Political Shenanigans and Father Benny's Harem

Current Vault 551 Status

Population: 80
Overall Happiness: 85% 
Benny Happiness: 100%
Wealth: 1743 caps

Vault 551 is a pretty political place.

First, you have the agenda of the Church of the Divine Copulation: controlling population growth and making sure the right people are in places of power. Then you have the individual happiness of Vault dwellers, which unfortunately you do have to take into account via job placements and other things.

Finally, you have the Objectives. These are constantly arriving new and arbitrary goals set by the game, such as "Put out 10 vault fires", each with a somewhat arbitrary reward (usually caps, but occasionally a lunchbox with new toys). I choose to see the Objectives as the steady stream of instructions from Vault Tec, in accordance with the shadowy, secret Vault Experiment assigned to Vault 551.

Politics is never not important, even in the post-nuclear wasteland.

When you put them all together, sometimes you end up with unintended consequences.


Deathclaws remain a problem, and most likely will continue to be a problem.  Our wasteland explorers have returned with new infusions of guns and outfits, which made it possible to complete security upgrades to the top two Vault 551 levels.  Overseer reports that we can pretty safely put an end to a Deathclaw incursion by the time they reach the level 2 power station room.

Political Problem 1: The Happiness Hole

The new radio station is now online on level 9 and fully upgraded and staffed.  This did attract another Deathclaw attack, but we were able to put it down with only one fairly inexpensive fatality and a lot of stimpak use.  The happiness-generating power of the station was able to successfully mitigate any happiness risks to Father Benny, keeping him steadily at 100% Happy even against a fire breakout in the CoDC Sanctuary.

The Father's happiness did dip finally to 99% for unknown reasons, which required a summoning of Olivia Newton (99% happy, 3 CHR) for an administered sacrament.

Keeping Father Benny happy isn't tremendously difficult.

The unknown happiness drag continued, eventually tracked down to a dead body in WRU-2.  No idea when or how we lost that one, but apparently working around a rotting corpse has been a bummer for the people up there.  So revived the dead dweller and reassigned her to the science lab.  This seemed to reverse the happiness black hole.

Political Problem 2: Inconvenient Vault Tec Objectives

At any given time, the Vault 551 Overseer is faced with a trio of set challenges, presented by the mysterious administrators of the Vault Experiments.  Successfully completing an Objective is rewarded by money and sometimes valuable gear, so you don't really have the realistic option of ignoring them.  They are usually pretty easy to complete, but sometimes you get one that represents a significant inconvenience.

About this time we encountered a string of tough ones.  They did, however, promise important rewards, so we had to figure out how to make them happen.

The first Objective was to stop 20 incidents (fires, radroach or molerat attacks).  Rather than force rushes in rooms that actually do productive stuff, a much easier and cheaper way to meet this goal was to build a cheap single-unit power station deep in the bowels of Vault 551.  We surrounded it with other cheap construction to avoid molerat attacks, and then sent Howard Newton into this new "Incident Room".  His job: create as many dangerous incidents as possible and deal with them.

"This job sucks.  How'd I get this crap job, anyway?"

It took a while and resulted in a very not-happy Howard, but Objective completed.  The Incident Room will clearly be very useful for dealing with these "put out X number of fires" tasks.

The other two long-haul Objectives would be tougher, and would stake the Overseer directly up against the CoDC agenda: get at least eight Dwellers pregnant, and deliver 14 babies.  The latter would be rewarded by a lunchbox, our best chance for scoring new advanced guns and outfits.  However, this new baby boom would complicate the Church's plans for controlled procreation, and it might take some work to absorb a sudden influx of 14 new citizens all at once.

Political Problem 3: Church Agendas, the Newton Family and Making Lots of Babies

Father Benny's people aren't totally unreasonable, and have been known from time to time to overlook the very occasional out-of-church baby.  But allowing so many new kids outside of official CoDC clerical sanction would compromise too many of the church's long term goals.  So church leadership decided to assign two Initiates - Larry Hart and Vincent Mitchell - to the daunting task of impregnating half of the women in Vault 551.  And so they got to work.

Except for those two over there, and the camera, and the long line of women outside.  Please take a number.

Father Benny himself stepped in at this point with a single directive, given onto him by a divine vision from Vault Boy Himself: the women of the Newton family are to be reserved onto Father Benny himself alone.  The Father had already administered sacraments to Emily Newton, as well as to her daughter Olivia on more than one occasion.  Along with Diana and Janet Newton, the Newton women would be assigned Nightwear outfits and only they would enjoy one-on-one time with Father Benny himself.

And they'd run the radio station.  Sexy, sexy radio.

Their nerdy younger brother Howard, with his high intelligence and low charisma, finally clued in on why he got assigned to the Incident Room.  Turns out, he annoys the crap out of Father Benny and so has to be kept out of the way, until such time as the "Howard Problem" can be quietly and safely resolved without disturbing the Newton Girls.

Father Benny also decreed at this point that henceforth, Initiate Robes would be assigned only to male church leaders, in order to facilitate their proactive roles in dealing with future baby boom demands.

The pregnancy and delivery goals were met, resulting in a new Tuned Gatling Laser (!!) and some mild Vault overpopulation.  Not long after this, however, a massive molerat attack took a desperate toll on Vault 551: ten dead, many of them high level and hard to replace, including the complete staff of one of our power stations and half of the main clinic staff.  No money was available to revive most of them, and if left to rot until the money showed up, the ripening corpse count would kill Vault happiness at a time when we already face a bad production shortage.  So we accepted the loss and cleared the bodies.

As one of the molerat victims was a front hall guard (who had been temporarily reassigned to help fight back the molerats), we needed a replacement guard.  Somehow Howard Newton was given the job, suited up with Wasteland gear and our new gatling laser.

This assignment unfortunately led to Howard's tragic, unrevived death in the next Deathclaw attack.  Howard, we hardly knew ye.  The Newton Girls mourned and swiftly got over it.

So now the Newton family is firmly under the sway of the Church of the Divine Copulation, and new Church kids are being born to replace the molerat-induced body count.  Our production numbers are slowly coming back up, and once again the radio station is closed until we are strong enough to handle another Deathclaw attack.

The most depressing Vault 551 screenshot taken to date.  But fear not, Larry was revived shortly after.

So, politics.  No one gets exactly what they want, but everyone gets something.

Harold Newton got a shit sandwich.

Father Benny got a dedicated harem and his happiness back to 100%.

A whole lot of female Dwellers got laid, and Larry Hart and Vincent Mitchell got happily exhausted.

The Newton Girls got their own popular radio show.

Vault Tec got their Objectives met.

The Church of the Divine Copulation got an opportunity to replace a large number of first-gen Dwellers with children who can be indoctrinated in its teachings.

The Overseer got enough material to write another blog post.

And that's what we call a good day in Fallout.