Despite the title, Nuka world can be fun, for a player caring much more about combat and not about story or roleplaying sense. In a way, there is some level of stupid evil mixed with smart evil.
The main story starts with
. The environments afterwards are great, from a space-themed mini park to a savanah surrounded with roller coaster. But the charm kind of ends there; the story itself is certainly not bethesda's best written, due on part of the raiders tendency to just not wanting to do anything themselves(as with many rpgs), which is the main problem many reviewers point out.
It begins to spiral out of control, however, when you finish taking the entire park. As you take control of the park, you establish territory to the gangs, and then it's off to the Commonwealth itself. The main problem comes from a few major oversights:
One: The raider outposts depend on HEALTHY settlements to feed themselves. This comes in the form of making healthy farming settlements into "vassals". The more food the better, and while a large 15+ population settlement providing 90+ food can "provide" for multiple raider towns, the problem can be major with the infamous settlement bug which doubles population and cuts water/beds/food down. This leads to shortages in the raider towns from any glitched settlement, forcing you to turn it into a raider outpost.
The other problem stems from the fact you cannot "vassal" or take over a settlement with either important NPCs such as your companions, some named NPCs(specifically those who are essential) and my now most hated settlement, whatever town is picked by the Railroad to be Mercer Safehouse. The safehouse the railroad has you establish cannot even be picked as a location, and if this is something that is essential for raider "infrastructur" such as red rocket truck stop, or any north-western settlement(the corner of the map with the most towns and thus fastest expansion) you can easily find yourself screwed out of hours of play with no means to make it really work.
If you have even so much as 2 towns lost to essential npcs(my case Red Rocket Truck stop and Outpost Zumanja), and you don't have much of the commonwealth well developed already, taking over the 8 settlements necessary to get the most out of the raiders becomes difficult if not impossible within any reasonable time frame.The other issue, is once a town is set as a "vassal" it'll no longer grow, for some reason, I haven't figured it out. But even if the crops are all in place for future growth, the town won't develop. So if you find yourself forced to take vassals which are small, you can easily end up with lots of vassals and not enough raider outposts. This glaring gameplay flaw is crippling to any character of low charisma, just as much as the local leader perk being unavailable, which is contradictory, as raider towns are actually efficient at logistics on there own without your intervention; they'll share all of there supplies without supply lines. While it'd look good on paper, it just doesn't work in practice unless the low-charisma character spent lots of time setting up turrets ahead of time and making the large a farms as they possibly can while also not letting essential npc's remain in the north-western settlements.
All of this combines for what I could describe as a clunky, and ultimately frustrating, experience with the DLC. While I enjoyed the changed challenge with the Raider mechanics and the DLC, somewhat(I hated a certain marathon level) it fell apart for me once I got to the commonwealth. My low-charisma character was made to win fights, so I didn't take endless hours taking towns and growing them ahead of time. And it'd feel contradictory in a way to turn them over to raiders(directly or vassal). While the rewards are immense(I was getting huge cash income far exceeding what settlements could give even a highly charismatic character from it), the nasty unstable and uncontrolable nature of the raiders annoyed me.
If bethesda did the following, it wouldn't have felt like a crapshoot:
1: Let me set tighter maximums on raiders in locations. I could do this with regular settlers, why not raider crews?
2: Let me keep growing the vassals and import "workers" to it or something after I assign it as a vassal so I don't have to play heroic minuteman beforehand. Really, it makes no sense for me to have to still be a good guy when I want to be a bad guy.
3: Why couldn't they let us take this further with it's own path to win the game? Has anyone found anything on this?
Thats it. Thats the main achilees heel for the system. When towns insist on growing to 16 people when I am only able to get infrastructure for 10 in each of them, I dang well should have a right to that. It'd have made sense for me and worked many times better, as I wouldn't be forced to spend all of my time developing extra towns just to turn them into vassals. I'd have been able to stop a town from growing when I found it had food troubles and chose to feed it only an extra town. I'd have the option to make more raider outposts and less vassals and opt for a "quantity over quality" approach(a mix of which seems to be the better option for this DLC, rather than pure quantity or pure quality, you need 8 raider outposts to gain all of the buildables, and it's needlessly hard in the wrongest ways of needing prior knowledge to avoid major problems).
Advice for anyone planning on doing nuka world:
Take Sanctuary, Starlight Drive in, Red Rocket, Abernathy(although this COULD be used as mercer, since it's always a bugged and useless piece of crap anyways, so I'd actually leave it unclaimed until doing the railroad), tennpines, outpost zumanja, actually all of the northern settlements before joining the railroad if possible. If it's north of Boston, take it(except abernathy since it's always BUGGED).
While doing the above, take local leader and link em up. This may seem contradictory but you need the infrastructure already in place before moving in raiders.
Develop the large towns into giant farm communities that you plan to vassal far ahead of time based on location and also the following: Country crossing and starlight have lots of land you can farm on, although Starlight may need the not so good wasteland workshop(it's ok for 5 bucks if you just like building things, if your not that into building then it isn't worth it) to maximize it's production. A central location with a lot of farmable land on it is perfect for a vassal.
Build your character as a leader, rather than a raider. This is a big one. A robot mastermind with 6 charisma(or more, actually), 7 charisma(get this to 8 with the bobblehead from boston city library) and a powerful automatron ally will have an easy time taking territory and developing it before Nuka World, and can have a good excuse for betreying it(hey, more money, weapons, and free drugs could make it worth it!).
In fact, if you have it, advance and even complete Automatron beforehand. Automatrons can be cheaply built to be used to quickly "fatten" a settlement quickly to provide a large crop yield as a vassal.
The irony is, if you develop the wasteland into a reasonable civilization as a leader, you'll do far better being the Overboss of Nuka world than if you build as a simple raider like I did. I suppose it makes sense, but the mechanics just scream "This is for an evil ruthless jerk!". Not to mention the story and how contradictory it is: Why would I, the general of the minutemen, if I focused on actually doing that, want to hand over people already paying me an otherwise smaller amount of taxes but still making me filthy rich?
The advantages I could see: Superior equipped settlers, free chems(you get tons of these with raider settlements), tremendous amounts of money, potential(from what I heard) for free legendary items and goodies. All in all, raiders pay up far more directly than settlements do(and I think you can still get purified water in them, so regular settlements don't have that as an advantage).
Disadvantages I can see: Difficult to manage and setup(specifically due to the later to).
Requires prior knowledge to make it work(the one I hate the most, but at least this one is negatable in future playthroughs(which is why I hate it))
Requires settlements to be very well developed(as very high food farmland) before you begin turning on the commonwealth.
At least I got to show expansionist wannabe "Another settlement needs YOUR help!" Preston Garvey what a real expansionist looks like.
Edit: Also don't think automatrons can farm for the raiders within there own settlements. They won't even tolerate the sight of seeing anyone farming and will begin to dislike you for it.