Until we can persuade Kyubey to disclose the actual equation he's determined for Class 3 spawn chance, I'm loathe to ever hunt beyond +10; even +10 is making me nervous because that's the supposed minimum for Class 3 spawns. I wonder if he'd be willing to trade for our demon hunting diary info?
Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
- Thread starter inverted_helix
- Start date
It was Turn 25:
Apparently "Open formal relations" is basically just a recruiting pitch for "groups" with only one girl.
Trade vote, ignoring fluff as always.
[X] Trade them an additional 10 GCU for 20 more points.
Purchase: (70 points)
[X] 50-Spell anchoring
[X] 20-$40,000
Reasoning: $20k isn't worth the knowledge on how they're organized or on how they do the interrogations. IC we don't know too much about the interrogations, but we're not planning on letting our gems be stolen any time soon nor are we planning on stealing others' gems. On the organization, it seems like just talking to some of the other member states would give us that information anyway.
Also, @Elder Haman Where did you get the +5 cubes number from? We're getting a bit less than 1 extra cube/month, not ~5. We do free up the penalty from our research, but that's it.
[X] Trade them an additional 10 GCU for 20 more points.
Purchase: (70 points)
[X] 50-Spell anchoring
[X] 20-$40,000
Reasoning: $20k isn't worth the knowledge on how they're organized or on how they do the interrogations. IC we don't know too much about the interrogations, but we're not planning on letting our gems be stolen any time soon nor are we planning on stealing others' gems. On the organization, it seems like just talking to some of the other member states would give us that information anyway.
Also, @Elder Haman Where did you get the +5 cubes number from? We're getting a bit less than 1 extra cube/month, not ~5. We do free up the penalty from our research, but that's it.
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Bear in mind, we have a ton of ways to make more money (mostly limited by meguca power) and we're stretching for things to spend it on. We haven't even touched healing as a money source and we're not short on business options.
If we don't know how they did it in the first place, then it doesn't matter if we're not planning on letting people be kidnapped, we just don't know what we need to do to stop it. This also potentially chains into other insights, like grief spiral mitigation.
For general warfare it's a tremendously complex simulation I have to run through a program.
For individual planned battles its essentially (Greens*d20 + Veterans*2d20 + Elites*6d20)*modifiers vs the same on the other side dependent on number of combatants.
Luck of the dice.
Eh things are still pretty good, I feel like people are cracking up a bit much under the pressure.
Armor it doesn't really matter for, the meguca wearing it can maintain the imbue automatically without the insulation.
Any girls that you want to practice this will have to dedicate a significant amount of time to practicing together. Call it 1 meguca per 4 girls you want trained in it.
Not quite, it's going to be some degree of free teleport transit I think.
No idea what you mean, she beat six girls
Not quite the accurate reason.
With as much I loved Ranma 1/2 a decade ago I couldn't help but include it when you reminded me of it.
Fixed.
Yeah unless you want to change it.
The advantage is there if you can decrease danger a little.
The firing range is more for their magical practice.
Essentially. I've said it a couple times before but there needs to be an organization to open relations with. When you're dealing with just 1 person that's basically what it breaks down to.
Also still wanting that omake someone suggested about the Tokyo girls looking for the probable cannibalism.
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That was me, and I can totally do that if I get details about the Tokyo girls living arrangements. Or just living arrangements in general for most puella. Is their hot water limited? Do they have free wifi? Do they have communal showers or does each room have its own bathroom? Is Mami trying to figure out how to enroll them into a school or do they have most of their non-training/non-hunting time free to do whatever they want?
Also, while the suspected cannibalism might get a mention, it's more rotating watches, insular behavior, hoarding food and money, general paranoia, suspicious explorations, interrogations masquerading as 'friendly chats,' attempts to be helpful backfiring, and trigger-happy reflexes.
Basically, The Walking Dead Season 5, magical girl edition. I was completely serious about the zombie genre parallel.
Oh, one last thing: what month/season is it? I avoided bringing about any specifics about the weather in the previous snippets, but it'd be nice to know when we are, roughly speaking.
As to the Tokyo girls living arrangements, they're the same as the rest now. As to prior, you captured that pretty well in your earlier omake. Homelessness on the run barely scraping in enough cubes to stay alive, and still in some ways better than their condition in Tokyo where the grief cubes were plentiful but your odds of being killed were quite high.
I don't perfectly recall how I mathed it out perfectly, but I can generalize what you've got.
You cover enough housing costs that hot water is no more limited than typical for apartments or large households. Each person isn't going to have her own bathroom, you're probably looking at around three to four people to a bedroom at this point and probably a little more to a bathroom. (Somewhat different from the main values because the abstraction is that around half live with their parents and around half live in your housing, don't stare too hard.)
You have cable tv/internet but it's fairly cheap grade and you don't issue laptops or such. The phones you issue at the price you pay don't include much if any data, but they should be able to use the internet in your households given that pretty much any modern phone even the cheap ones can.
Mami strongly encourages going to school. Meguca-months represent basically a full time job worth of activity, not every hour in the day. So it's a little rough to do that and school, but it is manageable, especially with so many around to help and an oddly nerdy culture. Plus similar circumstances so things are largely scheduled around school anyways.
(School vs no school is a choice I took out of the players hands because it was too hard to balance really. Plus Mami managed to go to school in canon so it seemed pretty reasonable that she'd want all her girls to go to school too. I thought about giving it as an option with a massive morale penalty to just get extra time out of each girl by not letting them go to school, but it was a huge balancing morass. You may not think they'd have a morale hit from skipping school, but it's a piece of normalcy they can cling to. You can figure that most groups aren't getting too much more than 1 meguca-month of labor out of each girl per month because the morale hit is too hard when you push them that far into the life.)
It's not a great life at all, but even for the girls you started with who were orphans it's still a better life than they had before, and it's got comradery.
Well IIRC I believe I put the start of the quest as the start of summer, so turn 28 should be the middle of fall and turn 29 the end of fall. Turn 30 the start of winter. I honestly pay very little attention to the season though.
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Improved Rotating Tactics. Assuming we stay at +10 DS, swings we get an additional 5 cubes a month.
We don't even know what questions to ask, or who to ask, or anything. We'd be fumbling around blind.
$20k isn't worth 10 cubes to us right now. What do you intend to spend it on?
Okay... not to bad.
Yeah, I figured by "firing range" you did not mean an actual firing range, but rather an underground location that they call their "firing range" because it's where they practice fighting.
??? I must have missed this reference.
Interesting. I wonder if you can do that with elite parts of your meguca force like for example Nagoyas core combat group (they sound like their 'professional army' of sorts). If they spend all the time they ususally spend in school intensively training with each other the morale loss should be manageable, since it would build quite an esprit de corps and they'd quickly grow to be rather deadly since they put one Meguca Month per girl per turn into becoming better combatants. You can also make joining the 'army' voluntary, making sure you only get the motivated ones.
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I get that; it's more the existence of an underground firing range at all, especially in gun-hating Japan, is going to draw a lot of attention; after all, even the gangs there tend not to have anything worse than handguns. Who would you be able to buy such a property from? Was it custom-built? Either way it's going to draw attention like mad.
Shooting ranges tend to be 5-35 yards long, and in a meguca's case the shorter ones are basically entirely useless so we're almost certainly looking at a larger one; once you include the soundproofing needed that's a very large room to build underground, which is going to be both massively expensive and especially noteworthy. Something like this would have to be built in nomad country, rather than inside a city proper as property values inside Nagoya would push this project into the high tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, as you'd basically be digging out most of a city block to build something like this, which implies some interesting things about the size of the core group's territory.
All in all the existence of such a structure under the Nagoya group's control is extremely worrisome; the implications in group size, wealth, and insulation from scrutiny are potentially staggering.
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You are still too caught up on the "firing range" phrase.
I figure they own a large building, like a front for the yakuza. That has a gym, and a large underground basement that they use as a firing range. It's not something specially built.
It's still a mark of huge wealth.
They totally went the crime route, and with a telepath at the helm they won.
We gotta get telepathic defenses. And Taura is sort of our trump card. They will probably be assuming that with our lack of wealth that we must not have a telepath. Sooner we have telepathic defenses the better our chances.
FixerUpper suggested earlier that since the genre that the Serene are playing is Princess Maker while everyone else is playing Zombie Survival that the girls from Tokyo joining would think the group too good to be true, and following genre conventions probably secretly cannibals.
Yes this is what they mean by it, you have to consider the idea in character. I probably could have called it a dojo as well, but it's not really as fitting I think since dojos rarely handle the assortment of weapons you're dealing with amongst magical girls. And arena would put more focus on pvp than it does.
You know people feeling like money has no value is part of why I started charging you more maintenance and food costs.
I find it kind of funny people acting in this game like there's nothing they could do with money all the time.Why worry about Nagoya obviously having lots of money if it's useless.
They basically took a fundamentally different path and had very different starting conditions. Right now they look way better off than you, but you've got like 90% of your starting members still alive. Hino is probably looking at around 30% or so. Though that's largely the fault of starting conditions, but also partly being on the Xcom playstyle.
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It's not so much that we have nothing to do with money so much that there's not so much to do with single infusions of cash other than single-use morale bonuses like buying everyone a netbook. $20k isn't going to accomplish any of the medium-term goals of buying property or paying down the business loan.You know people feeling like money has no value is why I started charging you more maintenance and food costs.
There is one thing we do need ASAP: more armor. If we're going to take advantage of IRT it means we need to armor against an RT hunt up to something like +16DS, which means we need a lot more armor, and maybe something more than armor to keep casualty numbers manageable.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Congratulations Helix, you wrote a PMMM quest that can make players start grief spiraling too! Good work on staying close to the original flavor?
Ah, so we have more current Meguca-power?
:lol
No, I mean that most of your original girls are alive. Most of the girls Hino started with have died and been replaced.
@inverted_helix
I'm working on a hunting plan, but I need to know what Seto's bonus is going to be to figure out the math.
Probably do pack hunting...
Ah, I see. I figure Urako will be the suspicious one, Manami the believer in the new paradise, and the other two torn between the two positions?
What Eyes said. Trading cubes for $20k seems like it won't benefit us much right now. Rather wait until we have a 50 cube surplus and trade for $100k
? I think you misunderstand how armor works. We can't stack it higher than 6% right now, it's not about how much we buy.
Additionally, we have to be very cautious about going above +10 Demons Strength.
Finally, we can already reach that high of risk reduction by using Pack Tactics instead of Pairs.
I'm working on a hunting plan, but I need to know what Seto's bonus is going to be to figure out the math.
Probably do pack hunting...
Ah, I see. I figure Urako will be the suspicious one, Manami the believer in the new paradise, and the other two torn between the two positions?
You know people feeling like money has no value is part of why I started charging you more maintenance and food costs.
Why worry about Nagoya obviously having lots of money if it's useless.
What Eyes said. Trading cubes for $20k seems like it won't benefit us much right now. Rather wait until we have a 50 cube surplus and trade for $100k
? I think you misunderstand how armor works. We can't stack it higher than 6% right now, it's not about how much we buy.
Additionally, we have to be very cautious about going above +10 Demons Strength.
Finally, we can already reach that high of risk reduction by using Pack Tactics instead of Pairs.
No, we just have more of our original group. I don't think that has many mechanical advantages, since combat experience seems to plateau fairly quickly and age doesn't seem to help people break into Elite status. As a result, we likely have a higher proportion of vets to overall population, but fewer Elites, fewer greens, lower total population, and, thanks to Hino's faction bonus to criminal activity, less money.
And now there's a hint that we have yet another faction to our north. This is going to be a fun* year.
*- Using the Dwarf Fortress definition of Fun.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
I have posited that, once we stop rolling shit for diplomacy, it'll give a considerable bonus to recruitment.
So, pretty much our situation sucks?
My concern is that we're going to run out of armor if we shift to pack tactics to full hunt our territory. OTOH, spell anchoring might let us anchor tandem-cast shields into our physical shields, which could boost protections, but we won't know more about that until next month.
And I wasn't suggesting actually hunting to +16; I was making the observation that we could have gotten the same benefit as IRT if we were willing to RT hunt up to +14-16, although we'd be risking an unknown chance of Class 3s.
Primary mechanical benefit is the prevalence of vets to greens. Means the following:
#1: We can turn recruited greens into power much more quickly (since we can put the green on the jobs, and use vets for other things instead).
#2: We are better situated for guerrilla conflict than they. We could attack their greens with our vets, and cut their numbers down quickly, while they would have to attack vets instead. Their alpha strike team is more powerful than ours, but we could launch multiple attack teams made entirely of vets, while they probably can't.
#3: We can potentially recruit their vassals away from them, based on our higher survival rate
Not to worry, with vets pack hunting and elites pair hunting, with teleport transport we can hunt the North to 10 DS with IRT, using 3 elite, and 12.5 vets. Vets need -3% armor, so either hard leather or kevlar clothing will work, and the elites need -2% armor, so vest will be enough.
We got enough armor for the basics right now. Of course, once we get more tech to allow us to return to pair hunting we might need more armor. Or if we add more territory.
Tentative thoughts for next turn:
Personal Enchanting (costs 4 vets and 2 cubes)
Telepathic Defenses (costs 2 vets)
Business is Business with Coalition (cost 1 vet, 1 Mami)
Join Imperium on Area 17 (costs 3 vets)
Leaves 22.5 vets and 4 elites available.
Should be able to get the hunting done with no more than 3 elites and 19.5 vets or 4 elites and 17.5 vets.
Leaving 1 elite and 3 vets, or 5 vets available.
The first option fits well with a scouting mission to Kofu (Taya, two tandem casting stealth girls, and maybe Nagisa for her animal questioning ability?). The second option could support more diplomacy or research.
Personal Enchanting (costs 4 vets and 2 cubes)
Telepathic Defenses (costs 2 vets)
Business is Business with Coalition (cost 1 vet, 1 Mami)
Join Imperium on Area 17 (costs 3 vets)
Leaves 22.5 vets and 4 elites available.
Should be able to get the hunting done with no more than 3 elites and 19.5 vets or 4 elites and 17.5 vets.
Leaving 1 elite and 3 vets, or 5 vets available.
The first option fits well with a scouting mission to Kofu (Taya, two tandem casting stealth girls, and maybe Nagisa for her animal questioning ability?). The second option could support more diplomacy or research.