Both of these plans are losing. Next time you should only make one plan because the votes are being split.
Attempting to Subvert the Plan: Dominion Edition
- Thread starter Etranger
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
-
- Tags
- starcraft plan quest
Both of these plans are losing. Next time you should only make one plan because the votes are being split.
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
For the record, I have disallowed people from posting multiple variants of their plan, but I have also disallowed questers using that as a reason to call someone out in the thread, so let's take it down several notches and engage either constructively and civilly or not at all.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Lists of Paranoia-influencing tasks. All event probability calculations assume a +15 omake bonus.
Readying the SCVs for Reconstruction
Augustgrad Phase 3 (-10 Paranoia) (0% chance)
Dylarian Shipyards Phase 2 (-15 Paranoia) (0% chance)
Ardonin SCV Factory Phase 3 (+10 Paranoia) (73/300, 5 dice, +6)
Korhal Regreening Phase 2 (+5 Paranoia) (11/100, 2 dice, +16)
Katherine Mengsk Memorial Hospital (-5 Paranoia) (98/200, 1 die, +16)
Port Bennet (-5 Paranoia) (0% chance)
Refloating the Fleet (-10 Paranoia) (244/300, 1 die, +6)
Fort Riley (-10 Paranoia) (41/200, 1 die, +6)
Fort Sumner (-5 Paranoia) (0/200, 2 dice, +6)
SALOME (+10 Paranoia) (233/300, 2 dice, +11)
Forecasts and Trends (+10 Paranoia) (0% chance)
Veterans' Benefits (-5 Paranoia) (0% chance)
VIEC (+10 Paranoia) (DC 80, 2 dice, +1)
Worker Aid Centers (+10 Paranoia) (DC 80, 2 dice, +11)
Now, many of these projects get much easier to complete if the SCV factory completes, so I'm breaking this down into two contingencies.
If SCVs complete (86.0% likely)
+10 from SCVs, -5 from Starke running interference
91.8% chance of +5 from Regreening
80% chance of -5 from Katherine Mengsk Memorial Hospital
100% chance of -10 from Refloating the Fleet
63% chance of -10 from Fort Riley (which drops to 41/100 Progress)
74% chance of -5 from Fort Sumner (which drops to 0/100 Progress)
95.9% chance of +10 from SALOME
19% chance of +10 from VIEC
8.6% chance of +10 from Worker Aid
Breakdown:
+10-5+(.92*5)-(.8*5)-10-(.63*10)-(.74*5)+(.959*10)+(.19*10)+(.086*10)
Expectation Value: -2.05 Paranoia.
If SCVs do not complete (14.0% likely)
91.8% of +5 from Regreening
30% of -5 from Katherine Mengsk Memorial Hospital
66% of -10 from Refloating the Fleet
4% chance of -5 from Fort Sumner
95.9% chance of +10 from SALOME
19% chance of +10 from VIEC
8.6% chance of +10 from Worker Aid
Effectively 100% chance of Starke's -5 firing somewhere in here.
Breakdown:
-5+(.92*5)-(.3*5)-(.66*10)-(.04*5)+(.959*10)+(.19*10)+(.086*10)
Expectation Value: +3.65 Paranoia
So basically, Readying the SCVs for Reconstruction is a more or less Paranoia-neutral plan by design, with balances of +Paranoia and -Paranoia options. The plan is (as the author noted) taking deliberate advantage of SCV Progress cost reductions on orbital platforms (including Fort Riley and Fort Sumner, as I understand it) to improve the chance of completion of a greater number of -Paranoia projects to offset the +Paranoia from the SCV plant itself. And the math checks out; this strategy should more or less work.
Obviously, freaky outlier worst case scenarios could cause skyrocketing Paranoia, and freaky outlier scenarios such as SALOME not completing could smack us right down to the Suspicion floor. But since the probability of such freaky outliers is certain to be low and also difficult to estimate precisely, I do not consider it worthy of examination.
Readying the SCVs for Reconstruction
Augustgrad Phase 3 (-10 Paranoia) (0% chance)
Dylarian Shipyards Phase 2 (-15 Paranoia) (0% chance)
Ardonin SCV Factory Phase 3 (+10 Paranoia) (73/300, 5 dice, +6)
Korhal Regreening Phase 2 (+5 Paranoia) (11/100, 2 dice, +16)
Katherine Mengsk Memorial Hospital (-5 Paranoia) (98/200, 1 die, +16)
Port Bennet (-5 Paranoia) (0% chance)
Refloating the Fleet (-10 Paranoia) (244/300, 1 die, +6)
Fort Riley (-10 Paranoia) (41/200, 1 die, +6)
Fort Sumner (-5 Paranoia) (0/200, 2 dice, +6)
SALOME (+10 Paranoia) (233/300, 2 dice, +11)
Forecasts and Trends (+10 Paranoia) (0% chance)
Veterans' Benefits (-5 Paranoia) (0% chance)
VIEC (+10 Paranoia) (DC 80, 2 dice, +1)
Worker Aid Centers (+10 Paranoia) (DC 80, 2 dice, +11)
Now, many of these projects get much easier to complete if the SCV factory completes, so I'm breaking this down into two contingencies.
If SCVs complete (86.0% likely)
+10 from SCVs, -5 from Starke running interference
91.8% chance of +5 from Regreening
80% chance of -5 from Katherine Mengsk Memorial Hospital
100% chance of -10 from Refloating the Fleet
63% chance of -10 from Fort Riley (which drops to 41/100 Progress)
74% chance of -5 from Fort Sumner (which drops to 0/100 Progress)
95.9% chance of +10 from SALOME
19% chance of +10 from VIEC
8.6% chance of +10 from Worker Aid
Breakdown:
+10-5+(.92*5)-(.8*5)-10-(.63*10)-(.74*5)+(.959*10)+(.19*10)+(.086*10)
Expectation Value: -2.05 Paranoia.
If SCVs do not complete (14.0% likely)
91.8% of +5 from Regreening
30% of -5 from Katherine Mengsk Memorial Hospital
66% of -10 from Refloating the Fleet
4% chance of -5 from Fort Sumner
95.9% chance of +10 from SALOME
19% chance of +10 from VIEC
8.6% chance of +10 from Worker Aid
Effectively 100% chance of Starke's -5 firing somewhere in here.
Breakdown:
-5+(.92*5)-(.3*5)-(.66*10)-(.04*5)+(.959*10)+(.19*10)+(.086*10)
Expectation Value: +3.65 Paranoia
So basically, Readying the SCVs for Reconstruction is a more or less Paranoia-neutral plan by design, with balances of +Paranoia and -Paranoia options. The plan is (as the author noted) taking deliberate advantage of SCV Progress cost reductions on orbital platforms (including Fort Riley and Fort Sumner, as I understand it) to improve the chance of completion of a greater number of -Paranoia projects to offset the +Paranoia from the SCV plant itself. And the math checks out; this strategy should more or less work.
Obviously, freaky outlier worst case scenarios could cause skyrocketing Paranoia, and freaky outlier scenarios such as SALOME not completing could smack us right down to the Suspicion floor. But since the probability of such freaky outliers is certain to be low and also difficult to estimate precisely, I do not consider it worthy of examination.
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
Yeah, from what I can tell both my plan and the second-place plan are relatively close to Paranoia-neutral.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I would run the numbers on your plan, as I did with the SCV plan, except that I don't really have time to do so this morning.
First, neither plan is losing by more than 2-3 votes out of roughly 35-ish votes cast.
Second, the overwhelming supermajority of people who voted for either plan you are referencing ended up approval-voting for both. It is impossible to determine at a glance whether the people who only voted for a "spoiler" plan would in fact have voted for the other version if it were available. They might have just ignored the singleton, speaking as a practical matter.
I personally think that TRUST is a distraction at best, and actively harmful to people at worst. Like, you're putting off getting an actual ship to build at Augustia so you can have a marginally better uniform for TRUST than what dominion troopers get. Ultimately however, no matter how many TRUST troopers we have, killing Mengsk is going to mean going through the royal guard. And they have full up marine armor and better. So we'd need a very hardcore ally, willing to do the actual work of killing Emperor Mengsk.
I don't think that we've been 'slacking' on subverting the plan, it's just that a lot of our actions have been scattershot and getting through the first tier of 'stuff that unlocks other stuff.' If we were actually hard-core on Subverting The Plan, I think it would be best to pick one or two aspects of Personal Dice and just hammer those aspects as hard as we can, rather than trying to be coy and recruiting allies from all across Terran space.
To be clear, here's all our to-date personal actions: Hiring a personal staff, setting up a personal budget, sending a letter 'home', Private investments, Request an Update, Deadman's Rock: Authorize Arendt's Working Vacation, Contact the Industrial Workers' Trust, "Lose" Military Supplies, Divert Supplies to Independent Settlements, Have a Talk with Director Starke, Go Drinking with Colonel de Santo.
8/11 actions were 'mere' setups. Only 3, to date, have had any actually subversive effects, but that is probably*by the QMs design?
Well should I eliminate my less favored child and just make it plan "Readying the SCVs"? I'd not seen this ruling before.
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
Ultimately not a huge deal in this case. Just keep it in mind for the future and all is good.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
[X] Simon_Jester
Just got here and read everything yesterday; really interesting quest, gonna namevote someone I trust from other quests while I get oriented.
Just got here and read everything yesterday; really interesting quest, gonna namevote someone I trust from other quests while I get oriented.
It's here:
It seems from that post like you're allowed to iterate (so if you have a draft plan Readying the SCVs and then change it, you can name it Readying the SCVs with Ice Cream to make it clear that it's new and different and possessed of ice cream) but you're not allowed to proliferate (actively propounding multiple variants simultaneously).
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
There's a balance to be struck between doing things that benefit the Dominion economy (and thus make it easier to keep Paranoia low and the slush fund large, which in turn help us Subvert The Plan) and hurrying up and doing the maximum possible to Subvert The Plan right now.
Personally, I think that trying to speed-run Subverting The Plan is a mistake that will get Chuck killed and/or the Dominion torn apart into burning chunks of Zerg chow. That is especially true if we don't want to just replace Arcturus with Valerian (and you don't).
So I'm not in hurry when it comes to prioritizing Free dice on Personal over Free dice on particularly good economy-boosting projects, because for purposes of this quest, if we're not planning ahead for a future twenty turns down the road, then we are already screwed.
Hopefully we can overthrow Mengsk within ten years, but I'm very skeptical that we can pull it off in less than five. Especially if, as noted, we're going full-bore republican and trying to do away with the Dominion's autocracy altogether. Which you are.
Yeah, this originated after we had a turn where there were like four simultaneous variants because someone (I sincerely forget who) posted "no X, no Y," "X but no Y," "Y but no X," and "both X and Y" versions of the same plan.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I honestly don't think we have ten years, though again that's nothing that I can provide a solid, mechanical reasons for--though narratively ten years of balancing Mengsk's Paranoia and Suspicion would probably start to pall--and so it's more my feeling on the matter.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I suspect we don't either, which is exactly why I hope it doesn't take that long.
The problem is, again, that we can't speed-run a plan that involves both being able to overthrow the Dominion and instate a republic at the expense of building a strong Dominion economy, for three reasons:
1) Because instating a republic would require a very broad base of support which means courting more factions, which takes more time.
2) Because speed-running will sometimes mean spending less dice per action and incurring more risk of racking up Paranoia, which we then have to burn off by building stupid projects for Mengsk, which requires us to have an economy capable of doing so.
3) Because even in the best-case scenario, instating a republic will antagonize more factions that want to preserve the autocracy or fear prosecution for crimes committed under the autocracy (the Dominion and the Confederacy before it). This makes destructive civil war more likely, which means that having this war soon, before the events of Brood War and before we've even fully rebuilt from the previous civil war, has too many devastating consequences.
...
If the problem is that you think Mengsk is going to shoot Horner within the next five years and we need to ride-or-die hurry up and coup him already, then as a matter of basic self-preservation, Horner is going to need to prioritize a single quick, dirty, and effective way to make that happen. One plan, committed to ruthlessly, is better than having five plans all slow-cooking in the background at once.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I am extremely sympathetic to this thread policy given what things are like in Divided Loyalties, where combinatoric variants are the order of the day for turnplans (look at the history posts in my signature and see how many times the winning turnplan is credited as a variant of something else). I've been a little guilty of this myself, but I try to limit myself to actively proposing only one plan these days, when I propose one at all.
My expectation is that once the Brood War hits, Mengsk's Paranoia responses are going to increase in intensity, which makes sense because while the Dominion is facing external threats is obviously the best time for dissidents to strike and so he'll see them within every shadow. To steal an MMOG term, it's a "soft enrage" -- not an automatic lose condition, but a point at which the danger level increases substantially and you really want to get things moving. This would be mitigated by War Buddies, but even so, I expect we're going to need to seize our moment or else be executed sometime during that crisis; helped along by the fact that it is, in fact, a good time for dissidents to strike.
So I agree with you that we don't have ten years (forty turns!), but my instinct aligns somewhat with Simon's that we should be planning for the five-year horizon, so as to support Raynor's revolution (or launch our own) in the waning days of the Brood War.
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I'm actually more interested in the building up the Dominion stuff then our, seemingly, half-assed ideas to overthrow and install some government that has no actual stability. So yeah, plans that focus on economic activity and bettering Terran Space but sort of forget the subvert part are totally fine with me.
- Pronouns
- He/They/She
Ideally - and I emphasize this is ideally and no plan survives contact with the enemy - if we're talking revolution, we use our current position of power to build up infrastructure and people-benefiting institutions and *then* (and this is the part a lot of people forget) we fill the guy at the top with knives and replace him with an accountable entity.
Sinsystems
Patron Librarian
Personally I think it might be a good idea to start putting a little more effort into our mandatory tasks as they appear to be slowly piling up.
I disagree. That plan has the glaring weakness of all mengsk needs to do is kill chuck right before he's done with building up the dominion so he can't use his position to overthrow mengsk. And we know that its a question of when not if mengsk kills us.
At best, we are mere years from entering into an even more brutal period of all out war and if the dominion really invades the combine even less. We aren't gonna be fully ready in rebuilding or trying to set up the anti mengsk movement even if we decide to go all in on one over the other but we have to prepare now so we got something set up when the opportunities offer itself.
We have to develop the anti-mengsk coalition in lock step with our rebuilding mandates. Really let all those factions seep in.
Feed the fringes ideas of breaking away when the core pulls back to defend itself from the ued or zerg or whatever and build the local places enough to make it doable. Hand over secret bases to the raiders to let them grow in secret and cut down on the rando bandit kings on the fringe. Seed every major industry we rebuild with unions. Steadily spread out and take over more of the dominion state apparatus so that every low level paper pusher or check point guard knows which side to choose when push comes to shove.
Point is the safe option is to do rebuilding and knife stabbing at the same time.
- Pronouns
- He/They/She
The same applies in reverse, though. We're both just one human guy. Hypothetically we could Operation Valkyrie Mengsk at any time, although hopefully, in a more thorough manner. The goal is building up a power base so that lopping off the head doesn't kill everyone in the Dominion of starvation, disease, or "oops, more Zerg".
I don't disagree with your overall point, though. We can rebuild in a way that empowers the "broad anti-Mengsk coalition" and we're gonna have to, because again, we're just one human guy. My point is the power that we have is the power granted by the Dominion's institutions, so we can't ignore or start burning them down like we are, ourselves, some fringe anarchists or separatists who just want the state gone.
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I really do think some people forget that while we might be against Mengsk we are totally and completely pro-Dominion. We don't want anarchy or chaos. Hell I don't even think we would want democracy - since there really isn't a culture of that in Terran space, but I don't feel like getting into that argument again. But yeah, all our plans are 'remove Mengsk" with a side of "but strengthen the Dominion." My focus is mostly on the strengthen the dominion side. If we bring up all the stats for the planets of the Dominion to a good level I would consider it a success.
- Pronouns
- He/They/She
Well, I'd argue we need to start figuring out who the anti-Mengsk factions are before we start including them. We've got Jimmy on lock and that's good, but we're going to have to spend a lot of time building an alliance bigger than just us and him, and we can't just ignore building up what we can in the meantime.
Eh, speak for yourself. I'd be doing full anarchist memes in here if it weren't for the fact that our main threat is being invaded by like six different foreign powers - a notorious Achilles Heel of Anarchist societies.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
As your daily reminder, as per the canon of this Quest there is literally a democracy in Terran space.
- Pronouns
- He/his/him
[X] Plan Something Something
[X] Plan TRUST in Us
[X] Plan TRUST in Us
But the people of the Dominion and other places relate it to the Confederacy, and they can't exactly search up history of past ones because of the Confederates in the past and the new order likely destroying or hoarding it for themselves?
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I didn't mean them. I actually literally meant, Umojan right now is, per word of QM, a democracy. People vote for the members of the council, the council decides what policies are pursued. Not a super-radical Workers Democracy or anything like that, but pretty standard democratic republic setup.