for all those who say the legion don’t use tech-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7bAkohmoKg
For civilian life in the legion-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ_9gIZD-n8

The NCR pony looks so adorable

Sadly, being a douche is canon behavior for the BoS, the Codex explicitly forbids helping outsiders. Lyons and his branch are pretty much renegades for wanting to help out at all, and the Outcasts gleefully await his comeuppance. It’s a shame, they were pretty helpful in Fallout 1 and 2.
 
I prefer to leave them be for the end game rather than destroy them - I like Veronica, and she’d probably be very upset if I went that route. Besides, do their quests and you get free ammo and a merchant selling at base cost. Not bad.
 
And if you’re thinking of siding with House, there’s a mod at the Nexus that restores the option to have a peaceful alliance with them - apparently it was dummied out in the vanilla game, but the dialog and everything is still there.

That’s the problem though. Read that sentence again; the leader of the people opposing the empire, supposedly because of the high elves, has been indoctrinated by them and is furthering their goals, intentionally or not.
 
He’s not a completely horrible guy, obviously, because you do see him in Sovengarde. (I do tend to let him just wander into Alduin’s misty snare and wait a suitable amount of time before clearing a path for myself, though. :3c) He’s certainly less of a douche than his right hand man, at least. But he still brings squalor and unrest wherever he has influence.
 
I really wish I could have done more to help the Followers in NV. I still prefer Fallout 3 to New Vegas and the main reason beyond finding the Capital Wasteland far more interesting to explore than the Mojave is because your main quest (if you’re going the non-douchebag route) is pretty much the same thing, working to bring a better quality of life to as many people as possible.
 
Its also a shame that the Brotherhood of Steel is much more douchey than the east coast branch was. I would have sided with them in a heartbeat if they were. As it was, I avoided them as much as possible when they were proving reluctant to just ally with the freakin’ NCR already because I hated having to blow them the fuck up on my House run.

I got the impression from those dossiers that they had indoctrinated Ulfric and was using him to keep the war going. They’re not supporting his cause, they just want the civil war to continue at a nice bloody stalemate so the Empire won’t be able to fight them instead.
 
House lacks vision, sadly. He just wants to bring back the old Vegas and make a city-state that is solidly under his control, and he’s apt to destroy anything he cannot control directly.
 
House wants to go back to the glory days before the war. Legion thinks the values of that time is what ruined everything and wants to go back to an even more primal time. And the NCR wants to move on ahead. The Independent route is up to the player, though I usually try to work out a peaceful, progressive coexistence for everyone. (I also like to believe that the Courier donated a Sierra Madre vending machine to the Followers along with a ton of chips, because those guys get a raw deal in every ending. No good deed goes unpunished.)
 
It would have been nice to have a peaceful option to convince House to let the Courier take over. Keep him alive so you can benefit from his insights and experiences, build a Vegas both of you can be proud of. But you can’t always get what you wish, or I’d have a whole bunch of ponies.

House isn’t bad. But he doesn’t have the power, even with all his securitrons and stuff, to keep the Mojave safe. The NCR does. Ideally, I would have liked to upgrade all the securitrons, disable Mr House without having to kill him, and have the securitrons assist the NCR.
 
The dominion is pretty much objectively the bad guys in the situation, whether you’re empire or stormcloak, but when you’re infiltrating them, you recover documention that flat out states that they’re all but actively supporting Ulfric. Diametrically opposed to them, you have the Blades, and the Blades would normally serve the Emperor if not for the whole “being hunted down by the Dominion” thing.

Good points. I wonder, though, how much of the non-Nord oppression is stirred up by the Thalmor to keep the war going. The racism is strongest in Windhelm, and even there it seems to be mostly a few hotheads leading the cause and bullying an easy target.
 
The Thalmor - those are easy to hate. So easy.
 
And I tried to take House’s side, but then I thought, “Hey, I could do his job better…”

New Vegas was morally black and white when it came to legion versus NCR. If you wanted to go grey, you sided with House. Or sided with no one in particular with help from Benny’s securitron whose name I forgot.
 
I will still argue every time that while they tried to make Stormcloaks vs Empire completely morally grey, they still failed, not as badly as New Vegas, but still severely. Unless you are playing as a Nord, the Stormcloaks are objectively worse. You are the only one of your race they don’t want to kick out of the country. They are full of racists, thieves, violent assholes and so on.
 
The only bad thing about the Empire is that they’re shackled to the High Elves with the treaty they had to sign or else be completely destroyed by them.
 
Yeah, the Stormcloaks have one good idea: oppose the Dominion. Unfortunately, they go about it entirely the wrong way and for the worst reasons with the exclusion of Talos worship, which as even you admit, the Empire didn’t want to ban in the first place.
 
(And is extra stupid considering that the shrines of Talos give tangible boons. the Hero of Kvatch also canonically being the Divine Crusader, with the blessing of all nine divines, etc. Again, as someone who played Oblivion first, I was a big fan of Talos. But banning his worship in public because the entire empire would be destroyed as in burnt to the ground and mass-murdered otherwise is very much a reasonable thing to me.)

@Keith Mowz  
Uh, no? That’s the point I was trying to make. The Legion are almost exclusively puppy-kickers. They prohibit science and medicine, oppress women, enforce slavery, and even sacrifice their own loyal soldiers for senseless gains. Whereas the NCR are significantly more moral and only dogged by a lack of resources and corruption in the chain of command.
 
Conversely, the Empire and the Stormcloaks are both morally grey. Both think their agendas are what must be done and sees the other as traitors. The Stormcloaks just want their country to be free and to be allowed to worship their hero-god as they should be. The Empire just wants peace and order and would happily have allowed the Nords to keep their traditions and their god if the Thalmor hadn’t said otherwise. Both sides have good points, both sides are doing things they don’t want to do, and both sides are waging a war they don’t really want because they don’t want to accept the other side’s demands. If there weren’t a war, they’d be better able to deal with outside threats, such as the Thalmor. Which is why the Thalmor is working to keep the war going for as long as possible.
 
Personal preferences aside, the Empire and the Stormcloaks are pretty much the same. Whereas the NCR could never generate the moral despise I feel for the Legion.

Really? Name me one example where the Legion is less douchebaggy than the Empire that isn’t the Aldmeri Dominion’s fault.
 
Like the jarl of whiterun said, ‘We didn’t have a choice, we were told [by the elves] and we had to like it’.
 
In my playthrough (head)canon, the Dovakiin shows up, beats the stormcloak rebellion into the dust as much as possible almost immediately, then turns around and sabotages the Altmeri every way they can while taking out Alduin.
 
It might be partially due to having come into the series at Oblivion, so I have a proclivity towards siding with Cyradil. For the Blades, for the Empire.

Empire/Stormcloaks balanced out pretty well in my opinion. Not so Legion/NCR. Legion pretty much did horrible things all the time, to everyone including themselves, killed innocents for the evulz, and kept all sorts of prohibitions (medicine, science, women) just because “we think this would make us weak”. I’ve played the game dozens of times and I’ve never felt any interest in siding with them, ever.

I will never stop being amused by the fact that Bethesda made two games back to back (this and Skyrim) that had two main opposing factions that are supposedly on the same moral ground but are still blatantly “neutral-at-best-intentioned bad guy cunts” and “jerky authorities that maintain peace amidst chaos good guy government”

>vault boy  
wat?

They all look so adorable.