I'm also not going to bother with settlements this time. It's fun building stuff, and it feels good rebuilding the Commonwealth, but I got tired of having to go round to each one and clear out the stuff and defend them when they get attacked and so on. I might just go with a few here and there with supply lines so I don't have to go back to, say, Sanctuary when I want to craft.
Well ... I have failed to avoid settlements entirely. But I am going to keep it to a minimum! I initially made the Red Rocket my home base, but now that I've got access to Boston Airport and the Prydwen, I'm slowly building a supply line via connected settlements. Aside from the bunch of settlers at Sanctuary Hills and the robots at Greygarden, I've mostly just got provisioners. I'm not going to grab every settlement like I did last time. Just enough to make it so I can have easy access to my junk for crafting from most points in the Commonwealth.
That's the plan anyway. And so far it feels like the BoS is a lot of bark and little bite when it comes to the whole following orders thing. I mean, Paladin Danse even apologized to me for it! And no one seems to care (or notice) that I'm wandering around in X-02 power armor* instead of BoS power armor.
*The Enclave stuff that got added with last year's patch is nuts. You hunt down Pyro to get some Hellfire power armor, but then the next thing you know, you're being ambushed by a guy in X-02 armor, which is even better! And then you go into the Atlantic Offices in the Glowing Sea and there are a whole bunch of guys in even better quality X-02 armor plus a guy in high quality Hellfire power armor. I couldn't carry it all back out of the Glowing Sea with me in one go. I'm also swimming in plasma guns, and I've got the Tesla gun and the heavy incinerator.
EDIT: Had a bit of a funny exchange with Danse last night. I went to the Railroad HQ to decode the courser chip. Danse loved that. But then I told Desdemona that I'd put my life on the line for a synth, and Danse hated that. Danse then wanted to have a little chat. I expected him to be mad about the synth thing, but instead he wanted to tell me about his youth and his BFF Cutler etc. I guess him loving the courser chip decoding unlocked more backstory and him hating my answer re: synths wasn't enough to cancel it out.
I said it was funny but moments like this are also kinda where the game falls a little flat for me. Like, after we killed the courser and let the girl out, Danse would've clearly heard he admit to being a synth, yet he had nothing to say about me letting her go free. And he also didn't balk about going into the heart of the Railroad HQ, even though the Brotherhood is vehemently opposed to synths. (They also made no comment about admitting BoS knights into their HQ either, though.) I know that the writers couldn't possibly have accounted for
every interaction in the game, but still ...
(The other one that frustrated me during my first playthrough was when I found out the Diamond City mayor was a synth, which is something Piper's been trying to prove since before I showed up, but the game wouldn't let me give her that proof. I couldn't do anything with it until the quest exposing him as a synth popped up later on.)
