The existence of distress basically nullifies all attempts that could be taken to actually balance out those encounters... without it those patrols could actually become less uberpuff eventually...
5. Npc ai is linear. They always know where you are, making rt fighting rather simplistic and favouring tank-onehex builds. Npc could sometimes lose their track to the player, making them choose a wrong turn when looking for him.
Like I said before
radio is needed to make balance on the badly scaled npc mobs. who can solo vc patrol/unity/ncr army/'bos/enclave when you encounter completely unbalanced amounts of guys. for example, enclave solo enc 1-3, bos is something like 1-5, with one hex 2 shot burst your still not going to do very well in those encounters, and once you hit -reputation its going to be even crappier fights or you change location and farm something else.its also highly vital to turn based pvp, also as someone said previous(i think abe) the radio distress timer, needs to be the same as the timer for the encounter.
but not in a way where just people (or person) who can bring more alts win
bring more alts
the way radio works helps with that immensely.