Building The Morale Machine

Vault 551 status more or less unchanged from yesterday: a few more people, a bit less cash, slightly higher general happiness.  Not worth posting new numbers.


Following up on yesterday's post, there have been some significant advancements towards increasing the general happiness of Vault 551, to be more in line with Father Benny's "LEADER SAYS BE HAPPY" governing philosophy.  We're collectively quite proud of how efficiently this system seems to be working.

Before I go any further, lest some of you come to the conclusion that I'm a coal-hearted asshole, I would like to remind all our readers that I did not create the rules to this game.  These are hard times in the world, and this population will do what is necessary in order to survive.  That means exploiting the ever-loving shit out of the legitimate game mechanics in order to keep production and happiness up, while keeping Vault 551 awash in great equipment and lots of money.

I'd also like to share this:

Not recommended in real life.

This charming little Vault Boy cartoon was drawn by Brian Menze, the actual artist from Black Isle who drew all of the official Vault Boy icons and images for Fallout 2.  This is the icon for the "Childkiller" reputation status, which the player receives if and when he.. ahem.. well.. kills a kid.  This action, accidental or intentional, typically brands you as someone to be violently hated across the Wasteland.  This icon was the only Vault Boy to be cut from the game, for being so over-the-top offensive.

So that having been said, let's not pretend that anything else I write in this post is anywhere nearly as bad as Vault Boy, happy smile on his face, giving a pregnant woman a sharp kick in the baby.  Okay?



Population Stabilizing and Happiness Dynamics

It looks like the recent policy changes regarding birthrate regulation and immigration are having the desired effects.  Birthrate has slowed down significantly, while not coming to a complete stop.  That's a good thing, because ultimately morale is indirectly dependent somewhat on at least the appearance of population growth.

Overall Vault happiness is an average of individual Dweller happiness levels, and as anyone familiar with basic math can tell you, a single very low number can drag the whole place down.  Part of why we're still hanging in the mid-high 80 percentiles is because so many of our people are stuck at 75% happiness - meaning basically that they're living to work and not much else.  We do have a lot of 100% Dwellers who love their jobs and are good at them.  But if we ever want to see an above-90% overall happiness level again, we need to do something about the melancholy out there.

Much as in real life, the really easy way to bump someone's happiness level in Fallout Shelter is for them to have sex.  You put a boy and girl together in a Living Quarters, wait for nature to do its work, he goes back to the job and she's now pregnant.  They both get 50% happiness bonuses.  Then the baby comes along a few hours (in real time) later and you've got another mouth to feed.

Unfortunately, the kid starts out at 50% happiness and stays there until adulthood, and you can't do anything with them until that point.  So then you have a lot of depressed emo kids running around the Vault, bringing the average back down for everyone.


Death Marches Proceeding As Scheduled

We can't shut down the radio station without taking real happiness hits for everyone, so it's inevitable now that new Level 1 immigrants are going to show up at the Vault door.  As mentioned in the last post, we are now accepting all immigrants cheerfully and without reservation: the females are inducted basically as sex slaves, and the males are outfitted with cheap gear that we can live without and turned back out into the Wasteland to march to their deaths.

This really isn't as bad as it sounds.  Let me explain.

Let's call the male death marchers our Wanderers.  Unlike our actual Explorers - high level, high skill Dwellers who venture out into the world professionally, using our best gear and weapons - these guys are as green as it gets.  They are dressed basically in garbage, armed with toys.  Their long term survival odds are not good, which is sort of the point.  Most of them are going to keep on going until they drop dead and are torn apart by something nasty, at which point their names will be swallowed in cold, bleak silence.

However.  If a Wanderer happens to get lucky with what he finds out there, and somehow manages to find loot that makes it worth the hassle to revive and recall him, that's what will happen.  He will be revived and recalled, patched up, de-radiated and sent back out again.  If the Wanderer is killed, has not found any admirable loot but has collected more caps than it costs to revive him, he will be revived and recalled.  If a Wanderer happens to find a better gun out there than he currently possesses (and so, swaps it out on his own), he gets to keep the gun.

The longer the Wanderer survives, the more experience he accumulates, and the higher level he achieves.  At each new level, he becomes tougher to kill, and so can last longer and can enjoy stronger revival odds.

So far, we have death marched two Wanderers: Ryan Phillips and Douglas Foster.

Poor Doug.  Remember in the movie Tron, when the program that was like an insurance accounting system was thrown out into the game grid, despite his desperate protests that he wasn't cut out for athletics?  And his swift and merciless death?  That was Doug.  He found a few useless items and just took a beating out there.  He died at level 2, without enough caps to justify revival.  Bye, Doug.

Ryan's been doing considerably better.  Almost right away, he found a sawed-off shotgun to replace his cheap rusty hunting rifle, and then managed to uncover several halfway-decent armors.  By the time of his first death, his loot more than paid for his revival.  In his second trip, he found more loot and just a tiny bit more caps than necessary to cover his revival cost.  He's now at level 4 and on his third Wanderer expedition.

This is sort of like gladiator games.  I look forward to the next poor sucker who follows Father Benny's radio broadcast, only to discover that in Vault 551, hope has a tough price tag.


The Other Half: Vault 551 "Comfort Stations"

As I've mentioned several times now, we lack adequate (i.e., any) psychological care or therapy resources in Vault 551, so we have to improvise as best we can with the bartending and sexual sciences to keep morale up.  So to speak.

Having Dwellers having sex is an important tool in this game to keep happiness at acceptable levels, and female immigrants from the Wasteland are extremely valuable in one very important way: they aren't related to anyone.  Game rules prohibit inbreeding too closely, and after a while it's hard to figure out who are siblings or even parent-children.  As new Dwellers called in by the radio station, immigrants are completely outside of that relative circle, and so can freely have sex with anyone of the opposite gender in the Vault.

This is why our level-1 female immigrants, their male counterparts sent marching into the atomic hell outside, are immediately dressed up in frilly sleepwear and put to work as morale maintainers.  Much the same way as when, in World War II, the Japanese army maintained squads of "comfort girls". Again, ladies: would you rather take your chances against the supermutants and raiders outside?  Our ladies sure don't.

To make it clearer who is who, these girls have been renamed, all with the surname "Slave".  Their first names have all been changed to awful stripper names, our first three named Tammi, Destiny and Nevaya (misspelling intentional).  We've dismantled an outdated diner area and replaced it with a new bar, positioned next door to a living area, which now serves as a place where the girls can continually increase their Charisma stats (which helps them get to business faster).

At first I'd planned to put them into the general training system, but then decided against it.  The workers of Vault 551's "comfort station" will likely stay weak and low leveled for as long as we need their services.

Yes, you've read all this right.  We've opened a brothel.

So.  That in place, we have a few male Dwellers who aren't doing all that well for whatever reason. First customer was Gerald Peterson, dressed in his comedian outfit - when a clown cries, no one sees it - and he was stuck in the medical lab at 57% happiness.

That may not be the drug you need to fix this love, Gerald.

After spending a few minutes with Destiny, they are both now at 100% happiness.  We've done this now with about four or five male dwellers.

Dealing With Unwanted Babies

Now here's the thing: no one wants these kids now.  Mom is drunk in the bar, 100% happy, waiting for her next chance with an eligible Vault 551 hunk.  Dad is God knows where, busy working and hanging out with the guys and HE sure doesn't want to raise the kid.  And in a few hours (kids take about 3 hours in real time to grow into adults) we're going to have another level-1 adult to deal with.

We could just shove him or her out the door like the male Wanderers.  And we might still do that, though the problem there is the long shot risk that a slave kid will grow up to turn into Darth Vader and screw up a much beloved childhood movie memory with bad acting and whining.  Better to just disappear the kid as soon as possible and maybe make a few caps at the same time.

The slave babies - and we have four of them now - have all been renamed with the surname of Deadmeat (Mark Deadmeat, Roger Deadmeat, etc.).  Don't judge me.  At 160 people, this stuff gets confusing and we needed these kids to know exactly what would be expected of them as they grew up.  When they mature into adults, their dopey 50% happy asses are either going to get shoved out the door, or more likely, into the Incident Room for efficient and possibly profitable disposal.

Either way, I'm guessing the parents' happiness levels won't drop a blip.

This has all had the immediate effect of raising the overall Vault happiness to 89%, bringing the 90-percentiles finally back within reach.  Our three sex slaves are now constantly pregnant, and our higher level male workers are having a grand old time.  Father Benny, of course, is still holding at a very solid 100% happiness himself.

Of course, in all this, the unanswered question is: what about the higher level female workers struggling with depression? Currently unknown.  We may be able to deal with that problem with job changes, or scheduled breaks, or simply introducing some really, really happy men into their work areas (happiness seems to have a social influence element in this game).  If absolutely nothing else, we can always acquire a few male sex slaves.  It's not a problem we have at the moment, but if it happens, we'll deal with it.

So far, so good.  The morale machine grinds forward, thirsting on the blood of only a worthless few in order to provide life for so many.

See?  Destiny Slave wouldn't want this any other way.

Addendum: The first three Deadmeats have now been thrown into the fire, swiftly and efficiently returned to the base elements from which they came.  And I was right: no one noticed or cared!