Lets discuss strategies

[Qerewen]

Im suprised this thread don't exist yet, or perhaps i'm blind, but Share your strategies
what have you found works to get your raiders going

where do you start?
who do you vassalize ?
when do you expand?
Do you equip your raiders?
what do you equip them with?
What do you have problems with?

For me i started in sunshine, i vassalized Abernathy for food and redrocket i built into a tiny 6 workers 3 guards vassal.
Sunshine is my mustering ground so i give my crew the best kit i can (handmade rifles and looted combat armor).
Despite this i am short on supplies and recruiting has somewhat stalled. my plans are to make Sanctuary a outpost but i need more manpower to capture it but since i am short on wages i will probably not be able to catch it anytime soon.

so therefore i ask the rest of you great kahns what do you suggest? i do

 

[Rudy]

I usually start at Starlight as my first outpost and then turn Abernathy into my first vassal for the same reason you do: Food!
After that, I would recommend that you recruit as many Raiders as you can (I make a LOT of Jet) and hit three or four more vassals.
I find that the built up city plans cause many CTD's so when I take over a vassal, I demolish it to the ground and re-build a much simpler settlement. For example, I don't use any Residential plots but place regular beds instead. Snap Beds mod (or named something like that) is excellent as you can use bunk beds or even cots three levels high.
Since I rebuild the vassals, I can focus on Commercial, Industrial, and Ag without blasting my game into dropping every time I visit the place.

But the key is to recruit, next day raid, recruit, raid, rinse repeat until you have 3 or 4 vassals that are supplying plenty of goods for your outpost. Then build up, wait for plots to level up, send patrols, etc.

 

[Qerewen]

a quick assault for vassals probably is what i should have done,
i am now stuck economically.

i have 2 vassals and they are unable to sustain my single raider HQ with about 9 raiders.
im lacking in wages and cant get them up.

 

[bullyrook]

i have 2 vassals and they are unable to sustain my single raider HQ with about 9 raiders.
im lacking in wages and cant get them up.

What's up with your vassals? Not enough Commercial plots? What's your Commercial Requirement set to? Homes or population or off?

 

[Qerewen]

my vassal had very few commerical plots, i however remedied it by changing some plottypes in abernathys to get a slight raise and then raided Oberland and Greygarden for more commercial plots.

Greygarden was a nice suprise since the internal gardenplots run on power so they can be changed for commercial plots without upsetting the powergrid and Oberland had plenty of commercial zones.

all this was done with the lowest amount of raiders possible and using Modern firearms turning the 2 daring raids into spec ops with specialized gear on the 5 brave souls that came along for the ride.

by the time i had caught those two vassals i had 2 raiders left and low control over my vassals.
i took a gambit and overextended but it paid out since the floodgates gave me all recruits i needed.

 

[bullyrook]

so they can be changed for commercial plots without upsetting the powergrid

Interesting.

Does changing a plot's type cause problems in City Plans? I don't really have any experience as far as plans go, but I hadn't considered it might be a problem.

Is it because the plan only produces say so much power at certain levels and if you change an Ag plot (doesn't need power) to an Industrial now it uses more power than planned for?

And/or that this new type isn't automatically patched into the grid and so needs to all the sudden be wired to a new generator? Wiring the city plan plots is a no-no, right?

Do you have the same problems when switching between types that already need power and the original type is already patched in, like say switching an Industrial plot to a Rec plot? I'd assume that from what you said switching types on interior plots, that this would work (better) than going from Ag to anything else.

 

[Qerewen]

i am not sure how much overlap there is in the power-grid to swap agri for industry,
i chose the small interior plots to swap out since they already did drain the power-grid.

and this boils down into a annoyance I've had since day 1 of fallout 4.
why does the meters not deduct the amount used?

in vanilla i expected that if i grew 12 food and had 6 settlers the game would tell me i had 6 food since half was eaten and the same goes for water/power.