Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)

[Elder Haman]

Anyway... priority at this point is to get the girls back.

Since they aren't asking for a ransom, maybe we can wave this off as no harm no foul, but truthfully these girls are not on my nice list.

Still, priorities:

1: Get the girls gems back
2: Avoid this being bait for another trap.
3: Establish some communication lines so "misunderstandings" like this don't happen in the future.
4: Gain as much information on these girls as possible

[X] Accept the offer to return the girls. Insist that this needs to happen today.
-[X] Point out that since feelings are running a little high right now, you suggest a dead drop exchange, where they drop off the gems at a selected location (like a rooftop), and then you come collect them.
-[X] Ask that they include some contact information so that "misunderstandings" can be avoided in the future. Suggest a more formal meeting in the future, after everyone has had some time to calm down.
-[X] Also explain that because of the lack of trust right now, you will be bringing a large force of girls to pick up the gems. This is for defense, and you don't want it misinterpreted as an aggressive move.
--[X] Bring as many clairvoyant girls as you can, Kyouko and her clone, Taura, and at least two barrier girls who are ready with barriers when you move in to collect the gems.
-[X] Play the pickup straight. Have the clairvoyants and Taura attempting to sense any girls watching the pickup, and if you can track any girls back to their base, or gain any other information about them, great. But make no aggressive actions against them unless attacked. Everyone else is focused on being ready for combat just in case this is a double cross. No teleporting to and out of the pickup unless attacked. (No sense in giving the other girls more information on who our teleporters are.)

 

[Elder Haman]

I know in the past this has bothered you but I have to question if you're upset simply at the characters or at my writing of people in this way.

Note that most of your interactions have been pretty much live and let live. The occasional one just alpha strikes, but I think it fairly reasonable from an in character perspective.

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I'm angry at the characters. Perfectly reasonable as a GM to throw this at us. I can totally believe people acting like this, since people do it in real life all the time.

All the freaking time...

 

[TheEyes]

I know in the past this has bothered you but I have to question if you're upset simply at the characters or at my writing of people in this way.

Note that most of your interactions have been pretty much live and let live. The occasional one just alpha strikes, but I think it fairly reasonable from an in character perspective.

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It's very much in theme with PMMM, which makes it great writing.

It is also enough to drive a poor girl to distraction.

 

[inverted_helix]

I'm angry at the characters. Perfectly reasonable as a GM to throw this at us. I can totally believe people acting like this, since people do it in real life all the time.

All the freaking time...

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Lacking communication creates a lot of problems in general, but it's really one of the hardest problems in life to fix. No one trusts everyone. And no one is trusted by everyone.

In this setting as one of the omakes pointed out, you don't even have any sort of larger body to fall back on for basic enforcement of agreements. It makes the alpha strike a more appealing option.

 

[FixerUpper]

I've also had a new idea for one about Taya and Seto - as I thought that the way both of them are depressed over their performance in the Demon Class 3 incident might bring them together on a common point of interest, and a teleporter-clairvoyant combo would be deadly. Only thing is I don't feel like I have a good grasp of what Taya is like or how to write her. @FixerUpper what are your thoughts on this idea?

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Hives and the fact I need a definite refresher are stopping me from making any categorical statements (and the former is making typing a pain), but for a quick rundown on Taya... lessee, for her, her ideal state would be the party mom, part of the group, not the fun one, but rather the responsible one, the one who makes sure everyone gets home safe. A lot of that is because of the guilt she still feels over her friend's death. Now the irony of her character arc is that she's actually kind of a loner. Her wish was to gaze at the stars and she spent an insane amount of time wandering between them and not feeling the loss of human contact at all, so part of her probably still wants to go back.

Failure on her part would either send her fleeing back to the stars, or she'd put the failure all on herself and work twice as hard until she started grief spiraling. What keeps that from happening is probably the other puella, who, unbeknownst to them, are coaxing her back to reality, and getting her to stay.

If Seto and Taya started working together, it would probably be Seto initiating the invitation. Taya is more... reactive. Like her magic, she monitors and performs small fixes where she thinks necessary; for her, it wouldn't be training that got to her, it'd be trying to be more alert, more aware, spreading herself thinner and thinner until something gave.

What might be interesting if someone else that was Taya's friend noticed that Taya was spiraling into overwork and Seto, being a former group leader, decided to take the initiative and give her something productive to do.

Hm, well, something like that.

 

[Elder Haman]

Quoting a bunch of posts to make it easier to review some of the discussion we had before the hiatus (Part 1):

The girls in area 10 are very grateful or the pamphlet and find it quite helpful to them. The information about the Class 3 demon is worrying, but they had heard rumors passed along from further east and so the information isn't as shocking as it might have been.

You'd half expected that the girls from area 1 wouldn't believe you about it, but they accept your information with a simple acknowledgement and thanks that you dealt with it.

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So we have diplomacy contacts in areas 10 and 1.

Kyouko admits that her family's church has fallen into a developer's hands due to her inability to pay for taxes on it. She's kept anyone from actually doing anything with it though. She's a bit torn about it though. It was her family's home, and she has good memories, but there are also the terrible ones. It's hard to let go of it, but equally hard to stay there. She's not opposed to the idea of repurposing it though.

Kyuubey admits that he maintains a bit of observation on that situation due to there being a high possibility of masquerade damage from Kyouko's efforts there, although to this point it is believed to be haunted by Kyouko's dead family. Development efforts have largely been written off at this point.

It could likely be purchased at a fraction of its true value, but it is still a rather large piece of real estate on the western edge of Kasamino. Purchasing the land will likely cost only around $500,000. Even with the rising cost of real estate in this region. Refurbishing it could have significant costs though. The basic structure of the building was made in the style of old churches and quite durable, but it will need interior repairs, on top of whatever modifications you would make to render it more suitable for housing.

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Thinking about it, probably the best way to repurpose and use Kyouko's family church would be to turn it into a school.

Probably make it into the start of our "exclusive cram school" plan. Students by invitation only. Get some more income coming in from the parents of magical girls that are still living with family. Provide some cram school stuff to help girls stay on top of their schooling. Provide a place for a more organized magical instruction to go on as well.

Also, provide a location for large meetings (we are getting to where we need that now). Can become the center of what we hope will be a larger Serene Empire. Eventually provide a place for people to meet and make connections in the magical girl society we are trying to build.

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Kyouko's church would be a medium term financial goal.

@inverted_helix 10% bonus to what exactly? Cubes harvested per a meguca? Is this superior to bikes? What bonus level do we get from bikes? How many mopeds will we need to get the bonus (best expressed as a relationship to the number of hunters I think, 1 per a girl?). Is this additive with the other bonuses like the dispatch team or multiplicative?

Is the bonus larger in rural or nomad areas?

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Cubes harvested per meguca. This is superior to bikes because average speed of a moped is significantly higher than average bicycle speed (mostly since you care about not looking superhuman), bikes just prevented you from gaining penalties for the large sprawl of your territory.

1 per hunter same as other equipment. This will be a multiplicative bonus with the others since it' a different type.

Bonus will apply equally both in rural and urban areas (partly because it's much simpler to keep track of that way, but in universe can say that the increased proportion of time spent traveling in rural areas is counterbalanced by roads not always being available directly to where you want to go).

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Okay, so there was the moped idea. Harvest rate of each girl equipped with a moped increased by 10%.

Although I think we might have come up with a better idea with the teleporter transport. That's very detailed though, so I'm gonna put that in it's own post.

Okay, so what does the internet have to say? Is it fiction all the way down, or are has someone done the manual thing already?

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Hmm... looks like it's fiction all the way down. At least so far. Putting up the manual as a background document for a fictional universe does not seem like something that will be useful at all to us.

Apparently searches on "Kyubey" and "QB" turned up nothing, suggesting the Incubators are deliberately censoring things. So we can't just put it up as is either.

This... is going to take some major thought. We need to make it visible for girls searching for it, but not visible for the Incubators...

Hmm.... you know... if we had a successful idol working for us who we could have mention in an interview how much she loves a certain series on magical girls, which is written about a magical girl organization called the Serene Imperium...

Then we might get enough attention to cut through Sailor Moon, and we then could have this be published as background documents for how the world works.

Essentially create a visible masquerade to conceal the real masquerade.

This is certainly going to be a long term project though.

Below I posted a bunch of posts from our brainstorming on how to improve our efficiency:

Interestingly enough Solo Elites produce at 6.6 cubes.

Vet Pairs produce at 3.96 while Vets Solo produce at 5.28 cubes.

So reducing casualty danger by -10% would increase vets production by 1.3 cubes per a vet. That's increasing production efficiency by 1/3rd.

We could switch to vet solo on the underhunt with only an additional -5% casualty danger.

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Research: What is the prime limiter in grief harvesting right now?

1) Time to kill demons? If you doubled demon kill speed, would you double grief cube harvests, or just spend more time waiting around for the next fight?

2) Time to find demons? Is a substantial portion of each hunter's evening spent waiting for demon location info? Or is that information always ready when they finish a fight?

3) Time to travel between demon spawn points? Are the demons located so far apart that you're spending most of your time traveling between points rather than fighting?

4) Demon respawn rates? Similar to #2, but not a problem with slow dispatchers; there just aren't any demons there to be found.

5) Demon grief cube drop rates? If there are no problems in any of the above, then is it just a matter of the rate at which demons drop cubes?

We need an answer to the above to decide on which area to research.

1) Combat tech and strength improvements.

2) Advanced detection methodologies.

3) Improved transport and patrol planning.

4) ?? Something to draw demons into existence.

5) ?? Something to draw out the energy that creates grief cubes

Some of them link together. For example, improved detection may allow many more choices to pull from when giving hunters their next fight route, significantly reducing travel time. Likewise, current detection may only pick out the stronger readings, leading to needing greater combat strength, whereas greater detection sensitivity may allow many more of the weaker demons to be found, limiting the need for higher combat capability.

Overall... I think advanced detection capabilities will get us the greatest overall gain: Better border protection (assuming we can tie it to enchantments), better ability to detect weaker demons (thus reducing combat risks as well as combat time), and just plain more options to choose from within a given area (making travel time a non-issue). Caveat: We need someone to crunch the numbers from the dispatch service.

After that would probably be something to improve #5 (long term item).

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I think we learned #3 is at least a big location for increased savings.

That sounds more like an action to setup a real official dedicated research team. Right now we've been sort of amateurishly doing it when we got resources. This would mean something like dedicating Keiko + assistant to research, which would then become an upkeep cost. Benefits would be:

Members of research team can be devoted to a specific research task.
Small bonus to research done with Keiko and dedicated assistants assigned to that research task.
Research team can spends their time and resources on independent research: Generate new ideas to explore (a way for the GM to slip some more of his hints out to us in a more explicit manner), dependent on some dice roll.
Research Team can receive lessons in magical theory. ie: Mami gives a lecture to the researchers on how she makes muskets out of ribbons, and then spends a month conjuring muskets in slow mo allowing the researchers to research. Researchers gain bonus to summoning of material magic, and transformation of material magic, etc. Kyouko give lecture on how to make illusions gain physical power, etc.

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Idea for a formal research team.

From my rough estimate of next turn's meguca availability, assuming we train Kaoru and have 1 person allocated to some aspect of the manual, we'll have 5 meguca free for research (or diplomacy).

Options are:

1 vet - Long term duration material check
3 vets + 1 green - Personal effects (80% success chance)
2 vets (2 months) - Technology
3 vets (2 months) - Tandem casting
2 vets (3 months) - Secondary properties
3 vets + 1 green (long-term) - Strength/Speed/Durability (each)
Advanced Detection Network has no pricing available.

We have various ways of combining two research projects. The duration test is the simplest and least expensive. Personal effects will only take one month (probably), but takes 4 meguca. Tandem Casting and Technology are each two-month projects, and take 2-3 vets. All of our important long-term projects cost 4 meguca.


We do have the option to continue to delay Kaoru's training, which will free up a couple meguca. Put Taya on hunting, and we could have 8 on research, which would allow something like: Speed, Tandem, Duration research set (or maybe replace Speed with the ADN, and push the long-term research back yet again). Speed and Tandem will both occupy 2+ months (unless we get ridiculously lucky on the speed research), so we'll need to be ready to dedicate those 7 meguca to research for two turns running.

Basically, if we want to make progress on research, we're going to be spending pretty much all of our optional meguca on that for several months. That means almost nothing else going on other than the hunting and working groups, which are all pretty much fixed. That means that, on the player side, we'll be doing almost nothing for several turns, if everything remains bound to meguca-months.

Maybe we can push more for a lot of smaller side-projects that don't eat (much) into actual meguca-month time. Stuff like non-meguca contacts, relations, and general info-gathering.

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I think we really need to move on the diplomacy front and at least Open Relations with all our neighbors.

(Area 11, 12, and 13 especially. Itawa is our most exposed location, we need some insight into what is happening around there).

I say we try to have 1 to 2 girls on Diplomacy, and the rest on research. So next turn I would suggest:

2x Open Relations: 11, 12
3x Tandem Casting

The following turn we go:

1x Open Relations 13
3x Tandem Casting
1x Long Term Duration tests

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Ideas on how to spend resources on research and diplomacy this turn.

That's probably the problem. We are used to things like electricity and computers. When we envision something it's usually got all these complicated parts to it. We need to think simpler. How do we hunt demons faster and more efficiently? Increased safety margin to get to Solo hunting with RT is certainly the most obvious.

We've actually already grabbed the lowest hanging fruit: Shields. Armor. Next might be to figure out how to create a protective enchantment- like a barrier enchantment. When struck, it releases a barrier for brief protection. Barrier girl enchants some material that we slip inside the Kevlar. If it cost 1 cube a month to make an enchantment that adds -10% casualty chance, then it might be marginally worth it. (As -10% chance would allow Vets to Solo hunt which increases their harvest rate by 1.4 cubes, so we'd be gaining .4 cubes per a hunter... which could probably save us a total of one or two megucas. Or alternatively, harvest more from our territory by increasing the DS we hunt up to).

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Actually... that was why I mention specific enchantment research. Most of our businesses are averaging about $1500 a girl, compared to $1000 a girl from odd jobs.

Our most efficient producer of money is Hainako, at $3000.

Imagine if Hainako could produce enchanted glasses (or some other such thing) that translated whatever you looked at with it. Or alternatively, a translator program that is enchanted. Even if she has to keep feeding it (so not an enduring enchantment), or rather, have another girl maintain the enchantment she casts, then we could equip multiple girls with enchantment glasses and they could act as translators.

Say maintaining this enchantment costs 1 cube. Then that means at the cost of 1 cube we could change a $1500 girl into a $3000 girl. We have about a 10 cube margin. Let's say that we can expend 4 cubes to fund upkeep of 4 translators. That increases our income by $6000, and we could then say drop two girls from working (putting us at -4 cubes, +$3000, and +2 meguca months). 1 girl hunting is worth about 4 cubes, so we just gained 1 meguca months and +$3000, or alternatively 3 meguca months.

We can trade excess territory capacity for either more money or more meguca months. That's probably our fastest route to research increasing our manpower available for other work.

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Personalized enchantment effects; on the research list, costs 4 meguca. We won't have the meguca to spare for it for a while, though, given the higher priority items and the relatively limited value of using this trick.

What about custom crafting commissions? Find woodworking shops in the area that will sell creative craftsmanship that we can do using temporarily enchanted wood. Real wood items carry a hefty premium, so we don't actually need to sell that many to earn a fairly decent amount of money. Two girls working on an average of 1 commission a day ($200/commission, could be as little as a $500 cost to the customer) would be getting an effective $3000/month each. Could free up the three odd jobs, giving us +1 meguca and +$3000 (and up to 2 more meguca if we gave up the money from courier jobs).

Edit: Forgot we shifted one of the jobs this turn; we'd basically be trading the 2 odd jobs for +$4000, or maybe pull a couple people from couriers to get +2 meguca and +$1000.

With 1.26 million people in our controlled urban territory (and another 140k in the rural territory, who might even be more likely to buy custom woodwork), distributing across several shops should easily allow that level of sales.

The only trick is getting up to a skill level to consider it art.

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[Aranfan]

I did suggest we eventually make our own magical girl anime.

 

[TheEyes]

I did suggest we eventually make our own magical girl anime.

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Wasn't the consensus to start a manga first, then an anime? Either way, we need to ensure that the manga/anime is a success first; the other thing we need to do is make it similar enough to what's happening so meguca twig to it, but not similar enough that the Incubators catch wind of it and swoop in with the orbital bombardment banhammer.

 

[Elder Haman]

Collection of posts on teleporter transport (Part 2):

If mopeds would increase demon harvesting per a girl (because of faster transport times), then a teleporter service should be able to do even better. Kind of like the Evac Team idea but redesigned to maximize delivering girls to the locations they need to be to fight.

Say 1 teleporter, at the cost of 1 cube per X number of girls being transported, increases harvest rate by 20% (multiplied on top of current bonuses) or 30% (if additive to current finding demon bonus).

To be more reasonable it should probably be 1 cube per X number of girls for Solo, 1 cube per 2X girls for Pairs, and 5X for Pack, with X thus being directly proportionate to the number of teleports. Noticeably this suddenly increases the efficiency of Pack Hunting relative to Pair and Solo, depending on the magnitude of X to what extent, which will make the hunting decisions much more interesting.

Might be too much additional complication, but it could be reasonably argued that the benefit of teleport should be greater for rural or nomad areas. Maybe as much as double the effect?

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This is reasonable and something I expected to be come up with sooner or later.

Balancing it to be appealing will be a little troublesome. To the spreadsheet! Tentatively thinking somewhere around 1 cube per 2 solo, 3 pair, 6 pack girls for the various hunting types, with a multiplicative 20%. Will do some math to see how that works.

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Ugh, barely worth it at that.

I played around with the numbers a little bit too. I didn't pull those multipliers out of thin air. Currently 20% multiplicative adds on .8 cubes effectiveness per a vet using pair tactics. Adds 2 cube effectiveness at vet solo. Adds .7 at pack tactics.

So charging 1 cube per 2 vets solo is gaining a single cube. That means you have to take it 5 times to save a single meguca month. (Because Vet Solo hunting = 5.28 cubes). So paying 5 cubes allows you to reduce your hunting team from 11 Vets Solo hunting to 10 vets solo hunting. But you've added 1 meguca doing support, so you have no gain over all. Increasing to a reduction from 22 to 20 vets you manage to save a single meguca month.

We'll come back to that later, but first let's continue with the comparison across tactics.

1 cube per 3 pair (why do pairs suddenly increase the cost of a teleport by 50%?) would mean gaining 1.4 cube per three pair. That means you have to take it 3 times to save a single meguca month (vet pair = 3.96 cubes), so paying 3 cubes allows you to reduce your hunting team from 11 vet pairs to 10 vet pairs with out reducing net cube gain. But you've added 1 meguca doing support, so you have no gain over all.

1 per 6 pack would mean gaining 3 cubes per 6 girls hunting in a pack. Taking it once saves a single meguca month (1 vet pack = 3 cubes), so paying 1 cube allows you to reduce a hunting pack of 7 to 6. Or 2 cubes allows reducing from 14 to 12.

However, this does not take into account the meguca month savings of the various tactics.

Solo = gain of 3 cubes
Pair = gain of 1.7 cubes (Which means that if Pairs don't benefit double from teleport transport compared to Solo then Pairs fall even further behind Solo)
Pack = gain of .7 cubes. (Which means Pack needs gains of at 4 times to be able to benefit slightly less than Solo, and 5 times to benefit more than Solo)

It would seem strange to me if Solo tactics benefited more from teleport transport than pairs or packs. You'd think Packs would benefit the most, and Pairs would benefit slightly more then Solo.

Suppose instead we take the equation I gave: Solo is 1 cube per X, Pairs 2X, and Pack 5X. (This takes the position that the number of teleports is much more important to the magic cost then the number of girls being transported, with no effective change between a pair and a solo transport, but some drop off when transporting packs - you could also think of the Pack as a 10/2 multiplier)

Assuming we take 2 as the value of X, then the saving for Solo is still as above, but the savings for pairs and pack change drastically.

1 cube per 4 pairs means saving 2.2 per four vets using pair tactics. This is just a bit more than double that for Solo, so that fits. Now taking it twice allows reducing cost by a meguca month, so reduce 9 to 8, or 18 to 16.

1 cube per 10 Pack means saving 6 cubes per a one vet using pack tactics. This is 6 times that for Solo, so I suppose you could drop down to 4X for the pack tactics, and instead save 4.6, which is 4.6 times as much as Solo, which gives Pack just the slightest edge over Solo in benefiting from teleport transport, thought this leaves Pairs benefiting slightly more than Pack tactics.

Now, back to the effective saving of 1 meguca per a month per 22 Vets hunting Solo. Changing to the 2X equation used above would make Pairs slightly better, allowing the effective saving of 1 meguca per a month per 18 Vets hunting in pairs. The 6X multiplier for Pack tactics would allow dropping from 12 to 10 vets doing pack hunting, thus effective savings of 1 meguca month. The 4X multipler for Pack tactics would allow dropping from 17 to 15 vets doing pack hunting, thus saving 1 effective meguca month. (Which is why I prefer the 5X multiplier for pack, it opens justifications for using pack hunting again.)

So X = 2 is not very useful to us when hunting Solo (with Vets, numbers might change for Elites) because our current territory is not sufficiently large to justify it. It's marginal, but probably worth taking if using pair tactics, same for packs if we use the 4x multiplier, but a sizable benefit to pack hunting if we use the 5X multiplier, enough so that while Pairs are still more efficient then packs, it might be worth considering using packs to drive DS higher if we want to prioritze cubes for a turn.

Not sure if that is what you want, but X would probably have to increase to 4 to make it worthwhile for Solo Vets hunting in our current territory size.

Which is another point, the benefits of teleporter transport increases as the territory grows, which makes sense. You'll need to decide if you want to increase costs as well, that would be most simply done by reducing slowly reducing X, although that's a bit unrealistic.

Alternatively you could require the addition of another teleporter beyond a certain number of cubes you are paying into it. For example, 10 cubes per a teleporter, would mean that 20 vets hunting solo could be supported by 1 teleporter, but the 21st hunter would require a 2nd teleporter. It would mean larger number of girls in pairs or packs could be supported... You can't go lower then 10 cubes because otherwise teleport transport would never be effective at saving meguca months for Solo...

This would mean locking in the effectiveness so that it grows proportionately with the size of our territory.

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Why wouldn't mass have an impact? If mass was meaningless then you guys would try to just teleport your house to each location.

Also your math really isn't matching with my own math.

Your harvest this month is 71 cubes. Pair hunting for that takes 18 vets. If you divide by 1.2 to account for a new 20% bonus you get to 15 vets. With a cost of 5 cubes for the service and 1 new support. You're trading 5 cubes for 2 meguca months.

Similarly with pack hunting taking 23 hunters to reach 71 cube harvest, divide by 1.2 = 19. Reduce hunters by 4, add 1 support, cost 3 cubes. This gives a trade of 3 cubes for 3 meguca months.

As far as I can tell you're doing some sort of funky math where you calculated how many more cubes each hunter would make net after the cost and then used that to calculate how many would be needed to cover the territory, which means that you're overestimating the number of hunters.

Anyways those were tentative numbers. What I'd really like to do is have both the GCU cost and the hunting rate modifier vary based on hunting type, but I'm worried that would be too much complexity.

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But that's the point.

Net is what matters. If we don't increase the net then we could get the similar savings in meguca months at the cost of cubes by simply reducing the number of hunters.

Take you numbers. Consider that without any additional support, we could just drop 1.5 vets from hunting at the cost of slightly less then 6 cubes, and we wouldn't have as great an increase in DS. So we'd be saving net slightly more then .5 vets by using the teleportation transport, but at without the reduction in DS. And we'd have to increase DS to make up the difference in cubes, which makes it very very marginal. Almost not worth it at the pair level.

Worth it at the Pack level, because a vet pack hunting gains 3 cubes, so we'd be netting 2 meguca months. But that means losing the greater efficiency of Pair hunting. Maybe if combined with hunting to higher demon strength levels we might be able to make it usable for packs. Have to go run more in depth number on that.

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Hmm on consideration I see your point somewhat.

What I'd really like to do from a modeling perspective is have both a cost difference and a difference in effectiveness. That seems like it would add too much complexity though. Since from a modeling perspective the more people in a group hunting likely means a larger proportion of time spent traveling and a smaller proportion spent fighting or searching. So if I wanted to hold real close to modeling at the cost of complexity I'd do something like Cost 1 cube per 4 solo, 6 pair, 12 pack hunters and modifier of 1.15, 1.25, 1.3 to the return. What I think I'll do instead though is 1 cube per 6 hunters of any type, and modifier 1.15 solo, 1.25 pair, 1.35 pack on return. Plus 1 upkeep teleporter vet.

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True, you can combine it into the effectiveness modifier, or you could combine it into the cost factor (ie, the cost incorporates the differences in efficiency as part of the cost difference), like I did (which was why Pack was not 8 to 10 times more cost efficient then Solo). I don't think it matters much mechanically which way you do it. I thought it was more intuitive (and certainly much easier to calculate) incorporating it into the cost, but whichever way you prefer.

I haven't played around with the numbers you gave there for cost effectiveness yet. It's just that whatever the cost benefit comparison we use has to take into account the opportunity cost of the next best alternative.

Also, you responded to my first post on the matter before I edited it. I added a section about making it scale proportionate to territory size, which is the other balance consideration:

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I'm worried I'm disenfranchising voters with all this hunting math but really it's not that critical since a couple people mostly math out the best solution each turn. I feel like posting on the front page "Math is less critical than it appears" in big bold font. I feel like some of you have fun trying to math out the absolute most efficient version down to the decimal, and I'll admit I'm that type too, but it's scaring people off.

Essentially all you need to know about it is worthless at solo, frees up a little meguca in exchange for a little less cubes at pair, and an even better ratio at pack.

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Regarding the teleporter transport option: While the spreadsheet shows a gain of 1.5 meguca for the full territory size, when you account for the elites running solo, and that the pair hunting vets would only be covering a fraction of the total territory, it's only a net gain of 0.5 meguca.

So, it's something to consider when we pull the elites out and we're doing just pair hunting, but not really worth going for immediately.

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I updated my spreadsheet to be able to use the teleportation option. The Transport dropdown at the top-left allows choices of None, Moped, or Teleport. Teleport sets the multiplier per unit/mode calc (ie: Solo Elite gets the solo multiplier, Pair Vets gets the pair multiplier, etc), whereas the Moped option is global.

Assuming I got the formulas right, it's an improvement despite my earlier misgivings.

Comparing for this turn using the 33/32 split (starting from 0 DS in the north, 8.7 in the south, 0.2 rural).

No teleportation:
North: 4 elite solo, 8 vet pair, +58.1 cubes
South: 4.5 vet pair, +17.8 cubes
Rural: 2.5 vet solo, +6.9 cubes (capped)

Total meguca: 19
Total cubes: 82.8


With teleportation:
North: 4 elite solo, 5.5 vet pair, +57.6 cubes
South: 3.5 vet pair, 17.3 cubes
Rural: 2 vet solo, +6.8 cubes

Total meguca: 15+1 = 16
Total cubes: 81.7 - 3.75 = 77.95

Savings: +3 meguca, -4.8 cubes (about 1 meguca's worth of cubes), so +2 meguca over simply reducing the number of hunters.


1 cube of that loss is from the rounding of using units of 0.5 meguca. That is, we could technically harvest a bit more from each territory, but it would be a wasteful overcommit.



Aside: This uses the same formula in all cases, but I'm not sure that the Teleport option applies to the rural area? Since this is tied to dispatch, and dispatch doesn't cover rural, was thinking that the teleport shouldn't apply to rural. If so, need to put the extra 0.5 meguca back on the rural area total, giving us an overall savings of 1.5 meguca instead of 2, right in line with the predicted amount from the sample spreadsheet.

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1 meguca vet produces roughly 3.97 cubes so that's more like +1.75 meguca.

Since we are already using the teleporter... does it make sense to use on the Elite Solo in addition?

Elite Solo might be more viable than the Vet Solo because they have a higher base to start from. I think it adds one full cube per an Elite hunter. So that that's an advantage of .75 cubes net per an Elite Solo.

So wouldn't that be the cost of one additional cube to gain one more meguca?

It wouldn't make sense to use the teleporter just for that, because you'd have to account for the teleporter meguca cost, but if we are already using the teleporter for the pairs then it makes sense to do the Solo hunters as well, doesn't it?

Basically it means that the marginal cost of adding the Elite Solo to an already existing teleporter transport network is low enough to make it beneficial, right?

Or did you already apply the bonus tot he Solo hunters?
Now since we are under hunting... it might make sense to only gain 0.5 meguca vets and instead gain back that lost cube.

I'll have to run more numbers after dinner. I have to head out soon to my niece's christening and we have a family dinner aftwerwards. So I won't be able to really look at the numbers for a couple hours at least.

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The teleporter bonus was applied to everyone, solo or pair (or pack as well, but I didn't have anyone set up for that), and vet and elite.

The cost is applied to the total number of hunters — though I should remove the cost that I applied to the rural area if the rural hunters aren't getting the boost. So it should actually be a cost of 3.25 cubes for the 13 hunters in the North/South areas, while excluding the 2.5 (not 2.0) in the rural. That makes the overall benefit +2.5 meguca (after accounting for the teleporter) for -4.25 cubes (since cube harvest dropped by 1.0 due to rounding differences).

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My current logic is that it doesn't apply to rural. Since you're effectively using teleportation to jump between demons spotted by your dispatchers.

Dispatch is inefficient in the rural area compared to just having boots on the ground. (Technically speaking you could do dispatch on rural areas, but the efficiency is too low to justify it.)

BTW, the two events in hunting are the beginning of the world closing in on you, you can expect other groups to begin impacting you a lot more shortly.

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Here's the link to the Google Drive file. Made it so that teleportation doesn't affect rural areas, and you can set separate transport for rural and urban (eg: moped in rural, teleport in urban).

Note that it's the actual file that I edit, so it will change from time to time throughout turns, and whenever I further adjust it, or add extra pages for other types of comparisons, etc. The link should be read-only, so you'll want to copy/save your own instance for personal use.

General details:
Hunting1/2/3 are just different copies of the same page, so that you can do comparisons of different configurations.
The cells that are designed for user editing are in orange (including the Data page, with the current armor count).
Anything that lights up in red is 'unsafe' — either using more armor than we have, or a casualty rate higher than 0%.
Meguca page is for tracking how many girls are assigned to which areas, and general cube use.
Money was a forecast on income over time, but is the most free-form; don't expect it to always be accurate.

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I thought teleportation was separate from dispatchers. We may not have dispatchers in rural areas, but we still have Demon Forecasting.

Last I remember the idea was that it effects rural. The lack of dispatchers lessens the effectiveness, but the greater distances between forecast demon routes meant greater benefits to teleportation in rural (similar to why Seto can hunt nomadic areas). These opposing effects were then going to be ruled as canceling each other out to make the math easier.

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Hmm, I suppose that makes sense as well and I probably did say it. My memory is less than great at times. I guess I'll allow it, though keep in mind that when you hit a 75 cube harvest I'll be bumping you to 1.5 meguca upkeep on it.

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Hmm. I'll need to revert some of my corrections, then, but I'll keep rural and urban separate in my spreadsheet, as it's not always worthwhile, and rural areas have blocky edges on demon strength.

--

Two issues we'll want to decide on.

1) Do we want to do the skewed split for hunting, with something like 45/20 instead of 33/32? This will free up a number of meguca every other turn, but clamp down on available meguca on the alternate turns. The numbers assigned to hunting will be like 22 one turn, 15 the next, instead of 18.5 both turns. Essentially, we'll spend one turn doing a massive amount of hunting, and then the next turn using the free meguca to pursue more meguca-costly projects such as research.

Arguments could be made either way on how to go about it. I'm inclined towards staying balanced at the moment because it's 'safer' — if something happens on a high hunt turn, we're not caught scrambling to get the people we need (at least, not as much). However I'm not entirely against the swing mode, as it feels like it could be useful; just not entirely sure how we'd apply it.


2) Do we want to activate the teleportation methodology? We lose net cubes, but right now we're more pressed for meguca. Need to get an idea of what projects we want to focus on, and how many people we'll need this month.

Updated my spreadsheet to count all hunting costs — Demon Forcasting and Teleportation — and taking the net total there.

Default: 81.8 cubes for 19 units (4 elite)
Teleport: 77.3 cubes for 17 units (3 elite), including the teleporter

+2 units (including 1 elite) for -4.5 cubes. 1 cube of loss is from allocation rounding.


I get the feeling we're going to want to make use of the elites' abilities this turn, so freeing up a spare elite will help with that.


If we use teleportation, we'll be at a net +10 cubes before grief spirals, which doesn't leave much room for research costs. We'll have 2 elites and 8.5 vets after all mandatory + Sports Day, though, which gives us a fair amount of wiggle room for all the things we want to look at.


Also, if we combine teleportation with the swing hunting, we could end up with substantially more meguca available, particularly in off turns. I'll need to see what the numbers look like.


Anyway, thoughts on which way people would like to go?

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I think we should combine the territories.
We need to play it safe for now.

And along those lines, this first turn we should not use teleportation transport. We need a good harvest of cubes this turn to put us solidly in the black on our stockpile. Next turn we should consider teleportation transport to make more meguca months available for other things.

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OK, updated the spreadsheet so that the Teleport mode works for rural areas, but is still selected separately from the urban areas.

--

Just as a side note: We can combine the current North + Seto for a size 37 territory at DS 0. That would give us a moderate swing size (instead of the more extreme 45/20), and is a reasonable thing to do due to the fact that both areas are already at the same DS value, and we don't have to lose anything from merging. It also fits within the armor limits if we use the teleportation method.

If we do a swing 37/28 split with teleportation, we can go from 3 elite/16.5 vet/81.1 cubes (33/32 territory split) to a 3 elite/14 vet/1 teleporter/81.2 cubes result. That is, we get the same number of cubes, but save 1.5 vets.

Next turn would be 69.5 cubes for 3 elite/11.5 vets/1 teleporter (1.5 vets less than this turn). Overall average of a bit over 75, instead of 79 without using teleportation.


In terms of available meguca after discounting hunt/job/support, it would become:

This turn: 2 elite/9.5 vets
Next turn: 2 elite/11 vets

Compared to, if using an even split:

This turn: 2 elite/8 vets
Next turn: 2 elite/8.5 vets

The above doesn't count the -2 for Sports Day in any of them.

So an extra 1.5 to 2.5 vets per turn. Leaving this as a potential path in case we really need a couple extra meguca, but going to assume an even split for the time being.

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Actually that presents another option. Don't do the even split and instead keep the slight swing. Use the teleportation transport on the large hunt, and drop it on the low hunt. I think that results in a slight average gain for us on the meguca side at a smaller cost on the cube side.

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Which if I remember right is what we ended up doing...

 

[Elder Haman]

Final review post (Part 3):

Yeah, that's going to be a bit of a ways away. I gave a brief rundown of buying one of our houses, instead of renting:
Short version: we need to put 20% down, and pay another ~15% in acquisition costs, for a total of $175,000 in initial costs, with roughly $2,150 per month in loan repayment costs and $700 per month in property taxes. Bottom line: we're going to need another restaurant-sized business, possibly two, to have a hope of even putting a down payment on that church before Mami graduates from high school, without even getting into how much it's going to cost to renovate.

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I wonder, is there any research we could do to increase grief cube efficiency? Study how people use magic in normal day-today activities, during fighting, while playing around with magic, etc. Observing which types of activities are the most expensive and coming up with ways to make them cheaper.

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I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. If you mean grief spirals, then yes, shielding wouldn't help the problem. But I'm talking about the fact that normal living and magic usage costs an average of one unit of cubes each month per girl. Magic usage is directly correlated to grief accumulation, so making magic more efficient (e.g. by using shielding or by telling each girl to focus on using the type of magic that she is most efficient at) should definitely be possible.

Also, girls who are hunting probably use more cubes than girls who are working normal jobs, but apparently this balances out at the moment. Maybe we could study this so that we have actual numbers to use for optimization? It might not matter much now, but it would matter at some theoretical point in the future where we have farming figured out so that only a small portion of our population does it.

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In universe, keeping track of that stuff, and determining the actual values of w, x, y, and z would be very important and the ability to put that knowledge to use optimizing magic use would probably be highly imperative. Even an average saving of .05 GCU per person per month is a gigantic advantage.

It's just too much work for us players to keep track of.

Maybe a research action to let us find the values IC and use that to lower the abstract average by some small fractional amount per person?

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Given your group contains a bunch of math nerds this is probably true. And you can expect that differing values of those between girls means that each likely has somewhat variable grief cube use, even varying month to month. I believe I originally gave it specifically as 1 GCU being the average use per month per girl. And you've always had enough girls that statistically speaking you'll probably be pretty close to average so long as variance isn't too severe.

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I might give a research project on this. Though I could also see making it an upkeep project since you'd need to dedicate some resources to carefully measuring each girl's need on a month to month basis. Mami as the players have helped characterize her is not the type to ever risk any girl's life for .05 of a GCU saved and so would want it carefully tracked.

Something like a Grief use monitoring position, 1 girl per 40 reducing upkeep cubes 5%. (This may sound like a terrible tradeoff since it's 1 meguca month for 2 cubes, but keep in mind it's effective Demon-strength free cubes, so it's better than it sounds, at least when you've got lots of meguca free but few cubes, or are pushing up against your sustainable pop limit.) This would represent approximately 10 minutes a day per girl being monitored to check in on them and do any follow up math, which is actually rather short when you think about it.

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It's meant as the opposite tradeoff of teleportation support for hunters. One lets you trade cubes for meguca months, the other lets you trade meguca months for cubes. It gives you options.

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It does more than that: it lets us trade meguca months for territory-free cubes. That'll be important if, for example, we somehow find ourselves with 10-12+ more meguca living off of the same sized territory. For now it's not worth it, but if we go all Serene-borg on that nomadic invader group and find out that there's actually a dozen meguca in the group? We'll need to squeeze as many cubes out of our territory as we can.

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Well... it's pretty easy to math out. 40 x -0.05 = -2 cubes

So even at maximum usage it is about half as efficient as having that girl just hunt for cubes (assuming it's a vet in pair hunting).

Might be worthwhile if we get in a situation where we have a lot of extra meguca months, or where the territory is not sufficient to harvest enough cubes. But normally, no.

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It's less dramatic than you think. Largely because getting higher morale is essentially more a logarithmic than linear process. The amount of effort to hold morale at say 1 or 2 is far far less than that needed to hold it at 4 or 5. It's hard to explain precisely, but think about it from this perspective: how much does it take to make a child that is rich, has a loving family, and is healthy happier vs how much it takes to make a homeless beggar happier? This is the most extreme example but it illustrates the idea. Diminishing marginal returns on happiness essentially, the happier you are the harder it is to make you happier. (Though happiness is not a perfectly accurate term, but you get the idea.)

This works in reverse as well, it takes a lot to make conditions worse the worse off your are to begin with.

Essentially all morale effects are modified by how high your morale currently is. It's a very unforgiving system at higher levels but very forgiving at lower levels.

You've also created a group with every effort to try and make the girls feel a sense of comradery and unity. This means that morale effects tend to ripple out more. (Though of course there are benefits to this approach as well.)

A callous group would not promote such unity and thereby reduce the impact of any deaths on the overall morale. Plus even at 0 morale a pack hunting group can offer better casualty rates than a solo hunter could manage by herself. And the need for new recruits would therefore still be in the sustainable level that Incubators are looking at.

If your group was at low morale levels you'd run into problems like dissent, desertion, theft, etc. These can be managed though as countless oppressive regimes have managed around the world.


This sums it up as well.

Yes this is a fair thing to say. Absorbing a group that lost 1/3rd its members in a day did not help your morale. Particularly in a group emphasizing integration like your own. You can expect that the abstraction of total morale is a combination of the differential though. (I actually shifted the meguca selection in this turn's grief spiral check to account for that a little.)

This is also a big situation. To a more pragmatic group preserving the quality core of the group at the cost of the greens makes good practical sense. It also helps maintain loyalty in layers to help you keep everyone in control, again a tactic many regimes have employed.

Something to keep in mind is that other diplomatic "nicer" groups can be accepting some casualty risk as well. They aren't going to be pushing up against 5/10 on morale doing so like you've managed in the past, but they won't break down either. With some minor casualty risk you're likely to be able to hover around 3/10 morale.

Something to keep in mind as well is that 10/10 morale is essentially impossible. The happiest person on Earth would probably be represented by 8 or 9 out of 10 morale. 10/10 would basically be: nothing bad has ever happened to you or will ever happen to you, you live in an unusually happy Disney Movie.

Your morale score is never meant to get that high as it would mean that nothing could possibly happen to make you despair. A morale of 5 is actually really good. It's hard to imagine, but meguca live a kind of terrible existence where just being sad can be life threatening. Every normal person gets sad or depressed every now and then it's just the vast majority of the time they recover.

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Interesting idea. Heh, I suspect a Serene recruitment pamphlet to be like 90% statistics, which would probably weird out a lot of the teenage girl recruits. Hey, maybe there's an omake in that?

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Do we actually know what our reputation is? Many of the groups are hostile (especially to scouting attempts), but I suspect that they're hostile to everyone by default rather than to us specifically. Most magical girl groups probably expand by kicking out the previous occupants rather than trying to integrate them, so I doubt that our behavior in the past would raise too many flags. And considering that the "pressganging" that we've done in the past has resulted in people being genuinely better off and content with their new situations? And that we were the first people that Seto came to when she needed help and that her group decided to join up afterwards? We probably have a pretty good reputation with anyone who actually knows about us. Of course, most groups probably don't have any more Intel than we do.

That being said, I'm not in favor of pushing the issue in the nomadic area right now. Too much risk for too little reward. We do need to do something about the apparent sabotage in Iwata, though.

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Slight sidetrack...



Hmm. Do we have an overarching corporation? That is, does the same 'company' own all of our businesses? We're the Serenes in the magical girl world, but what are we in the real/financial world?


Since we're looking into more land purchases (ie: Kyouko's church), I wonder if we can take things more naturally in that direction with a business that buys and sells property. That is, buy foreclosed or run down property, fix it up, then resell it.

It would give us experience in refurbishing property, which we'll need when working on Kyouko's church. Lots of interior work would also not be as generally noticeable, as far as the age of our workers would go. Magical girl strength combined with smaller bodies to get into more difficult areas would also be a boon. And we might be able to use some of our magical research as a bonus for finding and repairing damaged areas. The main issue is getting the base experience to start with. Checking foundations, interior damage, insect damage, electrical safety measures, etc.

However it's something that's relatively easy to translate into significant profits (10% profit being trivial, and 25% to 35% being fairly common for a fixer-upper; profits on foreclosed properties can get very high), just for the cost of labor (which we can manage) and a little money at Home Depot.

It'll take a while to build up. With our current bank, we could get a loan on a property of up to around maybe 100k. We could double our bank in 3 to 4 transactions with just 10% profit each.


Am also thinking that we might edge into information brokering. With the courier business, the girls are going to be known by a lot of people, and undoubtedly a lot of people in a lot of interesting places. I would be completely unsurprised if the yakuza were occasionally using our services for confidential deliveries.

We need to look into what sorts of information can be implied by the types of information being moved around. Which companies are in contact with which others; how that relates to public news, business projects, political relations, and other such things.

Particularly, I want someone in our couriers who is known as the person who knows everyone. Someone nice, friendly, cheerful, good at socializing, and very good reading people and mentally cross-referencing information.


The problem with the housing idea is the lack of meguca to handle the work. Technically it should only need maybe 4 people at most, but we're already tight on meguca-months. Of course the labor is only half of it; the other half is managing the re-sell, which means the actual number of meguca-months that we'd need to allocate to it actually isn't that high. Maybe 2-3. Would also be good if we can get in good with a realtor on the info-network side.


While the restaurant is heavily leaning towards a high school-age clientele, we could conceivably cross-sell it with the courier business/info network, discreet and circumspect. Plus we need to add a delivery service.

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I like this idea, but note that there would be a fairly high investment cost on the front end in terms of time and money that would not pay off until the property is sold. We could probably start by assigning one or two people to spend a month getting familiar with real estate values in the area, techniques for renovation, etc. We'd need to get them a netbook, of course. Once we actually buy a property it would take time and effort and money to renovate it, and then more time to find a buyer for it once we're done. But it would be potentially quite profitable and the experience would be invaluable once we have enough money to buy the church.

One advantage of renovation is that it would be low priority work. If we need someone for a different task, then there would be no cost for taking someone off of renovation to do it (apart from the renovations taking longer).

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2 Diplomatic issues to think over. This post will deal with the nomadic group.


A group of at least 4, hunting an area that Seto says she typically can harvest 3 from, without incurring any exceptional risk. We don't know how much they were dedicating to that hunt (eg: half-time, full-time, etc), but Seto met them several times while only hunting half-time there herself.

Issues:

Do they know about demon strength risks?

What tier are they? I would expect at least vet, since they managed to injure Seto. If there was an elite in the group, I would have expected Seto to have mentioned it. 4-to-1 is enough for a group of vets to fight on roughly even footing with an elite. They would have to be fairly experienced in working together, as well. This is not a group of newbies.

So, implications are that they're a group of experienced vets, hunting as a pack. They'd almost certainly have to know about the risks of overhunting and demon strength.

The fact that they'd actually fight an elite over nomadic territory also suggests a degree of desperation.

They're new to the area, since Seto hasn't seen them before. Given the recent major disruption due to the Class 3, we can expect that there is almost certainly a relation to that event.

Is it possible that they're the remnants of a territory that the Class 3 tore through? Alternatively, the Class 3 could have eliminated some groups along its path, which would create a power vacuum that some meguca from Tokyo might have followed to get out of that city, and they in turn pushed out other nearby groups when consolidating their hold on the newly opened territory.

If that's the case, that would explain their hostility against Seto; they've been put in a position where they have to treat all unknown meguca as hostile, while at the same time scraping together whatever cubes they can manage in an area poorly suited for it.

Another possibility is that they are with the group from Tokyo that's pushing out into the power vacuum. That makes any interactions with them much more difficult. On the other hand, this seems like an unlikely situation, since a Tokyo group wouldn't be hunting in a way that's likely to generate Class 3's on themselves. Unless they're actively creating Class 3's to clear out territory ahead of themselves; however that seems like a rather stupid approach to territory growth.



How to deal with it? [assuming here that they are not the Tokyo group]

a) Ignore it. Leave them to their own devices. As long as they don't try to force their way south, it's not our problem.

I don't think that's going to be a viable plan, as the nomadic territory cannot support them indefinitely, so they'll have to push outwards for more cube harvests. Given the limited directions they could have come from, and the high likelihood of being pushed in our direction from Tokyo intrusions, we will have to deal with them directly, soon.

b) Shock & Awe. A show of force to counter their show of force. Either block further progress towards us, or force them to join us.

I don't think this is a good plan. Gang-pressing has its known issues, and we don't want to be developing a reputation for that, especially when we're trying to rebuild our own morale. Putting up a wall to prevent their intrusion I think will also not work too well. It will probably be functional, in the sense that we can shift their movement around us, but it's ideologically unsound, both for the Serenes and Mami.

c) Diplomacy. A more open approach, pushing cooperation and integration.

Certainly preferred by Mami, but problematic in terms of personal interaction. We don't know what problems they've been through, but they are likely to be extremely wary of any offers by groups they don't know. They may have heard of the Serene, but that could just as easily be propaganda, and they aren't in a position to extend trust.


If they are the Tokyo group...

a) Ignore it. A short term solution, as they are clearly pushing outwards for territory. This will only delay things.

b) Shock & Awe. Viable, as it prevents an aggressive group from seeing us as an easy target to take over.

c) Diplomacy. Difficult to engage in. Far too easy for this to lead to a pattern of conciliation, which we don't want to allow to happen.



So, we need information. Scouting first. Taya, Seto and Kyouko (scouting, teleportation, stealth). Need to track down their home base and get an idea of the size of their group, and whether this is a splinter group, or part of a larger faction.

Assuming it's a splinter group, then we go to Diplomacy second. Mami, Taura, Seto, barrier. Set up a firm line against hostile actions, but be open to the possibility of them joining if they're in desperate straits.

If it's a Tokyo group, be more militant. Mami, Kyouko, Seto, barrier.

Add Taya to the diplomacy groups if the scouting is necessary to find them again.

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Flipping houses is hard, risky work, very dependent on the housing market. If we want to try it I'd rather not bet our whole nest egg on the attempt, and certainly not on a $100,000 property. You know what you can buy for $100,000? An apartment, or maybe a small shack way out in a remote rural town. That's basically it. Mitakihara is on the coast; you won't be able to buy a two-bedroom house in a coastal city for less than $500,000.

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As for the prank, it should be clear what that was. It was to study our strength and our response time to an attack. The demons were sufficient to force our local girls to retreat and call for backup. The hostile group (I'm guessing my previous thoughts that either the area between Iwata and our main area has been unified, or allied up to deal with us specifically. The very minimal response area 1 gave in response to diplomacy is weak evidence towards this. The update specifically said how they responded was strange) knew our force level in the area, and probably wanted to figure out if they could force us out of the area. Fortunately, our elites were in the area already, so our quick and overwhelming response has likely made them quite uneasy, but also gave them info on our elite's capabilities.

If I was running the OpFor, next would be an all-in strike against a lone elite as she traveled to or from the Iwata territory (preferably Seto as an obvious teleporter, but anyone traveling alone would do).

If they were operating under quite immoral standards, they could wreck a train that one (or several) of our girls was traveling on, and just pay Kyubey off with GC to cover it up as an "accident."

The less aggressive option is to use the same tactic to draw off the elites (since we seem to respond all-in with minimal or no reserve), and then attack in a different location. This is probably the most likely. A distraction in Mitakihara, and then trashing our apartments/stroage in Iwata would be a pretty hefty blow against us. If they prefer to keep us split up between divided territories, they could do the reverse (distraction in Iwata, attack in Mitakihara), and then we would be forced to choose between continuing to be divided, giving up on responding to attacks all-in (allowing normal attacks), or invading areas 11 and 1 indiscriminately in an attempt to root out our enemies (who could then ambush us on their home ground).

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I tend towards two types of strategies, Mighty Glacier/Defense Heavy/Inevitable Wall of Doom and Do-or-Die/Glass cannon/Go for the Throat. The Serene have so far been quite successful at the former, to the point that trying to compete with them directly at it will only lead to failure. So instead I go with the latter, a heavy alpha strike on the most strategically important enemy piece would be my choice. Ideally, they'd use stealth or a counter-power of some sort to increase the odds of success (Anti-Magic, Precog to figure out where she'll teleport to and set up a secondary ambush there, Clairvoyant + Teleporter, Stealth to get close enough to ensure at least a disabling hit, any MG who has a "trapping" type power, and any MG with an overwhelming offense. Or any combination of the above.) Mami herself would be the other option for an alpha strike, since she's quite clearly the lynchpin for the Serene. Kill her and they would implode. However, her reputation is quite well known, so they may be hesitant to engage her.

Kyouko is unlikely to be by herself (clone), and I'm not sure Taya is flashy enough to be easily noticed as an Elite without actually fighting her.

Even if it fails and she escapes, it still means the Serene can no longer easily move between Iwata and Mitakihara (must move in groups), and you could switch to another strategy (the loss would be mainly of surprise).

Of course, most don't share my love of victory or death, so a more conservative strategy will most likely be used, unless they are feeling truly desperate. The train derail tactic would work against almost any MG except a teleporter. The misdirection tactic would have the most gains in the short term, but would rely on avoiding reprisals/refusing battle.

Mostly, it's what they are trying to get out of the first move. Hit a base for the cube stockpile/moral damage (our homes are not safe) vs. Kill an Elite/moral damage (Even our elites are not safe).

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[Elder Haman]

Lacking communication creates a lot of problems in general, but it's really one of the hardest problems in life to fix. No one trusts everyone. And no one is trusted by everyone.

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At the age of 20 I had already decided on two things:

1: If you trust people, you will be betrayed
2: The only way to achieve anything decent in this world is to trust people

Thus my conclusion: To be happy, trust people, and get used to being betrayed.

 

[Kinematics]

Glad to see this picking back up again. Just getting over a miserable bout of the flu, so attempts to get back into the discussion haven't really made any progress. Appreciate Haman's reminders about past discussions, though.

 

[veekie]

I don't think they could in canon either. Otherwise they'd have just made the wishes into direct anti-entropy effects instead of what the girls wanted. But they do kind of siphon off a bit. Or possibly just tack on some riders to the contract. (Note for instance that even in canon every magical girl got a certain amount of powers like strength and durability not at all connected to their wish.)

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Easiest answer is that wishes are granted directly by the girls themselves using their own power, and the Incubators merely unlock the ability as part of activating their magic and converting them to soul gem. Which means in turn, trying to force someone to make a wish they don't want to invariably fails, it is granted by their desires channeled through their understanding.

It also means most of the OCP type wishes just don't work unless the girl knows enough about the context of how things work, or you'd get a superficial alteration.

 

[Sereg]

I don't think they could in canon either. Otherwise they'd have just made the wishes into direct anti-entropy effects instead of what the girls wanted. But they do kind of siphon off a bit. Or possibly just tack on some riders to the contract. (Note for instance that even in canon every magical girl got a certain amount of powers like strength and durability not at all connected to their wish.)

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It's implied that the Incubators destroy the magical girl's old body and replace it with an identically looking but more powerful one. Also,

Easiest answer is that wishes are granted directly by the girls themselves using their own power, and the Incubators merely unlock the ability as part of activating their magic and converting them to soul gem. Which means in turn, trying to force someone to make a wish they don't want to invariably fails, it is granted by their desires channeled through their understanding.

It also means most of the OCP type wishes just don't work unless the girl knows enough about the context of how things work, or you'd get a superficial alteration.

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This.

 

[TheEyes]

Easiest answer is that wishes are granted directly by the girls themselves using their own power, and the Incubators merely unlock the ability as part of activating their magic and converting them to soul gem. Which means in turn, trying to force someone to make a wish they don't want to invariably fails, it is granted by their desires channeled through their understanding.

It also means most of the OCP type wishes just don't work unless the girl knows enough about the context of how things work, or you'd get a superficial alteration.

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It's implied that the Incubators destroy the magical girl's old body and replace it with an identically looking but more powerful one.

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Right. It seems to me that the Wish isn't necessarily a process that the Incubators really control; the only reason they offer to mediate the Wish in the first place is because it decouples the girl's soul from her body, so the Incubators can then Lich-ify the soul, turning it into a Grief engine. Wishes don't themselves generate Grief so much as provide the mechanism by which the Incubators can collect Grief in the first place.

 

[Elder Haman]

Easiest answer is that wishes are granted directly by the girls themselves using their own power, and the Incubators merely unlock the ability as part of activating their magic and converting them to soul gem. Which means in turn, trying to force someone to make a wish they don't want to invariably fails, it is granted by their desires channeled through their understanding.

It also means most of the OCP type wishes just don't work unless the girl knows enough about the context of how things work, or you'd get a superficial alteration.

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Indeed. I always thought it was implicit that your wish had to be a wish you truly wished for. So you couldn't make a wish for "world peace" or "control over grief" unless that actually was what you wish for. Just saying the words isn't enough.

This is what made Madoka so special. She both had sufficient knowledge to understand what wish was needed to change the world to make it better for magical girls, and she also was willing to sacrifice herself and truly wished for this change. She wasn't "doing the right thing" because that was expected of her, she did it because it's what she wanted.

 

[Elder Haman]

Also... are people aware that we are voting?

Because I think I'm the only one that voted...

 

[Sereg]

Also... are people aware that we are voting?

Because I think I'm the only one that voted...

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I get too nervous to vote in some quests. This is one of them.

 

[UbeOne]

[x] Elder Haman

 

[landcollector]

*Looks at Elder Haman's vote*
Hm. Makes sense to me.

[X] Elder Haman

 

[Elder Haman]

Something else to think about.

This appears to be standard operating procedure with these girls. This was practiced and smooth. If they see a location being over hunted, then they attack and "gem coma" a few of the girls there.

How many girls have they done this too?

I now envision a room in this group's base, with soul gems lined up on a shelf.

That seems to me like something Mami is going to be very... intense about.

Once we have our girls back, we might want to figure out how many other girls this group has done this too, and perhaps think about what we should do about it.

 

[veekie]

I now envision a room in this group's base, with soul gems lined up on a shelf.

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Like in Kazumi Magica?

 

[UbeOne]

Like in Kazumi Magica?

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At least this group doesn't carry a treasure chest filled with shiny soul gems.

 

[Godwinson]

Let's go with Mami's plan.

[X] Elder Haman

 

[UbeOne]

Mami knows best. After all, she is the leader.