Ah, that's sad to hear. I really love being able to spend some time enjoying the surroundings, the ambiance, etc. A few of the mods I've picked up have been geared toward enhancing that part of it: more developed weather effects, water effects, some leaves on the trees (not *everything* should be dead, after all), etc. During one play-through, one thing I did was to adjust the time settings. By default, the timescale is around 20, so one minute of realtime equals 20 minutes of game time (not counting how much time you spend with time frozen in VATS going through inventory and such). I've been able to reduce it to a timescale of 6, which spreads out the raider attacks accordingly. (Any smaller than a scale of 6, however, and I've been warned that it messes with timing of scripted events noticeably.)
Really, I wish there were just some console command to disable raids for a while. There was a time in my last playthrough where I'd use the console and use "coc" to teleport to the settlement, use "kah" to simply blast all enemies in the region into nonexistence, then "coc" back to whatever spot I was at before the raid happened. But even then, there were points where I'd be in the middle of one settlement, and ANOTHER raid would trigger on another settlement far away. (COC acts like fast-travel, so some in-game time passes.) At least twice, there were THREE raids firing off during the same evening -- and these were settlements where I'd pushed the Defense rating to over 100, with turrets everywhere. It just really gets out of hand, I think. (I think the "Mechanist" DLC increases the chances of raids until that quest line is completed; I noticed a spike in raids when I got the DLC and installed it all at once, and maybe half the raids were attacks by the Mechanist's robots.)
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Really, I wish there were just some console command to disable raids for a while. There was a time in my last playthrough where I'd use the console and use "coc" to teleport to the settlement, use "kah" to simply blast all enemies in the region into nonexistence, then "coc" back to whatever spot I was at before the raid happened. But even then, there were points where I'd be in the middle of one settlement, and ANOTHER raid would trigger on another settlement far away. (COC acts like fast-travel, so some in-game time passes.) At least twice, there were THREE raids firing off during the same evening -- and these were settlements where I'd pushed the Defense rating to over 100, with turrets everywhere. It just really gets out of hand, I think. (I think the "Mechanist" DLC increases the chances of raids until that quest line is completed; I noticed a spike in raids when I got the DLC and installed it all at once, and maybe half the raids were attacks by the Mechanist's robots.)