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On the subject of copper, I can just about scrape enough together, but it always means buying all of the scrap from vendors, which usually means I have to build a trader as the first thing in each settlement(if I want to avoid lots of meaningless travelling and load screens!) . It is too much of a chore tbh, and far too unintuitive.
If you want to keep it ingame (rather than just using the console to give yourself thousands of units of copper) you could designate one of your settlements as a market town and build a dozen general trading shops in a huge shopping centre. You only need 1/6th of your settlers farming for a settlement to be self sufficient and with provisioning routes you could even get away with having every settler as a shopkeeper.
I have two settlements with shopping centres, one with 6 shops (tier 3 of each type) and one with 8 shops (3 general, 1 of every other type). The first was straightforward roleplay - trade is very important in building a country and a market town plays an important role. The second was a result of finding out about tier 4 traders after I already had a general trader there (so the other shops are for tier 4 traders if I find them). Each also has an inn, so people who come to trade can spend a night or two there. Obviously that doesn't happen ingame, but it would if it was real so I do it for roleplay.
Maybe the shipments you can order of certain materials could be a regular shipment instead of a one off. Like arranging a supply.
That would make sense. Although it raises the question of where those traders are getting a huge and reliable supply from in the first place. It is very reliable, since you can buy it from them very frequently and they're never out of stock. Where are the huge caravans carrying all this huge amount of stock to all the traders?
Also I agree that I think they misjudged how much people would get in to the building side!
I think my comments might have given away the fact that I'm finding that the building side is what makes FO4 the best game I've played
The game itself is, in my opinion, not as good as FO3 or FO:NV. I don't give a damn about the story in FO4. Cait's story was far more involving to me than my character's story (I play as Lone Wanderer, but I travelled with Cait enough to learn her story and do her personal quest with her) and the main questline is more an annoyance to me than something I'm interested in.
The settlement building by itself wouldn't be all that good, either. It's very badly implemented and has no story.
But put the settlement building into a Fallout game and that's golden.
PS. Mods will eventually make the building aspect of the game truly amazing!
They've already done a remarkable job considering they don't have the creation kit. Check out these mods for settlements:
Safe Settlement Extension
Homemaker
Alternative Settlements
Craftable Ramps
Craftable Elevators
Stackable Shack Foundation (the concrete one, although they also made a mod for the other type).
The fly in the ointment is the inability to clear up settlements. Why is there crap all over the place? It doesn't fit - people would get rid of skeletons and weeds and piles of dirt and useless shells of buildings and so on. There are mods to do that, but they all fall foul of a bug in the game engine itself.
Oh, and the really big glaring problem - the bloody settlers won't wash. I walk around shouting at them. The collapse of civilisation is no excuse for being uncivilised! Err...OK, not the best line of argument
It is silly, though. They have all the fundamental requirements, including an abundance of fresh water. They should be cleaning themselves and their clothes as best they can. People had flushing toilets at least 5500 years ago and hot baths before then. It doesn't require modern technology. I could build it in reality. It should be possible in FO4.
And there isn't any tea. How can we have a new civilisation if we can't have tea?
