybe not a in a few years, maybe not in a a few decades, but they will. Also, this still doesn't answer the question of how Vegas will defend itself with a finite number of robots, especially since House uses them to crush resistance against him, so no ones flocking to join a human army he may be building. Maybe with the Courier he can build a human fighting force, but this is counting on the fact that the Gun Runners and other major companies will even do business with him/her (they're an NCR company), and even then it'll still be no match for the NCR. Didn't House also say that once the Legion were gone, the NCR was going to make up a reason to annex Vegas? Isn't that a pretty hint that they'll be back?
 * Mr. House stated that the NCR will try to annex New Vegas after the Legion is gone, but they are only going to be able to do this if they still have a military presents in the area. And if you follow the Yes Man or Mr. House ending, their entire military will withdrawn from the region. For the foreseeable future, the most that they can do is to send you a Strongly Worded Letter though their ambassador or order economic sanction against New Vegas and forbid their traders from doing business with Mr. House/you. Unlike the Legion, the NCR does have a home front and their government will have to care about the civilian population's war weariness or they will either be voted out of office or even face a revolution. Simply put, the NCR does have the ability to steamroll over New Vegas and take Hoover Dam if they want to, but their system of government will ensure that unless they face a military coup and the NCR is transformed into a dictatorship, it will not happened in the near future.
 * Also, NCR's expansionism seems to have originated during Tandi's presidency back in Fallout2 when they were working toward uniting all of California under their banner. Even back then, there were voices in the government such as Roger Westin who opposed the expansionist policies. And if you 'helped' Vault City or Vault 15 remain independent, the ending will show that the NCR will imminently stop their expansion and Tandi getting removed from office, meaning that just a single settlement that refuse to be annexed is enough for the NCR to backdown. And remember that this was back when Tandi was president (who was so popular and ran the NCR so effectively that even Caesar respects her). Can you imagine the effect that something like this will have on Kimball? Anyone who succeed him will be crazy if they plan to start another expansionist campaign at lease within the next 50 years.
 * Pay attention to the lines you say to Oliver, as well. The lines you actually say to kill Oliver and his bodyguards is "Securitrons - erase the NCR from the dam" - the NCR, not just Oliver, but all the NCR there at the Dam. We just don't get to see that. Remember that Hoover Dam is the largest concentration of NCR troops in the Mojave, even the elite rangers are there for the battle. Consider then the NCR is probably not expecting a Benedict Arnold like this, will probably get slaughtered, regardless of whether or not you blew up the Fort. And if you did power up the Army at the Fort, the ensuing Curbstomp will ensure that the NCR won't have the power to try and take over New Vegas by military force. And lastly, it's also possible there's a giant robot there with the rest of the Securitron army that requires a huge jolt of electricity to get started... Afterall, RobCo and Mister House did build Liberty Prime, and I don't know about you, but I don't see Mr. House not having prototypes of his work where he can improve them over and over again.
 * You know, the Brotherhood, who're much larger than the Couriers army, thought they had damaged the NCR army enough that they didn't have anymore troops, and look at what happened to them. Also, wow... that's a little bit of Fridge Horror isn't it then? Ordering the slaughter of all those nice people who just helped you? Talk about Ungrateful Bastard...
 * Yeah, it not only falls squarely into What the Hell, Hero? territory, but it also widens the rift between the NCR and New Vegas as its basically a declaration of War. This is also part of why Mr. House didn't want President Kimball to die from a Legion assassin, Kimball and Oliver were going to be set up as the scapegoats for House's plan with the NCR. With Oliver dead, that's one less scapegoat to pin the blame on, and more of the NCR's hate will be on New Vegas. As for the armies, eliminating the NCR from New Vegas is only temporary, it does delay any further hostility between the NCR and New Vegas as the NCR council will spend some time pinning blame for the "Massacre in the Mojave."
 * If you choose to launch the Divide Nukes at the Long 15 the NCR loses its only efficient route into the Mojave. If you take the view that the Securitrons massacre all NCR at the Hoover Dam, that means the NCR loses a massive quantity of troops along with their main General in the area. In a worst case scenario the NCR ends up with a decapitated command structure, a large part of their army in ruins, their President dead and the Long 15 obliterated. That's an enormous amount of damage and if you believe Ulysseys the loss of the Long 15 may very well spell the end for the NCR as a whole. In that case at least it's doubtful whether the NCR will be troubling New Vegas again.

Homosexuality In The Legion

 * OK, this has been really bugging me, though this is in the fandom rather than game: Whenever someone gets into an arguement about the NCR, the anti-NCR person always brings up that they apparently hate homosexuality due to Major Knights comments, and that the Legion is tolerant. Uh, guys? Homosexuality in the Legion is punishable by death. Talk to the gay prostitute in Westside. He'll state that a Centurion used to repeatedly rape him, but since homosexuality is punishable by death, he tried to hide it. Eventually, some of his men came close to finding out, so the Centurion tried to kill the prostitute until he escaped. Once again, it's blatantly stated it's punishable by death. Homosexuality in the NCR? Well, it seems to operating on sort of a "Don't ask don't tell" system, judging by Knight's comments. But, it's also state that the "Don't ask don't tell" thing is only actually active in that one particular outpost he's at. He says "Well we can't be "friends" here, people here aren't as tolerant of that as they are back in the states, so maybe when I get off my tour of duty we can be "friends"." That, and no one at all has a problem with Corporal Betsy being a lesbian (until she started harassing every woman in camp after being raped, and even then it's more from the fact that she didn't seek psychological help from the incident), once again supporting the fact that homosexuality being "untolerated" (in a very very minor sense compared to the Legion) is just another thing the fans are blatantly lying about to paint the NCR as worse than it is.
 * (This troper is highly supportive towards the NCR both in game and in real life since I support the political philosophy that they stand for, therefore what I am about to write will be very bias) Basically it is a classic example of Fan Dumb and character hate. A lot of the anti-NCR crowd is actually against the entire idea of NCR, but since they are unable to find real logical reasons to support their hate towards a fictional country, they just nitpick on some of the NCR's less morally good actions. This goes for both the old school fans that played the first two games, and the new comers that stared with Fallout 3. *** For the hardcore fans, the NCR hate stated all the way back when Fallout 2 was released and the NCR made it's first appearance. Many of them hated the idea of having a post-apocalypse nation state with a functional government founded by common wastelanders, since it implies that the world will recover eventually and therefor the Fallout series will be Ruined FOREVER. (Ironically, these are the same people that complained about how Fallout 3 suck because the world didn't make any progress for the pass 200 years and how it is unrealistic.) They complained about how NCR supported slavery by refusing to close down a slave trading operation outside their capital city (ignoring the fact that they do send you to free the slaves), how they tried to annex Vault City (ignoring that VC is a racist dictatorship supported by a slave based economy), how they are trying to get everyone to join them (a.k.a giving them food, medical support and protection), and finally how they are not helping the people of the wasteland enough (I thought they were against the NCR getting into other people's business?). There is even a post on NMA about people fantasizing on how there should be a Fallout game in which you can make the NCR collapse.
 * This also goes for the new comers to the Fallout universe. In their case, they didn't have any pervious knowledge on the world of Fallout. After looking at the Crapsack World in Fallout 3 with people eating 200 year old potato chips, the NCR might seem too sudden and 'un-Fallout' like for them (ignoring that Fallout was never about being an 'EPIC' action game but instead about the flaws of human nature). They could only see NCR's actions in the Mojave (somehow corrupt and highly ineffective) and concluded that this is how the entire NCR is like and ignore all the real progress that the NCR has made (the fact that the state of California is mostly rebuild must mean that the NCR is not that powerless).
 * And lets not forget how real life politics get involve in them forming their views. The NCR is basically the representation of post-Cold War America in real life: A capitalist constitutional republic/democracy. This have the effect of making people reflect their political views such as socialism (see the above 'Just Bugs Me' post on Mr. House and the comments of one of the user or the NMA review of NV about how the NCR is unrealistic because it's history doesn't follow the Marxist Social Conflict Theory) and anti-American views when playing the game when ignoring what is actually going on in the story (FYI, the troper is not an American). Again, take the NMA forum for example. You can find postings there with people that talks about how awesome the Master in Fallout 1 is with his plan of forcing the entire human race to join the Unity but at the same time complain about how evil the NCR is for trying to annex smaller communities. So their logic is like this: America is bad, therefore everything America does is evil. The NCR is the Fallout's version of the present day America, therefore everything the NCR does is evil. Just go to the Bethesda forum and you will find a user there called 'Elvis' that is famous for being crazily anti-NCR. In his postings he portray everything that the NCR does as completely evil and all users that support the NCR are sheeps. It got so extreme that some of his anti-NCR postings were locked within hours.
 * So in conclusion, it was never about the NCR's actions. Some people just hate the NCR. To be honest, I have yet to have a good and honest debate with anyone about the NCR without them resorting to Insane Troll Logic or accusation of homosexuality against me (I guess they not against homophobia anymore if it doesn't involve NCR bashing)
 * The reason a lot of the NCR hatedom goes after these kinds of details is because there is no really justifiable reason to hate the NCR as a whole. They are the closest things to being effective "good guys" in the grey and grey morality of the first two games (Fallout 3 had the whole Lyons Brotherhood of Steel uses the term "Paladin," therefor they can act exactly like fantasy Paladins regardless of that not being in line with their earlier portrayals). You can disagree with their individual decisions and they are not portrayed as being perfect, not having a large degree of self interest, and having members that are outright evil on an individual basis, but within the context of the world, they still are fairly idealistic with enough pragmatism thrown in to actually function. The problem is if the NCR are the "good guys," then that makes the faction they want to be the "good guy" look worse in comparison, despite most of the other factions being portrayed being heavily flawed. The basic goal of the NCR is to build an economically powerful, safe, cohesive nation, which given the basic ant in this environment is deadly, isn't that unreasonable.
 * Makes sense I suppose. I've run across several people who actually go as far to assert the Legion are morally superior for completely idiotic reasons, one of which was because (and I'm using an exact quote from some guy who messaged me): "the Legion's trade is amongst the most free in the Mojave, the NCR's trade is both organized and controlled by a few wealthy families[...]Look at how strong and disciplined the Legion is as a whole. They are the type of faction that wouldn't use a nuclear bomb to rid their enemies like the NCR would." Apparently it's ok to enslave and mass murder anyone who annoys you, but having slightly restricted trade is pure evil! Anyway, back to the main subject. This kind of strayed off topic from my question about homosexuality in the legion.
 * Returning to the topic about homosexuality in the Legion, the reason that Legion supporters uses this point in debates is really simple: If there is one characteristic of the Legion that is totally indefensible from the point of view of the players regardless of political view, it will be their extreme sexism. They might be able to come up with justifications for the entire cultural elimination and slavery thing by saying that it is 'all for the greater good', but even they have to agree that to enslave, abuse, and rape someone just because of their gender is wrong and even outright evil. Therefore, they just shift the attention toward the flaws of the NCR instead in an attempt to say something along the lines of: "Well, sexism in the Legion is bad, but the NCR is homophobic! They are not any better! Therefore the Legion is better then the NCR. This allows them to ignore the need of defending the Legion's sexism, and instead making up the myth that the NCR is a homophobic state based on a single comment. I have yet to see any Legion supporter give a real justification for Caesar's sexism other then Hand Wave it with "Sure, the Legion might be a bit sexist, but look at the NCR! They hate gay people!" (See the older thread above on the hatedom for the NCR)
 * The Legion's position on homosexuality is actually unclear, since everyone but the prostitute says that Legionnaires tend towards homosexuality. Thus, either the writing team weren't writing from the same playbook (like that's never happened before), or that it's both a capital crime and widely practiced anyway; since the Legion generally seems to have its act together when it comes to internal affairs, I favor the former explanation, and obviously the NCR-haters are going to pick the explanation that best fits their views (well, duh). That said, the anti-NCR crowd are right in that the NCR right now has grown sexist, homophobic and jingoistic; they're completely wrong if they imply that the Legion isn't demonstrably far more sexist and jingoistic and arguably (depending on which explanation you accept) more homophobic. Why the NCR-haters don't rally behind Mr. House or the Wild Card ending is a mystery; I imagine there's probably too mant fa/tg/uys on NMA who like painting oppressive, xenophobic tyrannies as awesome.
 * Right, the NCR are sexist. That's why the CEO's of their two most powerful corporations (and potentially their national hero, the Courier) are female, along with half of their army and Colonel Moore, probably the most respected military officer in the Mojave. Let's look at who says the Legion practices homosexuality: Exactly three people say that, Cass and Veronica, and Major Knight, who is in an outpost miles away from the nearest Legion outpost. Those could easily be roomers spread by soldiers, which tends to happen a lot in warfare, either that or they just don't know or are making a guess (notice how everyone always says "I hear they're accepting", not see it firsthand). Guess who says homosexuality is punished by death? A prostitute who experienced it first hand! Then again, you can find officers such as Aurelius Phoenix drinking alcohol and doing drugs despite Ceasar banning those by death as well, so maybe your explanation is true, but no matter how you want to slice it, you cannot go around comparing being slightly uncomftorable with an openly gay member at one particular outpost to crucifying people for being gay.
 * And lets not forget that the NCR was founded by a female president (Tandi), and that their military presents in New Vegas was because of the the Ranger Unification Treaty, which was signed by another important female (Ranger Chef Elise). How many important Legion females can you think of other then possibly the Courier? In fact the only adult female character in the Legion that you can talk to is Siri, who will tell you that rape against women is normal and even accepted in Legion territory (and that if the Courier is female, that some of them are even thinking about raping you!). Saying that the NCR is the morally inferior to the the Legion (or even as it's moral equivalent) is like saying Nazi Germany was not morally worse than the Allies.
 * Well, the NCR was founded by Aradesh, Tandi's father, though Tandi was it's most popular leader. Point still stands.
 * It's explicitly stated that Colonel Moore would be a general now if she were a man, and "had to work twice as hard for half as much respect." Still, this is a serious case of "show don't tell." The NCR is talked up as being sexist even if they don't show it ingame. It's not like that has never happened before. (As for Tandi, the sexism is implied to be a recent development. No, I don't get it either.)
 * When did they say anything about the NCR being sexist the one thing they said was that comment from Colonel Moore but no matter how you look at it the NCR would be considered pretty equal even by modern standards (in the US) Women serve in the front lines and in command, they have openly gay soldiers with no one except one base where the troops are more conservative, and they pacefully work with tribals to help them out of the stone-age. Compare this to the Legion where women are forced into slavery, gays are subject to the death penalty, and tribals are either forced into slavery exterminated, or have their culture destroyed the NCR is clearly leaps and bounds better than the Legion. That and the Legion call themselvesThe Legion
 * You could also chalk it up to her blowing off steam over not being in a higher position, preferring to pin the blame on (possibly) non-existent sexism in order to justify it to herself. Note that in a piece of cut dialogue it is revealed that she does get promoted to Brigadier General if the NCR wins the second battle of Hoover Dam.
 * That makes a surprising ammount of sense given how her basic policy is to shootfirst ask questions after they are dead.
 * I always find this assertion crazy, seeing as it's implied the NCR has gay marriage, as evident by a letter home from a solider. It's a standard love letter, with a promise of buying a ring, with the twist being that both the writer and the recipient are women.

Doggie Treat

 * This has to be the most mysterious item in the entire series, this troper isn't even sure if he's using it right, it isn't consumable and it has no information on the internet, anywhere! The whole thing just bugs me, it sits there in my inventory mocking me ugh!
 * According to the Fallout wiki, the Doggie Treat is a miscellaneous item that makes it so any dogs in the wasteland won't attack unless provoked. It may be a semi-useless item, since there are only a few wild dog encounters that even a level one courier can handle no problem, and would be rendered redundant by the Animal Friend perk. It doesn't work on coyotes or Nightstalkers, though. And now you know.

Counterfeit Caps

 * How exactly do counterfeit caps damage the economy? The caps themselves aren’t backed by anything like gold or a cohesive economy; indeed they were only accepted as a means to facilitate trade and not as an actual currency. Granted, the dangers of counterfeit caps are expounded on by Alice Mc Lafferty, who may just be referring to the NCR economy. This is a little more glaring, though, because the NCR have their own paper money that is (was) backed by gold.
 * Through other conversations, you will come to find out that the NCR's gold reserves had been destroyed by the Brotherhood of Steel during their war. NCR funds are now backed by 'water reserves' which is why the caps to NCR dollar exchange is low (one hundred dollars in NCR equates to 40 caps, or a 2.5 dollar to 1 cap ratio), which is similar to using Pre-war money. With the value of the dollar becoming practically worthless, caps return to being the currency of choice, at least in the Mojave, since non-NCR merchants will trade for caps as well (such as the Legion or non-affiliated groups).
 * It was also stated that just as in the first Fallout, the caps are backed by the merchant companies at the Hub (a major trading city and founding member of the NCR). They made a guarantee that they will back the caps as a currency and will trade supplies for them.
 * As of Fallout New Vegas, that was a promise made over 120 years ago, and the economy has changed quite a bit since. By Fallout 2, all the money in the NCR (which by 2181 had annexed the Hub) had been switched to Dollars, backed by a gold standard (caps were made worthless). By Fallout New Vegas, because the gold reserve had been destroyed, the standard became water, which made dollars just as valuable as pre-war money, and made caps valuable again.
 * Point of notice: exchange value is not an indication of worth. The change of the rate would be. As long as the rate stays 1:2.5, both currencies have the same worth. It's like comparing the Cent to the Dollar: the individual Cent of course is worth less than the individual Dollar by roughly 99%, but hundred Cents are always going to be one Dollar, since the entity who issues Cents is just as stable as the one who issues Dollars. Just taking the exchange rate as a proof for stability (which is what money's worth is all about - some stuff which keeps its value while you wait for something worth exchanging it for) is a case of You Fail Economy Forever.
 * Caps have value because of their irreplaceability. Since the technology to manufacture and paint them is more or less lost, caps represent a lightweight unit that can be exchanged to equate to units of labor or value, much in the same way that normal fiat money works. Fiat money is valuable because the backing authority says so, not because it's backed by gold or any other valuable substance. If you think about it, if I offered to pay you $500 for a high five, you wouldn't be motivated by the gold you would exchange the bank notes in for; rather you would think of the goods and services you would secure with the $500. The money I pay you with is valuable because it is difficult to obtain and has a limited supply. Increasing the supply, say by an unauthorized entity printing their own money, devalues the currency. Sure, the occasional cap turns up when someone finds an intact unopened soda bottle or in day to day scavenging, but not enough to have an impact. The bottle cap press, on the other hand...

The Courier Naked in the Doc's Office
I may be missing something, but... where are the Courier's clothes when they start the game? In the opening cutscene, we clearly see the Courier (or at least I think it's the courier, it's the knocked out person next to Benny as the Khans dig a grave) wearing clothes, what appears to be a "field hand outfit" (the same clothes Doc Mitchell wears), and a cowboy hat. So why does s/he wake up naked? Did the doc remove the clothes for an operation? Why would he need to do that for a gunshot to the head? And why didn't he give them back?
 * Maybe he thought the Courier wouldn't want them back because it was covered in blood and dirt. Alternatively, he decided to check the rest of the Couriers body for injuries and had to cut through his/her clothes to see.
 * Standard medical procedure, given the circumstances, you were unconscious and the easiest way to remove you from your clothes is cut you out so the medical assistance can proceed properly. Also, you may have, uh... lost control of certain bodily functions, and you really don't want to be sitting in your old clothes for that. It's not like Doc Mitchell could have you set up with a catheter or another device, like a diaper, for that eventuality.
 * No diaper? Now that's a missed moment of awesome if I ever heard one!

Magazines and their effects
How can certain magazines like Milsurp and Future Weapons today make you better at using guns as well as True Crime stories which gives you +5% to critical hit chances?
 * Giving you information you didn't previously know?. Isn't that like the whole point of reading?
 * A Soldier of Fortune style Magazine will be more meaningful for the Guns one, but since Guns And Bullets already covered the skillbooks. It's a wonder why does a Milsurp reviews gives off more knowledge than a Gun Rag with biased reviews. Also the critical bonus for True Police Stories is boggling.
 * Think about it this way: Skill books are like real text book or works that are more serious in nature. The information in the takes much more effort to understand, but once you get it, the skills will stay with you forever. Magazines on the other hand are much more entertainment and casual in nature. The information in them are much easier to understand (more skill points) but they will not stick with you for long.
 * Still, the True Police Storie's critical bonus is the one that bugs me the most.
 * In this case, just look at back to the old Police Procedural shows like Dragnet, or their modern CSI type counterparts - they go over the accuracy of what happens in real-life crimes, such as the physical damage involved in, say, murder. While gun rags and books go over the safety and operation of weapons, medical journals would go over how to treat such wounds, but the True Police Stories would describe the damage done by those same weapons - basically what happens when you put a bullet into a body.

The logistics of New Vegas tourism
So, people from NCR-controlled California come to New Vegas as tourists in order to gamble away their money. Apparently, the only way to do this is to travel on foot with a caravan along the Nipton road - I-95 route, through territory that is not entirely free of dangerous animals and raiders and lately has been threatened by the Legion. Which seems analogous to 18th century town dwellers from the established colonies on the East coast travelling on foot for days or weeks through frontier territory threatened by hostile Indians in order to reach some frontier town in the Ohio valley or some such region where certain vices are legal. This would have been more believable if there actually had been a working railroad that could carry travellers and goods from NCR to Vegas, but that project was halted by the Powder gangers revolt.
 * Actually, that is pretty much what they do. Most people enter through the Mojave Outpost and head up I-15 to New Vegas. The route normally was rather safe, with only recent events making it less so. The Powder Ganger breakout happened only a few weeks ago, and led to nearly every problem along that stretch of highway. Primm would always be a stopping point for travelers along I-15, and Ranger Jackson sends people to clear the lower route of giant ants. The Deathclaws never moved in until the Gangers shut the Quarry down, and after passing the Quarry most people turn right to avoid entering Fiend territory. All in all, the route was safe enough, with only recent occurences that made it dangerous.
 * According to The Other Wiki, the real Las Vegas only developed as a town when it became a stop on the railroad in 1905. Still seems like it would be too inconvenient for the average person to make the trip on foot solely for the sake of gambling.
 * New Vegas doesn't want to attract the "average" person. The credit check is 2000 caps, most people in the world are no where near 100. The people it is trying to attract can afford transportation and bodyguards. Besides there is plenty of precedent for very wealthy people to look for imaginative ways to squander money. There is no reason to fly by private jet to "X" country for "Y" food, but it does happen.
 * The credit check is required only of people who don't have passports or some other identification. By the terms of the agreement he has with the NCR, Mr. House stipulated that the NCR do nothing to prevent its citizens or soldiers from entering the strip. The 2,000 credit check is for non-NCR individuals (such as Emily Ortal, the Follower of Apocalypse you encounter on the strip - she required 2,000 credits because she's not an NCR citizen). The way around this credit check is simply having a passport (or a counterfeit) - you do not need either if you take the NCR-controlled monorail into the Strip. Now, that said, the civilians most likely to have the resources, the caps, and the ability to get a passport, to travel safely to New Vegas are those in the upper echelon of society.
 * The only way to get a passport is to be connected with Mr. House or one of the major families (so not the average person). Counterfeit passports do not count as a legitimately intended method of entry. The NCR could have easily steam rolled Mr. House's forces when that deal was made, so, to some extent, NCR citizen entry could be considered to be a deal made under duress (thus an extra-ordinary circumstance). The monorail is completely controlled on both ends by the NCR military. Mr. House has absolutely no say on who can go on it (so it is an unintended port of entry he can't do anything about). So basically, the intended points of entry are 2000 credit check or a passport issued by a major figure in New Vegas (neither of which are accessible by the average person). The counterfeit passport and monorail are unintended points of entry that Mr. House has no way of controlling, so don't reflect the group of people he actually wants to let into New Vegas. NCR citizen entry involves a deal Mr. House essentially could not refuse without risking the NCR simply overthrowing him.
 * Do not forget, the treaty favors House rather than the NCR - House is using the treaty to buy himself time while he puts his greater plan into action (which involves the Courier, the Platinum Chip, and a certain army or robots). Call it Luck, fortune, providence, whatever, but House is in a much better position than your argument suggests. The NCR agreed to the treaty because they didn't want to expose a weakness caused by trying to fight both the New Vegas families and Securitrons and the Legion at the same time, so the NCR is not going to go back on the deal while the Legion is still breathing down their neck. Mr. House doesn't need any say on who goes on the monorail for the very reason stated - he wants the NCR to go in and out of the Strip on their own terms - be it soldiers on leave or NCR citizens willing to blow their hard-earned NCR dollars in his casinos. There's nothing preventing the NCR citizens and refugees in Freeside from going back to the Strip - the problem is simply that those people don't have the money to stay at the Casinos (it's pretty strongly implied that NCR troopers and Securitrons won't let people sleep on the street in the Strip). Vault 21 is the cheapest place on the Strip, but it still costs more to stay there than just squat in Freeside, end up at Old Mormon Fort, or wind up at the Aerotech Camp. It is not in Mr. House's interest to bar his target clientele from the Strip simply because they're a little short when they show up at the gate. He's taking the NCR for every cap they've got, including the ones that can barely afford it now. The credit check is there to keep out non-NCR riffraff while the passports - counterfeit or not - are to allow NCR citizens and certain others like the Strip families free entry. Simply put, the only way the Courier can get a passport is through Ralph - either as a favor from the King or with his own money, and it's pretty much stated that it's a forgery.
 * Also, a huge source of income for the Strip comes straight from the NCR - or more specifically, the hundreds to thousands of soldiers they have rotating through the Mojave on a regular basis to defend the region. The entertainment/service/support industry near any large military base is enormously profitable, because soldiers on deployment have nowhere else to really spend their money, and there are three such bases within spitting distance of the Strip (McCarran, Golf, and the Hoover Dam). The Strip sees a constant, regular influx of soldiers willing to spend their caps/NCR money/looted Legion money on booze, gambling, and whores, and makes a massive profit off of it. Colonel Hsu even comments that the NCR thought they had the advantage when they first moved in, but House has profited more thanks to all the NCR money he's getting from the troops and the NCR simply can't afford to pull out of the region. House's agreement with the NCR pretty much ensures a large, permanent troop presence around the Mojave, which in turn ensures he has plenty of money. I'm willing to bet House could get along fine purely on money garnered from NCR soldiers; the money from gamblers is just added income.

Lack of Ghouls and Super Mutants in the Legion and NCR

 * In Fallout 2, the random NCR Rangers could be humans, ghouls, or Super Mutants. Yet in New Vegas, pretty much every NCR soldier is human (I think I found a few Veteran Ranger ghouls), despite the fact that having Super Mutants in the army would give a large advantage on the battlefield. Also, why doesn't the Legion seem to have any ghouls or super mutants in their military? I remember reading somewhere that the Legion is racist against them, but that doesn't tie into Caesar's Darwinist philosophy. Ghouls and super mutants are as strong/stronger than normal humans and completely immune to radiation, making them physically better than normal humans, so shouldn't the Legion love them?
 * Well there is, you know, the whole sterility problem, which could make the Legion look down upon them as inferior. That and the fact that most of the Super Mutants (not all, but a majority of those shown) sound and act rock-stupid could lead to the Legion looking down upon them as simple dumb muscle and inferior to them.
 * There were really only a handful of actually dumb Super Mutants. The human level and above intelligence ones were more common, you just interacted with them less because they were harder to trick. Fallout 3 just Flanderized the majority of them to being big dumb brutes.
 * The Fallout 3 Super Mutants were stupid because they were the result of experimentation in Vault 87. They are not representative of average Master-creative Super Mutant intelligence.
 * There are a few reasons why it makes sense not to see them.
 * 1) There was only one named Super Mutant Ranger and no ghouls in Fallout 2. The non-randomly generated Rangers were exclusively human. Even assuming the random number generator wasn't putting too many ghouls and Super Mutants into the random Ranger encounters, they still are a very small percentage of that organization.
 * 2) Being stronger really does not make that any difference in a gunfight (which is the NCR strategy). Ghouls are only human strength anyways. Super Mutant sized armor is almost non-existent, so while Super Mutants are much more resilient than a human naturally and can survive more actual damage, a human in armor is far more resilient and a smaller target that can make better use of cover.
 * 3) If you take Fallout: Tactics as at least partially canon. Ghouls and Super Mutants, despite some rather significant bonuses early on, were overall pretty terrible in the long run. Both have significantly slower learning and training speeds compared to humans. On top of that, Ghouls, due to their long life span, tend to shy away from dangerous situations.
 * 4) The main advantage ghouls and Super Mutants have over humans is the nearly complete immunity to radiation. New Vegas is one of the least irradiated areas in the entire Mojave wasteland. Which kind of negates that benefit in almost every area, other than the outpost that was full of Ghoul Rangers due to the elevated radiation levels.
 * 5) Super Mutants are dying out due to being sterile, there just isn't many left at this point without going into Fallout 3 plot magic. This is a major plot point in Fallout 1. So far, the west coast games have been fairly good at showing this. Fallout 1, Super Mutants controlled about a third of the map. Fallout 2, they basically held one fairly large, powerful town. Fallout: New Vegas, they basically inhabit one very small town.
 * 6) NCR soldiers are from the NCR. Broken Hills no longer exists (the most likely place to recruit Super Mutants and Ghouls). I would guess Gecko is probably still around, but the Ghouls there just wanted to be left alone mostly.
 * 7) Ghouls eventually turn feral with no warning. That makes them a liability. There is absolutely no baseline for this either. Some ghouls start as feral, while other Ghouls have been around for hundreds of years.
 * The biomechanics around "ferocious post-necrotic dystrophy" are difficult to explain, but there's a very strong argument that it is not "without warning" and that many conditions need to be met for a ghoul to become feral (including isolation, mental deterioration, radiation levels). It's really Fallout 3 that introduced "crazed zombie ghouls" that are hostile to everything at the drop of a hat. Ghouls from previous games tended to be those who were in high-radiation areas, or victims of rather extreme circumstance. Afterall, living in a Post-Apocalypse is not for everyone, and isn't exactly conducive to proper mental health. Looking in the mirror and realizing you're effectively a walking, rotting corpse probably does not help the matter. Needless to say, it's more likely that Ghouls will have more psychological issues atop of physiological issues than humans.
 * 8) Super Mutants can become progressively crazier (and not exclusively the Nightkin Stealth Boy issue), so they also can be a liability.
 * I could go on, but I think that is enough reasoning to why the NCR isn't flooded with Super Mutant and Ghoul recruits.
 * This said, there are still plenty of supermutants wandering around, but neither in organized numbers nor settlements aside from bands like the group at REPCONN or Black Mountain. Marcus just hasn't been successful in getting them banded together like at Broken Hills or Jacobstown. For the most part, they have been shown really to be antisocial and otherwise unwilling to congregate after leaving the Master's Army, either out of fear (for good reason) or simply not getting along. The Master's Army had been bonded by Unity (a sort of psychic connection), and once that went away, the usual differences in ideology and thought cropped up again, added on top of being effectively being made "different" and all the psychological effects that entails. Marcus and others, like Neil or the NCR ranger, tend to be the rare exceptions.
 * The reason Super Mutants can't be found in the Legion is that it hasn't come up. The only Super Mutants who go that far east are mostly insane Nightkin who Caesar wouldn't even consider recruiting. In fact, the vast majority of the mutants in the Mojave are insane Nightkin, and the rest are mostly gathered in Jacobstown (and even there there's a whole lotta Nightkin). As for ghouls, they tend to be rather weak and unhealthy on the whole, not to mention sterile; I imagine Caesar wouldn't even find them to be good slave fodder.
 * On the NCR side of things, there still seems to be a lot of racism on their part against Super Mutants; they treat Jacobstown like the mutants are a bunch of tribals, complete with the debates in the Senate between "let's leave them alone" and "kill them and take their land!" There are ghouls in the NCR (such as the ranger), but they're pretty rare; they're pretty rare in the Mojave too (one community of sentient ghouls, a couple other ghouls here and there, ferals in several locations, and of course Camp Searchlight). The Mojave is basically human-dominated, which makes sense; West Coast super-mutants are a dying race, and the majority of ghouls are feral.
 * It's hard to really determine anything of Super mutants east of the Colorado because of a few factors. One is the general lack of information about Legion territory. We have a lot of clues as to what the place is like, but we've yet to see what is actually going on there. Plus there's the uncertainty of what is and what isn't canon from Fallout Tactics. Gammorin's Army did move through the Midwest at least 70 years before Caesar rose to power, so it would be possible for the tribes under Caesar's banner to have met some Super Mutants or some Super Mutants to be in Legion Territory, but as that raises a lot of other questions, it was probably easier to just ignore the question entirely. No one in the Legion ever mentions ghouls or Super Mutants in their conversations, as far as I know. Whether we see anything in Honest Hearts DLC is uncertain.
 * As I recall, ghouls tend to avoid danger because they don't age and will live forever so long as they play it safe. Super Mutants also don't age, and the intelligent ones would likely have a similar mentality. As of this game both the NCR and the Legion have large, secure inner regions that would give a lot of new opportunities to someone looking to avoid danger. Maybe ghouls and super mutants have been leaving the military en masse to become farmers, scientists, etc.
 * According to The Fallout Wiki there was a hostile NPC called a "Legion Creature" in the game files which acted like a Feral Ghoul (although it looked like just another legionnaire), perhaps this means the Legion were going to be more than just baseline humans before the idea was Dummied Out
 * Also, this troper just encountered a ghoul NCR ranger on the PlayStation 3 version, so NCR employs them to some extent, evidently.
 * Same for this Xbox player, in fact he was the frist Vet Ranger I saw, so odds are by the time between Fallout 2 and New Vegas all Ghouls in the NRC are Rangers now.
 * This troper's seen at least one "normal" Ghoul ranger, as well as several Ghoul "Veteran Rangers." The fact that Ghouls are only Rangers, rather than normal NCR grunts, could be explained in several ways: 1)Ghouls, being virtually immortal, would naturally have a lot more time to hone their military skills than normal humans, and thus more likely (per person) to be Badass enough for the Rangers than an average human grunt, 2)since Ghouls don't seem to suffer (at least as badly) from radiation, they'd prove useful in investigating hazardous areas where normal humans would suffer and 3)while they might not face legal discrimination, Ghouls could still face societal prejudice in many of the societies the NCR has annexed, so a commander would think it better to put Ghoul soldiers on recon and/or the frontlines rather than in garrison, where their presence could cause unrest among the local populace. The out-of-game reason why there are not Super Mutant NCR troopers is because the game designers couldn't/wouldn't take the time creating separate uniforms and armor for NCR Super Mutants, and in-universe it would take a lot of trouble to adjust all the different NCR bases and outposts to accommodate troops of such size...
 * It's also implied that the NCR has changed a lot since fallout 2, they've become much more expansive and war loving, these changes include a more human-centric view where super mutants are unwelcome and ghouls are politely tolerated.
 * J.E. Sawyer actually has an answer to this. According to him, ghouls and super mutants aren't part of the Legion is because:
 * 1). There aren't enough Super Mutants in the Arizona area to really matter.
 * 2). Ghouls, being centuries old are too jaded/cynical to be swayed by Caesar's words.

Value of Power Armor

 * Why the heck does Power Armor sell less for than the Mk. Versions of the Combat Armor? Are the merchants just trying to rip you off?
 * Supply versus demand. For most everyone in the Mojave, the reinforced Combat Armor is the best armor in the wasteland and thus, merchants are willing to pay much more for it and sell it for much more than a comparable suit of power armor. Even though Power Armor is undeniably more effective, power armor usage is limited as the vast majority of the Wasteland are simply incapable of using power armor - they don't have the training and can't equip it. Only two factions in the Fallout universe know how to use power armor - the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave - and neither are willing to share the knowledge with "wasters" - the Courier and his companions are a clear exception. While the NCR has access to power armor, they don't know how to use it (they strip out the servos that would make it Power armor and make it "heavy" armor instead).
 * Standard Brotherhood of Steel policy is to take any power armor they see a non-Brotherhood member carrying with no compensation. If that person is lucky and doesn't resist, he probably won't die in the process. That gives a very plausible reason for merchants not being as willing to purchase it at a premium.
 * Combat Armor is medium armour. It weighs about half as much to lug around with you. The grunt-tier T-45d series compensates with heavy duty servos, but still slows you down. The top-tier T51b is better balanced to not slow you down, but doesn't compensate as well for the extra lifting. (I guess it's a traction thing.) On the other hand, most Power Armor is built to last. Worth noting that T51b- and Remnants-helmets are indeed worth more than CA reinforced Mk 2 helmets.

Mr. House's behavior after his victory at Hoover Dam

 * I am honestly really surprised and disappointed at Mr. House's behavior if you help him win at the end. After all his talk about helping humanity rebuilt to their pre-war glory, what is the first thing that he does? Rebuild the area around New Vegas into a technologically advance capitalist Utopia? Expend the Strip with more casinos and hotels? Open new trade routes and develop a thriving business sector? No. But what did he do instead? He sends his robot army on a killing sprees against the Kings for not attacking innocent NCR citizens (The same NCR that New Vegas is dependent on economically), takes control of surrounding towns and tax them like crazy (As a businessman, Mr. House should know that this is not an economically good idea), and totally ignore the technologically advance and by now friendly tribe right next door to him (Who will really be helpful for him in rebuilding and ruling New Vegas). It is like he suffered a serious case of Motive Decay after he is finally put into a position to do those great things that he has planned for 200 years. The final ending feels like that he turned from the 'Noble and intelligent scientist and businessman that wants Ne Vegas to achieve economic prosperity' into an 'Insane dictatorial warmongering Statist that wants to control and oppress everyone'. It just feels like a Character Derailment moment for me.
 * Maybe Mr.House was a greedy tyrannical douchebag and he just played you- simple as that. Either that or he views this as necessary for future plans. Last time I checked, he had the kings killed because they wanted to remain independent.
 * It's more your misunderstanding of who Robert House is as a person. Keep in mind that House never ever cared for the people. There's a difference between building a utopia and caring for what happens to people in his actions to reach that ideal. He himself tells you he wants New Vegas to run the way he wants to, calling himself an 'autocrat' rather than a dictator. He just doesn't want people to interfere with his plans. He doesn't care for any of the tribes he has employed on the Strip, they are there to protect his investments - as long as they do as he says, they're well-treated. Once someone he has dealings with no longer has use (see: Benny), he no longer cares what happens to them, as long as they are no longer in the way. The NCR's allies are a liability once Mr. House is in charge, and if he's to keep a stable grip on "his" New Vegas, he has to get rid of factions who would be used by the NCR to gain a new foothold in the region. If someone in the area allied with the NCR, House believes he has to neutralize them so no one can challenge his new rule. Taxing Primm is his way of cutting off their support for the NCR (they'd be taxed heavily anyway), and the Kings are very independent, but fighting off the NCR is the only way for House to be convinced they're loyal to New Vegas. For him, punishing people for siding with a foreign power is just good business.
 * (The OP) Perhaps you two have a good point about Mr. House being an uncaring elitist. However, the thing that unlike the NCR or the Legion, Robert House does not identify himself with a set of political ideology beyond the idea of a new Viva Las Vegas and like any business person, cares about profit. After all, his background is that of a CEO, not a military leader or politician. But his actions in the end game are not economically logical. For example, killing off the only resemblance of organized government in an area that is the only access point to your business venture (or not killing them when they have declared open hostility against your best customers) is not good business; Going out of your way to antagonize the most powerful faction in the West Coast (who are also your best customers) is not good business; And as anyone that has studied macro-economics can tell you, taxing your citizens like crazy is no good business (not to mention that it is extremely bad PR and you will eventually risk a popular uprising). I guess I have expected Mr. House's actions to be more Pragmatic Villainy if anything else.
 * Actually, running the government and taxing people excessively is economically the best strategy in his position. Normal rules of economics do not apply in a post-apocalyptic world. Outside the casinos, which are really the only major way for New Vegas to bring in money, there is very little other options. He has no trading partners, no unique resources, no significant manufacturing capabilities, and his one source of revenue is the casinos, a niche business (especially in a post apocalyptic world) with high amounts of competition. Yes, the NCR was interested in the area for water and power, but keep in mind they are not starved for either of these resources. Bad PR and popular uprisings don't really pose a major threat. Anyone capable of posing a real threat to the securitrons already hates Mr. House or is completely apathetic. The casino based economy is not dependent on the average person.
 * It should be noted that the only town Mr. House taxes heavily is Primm, and only because they had accepted the NCR.
 * Uhhhh... no. Talk to the NPC "Street Vendor" on the Strip. She'll say that Mr.House charges a 50 % income tax. Much greater than the NCR's.
 * It couldn't possibly be because the Strip's income tax also pays for security services for a freelance merchant, could it? The Strip is where Mister House is making his profit. Do you know the difference between a whole town like Primm and individual merchants like that Street Vendor? The Vendor on the Strip can move to Freeside, and voila! He stops paying taxes to Mister House. The Vendors choose to be on the strip because it's safer to peddle their wares there than anywhere else. For accepting NCR protection (which is the Courier's decision), on the other hand, Primm gets hammered with a double whammy of being under Securitron "protection" and heavy taxes for no real good reason except House is a little bit vengeful.
 * Paranoia was essentially the main defining trait of Mr. House. In hindsight, yes, the level of planning he had does come off as justified. However, keep in mind he didn't know Benny was betraying him, he didn't know his network had been hacked, he didn't know a Securitron was reprogrammed, he didn't know any other faction was actually planning to move against him (granted, if he knew anything about how the Legion operated, then, yes, he has good reason to suspect them, on the other hand the NCR does have a track record of leaving people in his position alone if they cooperate), he didn't know anyone knew what the platinum chip did or why it was important, and he didn't know anyone had the slightest inkling to what his plans actually were. On top of that, he's been betrayed numerous times over his life, so he isn't exactly a trusting person. Just because people ended up being out to get him does not mean he wasn't already extremely paranoid. The way he managed his casino should be a huge clue for that.
 * Also, about the NCR point. He broke a treaty with them in the process of taking over New Vegas. They weren't going to like him no matter what.
 * Think of it as a literal "Hostile Takeover". House was always dedicated to controlling New Vegas, and he wasn't willing to share power. For House, the whole point of the treaty was a stalling tactic so he could put his real plans into play (this is where the Courier and the Platinum chip come in). His plan ultimately requires the end of the threat of the Legion, while simultaneously removing the NCR as a power in the Mojave. He relies on timing and positioning of his pieces, before he sucker punches the NCR. While a little violence is necessary to achieve his aims, he'd rather not have more important figures like President Kimball or General Oliver die - he needs scapegoats back in the NCR to take all the blame. This will allow him to keep relations with the NCR as a whole in an unfriendly, but not openly hostile, terms. It will keep him in business, since some people will still go to New Vegas anyway - knowing that New Vegas Security is seen as being practically better than NCR military. Should either Oliver or Kimball die, House figures it would just delay the economic boost of his city by a few years. He has plenty of time, he can wait.
 * Was my understanding that the Kings started the fighting in Freeside, due to their whole philosophy being based on freedom and independence. House is working on expanding Vegas and the Strip; to do that he needs to control the surrounding area, and since Freeside's the place that his gates open out to, that's where he starts. The Kings, being the Kings, resist and do so violently. Also, Primm getting heavily taxed might have another motivation; Primm advertises itself as "the other New Vegas"; they're his competition. NCR might start sending their tourists there to gamble instead of Vegas out of spite(at first). He kills, or controls the town, he still gets the NCR money flowing into his plans to rebuild.
 * Only the NCR-controlled Primm gets taxed to death when House wins. The other endings WHERE HOUSE WINS all have House leaving the town alone under the control of a slow robot or a trigger-happy human sheriff. Neither would be a match for a few upgraded Securitrons. Third Edit: Apparently no one reads the edit history/folder title. It's twice been edited in that House taxes the shit out of Primm for accepting NCR control WHEN HE WINS HOOVER DAM. WHEN HOUSE WINS HOOVER DAM, HE TAXES PRIMM TO DEATH FOR ACCEPTING NCR RULE/PROTECTION. Not the NCR, House is doing the taxing. He's taxing Primm for accepting NCR protection and control after he gets rid of the NCR and the Legion.
 * To the OP: Mr. House is an asshole. He's actually interested in making an ideal paradise for theoretical people in the future, because if his calculations are correct, he can turn the Mojave into a Pre-War Space Age civilization in 50-100 years. Actual, living individuals are more of an annoyance.
 * Hell, this is no better demonstrated than the Jane securitron; House could have slept with a real live celebrity, but instead he uploaded a scan of her brain into a robot. He could have all the 'companionship' he wanted without having to interact with one of those meddlesome 'real people'. Think of him as a crazy cat person, but with robots instead of cats.

How is Mr. House's future plans for New Vegas going to work?

 * When you ask Mr. House about what he intends to do after he takes control of the entire Mojave wasteland, he will go on to a Motive Rant about how he will use the wealth and resources generated from Hoover Dam and the casinos at the Strip to rebuild the high-tec industry in ten years, put a man in space in fifty, and colonized a new planet within a century. Lets ignore for a moment that his plans depends on the NCR continuing to do trading with him and for their government to not declare an economic embargo or military action against New Vegas (The same NCR that he just totally antagonized or possibly committed an act of war against). How exactly is he going to do all those things? During your travels around the Mojave, you will find that its lacks any kind of functioning factories or heavy industry. The only resemblance of small-scale manufacturing is the Gun Runner factory, but even it will likely close down after the NCR retreated from the region. And if he is going to to create an entire economic infrastructure from top to bottom, he is going to need a lot more than just caps, and even if he is Robert House, it is going to take him more then just ten years to do so.
 * (Continuing on) For starters, there is a lack of an educated workforce needed for a advance economy that Mr. House is aiming at. Every educated or trained specialist that you met are from either the Brotherhood or the NCR, and both groups are now out of the equation. There isn't even a single school or any teachers around that at all! Is Mr . House going to so all the staff training via his robots himself? And finally, Mr. House seems to be overestimating the importance of New Vegas. Other then Hoover Dam and lots of Silicon, the Mojave doesn't really have any rare or critical resources to trade with at all. Hell, they can hardly even feed themselves despite the area being relatively free of radiation. Colonel Moore even noted that when it comes to to it, New Vegas is just an Awesome but Impractical tourist trap. If New Vegas is more like Vault City or San Francisco in Fallout 2, I can see Mr. House's plans actually working. But right now, it feels like Mr. House is just outright delusional or tricking the Courier into doing his bidding, knowing very well that his plans not going to work.
 * That is kind of the point he will never succeed in his plans, he is an egomaniacal prick blowing smoke and fell into the objectivist trap and failed to recognize that he needs other people for anything he does to have a chance of success.
 * Just remember who Robert House is based on, right down to the mental flaws. House has big dreams, and he has a plan to accomplish them, but the reality is that his plans don't always work out. Afterall, for all of House's posturing, he twice fails to consider that his proteges could -both- betray him.
 * He's going to "borrow" those functional rockets from the REPCONN ghouls when they come back from their little trip to help Novac. Send Victor up in one to scout around for inhabitable planets and give him a GECK to make sure it's nice once the rest of humanity follows. ;) Seriously, whatever else he is, House is certainly an egomaniac. Given all that he achieved in his long life, possibly a justified one. He almost saved an entire city from a nuclear holocaust and survived in a Pringles can for 200 years; obviously he thinks he can do anything, because he's usually right. Putting people on another planet is a goal entirely in keeping with his personality--a big, impractical dream that has less to do with actually helping people and more with inflating his sense of importance and superiority.
 * Use the money to open more mines and build foundries and factories to use the material from the mines to make a whole new infrastructure. All while opening up new education systems so he'll have the manpower to make space flight work again in a within a hundred years. It isn't that unbelievable; the knowledge is there, he just needs the time and the resources to rebuild the infrastructure to make it a reality. That being said he may either be exaggerating to sway the Currier to his side or underestimating how long it will take, but the goal itself(rebuilding, getting into space) isn't a completely unrealistic one. And considering he has the knowledge and experience of a man who's lived since before the war, combined with his intellect, he's the best suited person to do it.
 * Construction doesn't work that way. You can't just build an infrastructure because you have money. Though not very obvious, it actually took hundreds and hundreds years of trade, scientific breakthroughs, global investment, production, and mass education to create our current infrastructure. Even if you know every single detail of what you need to make it, that doesn't mean you can actually make it. Most manufacturing processes use lots of different raw materials and chemicals. The amount of work to produce these are ludicrous for one company producing one thing to maintain.
 * House has two advantages we didn't when setting up our infrastructure; first, he's not in the dark. Someone did it before and he knows how. Second, he's not working from scratch; the pieces are there. He just has to build on what's still usable(like the dam) and reverse engineer what doesn't work anymore, and he has a massive amount of old world tech just in his immediate area to work with, with the potential for much more depending on the actions of the Courier. Its also doubtful he's planning on doing all of this with tourist money; that's seed money. He has Hoover Dam and Helios One, he can sell power from them to the NCR for a nice profit. Someone up the page suggested he could buy out and monopolize the caravan industry. Both of those would be a boon towards finances which could be funneled into projects in the rebuilding efforts such as food production and education, and that's just to start. Again, I'm not saying House is going to make the deadline he gave the Courier, not by a long shot. But it is possible; House has had over two hundred years to plan this out. He's going to hit snags, he's going to hit setbacks. But he can get it done.
 * (The OP) Perhaps it is possible for Mr. House to eventually do all those great things that he is planning to achieve. But I just don't see how he is going to be able to do so within the time frame of putting a man in orbit in just 50 years and colonized a planet within a century especially given the current condition that the Mojave Wasteland is in. It is possible for Mr. House to build schools and universities for educating the people so that they can work for him (I am still a bit skeptical about whether or not the tourist economy and Hoover Dam can really generate the amount of money needed, but lets ignore that for a moment). However, it will take at lease a few generations until the general population can achieve a literacy rate and education level high enough for them to support a high-tec industry. Also, it takes a lot of time for a post-apocalyptic civilization to achieve any industrial capacity at all, even if they have all the pre-war knowledge on how to do so. To put it into perspective, in Fallout 2, the NCR still needed to rely on savaging Vault when they want to get computer parts more then 60 years after they were established and nether the Brotherhood or the Enclave have any large scale production. Mr. House's plans might work eventually, but I just don't think the Courier will ever live to even witness a fraction of the plan's implementation. He/she will be lucky to even be able to be there when the first high-tec factory is opened.
 * Why is it necessary the Courier live to see House's plans fulfilled? Can't the Courier simply believe House is the best bet for the future, and work to help him plant the seeds, even though it won't bear fruit till long after he/she is dead?
 * Simply put, we just don't know what other resources that House may have had tucked away as part of his scheme. We only really know about his stash of robots under the Fort, and even then, we don't know if that's all he had, or if he has another stash tucked away for a rainy day somewhere else in the Mojave. The Courier visits the basement of the Lucky 38 exactly once, and we don't know if it's the only basement (House's personal security room is off the radar, afterall). House had resources all over Vegas before the war, so it's possible (and very in-character) for House to have more resources hidden until after he had Vegas fully in his control. There's plenty of stuff left over from the War for him to procure and use, too. H&H Tools to build new machines, REPCONN for chemicals and rockets to get his dreams of space flight off the ground - these two most prominently as Rob Co worked with both companies.
 * (The OP) Anyone that has studied basic macro-economics knows that for there to be any economic growth or development, there will need to be four factors of production: Land (natural resources), Labor (human resources, workers), Capital (machinery, tools, money, etc), and Entrepreneurship (someone that combines all the factors together to create things). Lets give Mr. House the benefit of the doubt and say that he is the best source of Entrepreneurship available. However, he lacks all the other factors necessary for him to have a functional economy, let alone an advance one that he his aiming at. For example, as seen in game, the Mojave offers very little resources, natural or man-made. Even though the area is free of radiation, it can hardly even produce enough food to feed itself. The only real resources that he has are Hoover Dam and Vegas' strategic location on the I-15 highway, both of these resources are only useful if you are trading with someone else (mainly the NCR).
 * Depending on the actions of the Courier, House could potentially have access to the technology of the Sierra Madre as well as a good relationship with the people of the resource rich Zion national park, as per the Dead Money and Honest Hearts dlcs. Both could go a long way towards making his plans reality.
 * Even with the technology available in the core game alone, Labor and Capital can be handled by robotic technology. The DLC provides plenty of Land, as the above poster pointed out. The resources of Zion, the nanotechnology of the Sierra Madre, and the biotech available in the Big MT, just to name three examples. It's clear that Mr. House's utopia is possible, though he may have miscalculated the timescale or the amount of resources he'll need.
 * And at lease for this troper, the reason why it is necessary the Courier live to see House's plans fulfilled is because one of the biggest reason to support House is that he promised that he is the fastest path towards re-building the world. But as pointed out in a number of post here, it is highly unlikely that he will be able to do so within his own time frame. Perhaps he will be able to do all those things if given enough time, but then he is falling into the same trap as many Socialist dictatorships did in that he only think in the future tense and become totally detached from the present. Which is not a sing of good leadership.
 * If you have a decent science skill you can call House out on his lifespan being impossible for anything but ghouls and mutants. He explains that he knows quite a bit about "the science of longevity" and that he hopes to one day commercialize the technology & perhaps share it with the Courier...which, granted, knowing what we know about how he lived as long as he did, may not be that great of an idea, but maybe there are some kinks that can be worked out. Still, I think its fully reasonable for the Courier to decide that House is the best bet even if they aren't going to live to see it happen.

Sierra Madre Technology

 * Jesus christ, Dead Money potholed so many weird bits of technology into the Fallout universe, and none of it makes any sense. First and foremost, the vending machines. They are explicitly described as being matter replicators, able to produce food, medicine, and other useful items out of worthless little metal chips. Apparently these were widespread at the time of the Great War. The Great War that was started over lack of resources. Why didn't the Chinese or Americans simply create a giant Matter Replicator and dump a whole bunch of granite or ocean water into it to produce tons of oil and food? Boom, resource problem solved. Secondly, the holograms. These things have powerful beams, are immune to gunfire on anything other than their projectors, and are still running after 200 years. WHY has the Enclave never used these? It would solve a lot of probelms of the Fallout uninverse if the Americans just used what a private businessman was using.
 * The technology at least gets explanations in that they -are- supposed to be overlooked, experimental technologies that were being developed in the Big Empty, but not yet adopted by anyone else. The holograms supposedly need enormous amounts of power (which is a plot point - since you need to overload the generator's capacity so you can break into the casino - bypassing the holographic security). Elijah seems to have wanted to take the holographic emitters and plug them into Hoover Dam - how's that for more power? As for the vending machines, the explanations are from the in-game files where Elijah believes that all the stuff you get from the vending machines are actually made by breaking down the chips themselves and reconstituting them into whatever produce you're buying. Combine this with Christine's lessons on how to make more chips which work with the machines? Think about that. You're basically breaking down scrap metal and fission batteries and turning it into edible food, clothing, weapons, and medicine. Wrap your noodle around that - how advanced and bizarre that sort of technology is in The Verse, and tell me it doesn't bug you that no one else in the world is using that stuff. And remember, the Courier is getting a delivery of more chips every week...
 * This is confirmed in Old World Blues. The Sierra Madre was both Sinclair pet project, mostly build in the name of Vera, and another experimental town for the crazy bastards of Big Mountain. Elijah thought the matter replicator technology was widespread before the war, except that if has been, there would have been no ressources war at all, so he is essentially wrong. The irony is that technology could have prevented the war, but it was too little, too late.
 * The vending machines aren't magical; they require specifically manufactured bits of matter to make things (so somewhere, someone has to expend energy and resources to make the chips) and they operate by, presumably, running on electricity like anything else. Even assuming that the technology can scale up, the amount of work it takes to actually use beyond the concept (manpower, fuel to build the machines to obtain the giant block of granite or portion or ocean, fuel to run those machines, fuel to transport it to the replicator) is always going to be more than you actually get out of it. You're also assuming you even have a 1:1 ratio of what goes in versus what comes out; maybe you need a hundred barrels of ocean water to get one barrel of oil.
 * Furthermore, it needs to be a "fissionable" material in order to break it down into what ever you wish to create. The machine doesn't work both ways. When you "return" an item for chips, it only accepts it in exchange for the chips-it would most likely give that item to the next person who "buys" it instead of making a new one.
 * Screw all of that. Why on earth did Elijah need to get inside the Vault to get ahold of all three of these technologies? The Cloud is everywhere, and Elijah had even figured out how to reproduce it (on a small scale, but it still worked). The vending machines were on every corner, even in the villa. And the holograms were found in the medical district. He could access all three things he wanted without having to stop foot inside the casino, let alone the vault. And what purpose would getting in the vault get him?
 * The running theme throughout Dead Money is how the Sierra Madrea consumes everyone in their sins. It does a lot with the Seven Deadly Sins - Dean's Pride, Christine's Wrath, Dog's Gluttony, God's Envy, Vera's Sloth (Acedia to be exact), Sinclair's Lust, and finally, Elijah's Greed. Elijah doesn't want the gold, right, but he considers the treasure of the Sierra Madre to be all the technology contained within the resort and casino, down to the Vault. Elijah's ultimate plan, then, is to use the Sierra Madre Vault as his personal base of operations, and he wants all the technology held within. Consider all the speech options you have when talking to him prior to the final encounter - the thought of denying Elijah what he wants most (control and possession of the Sierra Madre's tech) enrages him. He can be talked into sharing the tech, but that leads to a Bad End. On a more practical note, he really does want the Vault to himself because it's a safe base from the Cloud and the outside world, where he can work in peace. And possibly, it houses some tech not found elsewhere in the Sierra Madre.

Elijah not just killing you

 * If Elijah truly thought You Have Outlived Your Usefulness, why did he activate a bunch of turrets than charge at you with a Gauss rifle rather than just waiting inside the forcefield, activating your collar, letting you blow up, then taking whatever's inside the vault? On a similar note, why does your collar just stop beeping when you get back up the elevator and why does it take so much longer to blow up than it usually does?
 * A good bit of it is the Vault's apparent ability to block transmission of the radio signal to blow you up. Similar to Christine's Companion Perk, the interference slows down your collar's activation, with enough time for you to make your dramatic escape. As for why the beeping stops once you leave - like what happens if you kill any of your former companions in the Hotel, you're simply out of range of the interrupted signal.
 * Insane person acting illogically is not exactly a stretch.
 * He actually tells you, after you've turned on the power, that he would have set off your collars except that the signal doesn't work between floors.

Illogical reputation and karma systems

 * There's so many things here that bug me. First of all, killing Mr. House results in negative karma. Let us remember that in the Mr. House quest-line, you are forced to destroy the Brotherhood of Steel (hundreds of noncombatants, presumably including children) for no reason other than because House hates them; and every other quest-line forces you to kill Mr. House. Also, in his ending, he forcefully wipes out all of the Kings, who are demonstrated to be a rather positive influence on Freeside. Why is killing Mr. House negative karma? Whether he's some an enlightened dictator of a megalomaniacal tyrant is ambiguous and arguable, but the game just slaps you with an Anvilicious negative karma and a ridiculously white-washy obituary.
 * It's implied that House uses his influence to lower your karma (even though it's not reputation), and the obituary was written by him (read until the end: "Let's hope the ingrates never have cause to read it. Who knows how many of them are even literate!"). Either that, or, as Colonel Moore suggests, killing House will plunge the Strip into temporary anarchy until the NCR comes to secure it. Though you don't see it, so maybe it was intention more than results. Also, he doesn't murder the Brotherhood for no reason, he murders them because they hate him and want to take his robot army. Not defending the guy, just saying he didn't do it for no reason.
 * The Mojave Brotherhood doesn't leave the Hidden Valley bunker, save for grocers and scouts. The only one who actually did anything to Mr. House's securitrons was Benny, who was able to reprogram one of them. There's no indication that the Brotherhood is a threat at all; House just hates them.
 * The only reason they only send out grocery shoppers and scouts is because the NCR shoots them on sight (i.e. keeps them from stealing from traders). If you drive out the NCR in the Wild Card ending but leave the Brotherhood alive, without the NCR to oppose them they just start straight up murdering people for every little bit of technology they are carrying (unless you get them to make peace with the NCR first, in which case they "merely" go back on the deal by mugging traders). Not only that, they capture HELIOS One. Generally, murdering traders and capturing one of New Vegas' only sources if income is bad for business and publicity, it lessens his profits and makes him look weak, and House knows this. He's perfectly justified in wanting them killed.
 * One, that happens in the Wild Card ending. So what you're saying to me is that Mr. House is right to see the Brotherhood as a threat, in the scenario that he's already killed by the Courier. Two, given that the independent Vegas ending causes a power vacuum, the Brotherhood -- being probably the most responsible faction in the whole franchise, save for arguably the Followers -- is justified in taking Helios ONE and trying to hoard weaponized technology (lest Fiends or Khans get a hold of it, which would be catastrophic). Three, this ending does not in any way signify that the Brotherhood "just start straight up murdering people;" only that they take technology from travelers.
 * Except your forgetting the Wild Card ending is basically just the House ending, except New Vegas is controlled by the Courier instead of House. Nothing suggests that the Brotherhood would in anyway tolerate a Vegas policed by robots, whereas everything (including the Wild Card ending and comments by Yes Man and House) indicates that they would try to take away those things. That's the entire reason they started a war with the NCR (and got slaughtered), because they thought the NCR didn't deserve to have even a little bit of high tech equipment (and the NCR are relatively low tech compared to House's securitron army). When you say "The Brotherhood is justified in taking Helios ONE and trying to hoard weaponized technology (lest Fiends or Khans get a hold of it, which would be catastrophic)", that's just making an excuse for an act of agression for no real reason other than greed, dogmatism, and spite on the Brotherhood's part. They don't care about anyone but themselves, if they were really hoping humanity made progress like they said, they wouldn't have attacked the NCR.
 * You're completely wrong; the Brotherhood was the original faction to discover Helios ONE, and the NCR started the war by trying to reclaim Helios for themselves (look up Operation: Sunburst on the Fallout wiki). If "they don't care about anyone but themselves", then explain the Fallout 1 ending where the Brotherhood - now in a secure position in the Wasteland - begins using their resources to bring medicine and education to non-members. By the way, how is the hoarding argument "just making an excuse for ... greed, dogmatism, and spite"? Would you want the Fiends or the Vipers to get their hands energy weapons and power plants? Didn't think so.
 * Yes, the Brotherhood occupied HELIOS first. But guess what? They started the damn war. I fail to see how attacking an enemy base in your territory after they've already declared war on you and massacred civilians is wrong. They've suffered huge Motive Decay since Fallout 1. The Brotherhood, after introducing all that new advanced technology to the wasteland, decided that now they wanted it back (mainly from the NCR). So they attacked the NCR, who were really the only chance the West Coast had at salvation. They got slaughtered (both sides, but the Brotherhood's casualties were more severe due to their smaller numbers). In all my endings, I killed off all the Fiends, evacuated the Khans, destroyed the Powder Gangers, and slaughtered the Black Mountain mutants, so there's no threat of all that technology becoming theirs. Worst case scenario, and assuming the caravan owners are incredibly incompetent, a gang of Vipers takes a few laser pistols and energy cells from some caravans. Then they sight a caravan full of loot they like, without the NCR to stop them, and use the laser weapons to kill the caravan and take their stuff. You know, the exact same thing the Brotherhood is doing. The Brotherhood doesn't even do anything with the stuff they take. They just store it away. The only time they did something with it was at the end of Fallout 1, and as said above, they just tried to take it back.
 * There's no indication who started the Brotherhood-NCR war except in non-canon sources, which is still foggy. That being said, the first contact between the NCR and the Mojave chapter of the Brotherhood was at Helios ONE, which was a case of NCR aggression. That was for no good reason, by the way, since the NCR had no idea how to repower the facility -- and even if they did, their intent was to power their military bases instead of giving it to their citizens. Talk about pointless bloodshed. Furthermore, the Brotherhood hasn't suffered from motive decay; the Mojave chapter simply doesn't have the resources to both subsist and help common folk in the state they're in, under lockdown in the Hidden Valley. But, they do help patrol the I-95 in the NCR ending where the Courier engineers a truce, which is evidence that the Brotherhood is doubtlessly a "good" faction. And, finally, to the question of if the Brotherhood is right to confiscate high-tech from other people: consider who is in the Wasteland. Common folk (traders, travelers) have no need of energy weapons. The ones that would actually use it are primarily transnationals like Fiends, Great Khans, slavers and raiders. The Followers aren't a military faction and wouldn't use energy weapons for much. Mr. House and the Vegas families don't need them either. The NCR has a legitimate usage (against the Legion), but they're also at war with the Brotherhood (and, in the case of the truce, the Brotherhood helps the NCR against the Legion using said weapons). So, simply hoarding the weapons is a good plan, since it keeps them away from bad people.
 * If you're talking about how Veronica was complaining they don't help common folk, she's not complaining that they don't keep raiders away at all times, she's complaining that they don't help anyone at all, even though the ending shows that they are capable of doing that if they put their rivalry against the NCR aside (and the NCR ambaassador is fully willing to negotiate, something the Brotherhood would know if they didn't kill anyone who came near their bunker. And the ending where they "help" people? They only do that when they get paid with the salvaged power armor!. About the weapons: You're missing the point. The Brotherhood aren't keeping those weapons away from bad people, they are the bad people. If I'm a caravan owner, I'm not going to get worried by a gang of 3 or so vipers with laser pistols (thats what guards are for), I'm worried about those power armored killing machines who are taking my best merchandise and possibly kill me in the process.
 * The NCR wasn't willing to negotiate; the Courier was explicitly ordered to destroy the bunker, and he is scolded for disobeying orders and negotiating the truce. Considering the bunker is surrounded by radscorpions and mutants, it's a fair assumption that anybody who comes nearby probably has the specific intent of attacking the Brotherhood. Also, agreeing to patrol the I-95 was not IN EXCHANGE for the NCR turning over their salvaged power armor; that was part of the truce. The Brotherhood began the patrols simply because they ended their lockdown. And, how are the Brotherhood the bad people? They only attack NCR caravans because they're at war, which the NCR started in the Mojave region. As shown by the Fallout 1 ending, the Brotherhood is fundamentally a good organization. You keep trying to escape that, but it's pretty clear.
 * They're not good. Why do you keep ignoring that they steal and kill because they think they own everything? How is that any different than a well armed raider group? Oh, and yes, they did only help patrol the I-15 because the NCR gave them power armor, the exact words in the ending slide were: "As per their agreement, the NCR handed over all suits of salvaged power armor and in return the Brotherhood helped patrol I-15 and Highway 95." That clearly says the Brotherhood patrolled the highways because the NCR handed them the armor. The Brotherhood, once again, started the war!. The developers have alluded to this, even if its not explicitly stated to be canon. The Brotherhood's leader in the Mojave was Elijah, do you really think it's a good idea to leave a base in your territory with that guy as their leader? Also, regardless of who started the war, the Brotherhood moved into the Mojave and started attacking NCR caravans, before the NCR attacked them, plus they were already in an official state of war with the Brotherhood, so of course they're going to attack the nearby stronghold of well armed raiders commanded by an Ax Crazy madman that's already started attacking caravans. Only Moore is mad at you if you make peace with the Brotherhood. She even says flat out "This is terrible, now Crocker is gonna want to establish diplomatic ties with them!". Not to mention the Brotherhood is a really big backstabber. They were friendly with the NCR in Fallout 2, and then they just attack because they think the NCR don't deserve any technology, then they attack caravans, then they got driven back, and depending on your actions, you could drive the NCR away and they will just start attacking caravans again. A truce with them is ideal, but unless you're taking the NCR ending the best thing to do is to bury these murderous, greedy, self-rhiteous jerks under the rubble of their own bunker.
 * I'm supposing you're including all of the children and noncombatants in the category of "murderous, greedy, Self-righteous jerks"? Regardless of what your opinions on killing children are: (1) They are different from a "well-armed raider group" because they don't kill people for supplies, all they do is confiscate high-tech objects (mostly weaponry), which ordinary folk shouldn't have in the first place. It makes the wasteland even more dangerous. It's the equivalent of the U.S. government confiscating rocket launchers from civilians. (2) The key word for the ending is the Brotherhood "HELPED patrol..." That doesn't exclude the given fact that they were already patrolling the area, which is the case since the lockdown ends before the truce with the NCR is established. (3) Yes, Father Elijah is not a good person, but plenty of NCR leaders aren't either; as shown by the Bitter Springs massacre. Judging the whole faction by one person is ridiculous. Elder McNamara is the leader during the events of New Vegas. (4) Regardless of how evil Elijah is, the fact of the matter is that it's unclear -- no matter how much you cry otherwise -- who started the Brotherhood-NCR war, but in the Mojave, the Brotherhood first claimed HELIOS One before the NCR attacked them there. They are the aggressors in this instance. (5) "Only Moore is mad at you if you make peace with the Brotherhood." Yes, but she is the legitimate officer at that point, and there is no reason to think Oliver, Hsu, or Hanlon would've objected to utterly annihilating the Brotherhood. (6) "They were friendly with the NCR in Fallout 2, and then they just attack because they think the NCR don't deserve any technology..." Different chapters. Again, the NCR attacked the Mojave Brotherhood first in order to claim HELIOS One. (7) "you could drive the NCR away and they will just start attacking caravans again." That's a good idea. There's only a handful of responsible factions in the Mojave: the Brotherhood and NCR being the only ones with legitimate usage for energy weapons, so with no NCR, that's fair game to claim all of them.
 * Nothing at all suggests there were children in that bunker. There are a few of what appear to be teenagers, but that's it, and even those are armed. That's just making assumptions without evidence. They're are no non-combatants in the Brotherhood. Everyone has a weapon and is trained to use it, and is trained to fight to the death over even the most useless bit of technology. What I'm trying to say about the NCR attacking the Brotherhood in the Mojave is that the NCR was justified in doing that: They're not the aggressors, since they were already at war. The Brotherhood is one organization: It doesn't matter who's in charge of what chapter, they are all the same group. They didn't even make any effort to differentiate themselves from the people the NCR was at war with by sending a diplomat or something, they just occupied the nearest power plant and started confiscating things from NCR caravans. Even when the Brotherhood takes technology, they don't do anything with it. At the end of Fallout 1, they introduced new technology to the wasteland, but they just decided they wanted it back later. They're obviously not helping anything, since the NCR has a relatively loose grip on the region and I don't see any Jackals running around with Gatling Lasers. Some fiends have laser rifles and plasma rifles, but those are likely provided by Ceasar's Legion who bought them from the Van Graffs. Those caravan owners might have just lost their livelihood, but oh well, at least some violent cult has more shiny things to store in a hole! And yes, they are a violent cult. They kill anyone who comes near their bunker (they themselves say this), attack people to take their things with their better weapons (just like raiders), and generally kill anyone who dares question them. Let's remember this is an organization where Elijah was snubbed at times not for his cruelty, but because he wanted to actually do something with the technology he found. Plus, the vast majority of members will literally kill you if you don't follow their codex to the letter. Even McNamara won't go against the codex. This sounds like an awfully dangerous organization when left unchecked. And that's because it is. You're also ignoring that the Brotherhood are not the U.S. government. They have no legitimate authority to do anything. It's less like the U.S. government confiscating rocket launchers from civilians and more like thieves threatening merchants at gun point and taking their best merchandise. In fact, that's exactly what it is.
 * (1) The Brotherhood only gets new members through offspring of current members, so clearly there are children in the Hidden Valley bunker; they're in sections of the bunker that the Courier can't or has no desire to access. (2) "The Brotherhood is one organization: It doesn't matter who's in charge of what chapter..." False. There's no central Brotherhood master that everybody else takes orders from; every chapter is the same in purpose but makes its own foreign policy. The only reason the NCR is at war with the Mojave chapter is because they attacked first at HELIOS One. (3) "At the end of Fallout 1, they introduced new technology to the Wasteland, but they just decided they wanted it back later." Canon source for this please? (4) "Some fiends have laser rifles and plasma rifles, but those are likely provided by Ceasar's Legion who bought them from the Van Graffs." Thus justifying the Brotherhood's purpose! (5) "Those caravan owners might have just lost their livelihood, but oh well, at least some violent cult has more shiny things to store in a hole!" Again, it's like if the U.S. were to confiscate rocket launchers or C-4 from civilians. Oh no, the government is violating my rights! They couldn't possibly have a good reason for doing this! (6) "They kill anyone who comes near their bunker" Right, because the only people around their bunker are Black Mountain supermutants, Powder Gangers or NCR patrols (who they're at war with). I don't see how you could possibly argue against this. (7) "and generally kill anyone who dares question them." The paladins that get upset at Veronica are a fringe; as far as I know, there's no indication they're taking orders from McNamara or Hardin. (8) "You're also ignoring that the Brotherhood are not the U.S. government. They have no legitimate authority to do anything." There's no such thing as 'legitimate authority' in this realm. If you want to run with that, then Caesar has more political legitimacy than the NCR in the Mojave, despite being one of the most despicable human beings in post-war America.
 * I think 'killing' them is a bit much I prefer the method that Veronica had wanted to do which was point them in the direction of doing some good. To the guy who was arguing the Brotherhood was in the right, They may have been a force for good in the past but they are going through incredibly severe Motive Decay the old Brotherhood provided technology to the weak settlements in the California wasteland but they abandoned that cause a long time ago. As time went by they steadily became more dogmatic about the codex and how they where the only ones who could have advanced technology, (no it did not say just weapons but just advanced technology that includes farming and industrial technology). So as time went by and the Dogmatic kill and take stuff faction grew in power those who wanted to be benevolent either left or joined Elder Lyons and set up shop in DC until eventually all that was left where the ones who would slaughter a Followers Outpost because one member was sick of all the bullshit and decided to join a different group. They stopped being a group of former US military men and women who where protecting human technology from being entirely lost a long time ago and have since become The Tech Priesthood of Mars desperately trying to keep everything Pre-War to themselves.
 * (1) I actually agree with you on that one. (2) Actually the brotherhood does have loose central structure in canon, its basically just a council of the most important Elders but it is clear connection and shows that they are the same organization. Veronica mentions that they exiled Elijah for HELIOS ONE.(3) He is thinking of the Fallout Bible which is considered canon by many fans because it was written by a Black Isle staff member. (4) What gives them any right to take these things when they are not the government in the region that would be the NCR who don't like their merchants being mugged for their technology along with the fact that they don't just take weapons just that they take advanced technology that which includes technology for more efficient farming to machines to make medicine and help people. (5) If thats the case why are they so stubborn against the idea of actually rebuilding the world, they very clearly suppress people like Veronica and Elder Lyons. The East Coast BOS where refused supplies and had contact cut when they decided to become the government in DC and Veronica was kept far away from the rest of the brotherhood.(6) That is actually kind of justified if only because of the fact that they have made an enemy out of every single major group in the Mojave (7) The extremely dogmatic group is not just a fringe but the majority look at how they all but exiled Veronica for daring to say that they should try to help people and use what we have for good and cut off the DC group. (8) They have no legitimate because the actual group in charge the NCR wants them to stop and is capable of forcing them to stop.
 * (2) Where is this stated? Elijah disappeared during Operation: Sunburst, and since then, the Brotherhood dispatched assassins after him; but I never heard anything of a formal exile issued by all of the elders. (3) Specific citation please? (4) The Mojave isn't the NCR's region. They were never elected; they entered the area with force and annexed several towns. The Brotherhood has the exact same amount of legitimacy. (5) They do rebuild the world, as per the ending to Fallout 1. The Mojave chapter isn't, however, because they're under lockdown. (6) Who did they "make an enemy" out of? The NCR attacked first at Helios ONE, Fiends and other bandits are just psychotic, Mr. House wants to eliminate the Brotherhood either due to an irrational hatred or simple desire to annihilate any potential threats, there's no known contact with the Families, Boomers or Great Khans, and Caesar's Legion wants to eliminate any technological society. That just leaves the Followers, which are non-military. (7) What do you mean "all but exiled?" How are they the majority when they weren't acting under orders? (8) The NCR has no legitimacy in the region except military force. Prove to me why the NCR gets to police the citizens of New Vegas but not the Brotherhood.
 * (2) The Brotherhood does have a central command structure. Read the backstory. Though I can't remember this being exactly stated in New Vegas, in Fallout 1 Maxson explains it. (4) The Mojave is the NCR's region. Regardless of whether or not they took by it force, they are the closest thing to a ruling faction in the Mojave, and they drove the Khans and Brotherhood out of the area. (5) The Mojave Chapter doesn't even try to rebuild the world after they get out of the lockdown. At best, they get paid to help the NCR patrol a highway. At worst, they actively attack people, keeping technology out of there hands and setting the world back for everyone but themselves. (6) They made enemies out of the NCR because they attacked in the west. Veronica herself outright states that they have tons of enemies, and not just those in the Mojave. (7) "All but exiled" means they kicked her out of the bunker and sent her to some obscure trading post where she couldn't spread any of her ideas. Several extremists are in high ranks. In addition to Elijah formerly being the elder, Hardin is the Head Paladin, and is utterly unwilling to negotiate with the NCR, in addition to supporting taking everything valuable from "inferior" peoples. (8) The NCR has more legitimacy then the Brotherhood because they actually do shit other than hide in a hole. When the NCR comes to your town and asks if you want to be a part of them, they'll protect you from raiders, charge a few taxes, bring food and medical supplies to your town, and likely set up crops around it (look at Vault 15 in Fallout 2, for example). The Brotherhood won't do any of that. Instead, they'll hide like until their enemies go away, come out, hold defenseless people at gunpoint, and take whatever they feel like taking because apparently it's rightfully theirs. And once again, comparing them to the U.S. Government taking missile launchers away from civilians is idiotic for many reasons. One, laser pistols and rifles aren't missile launchers. They actually do less damage than their kinetic counterparts, and aren't anymore dangerous than the guns the Brotherhood sees no purpose in confiscating. Two, how exactly is things like farming technology and fission batteries dangerous? The Brotherhood didn't just confiscate weapons, they confiscated "anything they saw as inappropriate". Three, the U.S. Government is able to take away your missile launchers because they protect you. The Brotherhood doesn't. So it would be less like if the U.S. Government confiscated missile launchers from civilians and more like if some violent cult sprung up in the middle of the U.S. and started taking guns, phones, batteries, and pretty much anything they want.
 * You know what just recruit Veronica and talk to her about the Brotherhood she explains exactly why the Brotherhood is in the wrong she was all but exiled means she was given a job where she would not be able to explain her views to anyone in the brotherhood and spends most of her time outside the bunker.
 * Anyway, that's not the point here, we got off topic. You're question was why does killing House give negative karma when apparently he was unjustified in killing the Brotherhood. The answer, I don't know why it drops your karma, but I do know that he's right abut having the Brotherhood eliminated. This isn't a matter of whether they're good guys or bad guys, it's a matter of if they will attack innocent people, damaging the economy and making House look weak, or if they won't. And they clearly will. Mr.House was Properly Paranoid.
 * Furthermore, you get negative karma from stealing, but good karma from killing bad people. What. Annihilating Fiend or Legion encampments makes me a good person (understandable), but if I take any of their stuff in order to continue my crusade of justice, I'm morally grey.
 * It doesn't just apply to evil characters. If you slaughter an entire town, your karma doesn't drop a point, but pick up a tin can, and boom -5 points. Not to mention it was a little hilarious when I attacked the Powder Ganger base at the NCRCF, iced everybody with a laser rifle, then got in trouble for grabbing a plasma pistol on someone's desk (that THEY stole from the NCR).
 * You get a reputation hit in the NCR for engineering a truce between them and the Brotherhood. I understand ultra-militarist officers that don't care about casualties being sore about that, but your reputation is considered by every level of society (e.g., civilians, soldiers and officers alike); are you telling me that the frontline troops are unhappy that they don't have to be incinerated by plasma rifles?
 * I think they'd also be happy that they have Elite Mooks to absorb bullets for them on the I-15 and Hoover Dam, for that matter. And they are. The amount of reputation hit you take is extremely miniscule, basically saying only the jingos (they exist in civilian ranks as well) are mad at you. Of course this would require everyone else to be neutral, not grateful, so...
 * The average NCR citizen hates the brotherhood because they have acted as terrorists murdering civilians and destroying the NCR's gold reserves thus destroying their economy. They probably see the Brotherhood as an incredibly well armed Raider group and going off what they have done and what they do if you let them run rampant they are kind of right. It stands to reason that the person who went against orders to get the NCR to not only let them stay around but essentially become a part of NCR's military would be hated.
 * The Karma system is a hold over from Fallout 3, which only worked because of how ridiculously over the top branching paths were. When your options are consistently along the lines of "blow up an inhabited town with a nuclear bomb" or "don't blow up an inhabited town with a nuclear bomb," then it is pretty obvious what is the more morally correct decision. Fallout New Vegas, on the other hand, has much more gray and gray morality, so a black and white karma system is never going to make that much sense. Considering karma intentionally has almost no impact on the game, it can almost completely be ignored.
 * I agree, I always got the impression that the development team did not want and did not care about the karma system, but wasn't bothered enough to remove it.
 * Wait, what's the problem with the obituary being a whitewash? Didn't House WRITE the obituary himself? Granted, I don't really agree with getting negative karma for killing him (since you take karma points for offing smaller scale bad guys) but considering there's a way to disable him without having to pop a round into the middle of his forehead (or shooting him with Annabelle I assume they'd give that a cursory evil tag.

Companion Help with Doors/Computers

 * Why can't companions hack computers, pick locks or disarm traps for me? That's one of the biggest reasons to have henchman in role playing games: having someone who has skills that you do not have. This applies to other skills too. Why doesn't Arcade help me heal the wounded Boomers or NCR troops? He is a doctor after all. Raul or Veronica could repair things, like the Helios One computer. It just bugs me that the game requires my characters to develop lock picking and hacking to complete quests when other people could do it for me, especially when I want to role play a character that's stupid or has no training in those fields.
 * Because that would completely ruin the point of having medicine, repair, or science skills in the first place. They have practical application, but for the most part are for checking skill checks. If you could use companions for those skills, then no one would ever need to put points into them.
 * Not really. The companion wouldn't be able to help you with skill or speech checks, just hacking or lock picking. That doesn't ruin anything in other RPG's. Neverwinter Nights let you hire a halfling thief who could disarm traps and open doors. It could be balanced just fine, maybe picking a character who can open things means forfeiting a strong fighter character; when I picked the hafling I had less muscle in my party to work with so it was a trade off. Does it really make sense to have a master mechanic just stand there while the player tries to fix something by reading out of a magazine? The problem is that the game expects you to become a mary sue that can do anything and that's not fun for role playing IMO.
 * The only companions whose background would realistically allow them to hack computers would be Veronica or Arcade, and no one has the background to pick locks or disable security. Veronica does have the capacity to unlock specific computers, like the one in the unmarked Gibson shack outside of the scrapyard.
 * I didn't know about the computer in the scrap yard, that's pretty cool. I think Raul could realistically have lock pick skills, being a handy man with a criminal background. He definitely has the repair to disarm traps. I also had EDE in mind for that, kind of like R 2 D 2 or something.
 * The series has done this earlier installments. It was almost definitely taken out due to how easy it was to abuse the system. It also diminishes character roleplay because you would end up with every character type being able to more or less do the same thing. What's the point of playing a stupid, unskilled character if you do not have to deal with being stupid and unskilled because you can use companions for skill crutches?
 * Eh, I disagree on it hurting roleplay but YMMV. My main point was that it's unrealistic to have these highly skilled experts unable to help you when they are talked up as being highly skilled experts. The informed ability JBM.
 * Veronica, Arcade, and Raul are the only ones who you could count as highly skilled experts and the abilities they say they have are generally backed up. Raul keeps your weapons in good condition for longer than they normally would be it never said he was a good lock picker and it is not a tagged skill for him. Veronica says she is good at tinkering and punching people low and behold she makes it so you dont need a workbench meaning she can make things stuff without tools and she IS amazing at punching people. Arcade is supposed to be an incredibly skilled doctor and that is supported by the fact that having him with you means your wounds heal much faster than they normally would. Most of the things you say they should be able to do they are never even hinted at being able to, It is never stated that any of these people had these skills.
 * Raul is a former criminal with repair skills, some lock picking would make sense in universe. Just because the skill isn't tagged doesn't mean that he wouldn't be able to open a Easy lock. The character is expected to learn all these skills, why can't a talented handy man have some novice skill at lock picking? Veronica is a BOS Scribe, meaning she has a science background, enough surely to use computers and according to the troper above, she does at one point. The game is so generic about what "science" is that hacking would fall under the purview of her skills logically. Arcade is a doctor who is doing "scientific" research when you meet him. Surely he would/could also have good science skills. I don't think any of them should be experts, that WOULD defeat the purpose of the players learning the skills themselves. However, they could open Easy to Average level things realistically.
 * Well, during restoring hope, you can have Arcade teach the doctor there instead of having to run to Crimson Caravan buy two books.

Damnit, Hsu!

 * Alright, long story short I went too far in The House Always Wins and passed Don't Tread on the Bear before I got my NCR rep up past soft hearted devil(was low because I killed a merc at Jacob's town for his star bottle cap). Now, I could rant about why my rep went down so low for killing mercenaries with a checkered past who were trying to incite violence and murder the inhabitants of a peaceful village when I have evidence of that...wait, just did rant about that, sorry. But my point is; I still have the No, Not Much quest where you get troops sent to Bitter Springs. Having already done Restoring Hope, I got those troops sent. Having helped out the Misfits, I got the troops from Camp Golf sent. However, Hsu won't send troops from Mc Carren...even though I single handedly wiped out the leaders of the Fiends, caught the spy in camp, and solved the murder of one of his corporals, along with uncovering the theft of water from the sharecropping farms. Despite all that, Hsu won't send help to Bitter Springs and I seem to have run out of ways to raise my NCR rep any higher, which means I'll fail the quest to save Kimbal. Now, my own frustrations aside, I just don't understand why Hsu is refusing; all of his problems have been solved and he has men to spare. Forlorn Hope is on the front lines and they had troops to spare.
 * NCR rep is simply too low for him to willingly spare troops.
 * You are a random guy that he does not like very much asking him to redeploy his troops. You are doing roughly the equivalent of walking up to someone, intentionally kicking him in the shin, then asked for $5. He might not specifically need that $5, but you didn't exactly ingratiate yourself into him wanting to help you.
 * It is my understanding that as long as you spook Kimball into fleeing (by letting the rangers shoot you on sight, for example), he'll survive even if the quest doesn't reward you for it. Think there was some line from House to that effect.

Colonel Moore: Worst. Leader. Ever.
1. It is a show of force to the Kings. 2. To occupy Freeside after you kill the Kings.
 * 'What? A street gang in an urban backwater is causing minor unrest with passing citizens? MOVE IT! MOVE IT! MOVE IT! I want six brigades to scorch the entire region, wipe it off the face of the Earth, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?!?! Whew, well now that we got the serious stuff out the way, lets get on to the trivialities. Say, Ms Courier, could you be a dear and single handily wipe out that gang of drug peddling, leather clad badasses that already beat you to a pulp, left you for dead and who we haven't been able to get rid of in the entire history of our country? Wait, what's this about the Brotherhood? DAMN IT COURIER! When I tell you to completely annihilate the most technologically superior faction in the Wasteland without any backup or support I bloody well expect you to annihilate them! We could have had a decisive victory on our hands, now all we've got is the same Power armoured killing machines who brought our entire nation to its knees holding the line between us and that army of kiddie fiddling slavers that we've been totally unable to defeat up until this point and... eh... SCREW YOU!'
 * ....yeah? In case you didn't notice, Moore is a bit of an irrational psychopath. I fail to see the problem here; that's just her characterization.
 * Well...er...Moore is a firm believer that might makes right and openly states this. By making peace with the Brotherhood, you've basically undermined all the death and loss that occurred on Helios One. And, let's face it, she's just a bitch.
 * I think what the OP is complaining about is that she sends a whole platoon of soldiers to wipe out the Kings, yet just expects you to be able to wipe out a gang of raiders (not very hard) and the most technologically advanced people in the wasteland (hard) on your own.
 * Sorry about that, I got kind of carried away with the last bit. Though you do have to wonder why even if Moore was daft enough to expect a single combatant to take out both the Khans (whose roach like persistence gives the Enclave a run for its money) and the Brotherhood, then why would she deem them worth bothering about at all (Obviously they would be a major tactical threat from the point of view of a sane individual, but apparently not from the 'Elvis impersonators are harbingers of Belezebub' perspective of Moore.
 * I always wondered about stuff like that. How many soldiers is a lot in this universe? How are military tactics effected by certain individuals being able to take 100's of rounds of gunfire without dying, or kill dozens of enemies with their fists?
 * Base form the Fallout wiki the Battle of Helios One had the NRC sending over 2000 soldier vs the brotherhood's 200 (with 30 robots) this is a major battle that's a major battle between two super powers.
 * Operation Sunburst was a major battle, but not one between two superpowers. It was a last desperate holdout against a massive assault NCR force by a surviving chapter of the BOS. The Brotherhood itself was never a 'superpower' in the Western regions, even with all the chapters surviving. By comparison, the NCR is a huge force, with a home population numbering 700,000 that could simply overwhelm the Brotherhood with numbers. That said, comparing the two largest battles in the Mojave prior to the events of New Vegas, the memorial to the casualties of the First Battle of Hoover Dam lists 107 casualties and is considered one of the largest single battles in NCR history (though they are losing 1,000+ soldiers per year in the stalemate with the Legion), while the casualties suffered at Helios One against the BOS alone number around 700 or 800.
 * Moore never says you have to do it alone. Besides given everything you've done up until that point being ridiculously unrealistic for one person to accomplish. Should could just be genre saavy. If this one person that single handedly done all thing, then what's the harm of asking him to do this. Worst case scenario, the Courier ignores the request and she is in the exact same place she started at.
 * Moore isn't sending the NCR Troopers into Freeside with you to help you kill the Kings, she's sending them in because:

The troopers are there for the aftermath, you're there for the fight. Also, I saw Moore and Hsu as the only NCR commanders who are true soldiers: Oliver is willing to sacrifice hundreds of soldiers for a place in the history books, Kimball is in it for the same reason, even Hanlon is wasting troopers lives to discredit Oliver and Kimball. Moore is just as jingoistic as Oliver, but for very different reasons: she, and Hsu are in it because they believe in the NCR, and want them to succeed.

Scary Armed Stripper

 * Why does the stripper/crier for the Atomic Wrangler carry a knife? For one thing, it would scare off customers. Half naked woman with giant butcher knife is not sexy (YMMV I guess). Secondly, if she has it for self defense, would that even work? What's she gonna do against all those roaming freeside thugs? If security is even an issue, the Garret twins could have one of their many armed guards stand near her outside for protection.
 * The Kings are across the street, so presumably they would protect her from mostly everything. The knife, then, could be added assurance.
 * Oh yeah, the Kings ARE right there, good point! The added assurance is scaring away the horny customers though!
 * I guess that just leaves the hungry and the thirsty customers, then...
 * Well, would YOU want to go out into what is essentially an extremely violent ghetto full of rapists and murderers half-naked without a weapon? In a dystopian post-apocalyptic future, no less?
 * If I was being paid, didn't have better options for work, and there was a ton of security a few feet away (the kings and a casino guard). The other strippers in the same dystopia are unarmed. Its just needlessly jarring for the player, bugs me every time I see it.
 * Just because security is present, it doesn't mean you're safe. If some drugged-out psycho comes at her and tries to stab her with a knife all of a sudden, she needs a weapon to defend herself in the couple of seconds it would take security to respond. I know that, were I in her position, I would want to carry a weapon on me regardless of the presence of security.

Just shoot out the hinges!

 * Why on earth cant you just shoot the hinges off of doors? I had a shotgun from the very start of the game from the caravan pack that came with the game yet I never bothered to just shoot the lock or the hinges.
 * Cuz this ain't Red Faction.
 * So? What does Red Faction have to do with this.
 * Because Red Faction is pretty much the only game that could let you do that, and that was because of its unique engine. Fallout 3's engine doesn't let you do that.
 * 1.) It would make the lockpicking skill, and also the science skill (for dual pick/hack doors) useless. 2.) Shooting out the lock/hinges without specialized ammo is action movie horseshit.
 * Suspension of disbelief is required so they do not have to make every single locked door obviously capable of withstanding repeated mini-nuke hits.
 * Besides, if the hinges are on your side of the door anyways, then why are you shooting them? You could dismantle them.
 * Shooting the hinges is one thing, but by the time you have a rocket launcher, doors should be a non-issue. As in most cases, it's Gameplay and Story Segregation.
 * It would make an interesting perk. A Courier that is stupid, too stupid to learn lockpicking/hacking and is very strong could have a perk that allows them to smash doors. A Courier with a very high guns skill could have a shoot the lock perk.
 * Not really, most CRP Gs used to let you do this. All it did was negate the negative aspects of playing stupid, me smash type characters.
 * The fact that the old school Fallout games allowed you to blow doors open with dynamite makes this even more jarring.
 * J.E. Sawyer has commented on this, with his justification that letting characters smash down/blow up doors would make the Lockpick skill useless.

Doctors' Monopoly on Addiction Treatment
Addiction is bad, we get that, and part of the trade-off of using buffs is the debuffs you might get. Now, an addiction is something that can be cured with a visit to the doctor and 100 caps. But how come the Courier, who could already be a better physician than most of the wasteland, can't remove his addictions himself? Could he just synthesize some kind of Super-Fixer, which was used in the "High Times" quest with 50 science? Seems like a severe case of Gameplay and Story Segregation. Couldn't it be remedied with a high-end perk, similar to jury rigging in how it requires an almost maxed-out stat?
 * Skill doesn't necessarily mean you have all the tools needed to do the job. The best surgeon in the world is not going to have a high patient survival rate if he only has a rusty knife and a mostly dry patch of mud to operate on. The fact you can instantly lose addiction status is already a huge case of Gameplay and Story Segregation. Even chemical approaches to removing addiction take weeks to months.
 * I know, but we could have both the skills and the tools. To treat Bill Ronte's addiction, all you need is one dose of Fixer, Psycho, and Buffout, somehow combined with a science skill of 50. My question is how come a Courier can't make a chem like that for himself, if he supposedly could do it in a slum like freeside. And arguing for it not to be realistic is pretty strange considering you can de-toxify yourself in under an hour by talking to a doctor.
 * Am I missing something here? You're asking why the Courier can't make detox drugs out of detox drugs? That doesn't make sense. Fixer is already effective against all chemical addictions; Hoff and Ronte required the additional materials because they'd developed a psychological addiction and wanted to come down from that slowly.
 * Hoff and Ronte's addictions aren't completely fixed by the Courier. It's the only instance in the game where it is implied there is a psychological component to fixing addiction. The Courier's help puts them in much better shape for that part of curing addiction.
 * Fixer does not permanently remove addiction. It removes it from the status menu, but if you use the drug you were addicted to again, your addiction returns rather than using the normal percentage to determine if you get addicted.

NO CORNBREAD?!

 * Okay, this is really minor, but it bugged the crap out of me. Why can't you make cornbread out of maize and yeast? With a high enough survival skill the courier can make coffee out of a freakin' tobacco leaf or a sludge martini with seemingly random crap and some cloud residue. So way can't they make some cornbread? Is that really too much of a stretch?
 * Obsidian didnt think of it, they cant put a recipe for everything ever in the world so some things just dont get made.
 * They thought of making bloatfly sliders and gecko kabobs, but not a western favorite like cornbread (or beans and cornbread, which should also be avalible thanks to all those cans of pork n' beans floating around) even though the courier can find (most) of the logical ingrediants? Thats like having horses without saddles, it just isn't done.
 * Cornbread isn't really all that major a dish in the few areas the Courier has been confirmed to be in (Las Vegas, possibly California, possibly Montana).
 * Lots of cultures rode horses without saddles.
 * And were promptly wiped out by those cultures that did.
 * Not actually the case. Most of the saddleless cultures either adopted the saddle after wiping out a different culture or were wiped out by infantry tactics or superior technology. In the few cases of saddled cavalry versus saddleless cavalry combat, the saddleless cavalry tended to come out the victors. This was usually more to do with saddleless cultures being more adept riders to the point the advantage of a saddle did not actually factor in.
 * Cornmeal doesn't form gluten, so you can't make yeast bread with it. You would need a chemical leavener like baking soda or baking powder.

No ending without murder

 * This just bugs me: Despite the Grey and Gray Morality in Fallout: New Vegas, and the multitude of options available for solving almost every quest, you cannot get any of the four endings without solving at least one of your problems by murdering someone who's in the way. (I'm defining "murder" as killing someone to solve a problem, rather than in self-defense.) In three of the endings, you have to crack Mr. House's coffin, either at someone else's orders or to gain control of the Securitrons for yourself and Yes Man. In Mr. House's ending, you have to destroy the Brotherhood. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer in the idea that murder should always be a solution for any conflict in an RPG, but in a game as open-ended as New Vegas, it shouldn't be the only solution. One of the NCR, Mr. House or Wild Card endings should allow you to solve the main quest diplomatically from start to finish.
 * It is possible to spare House. You can leave him alive in his tube with no way to access the outside world using the terminal. You still have to kill several legionarries if you want to survive, but as you said before, that's self defense, not murder.
 * That isn't sparing him. He still dies within a year due to contamination, so the moment you crack his coffin, you're killing him through biological warfare. (And technically, you can sneak through the legionnaires using Stealth Boys if you so choose, but that's an irrelevant tangent.)
 * It's not 'murder' by your definition, either, but I do believe it's involuntary manslaughter by gross negligence. It's not intentionally killing someone, for self-defense or not. What you do to House is disarm him because his neural interface makes him a threat. The byproduct of him being removed from being a danger to others is that he cannot defend himself against contaminants. Death happens in every Fallout game, through your actions, directly or indirectly. Even the Pacifist Run in previous games has results in death, by way of the player's actions or inactions.
 * The game ends in a battle between two of the largest factions seen in the Fallout universe. The fact you can potentially get through the game only killing one extremely elderly, paranoid, violent, self-centered man who is already at death's door that has made himself a major threat to both of these factions while also allowing two of his three main underlings (Benny and Omertas) to conspire against him is extremely significant. In addition, the fact Mr. House designed the chamber so anyone can walk up to the terminal and open the chamber is Too Dumb to Live territory. That terminal did not need to exist at all. He knew going into the chamber he was never coming out, so why make it open in the first place?
 * That annoyed me too. It's WAY too easy to kill Mr. House.
 * The chamber may be openable to allow access to it for repairs. Still, the terminal did not need to exist: Mr. House could have designed the chamber so that once closed it could only be opened by someone hardwired into the computer network of the Lucky 38 (IE, Mr. House once had had hooked himself up, and Yes Man once you've already killed Mr. House and taken the robot there).
 * The chamber is referring to the pod Mr. House is actually in, not the room the pod is located. There is no way to open it without Mr. House being infected and eventually dying, so any maintenance that would require opening it is unproductive anyways.
 * It definitely is way too easy to take the guy out. But you know, the fact that you can get through the game (in theory) by only killing one guy is why it's irritating that you can't get zero murders. Take Mass Effect and Dragon Age; in the former, you're a soldier fighting off an alien invasion, in the latter, you're fighting against darkspawn, blood mages and abominations, and pacifist options in either are never really there. In Fallout: New Vegas, you can talk down General Oliver. You can talk down the Great Khans. You can talk down Legate fucking Lanius. The only people you can't talk down are the Exclusively Evil raiders like the Fiends...and honest, reasonable businessman Mr. House. At least in the NCR ending, you should be able to get Mr. House to cooperate without killing him (there's even Dummied Out content for that), if only because it'd royally piss off Moore. It'd be even better if McNamara could be convinced to make peace with House (he'll accept peace with Yes Man, after all).
 * You missed a lot of characterization if you think Mr. House is "honest" and "reasonable."
 * Honest is right out. He never intended to keep his word with the NCR and his entire plot line revolves around breaking his treaty with them. He even says he only made the deal so he could build up power to take them down.
 * A big point that most people seem to miss is that the NCR was in the area before New Vegas was established. He established an entire city solely to give himself some vague justification for eventually attempting to kick the NCR out.
 * If you actually do dig into his backstory, he is extremely self-centered and paranoid. This is why he built an entire army of Securitrons.
 * The fact he wants control of New Vegas at all costs eliminated being "reasonable." There is absolutely zero chance his army could hold off an attack from the NCR or Legion in force. His plan requires you piss off the NCR and Legion and hoping both get too distracted to actually attack him. Stopping the assassination on the President actually makes this a kind of reasonable assumption for the NCR. However, if Caesar or Lanius survive, they are going after him. If both die, he still has to hope that there is not a single, even vaguely charismatic leader left.
 * If he was reasonable, his main plan would have been "maintain treaty with NCR." Past precedent indicates the NCR would leave him alone unless he was a slaver (which he is not) or directly attempted to undermine or attack the NCR (which is literally what Mr. House's entire life has revolved around since he woke up).
 * Mmkay. Saying it's unreasonable to want power if you think you can win it is a rather extreme values statement...and he can defeat the NCR's forces in the Mojave if the Legion has battered them first (he has to stack the deck properly, but it's established that he can do just that if the Courier doesn't go rogue). I never said he wasn't self-centered or paranoid, but being selfish (or even evil) doesn't make you impossible to deal with, and if he's paranoid, he's Properly Paranoid since Moore really is out to get him (because she's Properly Paranoid that he's up to something, yes; vicious cycle). So yeah, the seizure of New Vegas was a blatant power grab on his part, but I don't see how relevant that is to whether he can be reasoned with. Cut content suggests that he could have made a deal to join the NCR if he realized that he was out of cards and wasn't getting the Chip.
 * Part of why it was cut is probably that it just isn't the sort of thing that House would do. Given his general distrust of the NCR and Democracy (see all the arguments above), it might be a bit of Character Derailment to convince such a massive egotist like House that he is wrong and that he should trust the NCR to keep their word (even though he mentions that without the Legion, the NCR would just make up a reason to remove House from power in the Mojave). It would be nice for a guy like House to see reason, but this Fallout, and Grey and Grey Morality is the norm.
 * You are still ignoring that the NCR and began settling in the Mojave before New Vegas was founded. It is even said that Mr. House didn't even become active yet, let alone formed an entire town until after the NCR showed up. You are also neglecting the NCR force in the Mojave is a very small fraction of their military. The NCR is far and away more powerful than the Legion or Mr. House and this does get mentioned. The problem is the NCR is protecting the largest territory, so their forces are spread out very thinly. The diplomatic approach to getting rid of the Legion is pointing out they would have the exact same problems if they defeated the NCR. The only reason the Legion is a credible threat was because they could concentrate their forces more highly than the NCR. The NCR is the single largest, most populous, wealthiest faction in the entire "Fallout" universe. They also have a large chunk of Enclave and Brotherhood technology. What you saw defending the Mojave was a few hundred poorly equipped grunts with some minor support from elite forces, not the whole of the NCR military.
 * There's a good reason for that, remember, something that House goes over once or twice. As Chief Hanlon also mentions, the NCR's best troops were diverted by rich cattle barons in the home territory to protect them from lowly raiders (instead of rebuffing the major threat of the Legion). The elite troops who wear heavy armor (stripped out Power Armor), and make a brief appearance near the end of the main storyline. It's something that House was counting on as part of his scheme.

Broken Down Wasteland

 * It’s two hundred-odd years since the nuclear war, yet everything is still broken down. People are still living inside the husks of burnt out buildings and making walls out of scrap. Fences are still decaying and ruined and everything has a sort of half-assed recycled look to it. Why in two hundred years have people not built entirely new structures or improved upon what they have beyond gathering up more scrap?
 * It is just one more of those things that either does not make sense at all or would only make sense if it had only been a few years since the Great War. Note that in Fallout 2 Vault City and Shady Sands had post-war, well-maintained buildings in the form of white adobe single-story structures.
 * It does make sense when you put together the Big Picture, there have been several attempts to start rebuilding, it has just been a slow, painful process. There's a heirarchy of needs that prevented more ambitious projects. No one has an organized way of creating an infrastructure to rebuild - all the machines and plans that were used to build before are not readily available. Vault City is the prime example of a first foothold back in the Wasteland after the Big One, though they had limited resources and needed to ally themselves with the NCR in order to expand. The NCR itself has had a long, painful history, dealing with raiders and slowly building up over time, but is only a few breakthroughs away from having mass construction projects. One of the places that doesn't seem important at first there in the Mojave is Quarry Junction, where they bring up limestone for cement used to pave roads and buildings. It's a slow process. They don't have big giant cement trucks readily available to haul the stuff around, but that will probably come in time.
 * There are probably more attractive places in the world but those would be boring. You are a character in a wild and dangerous area because that's where the action is. Since the area is a savage frontier, civilization is basic at best, hence the crappy buildings.
 * But Beyond even the crappy buildings, why are places that have people living in relative comfort so... dirty? Why is the hotel at Novac still a dilapidated mess? Why does Primm still have rubble and skeletons in its buildings? Why does Camp Mc Carren still have broken slot machines cluttering the floor (and for that matter, why are there slot machines at what was once an airport)? And why do many of the casinos have broken and useless machines or areas of refuse?
 * McCarran International Airport actually does have slot machines right there in the terminals for people to keep playing as they're waiting for their flights. Today, there's over 1,000 machines in the airport. As for everything else, part of it is that some of the place actually has been cleaned up, but again, with nowhere to really to put debris except throw it out the window or our back. You and I might take curbside trash pickup as a luxury, but the folks in Post-Apocalyptia don't have that option. Novac is as good as Jeannie May Crawford was able to get it with a limited population and supplies. The fact that Carla didn't approve of how ramshackle Novac was is a plot point for Boone. As for Primm, well, the first floor is relatively clean, actually, with only one collapsed hallway in the back. The second floor is really where all the damage is, and some of the skeletons there were behind locked doors, so it's possible no one had bothered to actually explore/check the upper level.
 * There is a goddamn bloodied corpse of a Courier named Daniel propped up against a wall in front of Primm's Mojave Express when you first arrive and unless it bothers you enough to move it yourself, it won't go anywhere, no matter how many times the citizens of Primm walk by it in plain sight. Yeah, it's nitpicking but compared to the absurdly senseless world that was DC Wasteland, Mojave is incredibly well thought out and the fact that there isn't an extra set of textures/props for semi-renovated places where everything isn't such a ruin and you don't have all the random shit just laying around is a bit jarring.
 * It may have been an oversight, something for the Courier to deal with, really, or a case where the Developers got lazy. While Daniel just sits there, there's two other incidents where the Courier himself can dispose of bodies properly. Both involve simply dumping the body into a nearby dumpster.
 * Daniel isn't related to any quest, but does contain some information relevant to the plot on his body. If the body dissappeared at random or based on quest progression, then people would lose access to that information.
 * The NCR military is just sort of squatting in the airport and there is a lot of wasted space. The terminal is almost unused except for a few offices, so the trashed slot machines in the dark uninhabited corners were just left alone. The Novac motel is run by a elderly woman working alone, and she says that it's off season in dialogue. She might clean up a bit more when its tourist season.
 * It's distinctly possible that dirt and disrepair simply don't bother the locals as much as they might someone from our time and our universe. We're used to relatively sterile, clean environments. For them? This is normal.
 * The amount of resources to build anything better than the old buildings are far beyond the capabilities of the people in the Fallout world. There are groups that make new strutctures, which is more prominant in Fallout 2, but those structures are fairly primitive and would be no where near as effective a shelter. Very mundane seeming tasks in construction are actually virtually impossible without massive amounts of infrastructure providing raw materials and tools.
 * There is a historical precident for this. When Rome fell, many of their structures were used without repair for centuries. A well made building is still useful, even if it looks aesthetically run down and for dark age type societies, functionallity always matters more than aesthetics.
 * Also House only got Vegas up and running a few years ago, before that it was mostly just tribes running around who wouldn't have the means to fix up anything.

The Courier's Ignorance of Christianity

 * In Honest Hearts most conversation options indicate that the Courier is not a Christian. At best, his response to Joshua and Daniel's conviction is a "Yeah, whatever". At worst, you can have him mock them about their beliefs. This is repeated when Joshua talks about the need to protect Zion on religious grounds, and one of the responses is "You know I don't share your beliefs, right?". A conversation option mentions him visiting Utah in the past and the head of the Crimson Caravan mentions Mormons. In addition, people still exclaim "God" and "Jesus". So, there is no way he never heard of Christian figures. Even if the Mormons are the only "real" Christian community left, one expects the Courier to still have a basic understanding of Christianity, which he blatantly seems to lack. I have no problem with him not being a Christian. But I did find it jarring that the Courier shows no familiarity to Christianity and Christian figures.
 * Hearing the names of religious figures doesn't mean you're going to have knowledge of the passages and quotations the likes of Joshua use, similarly people using exclamations like 'Jesus christ!' and so forth doesn't make them religious. People still use Latin phrases today after all, and the language is dead.
 * "God" is a generic word, so it doesn't by any means apply to only Christianity. "Jesus" being used as an exclamation does not put it in context. A lot of words used in the same manner are used incorrectly or without people even understanding what they even mean.
 * Christianity is not a large religion in the "Fallout" universe. Considering how few Christians even understand their own religion now, there is very little expectation that a non-Christian in a post-apocolyptic world would have any significant understanding.
 * One could note that Fallout 1 has an example of religion becoming rather muddled while names were carried over - not with Christianity, but with Dharmic religions - amongst the people of Shady Sands (IE, the founders of the NCR), some people say that they are followers of Dharma, with one person specifying that Dharma was a great man. Of course, Dharma could have been a post-war founder of a religion, but that still means no-one of his followers catched on to the 'coincidence'. There is probably a great deal of variance in just how much the local Christianity-descended religion is Christianity. Still, it is somewhat odd that someone as explicitly far-traveled as the Courier doesn't have a basic grasp of what it could mean.
 * There is a big difference between well traveled and religious understanding. For example, if a person visits India, it is very unrealistic to assume that person suddenly has obtained a through understanding of Hinduism as a result. It is still unrealistic to expect a non-Christian in a post-apocalyptic wasteland to understand Christianity when most actual Christians don't even understand their religion.
 * Not understand it, recognise the terminology (IE, God, Jesus Christ, etc).
 * The problem is that the Courier seems to be unable to make the connection that the "Jesus" and "God" people shout happen to have the same name as the "Jesus" and "God" and that Joshua and Daniel seem to worship. I mean, he is smart enough to make the connection that the Sorrows came to see "The father in the Caves" as "God". Second - The Courier has likely encountered people of Christian upbringings. Religion may not have been big but it still existed. America was still a Christian-majority country and, practiced or not, it would have survived one form or the other. One of the Misfits mentions a Christian upbringing and Searchlight, which was inhab,ted until recently, has two churches. They may not have been used but I find it very unlikely how clueless the Courier seems to be about it. Again, I am not complaining about the Courier not being Christian. Just finding his unfamiliarity very odd.
 * I would simply put it down as Obsidian trying to avoid a serious religious argument at that point in the story. A little railroading to avoid derailing the story into one of conversing about God and Jesus. It gets mentioned, but it avoids a more serious discussion at length. The Courier probably knows more about it, but the script just ushers the more direct story along. Afterall, it's possible for the Courier to talk to Arcade and have no idea what Latin as a language is, and then five minutes later, be using Latin fluently to trick a Legion Officer into giving up Caesar's plans.
 * It's a roleplaying game, the Courier is your character. If you select statements suggesting the Courier know nothing about God or Jesus then it's you actively deciding that the Courier isn't well aware of Christianity or possibly just saying he doesn't know anything because he wants to find out more about Joshua or Daniel's beliefs. As for not having many options to talk about Christianity with the characters, I'd also say it's probably Obsidian avoiding religious arguments in the story.
 * That is my point though: Pretty much all responses in that conversation implies he is ignorant. The one that doesn't is more of a "Yeah, whatever" response that can be interpreted in different ways. I think I will take the Latin example above and mix it with the religious argument issue. Still finding it a bit odd though.
 * No, only a couple imply ignorance. You're forcing your interpretation into the other responses and assuming motive based on that. It's clearly not the intent.
 * There's also the issue that Joshua Graham isn't some christian you're likely to stumble upon in your local church. They're New Canaanites. Gun training is a religious rite of passage. The only scripture he seems to have is one I hear is rare for current mormons to use.
 * Personally, I'm wondering why the game spefically makes a point of not allowing the player to choose the Courier's beliefs, or lack thereof. It makes sense that the main game wouldn't broach the subject, so there was no need for it to be decided, but specifically mentioned it in an expansion and didn't allow a decision. Little things like that tend to make the Courier feel less like your character and it's somewhat jarring, considering the freedom you have over him/her throughout the rest of the game.
 * Obsidian are just being pragmatic. There is an insane variety of religious beliefs out there, and having to choose a handful of them to go into the game would elicit just as many complaints as not having any - no matter the choice there's always going to be something they forget, or something which needs to get pushed aside. The 'I don't share your beliefs' line covers all the bases without getting bogged down in extraneous detail.

Origins of the Brotherhood/NCR war

 * Why among the thousands of questions you can ask to hundred of NPCs, why don't you ever have the possibility of asking HOW the war started? I had to check the Vault Wiki, and what they have to reveal is only based on Van Buren, and thus of doubtful canonicity.
 * Long story short: the latest descendant of Maxson is kind of an asshole. Presumably, he wants to build an old world technologies bin and fill it up with every remaining kinds of old world tech, swimming in it Scrooge McDuck-style, all the while giving a giant middle to all of those who'd like to use that tech for productive purposes. Sound incredible, but the NCR doesn't share this opinion.
 * We know it isn't Maxson's latest descendant that is responsible, because we met him in 2277 (a scant four years before New Vegas), at which point he was ten, so that bit of Van Buren seems to have been left behind, but the general implication is that the Brotherhood have flanderized themselves into forgetting that the original purpose of gathering old technology and keeping to themselves was to preserve that technology, not "to keep technology they must never have" or to "not take them in or help them". Remember how quickly the Brotherhood decides on confiscating advanced technology in almost all the endings where they survive? Now add to that the fact that after Fallout 2, the NCR captured Navarro. Given the Brotherhood presented, but stronger and being capable of thinking that it might win a war against the NCR, and combined with the NCR suddenly having access to technologies from the most advanced faction in the Wasteland... but of course, that is all implication and extrapolation, and it is still somewhat odd that no-one can be asked exactly why it started.
 * The main BOS flanderizing itself is rather likely (both FO3 and before FO tactics had whole chapters deserting an order that was becoming stupidly isolationist), but it still as a bit odd when you consider FO 1 BOS ending, which explain they'll gradually integrate into the new society as a research, and FO 2 where their presence is minimalist. Essentialy, in the rather mysterious time period between FO 2 and New Vegas, the BOS did a 180° and start working backward toward an extreme version of their original doctrine.
 * The process seems to have started at the time of Tactics - it takes place between Fallout 1 and 2 and features the 'isolationists' winning the internal debate and effectively exiling their opponents, after all - and led to the Brotherhood that is more isolationist by 2241 than the FO1 ending implied they would be (they should have slowly reintroduced their advanced technologies to New California, but eighty years on there is no indication that they've even begun to do that. Granted, their presence is, as you say, rather minimalist, so it is hard to judge). One presumes it was not so much a 180° as stagnating into a shape that was meant for another time - the compulsive technology-hoarders - and gradually making dogma of the old reasoning (everything they do makes perfect sense... for an organization bunkering down in a wild wasteland where most travelers are raiders and settlements are few and small - but by 2281 even the Mojave Wasteland is more of a Wild West Reborn than a wasteland, despite the name). It contradicts the Fallout 1 ending, sure, but it wouldn't be the first time endings haven't been followed exactly. The headscratcher still remains, though - Wild Mass Guessing based on what we have been told about the Brotherhood aside, it is still quite odd that no-one, neither in the NCR, the Brotherhood, or anyone else, ever bothers to mention anything of the triggering cause of the war beyond the vaguest of details ("disagreements on how technology should be regulated in the wasteland", to quote the Fallout Wikia).
 * Bear in mind, the Mojave Wasteland isn't NCR territory (until the NCR ending, at least). Most of the people you meet probably have no idea how the war happened anyways, and the ones who do have bigger fish to fry at the moment (that Caesar guy, for one).
 * Agreed, but you get to meet quite a lot of NCR and BOS military personnel...and you can't even ask a single soul when the whole mess begin. I think the implication are that the war started a few years after F02, when Navarro finally fall, apparently from a combined assault of the BOS and the NCR (shades of WW 2). Presumably, the bounty of tech they got from Navarro must have been very important. Then, the NCR goes all "make a vertibird the new Air Force One and try and improve the life of our citizens", while the BOS goes all "let's compuslvely hoard the tech and do nothing of it, because... well..." Cue war for fairly stupid reasons, on the BOS side at least.
 * IIRC, the BOS aren't prominently featured in the battle against the Enclave (They don't even rate an ending in Fallout 2). If the NCR managed to take Navarro with minimal help (not counting the Chosen One, who really just wants his village back), it's possible they may have refused to turn over whatever tech they grabbed from Navarro. Cue shooting war.
 * The chapters of the Brotherhood are capable of operating fairly independently. Odds are a few of the more isolationist chapters got into a minor firefight with the Republic and it exploded. Wars aren't really the nice straight forward things people learn about in history class. Two sides can be fighting each other for years before a war officially "starts" and it can go for years after it "ends." Besides, anyone that actually knows probably falls under "too important to explain what should be minor historical details."

Ok just how do you juggle the factions till the last minute?

 * So this game's trope page states that you can go all Magnificent Bastard on everybody in the endgame until the very end if you side with Yes Man. And one of my friends confirm that I can indeed to this until the quest "Finishing Touches". Ok, ok, just how the frak are you able to manipulate both the NCR and the Legion in the Wild Card route until the very end? The moment you do one of the quests for one faction, the other one warns you that you're going too far. So just how does this work?
 * One: play the game. Two: You can't manipulate both factions per say. At one point, after manipulating both factions, you have to decide relatively early which is going to be the one you stick to until the final quest. If you chose, say, the NCR, then you can help them, do their quests, lead them on attacks against the Legion (two quests specifically let you do that), stop raiders that attack them, and overall make them think your an ally to them. This means that at the final battle at Hoover Dam, they'll have an Enemy Mine moment and help your securitrons against the Legion until your last second backstab. Or you can just not help anyone or choose to help the Legion until the backstab, but that gives you bad endings, makes several people hate you, and means you don't get any support in the final battle (they still attack you). In fact, they meant most of it in lore terms rather than in gameplay terms.
 * I don't see why this doesn't make sense to you. Yes Man is the only faction leader that plausibly could keep it a secret that the Courier is working for him. All of the mandatory quests for Wild Card can be completed through stealth. It is very plausible that the Legion and NCR are monitoring each other's communications to some extent, so one of them mentioning the Courier is aiding them significantly could tip the other one to becoming hostile. Mr. House's communication networks are compromised before the game even starts, and it can only get worse depending on your actions.
 * Juggling factions requires meta gaming. Check and see what actions you'll need to take for a particular ending, and then complete those quests before actually going up to whichever faction you're working for and accepting their quest. It's fairly Sequence Break-y, but it's a completely viable way to play the game.
 * Is it possible to work with the Legion long enough to kill Caesar in surgery, and then turn your allegiance back to the NCR?
 * No, but Caesar dies without your intervention anyways, so there is no actual net gain for killing him during surgery and then defecting back to the NCR anyways.
 * Well, apart from the delicious schadenfreudeness of killing Caesar right under the Legion's noses and getting scott-free away with it.

NCR Trooper MP

 * This one kinda puzzles me. I haven't even done any wrong towards the NCR, yet when I was in the embassy, this one guy tells me that I have a "due to pay" and "Don't fuck with the NCR", just before attacking me and immediately prompting others to shoot me on sight. I wounder what the reason for this is...
 * You'll have to provide a bit more detail. You could be wearing Legion/Powder Ganger/Great Khan outfits and getting attacked. That whole faction thing does have an in-game effect, yanno.
 * I wasn't even wearing them. Must be a bug...
 * One documented bug is that wearing faction armour while your faction status changes will lock your status as it is with the armour on - it happened to me when I was doing errands for the Great Khans; I got a little fame delivering for them while wearing their armour, and the next I knew, I was being shot at by the NCR even though my reputation with them was completely friendly and I'd taken the armour off. I think the only way to fix it is to reload a previous save.
 * I've had a similar bug occur during "I Put A Spell On You" during a Legion playthrough. Going to Camp McCarran in NCR disguise and my Caesar's Legion rep actually vanished (as in, completely reset) even after changing out of the outfit.
 * The Fallout Wikia has an entry about it: there is a bug, or possibly badly explained WAD, with the NCR military police that can cause them to attack you randomly. It appears to be related to how you entered New Vegas for the first time, with one of the theories being that it occurs if you entered via the Monorail. The military police then drags all the other NCR soldiers in the area into hostility, thus explaining the shooting.

The End of Honest Hearts

 * There is no unambiguously good end of Honest Hearts DLC - either the Sorrows are displaced or are taught in the art of war and begin to vaguely worship Graham as their war chief, with Daniel in either scenario mourning the loss of their innocence or Zion itself. Having a level 20+ Courier at the time and Joshua Graham with a DT of -50- there is absolutely no reason that both the Courier and Graham couldn't take on the White Legs by themselves (as you've been doing up to that point), as even the intervention of the Sorrows & Dead Horses took perhaps six White Legs out of the fight in the leadup to the end of the canyon. Win-win - the Sorrows maintain their "innocence" (for a while at least), and remain in Zion with the Dead Horse tribe taking care of internal & external threats. Why aren't the Courier or Graham allowed to take this route ?
 * The longer Joshua Graham and the Dead Horses stick around to defend the Sorrows, the more the militaristic/warlike influence Graham has over them, which is what Daniel does not want. Daniel wants to get the Sorrows to a place where they do not have to witness war, and he can't do that if the Dead Horses are around all the time to defend the Sorrows. If the Sorrows stay, they will continue to see more and more of Graham defending them from the White Legs, and eventually, they're going to change their ways because of the stories they're going to tell (remember, the Sorrows have a fairly strong storytelling tradition). He already thinks Graham is already changing the tribe by the time the Courier appears. Unfortunately for Daniel, Graham does not protect the Sorrows from afar, as the Father in the Caves had done. He's someone who walks among them, and brought about another tribe to help. As Daniel says, he's seen it from other tribes he's tried to help - the more people attack the tribes he ministers to, the more they change from a peaceful culture to a more militant one. His only option is fleeing to Grand Staircase, which apparently is remote enough where the White Legs cannot follow.
 * Plus game mechanics are not meant to be taken as a strict interpretation of the lore. Graham has a DT of 50 to minimise the risk of his death, which brings the entire DLC crashing down to its worst possible ending - instantly cutting off the rest of the content.
 * Well, Graham's insane DT is more like Gameplay and Story Integration; Graham was tough enough to survive being tossed off a cliff while covered in pitch, naturally, he should seem tough in gameplay.
 * You consider the Sorrows maintaining their "innocence" a good thing? Like it or not, violence exists in the Fallout world, and people do need to learn how to defend themselves, which is why Graham and the Dead Horses are needed to protect them from the White Legs in the first place. Otherwise, they'll always be at the mercy of others who want to take what's theirs. If you want to consider Graham to be tough enough to protect them singlehandedly, he's still just one man; he can't always be there for them. And you can't ever trust the Dead Horses to want to be their defenders forever either. That "innocence" was going to be lost, one way or another.
 * To be fair, Daniel just doesn't want the Sorrows to lose their innocence because of himself and the New Canaanites. The White Legs are attacking the Sorrows and their land because of the presence of Daniel and Graham, as Caesar has ordered the destruction of the New Canaanites and their allies. The Dead Horses were warlike before Graham showed them how to maintain their weapons (which is why they agreed to help Graham out), but it's the Sorrows who were a relatively "innocent" hunting tribe being helped out by New Canaanites before the White Legs started stormdrumming their way into Zion Valley. To Daniel, he's feeling guilt over putting the Sorrows in the position of having to flee their home or defend themselves violently.

Lack Of Noticable Effects Strip Quests Have.

 * Now, I know that it wouldn't be feasible to fit every single quest into the ending narrations, but the quests for the Ultra-Luxe and Gomorrah seem like they'd be pretty major, and the fact that the Strip is a key location in the game also makes it seem like it should have had more details covering it at the end. Granted, the White Glove Society had several different outcomes, which would have made things more complicated when it came to the ending, but even then, all of those outcomes revolve around whether or not they return to cannibalism, which is pretty major. Even more important than that however, is the matter of the Omertas' possible chlorine bomb threat and planned massacre, which is either assisted or thwarted by the Courier. That sounds like something critical enough to deserve an ending slide, especially if you sided with the Legion. But instead, the only possible mention of it is in the Independent endings detailing the Strip mentioning that either "anarchy ruled the streets" or "any chaos on the streets was ended, quickly," and even then, completing the quest by stopping the plot still yields the same messages, indicating that they are not talking about the scheme, but just disorder in general.
 * It's not just the Strip quests. There are several sidequests that should have more effect on the endings but don't. "Restoring Hope," "An Eye For An Eye", "White Wash", "Hard Luck Blues", "I Put A Spell On You", etc.
 * The Strip itself isn't all that important in the overall plot line beyond "Mr. House and Benny live there." The White Gloves and Omartas are very minor factions that are only of marginal importance.
 * Well, Primm is hardly an important place, but that got its own slide. It is weird that Primm got one and not one of the most important areas of the whole Mojave.
 * The lack of an ending slide is probably because, in a sense, the main endings provides one - the Indep endings has it either in chaos or quickly brought to order, House's ending is all about New Vegas (and the Strip is the central, most important part of New Vegas), the Legion endings starts off with recounting the fate of the Strip when the Legion comes, the NCR ending specifies that the NCR annexes the place... as for several of those sidequests that should have more effect on the endings, the game actually provides some measure of explanation for that: the main impact happens during the Battle of Hoover Dam.

The White Legs

 * Okay, several things about the White Legs bug me. Most importantly, why do the Legion reject their request for membership in one of the endings? I can understand the Legion wanting to just let these loyal followers deal with the tribes around New Canaan to make them more vulnerable for when the Legion arrives, and for sacking New Canaan itself to kill Joshua Graham. But what I don't understand is why they'd turn away such a good source of potential soldiers.
 * The Legion doesn't reward fuckups. See also Graham, Joshua. If you reach that ending, the White Legs have failed to finish off Graham, and have also failed to exterminate the New Canaanites, despite the Legion and Ulysses' assistance.
 * Still, rejecting so many well armed and trained soldiers just because they failed at killing one man is just stupid when your forces in the Mojave are trapped in a brutal stalemate.
 * When Lanius is executing and decimating those Mojave soldiers for far smaller errors in performance, admitting a tribe that's screwed up a simple job as badly as the White Legs have is going to introduce all kinds of morale problems.
 * First, they're naked and have no military training of any kind, so "well armed and trained" is out right from the start. Second, if you find Ulysses's tapes he says, in a convoluted way, that there never was an offer to admit them into the legion. Ulysses just told them there was so he could throw them against New Canaan's walls.
 * Right, naked and have no military training. That's why they carry sniper rifles, power fists, and .45 submachine guns and have almost NCR Ranger level health whereas Veteran Legionnarries carry hunting rifles and 10mm submachine guns(which is given justification in universe). Then again, I guess I can believe that Lanius refused to admit them as part of his whole Honor Before Reason shtick.
 * Did you pay attention to Honest Hearts, like...at all? The White Legs don't have any military training but they uncovered an enormous cache of munitions during their travels (and before anyone speaks up people are still capable of learning how to use weaponry without being part of an army), and the sort of environment they're raised in has given them high levels of endurance and strength compared to most normal people (soaking up bullets and the like is a given for game balance). All the complaints here are addressed, you just need to actually listen.
 * Nitpick on that point; Lonesome Road shows they were in fact trained by Ulysses. Not that I disagree with the overall why the White Legs were denied entry, but they were trained.
 * But not to a military standard, which is the distinction. The White Legs took after Ulysses, not the Legion or any other armed forces.
 * Caesar does not care how well-armed they are, how well-trained they are or how numerous they are (especially given that half the White Leg warriors are female and thus irrelevant as a fighting force to Caesar). He has men by the thousands. He rarely arms them with more than pistols. He lost Hoover Dam through bad tactics, not lack of forces. The White Legs had one task and plenty of help, and not only did they fail despite them, their war-chief was kicked out on his ass, left a hangdog ruin of himself and/or killed. Why would he admit such a bunch of pathetic weaklings into his glorious Legion? There are other, worthier tribes all over the place to be conquered or assimilated.

Ulysses' Motivation
"Step 1: Gather a metric shitload of poorly equipped yet completely fanatical soldiers.
 * Okay Ulysses, let me get straight. A few years back, you were following me for some unknown reason. You found a town I used to resupply and fell in love with it, leaving the Legion. Then one day I brought a package deep from the NCR, left it there, as ordered and having completed my assignment, went on to my next job. The package contained some electronic equipment (Well, a copy of ED-E) that...somehow detonated a bunch of the nuclear warheads. A lot of the nuclear warheads. Hopeville was destroyed. Everybody got that? So Ulysses, having survived you decided to blame: A) The people who built thier town around a goddamn cash of nuclear warheads (Who DOES that?!) B) Someone in the NCR who carelessly sent the package, killing thousands. C) The Pre-War people who designed this Death Trap. D) The Enclave for building a robot that accidentally sets of Nuclear Missiles when replaying Pre-War TV shows. E) Me, who didn't actually do anything wrong, whose responsibilites of the job is to respect the privacy of the package (the same job you do, by the way) and doesn't remember a goddamn thing because, oh yeah, you've got me sent on a suicide mission that left me completely brain-scrambled and on the edge of death!
 * Minor point, but J.E. Sawyer has stated that the dev team went out of their way through dialogue options to show that the Courier does not have any memory issues. As for the rest, you can point out your limited involvement to Ulysses in-game; he will cop to it and then state it doesn't matter.
 * If the Courier has no memory issues, why does s/he so clueless about the NCR? Or the Fallout Surrounding in general. Yes, Gameplay and Story Segregation, and in some cases you can the excuse that I am simply playing ignorant because I am surrounded by armed people who may be violently opposed to the politics of my homeland, whether I myself am loyal to that homeland or not. In other situations claiming memory issues is the best way to avoid Fridge Logic. Like being unable to tell Dad that Jonas was killed in Fallout 3, being able to point out that there are people FAR more responsible for Hopeville's destruction is something that Just Bugs Me.
 * You do remember the questions about NCR are phrased in a "what do you think about..." manner, and you have the option to speak about areas without being forced to sound clueless, right? You're either misremembering or were picking the worst options available in those conversation.
 * Furthermore you seem to have missed the whole point of the New Vegas DLC by a huge amount. Learning to let go in Dead Money, being true to your self in Honest Hearts, clinging to the old world in Old World Blues? Guess what Ulysess embodies? The whole point of his character is to show you just how fucked up and deranged it can make someone - regardless of how otherwise level headed they might seem - when they focus themselves on one goal with such zeal. The others you speak about? Dead, or gone in other ways. The Courier survived, the Courier 'destroyed' Hopeville without so much as a backwards glance. The Courier completely destroyed Ulysses hopes and dreams for a new world, completely broke him...and depending on your dialogue choices can even not even remember or care about doing so. You have both grossly simplified the circumstances and failed to understand the thematics of the DLC.
 * Accepting what you say about NCR questions, I still reject the 'thematics' of the DLC. Ulysses' whole deal seems be a grand theatric of the saying "Shoot The Messenger." And he CAN find someone more to blame for Hopeville's destruction - whoever sent that package to Hopeville in the first place. (Heck, I'd help.) Instead he zooms in on the one face and name he knows and suddenly It's Personal. The fact that he himself acts as a courier makes him more hypocritical in the first place. Ulysses lost the most important thing in the world to him -his self-. I get that, and for that he would normally have my sympathy. But he is not a great Chessmaster or Magnificent Bastard. And somehow he mind is too intact to write off as "simply insane." He is petty.
 * Your rejection of the thematics doesn't mean they're irrelevant, it simply means you don't understand the character. Ulysses is petty? No shit. That's the whole point.
 * There's plenty of petty characters in FNV. Elijah's genocidal plan essentially boiled down to eliminating all traces of his failures. Dean Domino stuck around for 200 years because he wanted to ruin a dead man's life. Jeannie May Crawford destroyed Boone's life because of wounded pride. General Oliver cares more about getting into the history books than beating Caesar. The thing is, however, pettiness can be a hard thing to write; all of the above characters work brilliantly because of how well their pettiness is written and their reasons for it. Ulysses? His pettiness just comes off to some (like myself and the OP) as nonsensical and bizarre, instead of the raging wounded man he was intended to be. And considering that this entire confrontation was hyped up so much throughout the game, Ulysses came off more as a joke rather than the badass he was supposed to be.
 * Secondly, how did I 'fuck up'? I delievered a simple package, having no clue as to what it was or what it could do, and then went about my business. I'm just as much to blame for that as I was for getting shot in the head carrying the Platnium Chip. And the dialogue choices of not knowing or caring what he's talking about just make it worse; you'd think the courier would hear about the Divide getting destroyed and wondered what happened, or at least remember something about a package delivered to a place before nukes went off under it. But the fact that you can only cock your head in total confusion - and have that be utterly plausible - just makes Ulysses anger seem petty. And not petty in the way that many other villians are, but in the way that his anger seems to have no solid ground.
 * Ulysses has a big case of Insane Troll Logic with the theme of shooting the messenger and that the Courier is responsible for the message the way Ulysses himself was responsible for bringing Caesar's message to the White Legs and others. Ulysses is a wounded character, hurt because history has not availed him the faith that he desperately wants to give. What's not in those holotapes or your conversations with Ulysses is what he hoped to find in Hopeville, just that he found what he was hoping for there. He is lashing out at the only other survivor, and pinning the blame on the Courier, who is in fact, blameless. The structure of Lonesome Road with the Courier following a path prescribed by Ulysses makes a lot more sense when you note that Ulysses himself set the path the Courier takes, having him deliver ED-E and use the Laser Detonator (Ulysses tells you that you have to get it) to make his way to his Temple. He's trying to justify his blame by putting the Courier in a situation where everything he says about the Courier becomes true, that Destruction and Death is the message that the Courier delivers.
 * His plan to let the Legion take New Vegas is completely insane. The fact that he's willing to let them have free run of the place and possibly splinter into warring factions afterwards (which would get even more people killed) makes him an out-and-out monster. Any tragic elements he may have had are just outweighed.
 * His plan really isn't all that insane. He isn't too optomistic about the Legion's future, but he also still seems to legitimately consider them the best option, which isn't a completely unique viewpoint. If anything, it's much more intelligent than the Legion's actual plan.
 * Legion's plan:

Step 2: Charge less numerous and demoralized yet heavily fortified, better armed enemy.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: All hail, Caesar."

"Step 1: Blow up NCR supply lines before Legion charges Dam. Step 2: NCR soldiers start running low on food and ammunition (even the private merchants get their shipments from the West). Step 3: Legion charges hungry NCR soldiers with limited ammo. Step 4: Ulysses stops caring anymore. Step 5: Legion unifies region or falls apart, reverting back to the tribal cultures Ulysses seems more comfortable with."
 * What is the conversion rate between an imperial shitload and a metric shitload?
 * It's 3.272 Imperial to one metric.
 * Ulysses' plan:

Here? Oh, well, according to Ulysses long lectures, apparently there was a settlement here (there was?), that you built (I did?), and it was an awesome place that held Old War ideals (it did?), but then you delivered something (I did?) and it killed everyone (it did?) and now all of that is your fault (it is?). All of that is meaningless empty air unless you really feel the consequences, and how can you do that when the Divide is nothing more than generic rubble with little story to be found and no emotional ties to the people who died there? If the story has Ulysses tell you, rather than the game showing you, what happened, then his anger has no real depth and thus his pettiness is just stupidly shooting the wrong messenger. Christ, Bethesda, you made me weep at the hologram of a woman who died 200 years ago, but then spend the most anticipated DLC having Ulysses wave his finger at me? Come on.
 * When I said "completely insane", I was referring to the part where the people in the Mojave get enslaved or slaughtered en-masse by the Legion. As a plan, it's actually pretty well thought out. It just so happens it happens to be incredibly evil. Also, I was under the impression that Ulysses didn't actually care about the results, as he just wanted to prove that 'one man can make or break a nation'. Finally, I remember him saying that Hoover Dam would kill Caesar, whether he won it or not. The Legion's incredibly overstretched (as you can point out to Lanius in the final battle) even without having control over the Mojave. It seems more likely to splinter than hold together. And once that happens, the tribes would war against each other and get more people killed.
 * Jesus christ, I was seriously thinking of coming here and saying this exact same thing. After having Ulysses and this DLC hyped so much throughout the entire game, after fighting my way through the Lonesome Road, after finally confronting this man who got me shot ... I was seriously disappointed. Thing is, the entire game is filled with petty characters who hurt themselves and others; Elijah, General Oliver, Jeannie May Crawford, Benny, Dean Domino, Manny, and so forth. But the reason their pettiness works so well is that we see first-hand the effects it has on you and other people - you suffered through the Sierra Madre, you see how Boone's life was destroyed, you got shot in the head, you help fix the NCR's problems - their pettiness had actual weight because of you personally saw the effects.
 * So basically the whole issue you two are having with the DLC is believing Ulysses is meant to be justified, deep and emotionally engaging. He is the thematic summary of all DLC so far, not something to make you as a player feel bad. Stop assuming your own pet theories are what the writer meant.
 * Yes, I generally assume that an antagonistic character of a story driven RPG will have a decent motivation, depth to his character, and make the player get emotionally involved. I thought that was the baseline of basically any villian; every other DLC accomplished this easily. So this isn't my 'pet theory', this is kinda what I expect of decent writing in a game that is otherwise full of decent writing. (Also, how is Ulysses not supposed to make me feel bad, when he tried to get my character shot in revenge and spends the whole DLC condemning me for what I did to him?) Seriously, both the OP and I have outlined why we disliked LR; you can disagree with those reasons, but there's no need to be rude. Remember, rudeness is not cool.
 * No, it's still your pet theory. The whole point of Ulysses - THE WHOLE POINT OF THE DLC THEY DRUM INTO YOUR HEAD OVER SEVERAL PORTIONS OF IT - is that he's a pathetic, miserable little man too wrapped up in his own ideals, his own past and symbols of the old world to move on with life. He's fixated, obsessed and does not function as a normal person. That you cannot understand this means you have failed to understand the blatant, recurring message that Obsidian keeps throwing at the player. It's a 'baseline' you haven't paid attention to beyond the surface level. An NPC condemning you doesn't mean you're meant to feel aghast. If that was the case every antagonist, ever, would have you blubbering like a baby apparently.
 * Dude, this wiki doesn't have a lot of rules, but one of the big ones is to not be rude. You can disagree with me all you like, but nothing I've said has been an attack on you, the DLC or FNV. "It's just a wiki, I should really just relax." Anyway, to your point; yes, of course Ulysses is an obsessed petty wretch of a man. I've never said anything otherwise. Rather, I've pointed out other wretched petty people in FNV and how I considered their characterizations to be better than Ulysses. Here, I pointed out that the climactic battle couriers suffered from too much Show, Don't Tell to the point that Ulysses's character suffered, and thusly sucked all the weight out of his anger towards you. Seriously, that's it. I didn't like how his character was written. That's not worth bickering over.
 * I think the point is that the whole thing really wasn't personal. The whole story basically comes down Ulysses stalking the courier, who then delivers one of a billion packages throughout the Mojave. With no actual relating. It just feels really weak to me and what does the whole "you can go home courier" mean, I've only been there a handful of times. Seriously, folks there can't have been one person playing who thought "yeah this is what I was expecting and it's epic" instead everyone is like "well that was anti-climatic" and it's true. Even if you enjoyed it as I did, it really wasn't the huge battle of the flags that changes the wasteland as it was meant to be. And it was demonstrated to be this as shown by Dog in Dead Money, "praying for the courier" and all that. Really weak ending to what was a good arc.
 * Outside of the finicky and pedantic troper pages, response to Lonesome Road's narrative arc has been extremely positive. There is absolutely nothing objective about your opinion.
 * Um, no opinion is objective. Secondly, the response to LR can't have been extremely positive if there's, well, people right here pointing out why they didn't like it.
 * Hence 'outside of the finicky and pedantic troper pages'. If you're not going to read things like this properly it's no surprise you guys are having trouble understanding the meaning of Ulysesse's story.
 * To be honest, I think that you're being a bit biased to yourself and what not with insulting people. The game explicitly and continuously said that it was hundred percent personal and that there was going to be major history between the Couriers. We didn't get that. Plus it wasn't as well received as your saying, a lot of people have said that it's good but not what it was built up to be and that's reviews. You didn't even answer directly instead saying that apparently I was claiming to know it all when I was saying my opinion. I'm the original poster but not the one who replied to your sarcastic and to be frank fanboy bashing. Now I love Fallout more than most, but we can criticize it, especially when we know they are capable of epicness.
 * Second poster here, I agree. Seriously dude, we disagree with you on Ulysses's character. This isn't us being 'pedentic', as if that could be the only reason why someone could dislike the DLC. And if it's down to us 'not reading' things properly ... well, I don't think we're the only ones 'guilty' of that. This isn't worth fighting over. If you keep being rude, well, have fun with that, but I'm only going to respond to actual discussion lest the mods get involved.
 * The whole problem stems half from the fact that 1 - There has been an insane amount of buildup leading to this DLC; 2 - The fact that the developers actively went out of their way to keep the Courier's backstory as open-ended as possible ended up hurting badly their ability to tie Ulysses and the Divide into his past; 3 - No trace of the Divide (city) exists at all. Point one is understandable. With the amount of foreshadowing and buildup that has been done to this final confrontation, there's no way the final product could have live up to the hype, no matter how awesome. Hell, this wiki's own WMG page for New Vegas has a couple theories that would have been absolutely fantastic if implemented. That's what Hype does, make people constantly think better and better ways it could have happened. No way the developers could keep up with all the Crazy Awesome stuff being done. Point Two, however, isn't. Without being willing to compromise and reveal SOMETHING about the Courier's ties to the Divide in the main game, it's no surprise that the whole setting feels like a rushed, poorly-written fanfiction. And when I say something, I don't mean some guy coming out of nowhere and asking "Hey Courier, what about that awesome town you built that got nuked to hell last month?". I mean, at the very least, SOMEBODY MENTIONING THAT THERE USED TO BE A THRIVING TOWN RIGHT OUTSIDE THE MOJAVE THAT SIMPLY DISAPPEARED OVERNIGHT. It wouldn't be a stretch to have some of the Rangers in the Mojave Outpost commenting on how "supplies are even more scarce after we lost The Divide", although I guess they take their duty of informing you of the Mojave's meteorological conditions' effects on their psyche quite seriously. Point 3 is the worse, though. Even if no one in the main game ever mentioned that The Divide existed at all, the DLC could still have done a very good job at making us players feel emotionally connected to the place... if they actually showed SOMETHING of it. Through the entire DLC, you wander through all of the Divide, but there isn't, anywhere, any signal that there used to until recently actually be a community there, not just a 200-years old abandoned military base. Hell, even the records you find there are all from pre-war citizens! If there were at least a couple more records from the post-war settlements, something along the lines of "Hey, that nice Courier came here again bringing supplies. With such a nice guy like him helping us, I'm sure we'll grow up to be a thriving and friendly community! Nothing can possibly go wrong!", there would be at least some EVIDENCE that the Courier have actually PASSED through there before. The way things went, though, till the very last second of the DLC, there wasn't ANYTHING stopping Ulysses from raising an eyebrow and saying "Oh, sorry... your name is Courier? I thought it was Courrier. Sorry, I got the wrong guy. You can go away. Don't tally now, I'm a busy madman, I've got other people to stalk". Which... actually would have been quite awesome. In summation, Lonesome Road has a quite impressive and sharp execution [the final confrontation is the best of all DLCs], but many and very, VERY rough edges story-wise that could use a lot of polishing.
 * Is launching/preventing the launch of a bunch of nukes not epic? Although I didn't think of it that way. I thought it was supposed to be, well, personal. You walk the road because you want to learn about your past. You do. End. And I liked the ruin of the Divide - all that vertical space, the gritty, dust-filled wind, the combined loneliness and feeling of being constantly watched. But I realise I may be in the minority.
 * It's not personal though is it? It is revealed that we once walked west while he walked east, oh and that overall we've never met the guy. Hardly the lifetime grudge it was built up to be. The Courier literally had no way of preventing the nukes going off and had no idea that he was even responsible yet somehow he's "going home". Nothing about our character was revealed, not his background or anything. That said, the atmosphere, the enemies and the overall build up was superb. The actual motivations weren't really as good as the gameplay.
 * Yeah, I agree. The launching of the nukes was epic (ha ha, eat it Legion!) with real-world consequences and the Divide was a fascinating place, but it didn't measure up to the epic building up over the course of the whole game. We heard things like the 'battle between couriers', 'you can go home now' and 'an ending to things'. That is a lot of expectation to raise, and unsurprisingly it didn't satisfy everyone; especially since it had a pretty sparse story.

Wait, what about the Tunnelers?

 * Okay, so Ulysses told us about the Tunnelers and how they're slowly making their way towards the Mojave, where everyone will be utterly screwed once they start popping out of the ground. The game then demonstrates just how fearsome they are by having them slaughter a deathclaw. Okay ... so now what? I assumed at the time that at the end of the DLC there would be an option to blow up some more nukes to kill them all, but then they're never mentioned again. Sooooo, certain death is tunnelling its way towards the Mojave, and apparently the courier can't do anything about it. Uh, Esoteric Happy Ending, anyone?
 * I did end up killing an enemy called the "Tunneller Queen" and I don't remember encountering any after that. Er, problem possibly solved? ...This strikes me as a dropped stitch in the plot, actually. Somebody forgot to cut the thread.
 * Ulysses might be a bit over dramatic about the threat they pose. They flee from bright lights and fire. They also don't seem to have any success taking out the Marked Men or Deathclaws as a whole in the Divide. A large pack might be able to kill a Deathclaw, but Deathclaws also come in packs and intelligent creatures would be able to scare them off very easily.
 * Well maybe it was just me, but those little bastards were hard. Sure you can scare them with a bright light, but you only have a short window of time to pour hot lead into them until they recover and rip your face off. And if they took the Mojave by surprise - which they will - then people won't know how to fight back in time before all hell breaks loose.
 * They aren't that difficult. Stat wise, the only real advantage they have over soldier ants, which are less than half their level, is that they tend to appear closer to you and can move faster. Unless you are trying to melee them in light armor, they can't pose much of a danger. The Tunneler Queen is the only Tunneler than does enough damage to be a threat. Even without much focus on it or chems, it is easy to get enough DT that even Hulking Tunnelers won't be able to break it.
 * Most of the major habitated parts of the Mojave are brightly lit anyways. If they did attack, it would be very obvious, very quickly that they wouldn't attack brightly lit settlements. They might kill a lot of people, but their avoidance of light is too detrimental for them to completely decimate the region.
 * Oh, okay. I guess it was just me sucking at close-quarters combat again. *shuffles feet sheepishly*
 * However, all of this assumes that they WANT to go to the Mojave. After all, they refuse to leave their caves, so why would they want to go to a strange place full of bright lights? Besides, they're afraid of the Courier by the end of Lonesome Road, so if (s)he hears about an attack, (s)he'll show up, and they will flee from his/her mere presence.
 * It seems like the tunnelers like to eat people and, well, the Mojave is the closest place full of people. Gotta go where the food is.
 * The Tunnelers, even gameplay wise, prioritize running from light over attempting to eat people.
 * Yikes, which would make night time in Vegas (especially without Hoover Dam's power) a bad time should the Tunnelers ever head that way.

No way to fix 8's voice

 * Why is there no option to fix Doctor 8's voice? He clearly doesn't like having his voice damaged, so why can't the Courier fix it? Surely there are unused think tanks somewhere in Big MT, and even if there aren't, he/she could surely find a substitute. Understanding him isn't an option for all couriers, so there should also be an option gameplay wise to fix his voice
 * 8 probably doesn't want anyone touching his voice module after what Elijah did; he could end up not being able to speak at all. Plus, any skill check to fix his module would probably fall into the same skill set as understanding him in the first place. Those things aside, Rule of Funny. Same reason there's no way to fix Klein's volume control. Pretty much every gag about 8 revolves either around his weird speech or his obsession with the number 8.
 * If 8 really wanted to fix his voice, he probably could. He specializes in sound technology, is over 200 years old, and has had access to pre-War tech over all that time. There is no plausible reason the Courier would be better able to fix his voice than him beyond adding some sort of "I need this to fix my voice, but it is in a dangerous place" quest.
 * Female couriers actually find out why. When talking to your brain they mention that there are almost no voice modules left, and even then they're all male. Sure Dr. 8 is male, but the implication is that they don't have any to spare. Given what a prick Klein is, he probably won't let 8 replace his since he's perfectly understandable to the Think Tank.

Where did the Tunnelers come from?

 * What exactly are the Tunnelers? Is it ever explained? At first I just assumed it was humans mutated by radiation, like everything else in the Fallout Universe, but radiation is explicitly described to make you sterile even in Fallout, and the Tunnelers are described as explosive breeders. Plus, how does radiation somehow make you stronger, faster, and make you look like a lizard?
 * There are two possibilities found within Lonesome Road: The insinuation made during the conversation with Ulysses is that they are mutated pre-war humans who hid underground during the great war, and mutated to the point of becoming lizards on their own. Other possibility is that they are experiments gone wrong again. Several notes in the "Nostalgia" challenge refer to a pre-war incident of Protesters in the vein of 60s hippies being "rounded up" by the Chief Liaison officer with Big MT with something "special" planned for them. It may very well be a combination of both, however.
 * All the wasteland humans are partially irradiated and still capable of breeding. The super mutant sterility comes from the FEV. Ghouls actually are irradiated to the point they should be sterile. Radiation caused the Jackson's chameleon to change into Deathclaws, so humans changing into tunnelers is not particularly less plausible than that.
 * Aren't the Deathclaws stated to be the result of FEV?
 * Deathclaws are a pre-war experiment, like the Cazadores and Nightstalkers, that escaped. The mutation from radiation exposure is that they have lost their color-changing ability. Joseph, an herbalist in Vault 13, theorizes that Deathclaws are just mutant chameleons. However, Fallout 2 Lead Designer Matt Norton, tells us specifically that Deathclaws are a pre-war experiment, later experimented with by Fallout 1's Master.
 * I thought with either survival or INT checks you can suggest to Ulysses that they are the mutated result of something that lived deep under ground being brought to the surface by bombs... removing the surface. Like No-Bark's mole people.

Why don't the Marked Men just commit suicide?
So, we all know that they are insane cannibals. they feel nothing but hate for the Divide and all that enter. Close to feral ghouls but not quite, they capable of making decisions. For instance, some of the former Legion members model their armor and weapons of Legate Lanius, as a symbol they can hold on to. They can jury-rig scrap metal, road signs and other armor pieces on to their own. Lastly during the epilogue, the Marked Men are among those who avoid the courier either out of respect or fear. They are in constant great pain, only kept alive by the constant radiation, plus their is now no point to their existence beyond killing all those who enter the Divide. So, why don't they just kill themselves?
 * Constant great pain can drive the human mind into insanity, where the rational thought leaves the mind, but the capacity for intelligence remains. It's very likely some of the survivors had killed themselves in order to avoid such a fate. We've seen similar incidences in other genres, such as zombie horror ("I'd rather die than become one of those things"). Reavers display similar characteristics as the Marked Men, driven on impulse by rage, in spite of still retaining some communication ability and tool-using capacity.
 * Suicide isn't as easy as you think it is, regardless of the circumstances.
 * The ones willing to commit suicide already have.

The Lucky 38 in a non-House route
Not that I don't appreciate it, but I just find it odd that, even if you don't side with House (which invariably means you ultimately kill him), you're still able to use the Lucky 38 as your unofficial "main base". You'd think Victor and the other securitrons would be a tad upset you "betrayed" and offed their boss.
 * Hm, doesn't the securitrons inside the Lucky 38 all become hostile after you neutralize House (the non-unique ones just re-spawn non-hostile)? Notice that Victor disappears from the Lucky 38. And at least for Yes Man, there is a good explanation for the securitrons being friendly - they are machines, controlled from the Lucky 38's grid, and even in the darkest interpretations of Yes Man, he'd still need you at that point.

Christine's Abilities
Christine Royce has a lot of disparate and seemingly contradictory traits. She mentions how experiments in the Big Empty cost her the ability to read letters, but she can still do math and equations. Um, okay, this is a universe where radiation makes your skin fall off and cause you to live forever, whatever. When she's then rendered mute, communication is a real bitch, but the confusing things come later.
 * With a stat check, you can deduce that her part in the Gala Event requires her and her alone because of her technical expertise. For that quest, you have to lead her to and subsequently activate a computer console. In the Fallout universe, GU Is don't exist--it's either DOS-style command lines or voice-activated controls. Christine doesn't have the ability to operate either, yet is considered essential.
 * Binary. Maybe she remembers how to force computers into a binary-only readout.
 * Doesn't even have to be binary. What Christine cannot do is read and write English syntax, but that does not mean she is incapable of still using computer programming language. Christine is still capable of equations and mathematics, so she might still be able to understand computer syntax and allow her to operate the computers she finds, regardless of the interface.
 * When you reunite with her, she has  Not necessarily hers, but it works. If you were nice to her, she details the circumstances of   death and the addiction that lead up to it, gleaned from the Auto-Doc in the room. The only way should could learn this would be to read it or have it played out loud--and speakers agitate the collars the two of you are wearing, making your head explode.
 * Once again, binary.
 * Or the Auto-Doc speakers haven't degraded from running constantly for two centuries like the others.
 * My bet is on that. The speakers on that particular Auto-Doc have been in a room isolated from the nearby Cloud, and yes, have also not been running constantly in two centuries.
 * made Christine mute in the first place, so that he could "tune her like an instrument," to . However, that turns out to be irrelevant, as piecing snippets of songs together to make the key is an unskippable part of the main questline, making it doubtful of why she's even necessary in the first place.
 * Dean's plan to break in must have been different from Elijah's plan to break in.
 * Indeed, his plan was thrown off by the War occuring before he could put his own plan into action. It never occurred to Dean that he could just use the snippets of recordings to unlock the Vault, particularly when he had the originator of the sound in his pocket.
 * Lastly, she states that she's good at fighting with guns, energy weapons, explosives, melee weapons, and unarmed. However, she sucks at everything that isn't an energy or melee weapon. Probably just Gameplay and Story Segregation, but still irritating, especially since the weapon of hers you recover in Old World Blues is a conventional ballistic weapon.
 * Maybe she was brain-damaged enough to believe it, even though it wasn't true.
 * Or it was just skills she had lost because of the lobotomy.
 * Probably a game engine limitation. All NPCs only get three "tagged" skills, but they seem to have 0's for anything that is not tagged. She should have all of the skills she mentioned, but the game doesn't allow it.
 * They can have four tag skills (there are a few non-companions that have it), but otherwise, yes.

BOS Quest Arc Segregation

 * Why is it that even after you go through such lengths to help the Brotherhood survive, and succeed, in which case McNamara will inform you that the lock-down has been lifted, yet this never comes up when Veronica berates him for his isolationist policy. Why?
 * The main explanation is probably that Veronica is talking about Brotherhood-wide isolationist policies in her quest, while the lock-down is a case of McNamara being excessively cautious. Basically, Veronica wants the Brotherhood to venture out and help people (her argument being that their current course is self-destructive, but if they could get friends and more recruits from the outside...), or failing that at least to take a closer look at the potential of non-military stuff. Lifting the lock-down does nothing about any of that, so...
 * Veronica is an extremist and she is angry at the Brotherhood of Steel. McNamara agrees with her on numerous points and he points out where she is being unrealistic or where certain things take time. McNamara is basically what Veronica would be if she was intelligent about changing the Brotherhood rather than simply alienating them with radical ideas. McNamara is much more practical, hence why he takes small steps towards ultimately the same goal.