After farming pretty much everything farmable, I realized that the major NPC factions almost never have an opponent who's up for him:
NCR army vs. powders and marauders, NCR always wins.
Unity vs rogues, only a very small patrol can be beaten by rogues.
Vault City patrol vs slavers... almost same situation as NCR army vs marauders.
Rangers vs marauders (even though farming rangers is next to pointless).
BoS vs. radscorions or centaurs... The friendly fire from each other is worse than any damage their enemies can make.
For once, I would like to crash into an actual encounter where both sides have about the same strength as each other, hell... I would travel the WM with my sneak just to watch the fights.
Sure, it's extremely easy to farm when you can just focus entirely on the strong faction and leave the "bait faction' for later, I'm not saying we shouldn't get NPCs 1hexing rats anymore, I mean that WM is too unbalanced overall when it comes to NPC placement.
Considering Fallout canon (this game isn't canon! blargh! ugga! gooo! yeah... yeah...) I would like to see these factions at each other's necks for once:
Unity patrol vs. Vault City patrol:
VC has the armor and decent equipment while Unity has big guns and splash damage, pretty balanced if you ask me, plus VC would try to make sure muties are as far as possible from their city while Unity would hold a grudge against them.
NCR army vs. Khans:
I never understood why the Khans are above BH, they should be near Shady Shands messing with caravans and bystanders, their presence would make newbies think twice about getting bad rep with NCR, I know khans aren't really strong, but at least it's an improvement, and considering NCR wiped all their enemies long ago it would be no surprise that the worst they have to handle are a bunch of organized thugs.
BoS vs. Mutant Remnants:
Wake those muties up, the first time I met them and noticed that they weren't attacking me I just went "Lol... Really?", they are a former army, they hate and kill humans on sight and most importantly, they live considerably near the Lost Hills bunker, an even group of muties could at least scratch the paladins' armor and a big group against a small patrol could beat them with some losses, it's almost laughable how BoS damages themselves more with misbursts from shooting radscorpions than actual enemies.
Enclave vs. Tough Deathclaws:
Not really anything else, no human faction would go near Navarro, though it doesn't mean they should only have foes who can be killed on 1 burst, I thought about Endless Walkers but that would be way too out of place.
Rangers vs. Professional Slavers:
"Strong" slavers aren't really match to rangers, so I had to come up with that cheesy name (it was that or steroid slavers
) which are basically buffed thugs with assault rifles, pancors and etc... Rangers being helped by traders and NCR army would easily defeat the slavers but a slavers vs rangers encounter would surely be interesting to watch... And no... They won't show up as "Professional Slavers" on the encounter... That's just a nickname.
Wild Brahmin vs. Mad Brahmin:
Do want.
I'm not saying every encounter should be an intense PVE warzone, I just think that encounters are too predictable the way they are, it would be nice to pay attention to both sides of the table for once instead of just caring about one side at a time, especially because the wasteland is full of opportunitists just waiting for that
"You encounter High Tech Faction vs. Epic Meat Shields" encounters, and that is completely normal and fine.
And don't use the old "too much loot in one encounter" excuse, I would take the same amount of loot sooner than later in a much easier way, just waiting for those factions to be away from each other while exterminating a massive horde of mantis or raider meatshields.
This would also barely affect players who want their farming to go smoothly, most of them farm on the surroundings of cities anyway, I'm suggesting most of these balanced encounters to happen on the "border" of cities and interest spots, it wouldn't make much sense to see mutants fight against patrols on the outskirts of VC and vice-versa.
TL;DR: Make PVE a bit more interesting, both for NPCs and Players.
