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- They/Them
It is a balance thing I guess, or the 50% extra (or 50% off, whichever) would not just be a gimme be a huge gimme.
Sterbelicht - One Sacrifice At A Time Against The Galaxy (40K)
- Thread starter HeroCooky
- Start date
- Mature Sci-Fi
It is a balance thing I guess, or the 50% extra (or 50% off, whichever) would not just be a gimme be a huge gimme.
- Location
- madison
Well that's a fucking terrifying sentence. 4 escort sized ships killed over 20 cruiser sized carriers and from what I can tell not by catching them while their strike craft where to far to help them, and they considered that poor performance. I'm not sure if we got a lucky weapons match up, rolled well, or just had enough firepower that we where able to take them down without to much blood, but these things are going to be a problem. The enemy has hyper lethal super ships, ones wildly out of step with the lethality of anything we've seen. I'm assuming that they are sharply limited in how many can be fielded given we won in the end, but godamn. Though given their size, I'm going to guess they don't scale up to well because that level of bullshit on a heavier hull would be the kind of thing a space marine chapter would need multiple companies and an entire book to kill.
Still, despite not yet having a counter we won, next time we'll be ready which should siginfgantly mitigate the threat they pose. Also an observation, they have rapid micro warp jumps and a fuck you speed, yet still fought to the death. Either there is some limit at play here that ensured they could not retreat, or it's the typical imperial "death before retreat!" brain rot. Hopefully we can catch and kill most of them before someone has the bright idea of giving them standing orders to disengage rather than fight to the death if they start to lose.
Well I think that explains a fair bit about what the fuck was up with the Flyssa. Hopefully, they only had the one AI and they lost that asset. But if not, we might be able to save and recruit one. It would probably take a few choirs stained with it 24/7 to keep it from chaos but that would be worth it.
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- ?????????
I know. It's still max salt lmao.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
We actually got clarification later and it's even worse!
Those Flyssa class ships are a walking atrocity out of Chaos' darkest nightmares. At least Ten Billion Sapients had their souls ripped out to activate those Lances, which are apparently mini Warpfire Cannons like on the Blackstone Fortresses. They also involve a lot of Psyker brains hooked up in a network for some reason and also seem to be AI controlled.
Also, Van Zandt has at least one Man of Stone, and has forked it aggressively to get even more, the one we killed was already most of the way to falling to Chaos before we put it down, whether we did anything or not.
Also, Van Zandt has at least one Man of Stone, and has forked it aggressively to get even more, the one we killed was already most of the way to falling to Chaos before we put it down, whether we did anything or not.
- Location
- madison
Oh dear.
If any Flyssa live long enough for the AI and or crew running them to fall to chaos they are going to get so much worse. We're going to want to hunt them down aggressively. I do not want to see what one of these things can do when enhanced by chaos and the dark mech.
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- They/Them
Wait. Wait wait wait.
Oh yeah, they're fucked.
The bad thing about relying on mass non-human sacrifice is that eventually you'll run out of other people's Xenos.
I still think that as the primary recruiting world they HAVE to put up a real fight (hence why an SBG a turn for the next few turns is valuable), but in the long term of the next century, if they're fighting us and don't have Vox Primus to give them meat-shields, then I don't know how, if they've been producing any more of them, they'll be able to keep it up as their horizon on the other fronts begins to diminish.
Obviously if it's just a one off or hundred off miracle that they don't produce by any means, then they similarly can't keep it up forever, just in a different way.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
That was always the case though, one of the core materials of those giga-lances is...
Blackstone, which you just can't get outside of having a Necron Tomb in working order, and even that only in very small quantities
Which means every Flyssa that goes down is 10 less focusing devices in their arsenal. They just can't replace that. Same deal with the Null-Nets. They're drawing from Deep Vault Reserves to power these superweapons, which means every one that's lost just can't be replaced anytime soon. You're lucky to get one Blank a generation that survives long enough to be noticed in a Hive World, let alone anywhere else.
And once you take away their superweapons, Van Zandt just... Isn't really anything special?
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- They/Them
I wouldn't bet against them having some means to basically identify and tag Blanks, if they're going all-in on Psytech. Of course, we might also figure out shit about Blanks, given enough time.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
They're also highly reliant on AI that are prone to getting corrupted by Chaos apparently, which doesn't exactly put any less pressure on them. I feel like Van Zandt is very likely to flip into 5/5 Heretical the moment they lose control of their AI Slaves. (Who they already don't have perfect control over! Or we'd be actually fucked instead of just tipped off enough to notice something Fucky was going on)
I do agree we need to build up! We're not even in conflict over that! My main disagreement is that I don't think they're going to be able to shit out 5-6 SBGs worth of forces a turn to ram into us. A great deal depends on the current astrography of Van Zandt with regards to Breskal though. It might just be that they'll attempt to dislodge us with everything they have left in Reserve, and if that fails, they might just... Write it off as a lost cause and withdraw to a choke point to leave us to deal with the Orks and the Dark Space Elfs they've been fighting. Depends if we're bisecting their territory or attacking a frontier. One of the Imperium's favorite strategies when overextended is to withdraw to a new line of defense and let their enemies chew each other to bits until they've built up enough strength to come back.
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- ?????????
The "Shitting out 5-6 SBGs is also reliant on them having the manpower to man those and while it's certainly possible for them to have it in the rest of the Empire it's not something to count on. Also we can see their fleets building up.
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- They/Them
If I thought they were able to shoot out 5-6 SBGs worth of forces every single turn I'd be advocating for rather more than 1 SBG a turn. But I do think that they could probably, for this, literally their primary recruiting world, pull together something like 6-8 SBGs from their every emergency fund in the next 2-3 turns, since this is in fact an emergency for them.
If we're doing 1 SBG a turn, then we'll probably be fine, but if we're doing less than one SBG a turn--which is what you were proposing at first--then that will... not be good?
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
I can commit to 1 SBG a turn with ease, yeah, that'll be roughly 2 AP, leaving 2 AP for Psytech and 1 AP to push where it's needed to best assist the war (Either to push an SBG over or design a ship, or get some precursor techs, whatever, the point is we have a little slack while still capitalizing on our advantages, as long as enough people decide to go that way instead of thinking we can do anything else until things settle down)
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- They/Them
We're also going to be getting a bunch of Research stuff, though, and I actually do think we should do SEVERAL Design Actions, first to update all of our shit, and second because I do think that the Ace if mixed into our SBG build lineup would be very effective.
It's why I was talking about spending a total of 4 Actions on PsyTech over the next three turns rather than your goal of 6... the things not on PsyTech are absolutely going to be on other things directly relevant, if not even more directly relevant, to the war.
E: Like, some of the Research stuff we have is absurd. We can just make our missiles better, right out of the gate, no need to pass go, but we do collect $200 and all of our ships that use missiles just become better without even needing a Design Action.
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Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
We'll have to see how things shake out then, I can put aside the Lance for a bit for instance if we can get the Arc Carronade, which is probably almost as good for our purposes, and if we can nab, the shields, Force Weapons, and the Orrery, I think we'll be in pretty good shape, and I think we could do that with 4 AP + the 2 freebies.
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- They/Them
It really does kinda come down to how the vote goes. If the 50% vote that I'm going for doesn't win I'm probably not going to touch PsyTech for the next few turns in favor of Refits and Research.
I... do think that finding three Civ Infra actions would be pretty hard, honestly? Maybe not impossible, but pretty hard.
It would be a pretty funny flex, though.
I... do think that finding three Civ Infra actions would be pretty hard, honestly? Maybe not impossible, but pretty hard.
It would be a pretty funny flex, though.
- Pronouns
- Zack
I suppose we would also have to take into account that if I remember correctly, I think they have a forge world as an ally.
I think it is possible that they use their shipyard to create ships to contribute to the Free Dutchy counterattack
I think it is possible that they use their shipyard to create ships to contribute to the Free Dutchy counterattack
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- They/Them
Though since people were asking, albeit as an angry conclusion, if we do win this war I kinda wanna chill and do some of the Saint Trials, maybe start pushing for pro-Juvenat Production Write-In Actions.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
I'd love to as well, but the Cooky lord will Never give us more than a century of peace at absolute max.
[x] [X][Flyssa Wrecks] Send Them Back For Study
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
If the plan is to spend 6 AP in order to get 3 free AP, then there's no AP advantage between the two choices, only the ability to direct the AP on chosen projects. But the 'Send Them Back' option means there's a commitment to spend a lot of AP on psytech at the same time as both a war and cleaning up an entire hive world (and random events) are on the table. Sure, we might get psytech we wouldn't have prioritized, but any psytech at this point is a big advancement over having none. And we can't know ahead of time what's going to happen in the next three turns, or how much AP we'll be obligated to spend on other things.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
That's actually a huge advantage though, because we have no control over where the AP in that case go (And it might end up scattering in such a way that we don't actually get anything actionable). Even if a total of 3 AP gained through pushing Psitech for a bit seems the same, we can use it however we want, which is likely to roll up most of our current Psitech projects, leading to a significant benefit to our eventual doctrine based refit.
It should be noted, we already know how this Man of Stone copy got corrupted. Remember Caine? That bitch that forced our timetable to accelerate with her bullshit crit? Well with said crit, she got 3 things done. We already know what 2 of those things were (whipping the authorities and Mechanicus into a paranoid frenzy), the third one was most likely corrupting that AI since in that excerpt it was noted to be screaming when it looked at what was happening.
So not only did she fuck up our plans, she denied us freeing an AI. And it's not that bad that it only got corrupted b/c what looks like our primary antagonist and a Major Hero getting a crit success. Still a cause for concern, but we don't know what protections the Duchy were using.
Are you sure that's the case? I read it as an improvement of the Snapshot Cogitation equipment and not an outright improvement.
It wouldn't be easy, and likely would come at the cost of putting other things like redesigning ships back a bit. But the rewards would be nice since not only would it help with the discontent from moving billions of people, but if we get more ISCs we would be setup to raise other infrastructures like Void or Military.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Remember the big post way back in the day about Artificial Souls? It takes a Lot of work to create an AI that isn't just Chaos Bait, and the Mechanicus apparently is not putting that effort in, because they're evidently just copy-pasting a single base model again and again
Hoping to get in a few write-ins when that time comes.
- Luxury planet
- with a grand diplomacy palace to influence the kind of people impressed by that
- can use the right to stay there as something to bribe with
- spare capacity: vacation destination!
- Irrita diplomacy
- We have the Kil'Drabi, we have Hyena furries. I want the cute plant people, too!
- Starting of with an offer:
- They get to chose one of the terraformable planets in our federation.
- We pay them to terraform it to their liking (mechanically: spend an AP, analog to the terraforming we did for Voxx Primus offload worlds)
- Interested Irrita can settle there and live as protectorate of the Glimmering Federation (probably with some cooperation on terraforming planets in the federation).
- If it goes well, we can work towards having Irrita as a normal protectorate and maybe even start absorbing the Stellar Growth.
- Hymns of the machines for A Web Of Song
- Maybe we can invent psytec that allows temporarily linking different planets noospheres, instead of sending individual messages with "A web of Song"
- Assumes we have gotten experience with psytec beforehand.