I am probably late to the party but I do not consider the Minutemen as a Communist Society because classes still exist(settlers, traders and militiamen) and if they were, they wouldn't need the sole survivor to lead them since the end goal of communism is the abolishment of classes, governments and money(kinda like anarchism).

The group, in my opinion, is a borderline between an autocracy and a socialist society. Resources are being shared between settlements and is being controlled by an autocrat who in turn act according to the will of the people within the group. We can observe this on Fallout 4's settlement system and the radiant minutemen quests where you have complete control over the shared resources of each settlement but you ultimately have to appease the needs of the settlers(food, water, bedding, security and happiness).

@Wertologist
"You're still taking their resources and giving it back to them. With communism, the resources are in the hands of the government, which in this case is the MM. The MM take resources from them and "pay" them for the public work they do."

Uhm, no, at this point I'm going to have to object strongly. Not in any of the scenarios I described above does it work out the way you say. Your whole argument rests on the idea that each settlement contributes the same and doesn't actually get anything back compared to the work they put into it individually. If you go to a settlement expecting to do your minutemen thing with the resources they have there alone, you are going to be very disappointed, none of the places (even Abernathy farm, even if you scrap everything inside their home also) has enough resources to set up all you need in terms of recruitment, extra beds, turrets, power generator and so on to make that place a successful settlement. All of these things are supplied by YOU, aka the Minutemen, this sets up a contract, I made an investment in this place so I expect them to pay me. At this point I'm allowed to take whatever I want out of their workbench, and the workbench is NOT their entire store of resources that they themselves use; if you set up a level 3 weapon shop at Abernathy farm, that weapon store will give you 10 caps per day, if I buy a minigun from them for 500+ caps then I can't go pick up all my 500 caps at the workshop (if this was a proper communist state and I was the premier of the place, I should have been able to just TAKE that minigun from them if I wanted to), that's not how this works; there will still just be 10 caps at the end of the day, and you have to assume that if you set up such a shop then occasionally when you're not there other wastelanders will come by and buy and sell stuff also, that and their trade with others like Cricket is where their renewing supply and that constant 10 caps per day comes from. What's put in there is just my tax on the place, the stuff they don't actually need themselves, and in fact if I don't come by and pick up my tax they'll stop putting stuff in there eventually, as they figure no one's taxing them any longer. It's not like they don't produce at all when this happens, they're just stuffing everything in their own pockets at this point since you're neglecting claiming your profits anyway.

Incidentally what I said about settlement attacks and game mechanics works out pretty well in your Abernathy farm vs Finch farm example. The Finches were right next to the maniacs in Sagaus Ironworks  for months at a minimum before you ever show up, and they weren't wiped out for the simple reason that it wasn't worth the hassle, it was just one place with a farm with some mutifruit, other than messing with them occasionally it wasn't something the raiders or gunners care about. And in fact if you show up and do their quest (which means wiping out said raiders, that's the only way to ever recruit Finch farm except wiping them out yourself with Nuka World raiders) recruit them to the minutemen and set up 4 machinegun turrets on the roof of their hut and call it quits, they still aren't going to be attacked all that much because why bother? They aren't producing much more than that family needs for themselves by default, so the workbench is never going to have that much stuff in it unless you wait for weeks, so again even if you left the gunner base alone no one is going to bother them unless you make them worth bothering. Now Abernathy farm on the other hand, those guys by default produce TONS of resources, way more food and water than that family will ever need, their workbench will fill up all the time, and as a result they attract attention, which is why when you arrive at the farm first you hear they have ALREADY been attacked by raiders that killed one of them. Once you take them over that's just going to continue, Abernathy produces more so they are more lucrative to attack, so they will by default get attacked more often than any of your other settlements, even compared to the one on the edge of the Glowing Sea, and it's not like you can really build a turret out of tatoes, you'd have to trade those tatoes for materials that you build turret out of, and you have to give tatoes to recruited wastelanders that then stand guard over the farmers, and that's what happens in the game.

So yeah, aside from a few places like Abernathy, none of the settlements are worth it to you to recruit into the minutemen unless you actually put the time in to make ALL of them as successful as Abernathy farm, and while you can use a few of the tatoes from Abernathy and some of the corn from Graygarden and chop down wood at various locations, 90 % of the materials you need to make those settlements actually successful and profitable is going to come out of your pocket. And if you are investing that much time and resources into a place, and you get paid back only a rent/tax over time, does that still sound like communism to you? Because welcome to a Communist World then.

OH, as for the Railroad, they don't care at all about the settlement system and none of it bothers them at all. You get one settlement related quest there, to set up a new safehouse which involves clearing out the ferals, setting up some very basic stuff (the kind you won't ever need local leader or the minutemen system for) and then handing it over to the Railroad, unless you go off script and make it into a regular settlement as well that place will be outside of the normal settlement rotation entirely and only populated by Railroad folks, and not subject to any of the regular settlement issues or rules. How they get their food and resources and so on is completely unknown and never touched on, but my guess is donations, stealing off camera, or they have a farm somewhere manned by freed synths or the like. Maybe they have arrangements with some of the farms, they'll provide you fresh, hard-working workers that require little food or sleep and you keep quiet and give us food.

I'd argue that the minutemen don't govern. And since they don't really run anything they can't be communists, though that would be more likely than them being full on capitalists :p

Well, if we ignore the game mechanics then they don't really resemble either. They are supposed to be a citizen's militia and nothing else, we all pitch in together when the muties come along and all of that, to protect the people at a minute's notice, with the members of the minutemen largely being the settlers themselves, who go back to being farmers when not needed (without mods to upgrade the minutemen when you fire that flare gun all you are getting are level 1 farmers with pipe pistols after all, not hardened mercenaries). The caravan system, the shared scrap, even you building up the settlements, all of that I'd argue is really just game mechanics at work, and should be ignored if we want story alone, like how the story of the minutemen will be told in Fallout 5 or 6. Story wise the Sole Survivor probably didn't go around rebuilding most of the commonwealth by hand as that's kinda stupid and would have taken them decades, he or she just arranged a militia and then the settlers did the rest slowly and gradually as things became safer for them, while the supply lines are trade caravans between each settlement kept safe by Minutemen patrols and so on.

The Minutemen as such doesn't really govern anything at all canonically, they just come along whenever mutants or raiders kidnap a settler or ferals threaten a farm. You can assume that they built up the Castle, probably fortified it well, maybe placed those Old Guns fortifications around a few spots, and instituted a few regular patrols and training and outfitting of settlers to guard themselves, they didn't cause the settlements to grow by ten times in the span of a few months or the like. My example in my previous post was just how it effectively is if we DO include those game mechanics and their logical end.

If you were a ghoul or a synth, the answer to "which is best" may change drastically. So before one can answer the question, one has to include whether or not synths' and ghouls' rights matter.

In the end it's really going to matter as to what kind of person your sole survivor is. A sole survivor who just likes watching the world burn, and faction won't matter much.

Me. I am the best hope for the Commonwealth.

maccrawinthejaw wrote:

Me. I am the best hope for the Commonwealth.

Exactly right. None of the factions will be all that useful for the commonwealth without the sole survivor.

Which is honestly kind of annoying about Fallout 4. It feels like nothing important ever happens without you somehow being involved

farlas816 wrote:

Which is honestly kind of annoying about Fallout 4. It feels like nothing important ever happens without you somehow being involved

The minutemen are all too blatantly the most right, from a "standard" good guy perspective. To counter that they (he) seems to have been made into the most comically weak, player-reliant faction in fallout history. And Preston stays comically player-reliant even after being helped. It was a bad way to compensate for them otherwise being the probably best good-guy choice for the commonwealth.

The best leader for the Commonwealth is the Butch man; leader of the Tunnel Snakes!

Seeing as how the Minutemen are pushed as the only faction that cares about the common man, with no ulterior motives, I'd go with them.

BUT as others have said, this is all a charade. The only person that matters is you, seeing as how these all powerful groups and organizations can't seem to do a damn thing on their own.

@Sirdanest Ghouls and synths are a pretty small minority in the Commonwealth. To forsake the (extreme)betterment of all for a couple dozen people seems like a bad trade-off. That being said, a benevolent Director would probably leave them both alone and/or treat them as normal people so no real change.

I’d have to say the minute men. While the brotherhood of steel and the institute both claim to have the commonwealth’s (and to a larger degree humanity’s) best interest in mind, they seem to be mostly focused on pursuing their vision for a better future, despite the affects their agendas might have on people in the immediate term.

For instance with the brotherhood, if you get in the way of their mission, they’ll consider you a threat to be eliminated. They had no problem wiping out the railroad, despite its members being human. Their actions just happened to conflict with the brotherhood’s ideal future for humanity, so they were taken out.

With the institute, they don’t have a problem with killing actual human beings and replacing them with synths so they can exert greater control and influence over the commonwealth. In addition to doing this to residents for years, Father then tells the survivor that basically the people of the commonwealth are beneath them, unworthy of the institute.

The railroad has their priorities in the wrong order, focusing on saving synth over actual human because they see them as an oppressed group. While I’m sure many people would be sympathetic to helping synths, I feel like they rule out a lot of support by their overzealousness in pursuit of their goal.

And that leaves us with the minutemen. The only suitable faction left that actually focuses on what is important: the people of the commonwealth. While not perfect, if I was living in this world I’d definitely want them in charge of things. Their goal of setting up a group of safe, connected settlements can form the foundation for a new and better society.

I feel like this question has to be redefined a little bit; rather than a vague 'who is best' question perhaps to better ask who is best for the commonwealth's immediate future, and who is best for their long-term future? For the first it's obviously the Minutemen all the way with no real competition, their end-goal would be the most ideal for all the regular people of the commonwealth today. After that probably the Brotherhood, for the simple reason of getting rid of the boogeyman and at least pacifying the area a little bit, not as ideal as the Minutemen but it'll help. For the long-term future on the other hand, that's where the Institute comes in, and it's where the others fail.

The absolute ideal future that the Minutemen could ever achieve would be an east coast NCR, and that's about it, and we know from New Vegas exactly where that ends up. When the Commonwealth meets the Republic, then we probably got another civil war going, if it was the NCR of around Fallout 2 then they would probably work it out, but now, presuming the NCR even survives Hoover Dam and the Legion and doesn't splinter into warring city states, the Republic that spreads east will be one getting ever more war-like and greedy out of sheer necessity, and either the Commonwealth bends over and lifts their skirts and is assembled as a vassal state of a very far-off government (rather than today's America thanks to the issues with travel and communication think instead British India and similar), or just end up sacked unwillingly. And if it was the Legion that showed up instead, yeah that's obviously much worse, not unlike a Nuka World evil ending really, except with a Emperor or Legate instead of an Overboss ordering the horrible deeds. Best outcome for the Minuteman Commonwealth would be a House ending for New Vegas, and one man trapped by his mortality is unlikely to ever be able to claim more than the Vegas he wanted, and even if he did that's just another Institute coming at you really.

A Brotherhood ending would be even worse off at this point, as not only are you lacking any real leadership or power base beyond settler militia, the Brotherhood probably stripped the area fairly bare of any really useful tech before moving on, meaning even the remote possibility of finding something fantastic in a pre-war location that could give the settler Commonwealth an edge is gone as well. Best hope for the commonwealth is that the Prydwen swings around again and engages the Republic or Legion in a war of its own, but that's not liable to do the people much good either.

But if the Republic or Legion arrived and ran smack into a Commonwealth sporting a teleporting synth army, with technological wonders they'd never see on the west coast outside of the Big Empty, that becomes a different story entirely. But then at that point we're probably talking about the children or grandchildren of today's Commonwealth citizens reaping the benefits. If former CIT graduate Robert House is still around in this scenario and manipulating the NCR, that's basically the best of all outcomes, and we'd likely see Atlantic City open up soon after, with a steady stream of trade between the two with caps and tech and happy settlers to gradually rebuild the world.

That's a point, that we have to look at it in the long run; like, when west finally meets west.
Whomever is in charge of the Commonwealth needs to be ready to stop something like the Legion (Just in case. We don't really have a canon ending yet for the west or Chicago's potential for Enclave.)

An NCR with Vegas' economy to boost it will probably eventually integrate Big MT, Brotherhood, and Shi tech eventually. Along with the gun runners and Vegas money and at least one Geck-founded town like Shady Sands, they'd be unlike anything in the commonwealth... other than the institute. Although maybe losing the the NCR and being absorbed would actually be the best path to re-founding America, if that's what we're after.

I feel like the Republic could potentially be if not as great a danger as the legion, then at least certainly not a benevolent one to new targets they run into. Kimball's NCR was a lumbering overstretched beast more concerned with providing for the cattle barons and other bigwigs back at the core area than to assist new areas they expanded to. Essentially many of the worse qualities of today's America and America of the 1700s combined. If a new Tandi could take the reigns or if House could manipulate the republic into something bore beneficial then it still has a lot of potential, but extrapolate in a bad direction from Kimball's Republic and honestly I'd rather see it die a painful death.

The Chicago Enclave I feel I've heard mention of, but wasn't that where the Tactics Brotherhood (who was mentioned offhand by Proctor Quinlan, though he didn't know what became of them) ended up? I always felt like bringing those guys in as a genuine enemy would be cool, canonize Tactics and say that they went even more expansionist and radical post game, using the tech and the vast armies they built out to create an empire, something like a mix between the Legion and Enclave essentially, not caring so much about racial purity and dedicated instead to using the tech they'd discovered to actually govern, to take control of the world with a power-armored fist and squeeze it so tight the horrors of the past will never have a chance to happen again. I actually thought that was the Fallout 4 enemy, when I saw the Prydwen in the E3 trailer. But I also seem to recall some actual Enclave mentions around that area in Fallout 3...

I'd prefer to see the theoretical enclave in Chicago go for something more interesting next time than just "more genocide." A grey-area, tough moral choice kind of faction. They've tried being the crazy genocidal types at least twice now, that's probably enough.
They wouldn't end NV with Yes Man talking about becoming assertive,without plans for that to go somewhere in a sequel, I suspect. It's weird to just go "ok, he's doing something" and then forget about it.
Using Barter to beat Lanius leaves him open to come back later. Maybe he'll go further east instead of west, in that case. There's a lot of room for a sequel in some of the stories left hanging in certain NV endings.
But taking all this into consideration, the minutemen would be hard pressed to stand up to any of this, even with a sole survivor. "Weak but nice"... that's a bad choice for long run security. They're all flawed choices in the long run, while there are potentially many powerful, dangerous factions in the west.

Eh, I don't know if we're giving the NCR enough credit. Things are bad for it during New Vegas BUT Kimball will only be president so long, and many people of the NCR, Like Chief Hanlon agree they're overstretching themselves and being too imperialistic. I'm generally the optimistic sort, and think the NCR has good intentions, and that things will work out.

If the NCR takes Vegas and the Dam, the income and prestige brought in from Vegas will probably be huge and change the NCR's fortunes considerably.

Not sure why everyone is talking about the NCR. It's a thread about the Commonwealth, not the Mojave. The NCR is on the other side of the country. They have no reach on the East coast. It'd take them decades to have any influence there and by that time, this debate is a whole other matter.