Tolq said:
Well they are mentioned, and while some places should have just died out out of starvation, say the Den - it's full of junkies, a few bars, and that's it.
Even if we say that the residents are somehow magically able to pay for food brought by caravans from other places a single or few caravans interrupted by raiders and the whole town is left to starve.
You are forgetting the Den's location - it's the last major settlement on the Fo2 map and, by extension, a major trade hub. It's also the only option Klamath (a town with estabilished agriculture and livestock herding, not to mention a significant trapper population) has to sell its goods to.
Basically, all the tribes in the north are a major supplier of raw materials like gecko pelts, herbs or food, which they sell in exchange for necessities to Klamath, which in turn trade with the Den. This alone forms a simple, yet efficent economy.
Then there's slavery, which is a big and important part of the Den's economy, as the slave guild requires food, gunsmiths, repairmen, 'entertainment' and other necessities, which, in turn generates employment among the townsfolk.
It's late, so I won't elaborate too much, lest I risk becoming totally incomprehensible. Point is, the connections exist, you just have to stop and think for a while.
Vault City for another example - their outer(courtyard) water source is contaminated, hence they need to use their inner water source for all farming pourpouses, and they need to make sure that their soil is uncontaminated by the radiation from the courtyard which i think is quite impossible.
Uh, no, you missed the point. The soil is not contaminated, it's the Gecko's leaking reactor that's polluting the groundwater (and pissing VC off to no end).
New Reno's survival is also quite questionable as most of the population are either whores/junkies or crime family members, and a small amount of half decent citizens.
New Reno's survival is another matter entirely, I might cover that someday.
Aside from that how many people can you feed with a single field, and over what period of time?
How many people will you feed off a single brahmin? say a roast will make a meal for 30-40 people and some meat jerky, and on the next day you eat another one? and another one?
See, this is where problems start. I don't know if the current generation of players is retarded or something, but they apparently cannot comprehend the fact that a game is an abstraction. Obviously, Fallout cannot present an entire city, only a slice of it, a summary of how it would act and look if it were to exist in real life.
Point is, you try to take Fallout at face value, not as an abstraction. The locations aren't meant to be taken literally and dissected; after all Vaults are supposed to house 1000 inhabitants, but none of the ones seen in Fallout 1/2/3/VB could hold more than 32 people.
What's important is to show the player that the city does indeed have some means of supporting itself. Those small herds or singular fields you moan about as "not sufficent" are meant as storytelling devices. They exist to tell the player "Hey, this pen with brahmin in it and a cow tender in front means that this city has a sustainable agriculture!".
A simple mathematic calculation will lead us to the conclusion that you need alot brahmin to sustain life in a 30-40 people community over a year, say we eat 300 a year, we need to have at least the same amount of females to sustain reproduction, at least a few males, and i think we could safely double or even triple that number to allow the newborns to grow into a fully adult animal.
That said you'll need a LOT of fields for them to feed, you"ll need enough people to control and defend such a herd
Which has been done in history previously. Really, the postnuclear world isn't any worse than, say, post-Roman Europe.
And furthermore in a setting in which there is almost no farmland as most of the soil is a radioactive wasteland with contaminated water, you cannot expect to grow sufficient amounts of crops, and you cannot actually store food due to abundancy of rodents(rats and such) and lack of means to stop their numbers, which find ways into and destroy all food storaes, and most likely will consume even the crops you are currently growing
Where was it said that there was no farmland? Or that the soil is radioactive and all water is contaminated? Yes, farming is hard, but possible in the Fallout world, as evidenced by Shady Sands, Junktown, the Hub, Adytum etc. The world wasn't nuked and salted with radioactive fallout thrice over. It was simply nuked. Nukes aren't nuclear power plants, they don't act like miniature Chernobyls, so they aren't going to blanket the entire world with radioactive dust killing everything.
The problem here is that you are not thinking.
