Which is why his plan is to swarm the Dam with elite, well-equipped troops and tear the NCR apart in close combat where their numbers and massed firepower count for less than individual skill. And its why the heavies Oliver deploys are a far better choice than the Ranger, since mobility is far less important than sheer toughness. Granted, stats-wise the salvaged armor is flat-out worse than ranger armor or the top-tier combat armor thanks to the weight and AGI penalty for the same DT, but presumably there's more of the salvaged PA since any looted BoS PA can get turned into one pretty easily (and lore-wise since its just a bunch of metal quite easy to repair) whereas the combat armors are all pre-war and require advanced composites, both to make and repair. Personally if I was going to mod in a change I'd boost the DT up to the T-45's 22 and the helmet to the T-45 helm's 5, and drop the AGI penalty down to like 1 to reflect the greater interior comfort from the climate control.
If I were General Oliver, I'd have kept the Heavy Troopers a secret. Have the NCR Rangers accompany most trooper squads, but have all the Heavy Troopers be in the Dam using hallway-clearing weapons like heavy incinerators and miniguns, then have them guard choke points like doorways and hallways where they can just kill Legionnaires by the bucketloads with a single pull of the trigger. The ensuing massacre would be the most glorious victory for the NCR army, that is, until they finally crack open Lost Hills and burn down the California Brotherhood for good.
That, and the NCR Veteran Ranger armor looks pretty funny when there's no leg protection. I mean, at least the Elite Riot Gear from Lonesome Road has kneepads. If I were a Legion sniper, I'd just aim for their legs to cause them enough pain so that regular Legionnaires can run up and chop them up or shotgun them.
I think the Legion having institutionalized misogyny and rape is a huge turn off for a lot of people.
Like, it wasn't bad enough that they were slavers, glorified raiders, and luddites, did Obsidian really have to let the Legion inherently treat half of humanity like breeding stock? Sure, it might fit in with Caesar possibly having severe mommy issues (or maybe he's just a psychotic douchebag at heart), but who the hell would willingly join the Legion while playing as a female Courier (you know damn well they'll betray her at some point)?
The ending shows us that the Legion honored the female Courier by putting her face on the money. Verdict's still out on whether or not they turned around and made her Lanius' bottom bitch in the end, but considering that Caesar can change laws on the fly, and they just stabilized the Legion and gave it a New Rome, chances are that Caesar was going to change his women policy to be a tad bit more flexible now that his nomad tribe is transforming into a genuine empire.
I think it's more of a utilitarian mindset. When it comes to breeding, women are way more valuable than men. One man can impregnate many women simultaneously, but each woman can only give birth to a single baby at a time.
And considering the rate at which people will die in a society that has almost no idea of anything beyond tribal medicine, keeping up numbers is important.
It kinda makes sense, but the game definitely gives off this vibe that he's a misogynist because we see no exceptions made. If we'd seen at least one or two examples of females in the legion, women who are so badass Caesar can't justify relegating them to shitting out babies, then it would definitly have done a lot more to demonstrate that the legion is utilitarian rather than sexist.
This is why I say that the game based the Legion on Hollywood Rome rather than real Rome. Women in Rome had a place outside of just being the men's bottom bitches. They raised kids, they cooked and cleaned, they served as mothers and matrons, and sometimes as politicians and even as gladiators. And yes, they had slaves do work for them now and then. Obsidian's writers probably just took a look at how Roman women were far below the men in the social order of Rome and assumed it to be no better than slavery, so they made the Legion enslave the women they come across.
They could have just sidestepped this in FNV by saying that most women are given the task of pumping out babies, and are paid for each child they give birth to and give to the Legion. There would be male and female slaves in the camps, and there would also be a small number of women are running around the Legion camp working for the Frumentarii and fighting in the arena. I would even have wealthy Legion citizens, both male and female, buying slaves recently captured from the NCR while they're on their way to pay tribute to Caesar.
Like say, during the Courier's visit to Caesar, I'd have a wealthy couple whose ancestors were designing energy weapons for the government before the bombs dropped, and they come in to pay tribute to Caesar and drop off some plasma rifles and plasma casters for his elite soldiers to use. You then see that couple later on, going to a slave auction attended by rich citizen-tourists from Legion lands, where Legion troops are selling off captured NCR troops and civilians as slaves and pricing them based on how healthy they are. At least THAT would be more accurate to how Roman slavery worked.
Well, this has probably been the most text-heavy page and a half I've ever read. Let me add my mess to the pile.
I think that the Legion's deal on technology is honestly something of an "it builds character" approach. Specialists get guns for specialist purposes, but for Legionarius Joius, it's a machete and into the thick of the fighting for him, where he will either die and be replaced, or emerge a hardened motherfucker who has seen and done the most horrific shit humans can inflict upon each other, and wants more.
I think they just save the good guns for the guys that can use them well. Like say, recruits get dinky service rifles and machetes, but the higher you get in Legion rankings, they give you better weapons, from shotguns to assault rifles, to thermic lances and anti-materiel rifles. It forces the lower ranks to improve their lot by fighting hard and emerge as hardened motherfuckers, and once they do emerge as such, they're given better instruments of destruction now that their bloodlust has kicked in.
I think this is something of an inevitability, if not outright the plan. Caesar remarks that taking Vegas will be the Legion's transformation from a giant nomadic tribe to a genuine empire, and to me, that says "government". Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado is just too big of a region for one man to play autocrat over in a world that needs to rely on couriers to convey messages, and I expect that Caesar would start appointing regional governors between the conquest of Vegas and his proper push into the NCR.
Exactly. The ending shows him sparing people whom he would normally slaughter. He spares the Boomers and the Enclave Remnants despite the fact that those groups can reduce his New Rome to cinders. Probably because he would want to recruit them later on as heavy artillery/shocktroops. He spares the Followers of the Apocalypse, and even lets Arcade Gannon remain alive despite the guy hating his guts. He decapitates Hanlon instead of crucifying him as a show of respect to a worthy enemy.
The Legion goes from rampaging animals to a legitimate army that polices its turf and wipes out threats like the Fiends and the Powder Gangers. The Legion "settles down" and becomes more civilized, being more like Palpatine's Galactic Empire where you have regional governors having control over territories in the Emperor's name, instead of the Hun-like behavior they exhibit in the base game.
As for women, the Frontier's Legion ending is actually not too far removed from what I expect in the bizzare scenario of a female Legion Courier. A woman being at the forefront of the conquest of Hoover Dam is going to send cultural shockwaves across the Legion, doubly so since Caesar chooses to publicly celebrate her, even going so far as having a special run of the denarius minted in her image. You're not going to see women showing up in the infantry, but I suspect that the Frumentarii might slowly start incorporating very select and highly-qualified women into its ranks.
It makes more sense for Caesar to be the one to instigate it. Some random Legate doing that would probably get him removed from command, but if Caesar does it, it's alright. Especially if said woman in question assassinated Benny and House, blew out President Aaron Kimball's brains, wiped out a small army of power-armored Brotherhood paladins, saved Caesar from his brain tumor, and led the attack against the NCR army which led to General Lee Oliver retreating or getting killed. By that point, a woman has proven herself to be very useful to the Legion outside of being a baby-maker, to the point where Caesar puts her face on the coin. I wouldn't put it past Caesar to allow the Courier and other strong women into the Legion after that. I also wouldn't be surprised if the female Courier ends up being his heir, after presumably getting married to Lanius, of course, so she can pop out a super-baby with Lanius' brawn and her brains, so that Caesar #3 will be an absolute fucking monster.
For me, the contrast between the NCR and the Legion is one of under- and over-correction, respectively. The NCR insists on recreating America as it was on 22 Oct 2077, and for their trouble they get exactly the kind of bloated, corrupt bureaucracy-economic complex that fucked everything up in the first place. Caesar, on the other hand, essentially wants to turn the calendar back to 1 AD and start the whole damned journey all over again, mistakes and all.
I can see why Caesar would do that, though. The cultural progress of humanity was reset, so Caesar is going back to old ways of ruling to keep the barbarians at bay, since they're not dealing with a civilized world, they live in the Dark Ages of their time, so Caesar is playing from a Dark Age warlord's playbook on how to pacify the world. Once the world has been pacified, they can return to more civil ways of running things, like how Caesar began to be more diplomatic once he sat on House's throne.
Clicking these into the above points, Caesar doesn't play "women are for breeding" out of animosity, but because it is the most basic form of human society: the man hunts, the woman has kids. As he says, the War effectively reduced humanity's cultural progress back to zero, and he is trying to start at that zero and move forward from there just like we did last time. I don't think Caesar sees his empire being the same thing in a hundred years, but rather plans for it to one day tame the wastes, and once the world is no longer in a state of post-apocalypse, it will start being a viable option to be something other than a totalitarian hellhole built for functionality above all. This is essentially what the Medieval period was, a millenium-long apocalypse brought on by the fall of Rome, and only once Europe stabilized to the point where the feudal system stopped being a necessary evil did we have the Renaissance, the Enlightment, and eventually the return of the republic as a form of government.
The ending slides suggest just that: Caesar's brutality served its purpose once he took Hoover Dam, and he starts reigning it in and starts acting more civilized once he takes Vegas.
I think people heavily mischaracterize the legion's stance on technology they aren't luddites they're taught to not rely on advanced tech on a world where natural resources aren't a thing anymore they blatantly use tech all the time as I'm sure the legion hit squads will remind anyone as well as the howitzer they fix up to blast the ncr.
They're 200 years on from a nuclear apocalypse and that's after the resource wars I think it's perfectly sensible for your troops to not be reliant on finite supplies that will only degrade, deplete and worsen with age. Alongside that the reason legionaries use spears and machetes and the like is to ensure even a basic legionnaire is as deadly with their hands as they are with a rifle something that the ncr is clearly shown to lack in all but their most advanced rangers.
That's my reaction every time someone calls the Legion "primitive". The Legion isn't primitive. They're just trained to make the best out of a bad situation, they still use guns when they can. It's just that they're trained to use melee weapons when it comes to close quarters.
Not to mention the fact that unlike the Gun Runners, most factions just scavenge guns, so Caesar is just trying to be ready for the day when old guns start to break down, which they can. NCR troopers are nowhere near that ready, which is why they can get mugged and killed by random gangsters when their guns jam or they run out of ammo.
