Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)

[Elder Haman]

Current Elder Haman Plan

Here is my fluff for the Join Imperium action. Manami is the Tokyo girl that is still hopeful so she seems the best pick to sing the praises of the Imperium. While Kaoru has been there since the founding as a green, so her perspective should also be interesting.

Suggest they join the Imperium: Target Area 17 and Area 10
4 vets (include Kaoru and Manami), $7,000 for welcome package
-- Invite them to the house party we are having this month. Point out the stipends, housing, and social events available to the Serenes.
-- Explain that if they join the Imperium, that as greens they will be put on jobs (as couriers) until they have been trained enough to become veterans. This is done for safety, so that they are properly trained and can hunt safely without risk. Make sure to point out the good safety record of the Serenes (no hunting deaths in over a year), as well as the age and magical girl seniority of the girls who are members (most of our vets have been magical girls for 3 years or more, and Mami has been a magical girl for over 5 years).
-- Have Kaoru talk about her experience joining the Serenes as a green at the very beginning, and all the changes and improvements in safety since then.
-- Have Manami (the Tokyo girl who still believes in hope) talk about the dangers she experienced, even with a smaller group, and the benefits of joining the Serenes as a recent person to join.

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This is my business proposal. Anyone have any comments or idea?
@inverted_helix Actually I was going to ask, how many of our vets are required for this to work? I was going to guess three, but then I figured I might as well as you. And do we have a guesstimate on the total number of new couriers we will need?

Business is Business: Target the Coalition (Areas 1, 2, 11, 18)
1 Mami, 1 vet
- Business proposal that we expand our courier business into their territory, and hire their girls as couriers.
-- We will need to assign at least # of our vets to the business in their area to help it get started
-- We will need to determine how many more couriers we need, but the excess positions beyond those # vets will be available first to the Coalition. Any excess courier positions that they choose not to fill will be filled by our girls. They must notify before the start of the month if they wish to change the number of their girls working (increase or decrease)
-- We offer to pay $1200 per a girl, with future raises as a possible negotiating point. Alternatively we could negotiate a payment in cubes.

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Here is what I have planned for Tandem casting training (instead of Grief Management):

Tandem Casting: Now that you've deciphered how to combine two girls magic for greater effect they have to be taught it.
Cost: 1 Veteran per 4 girls trained in the task.
--2 clairvoyants
--2 barrier
--2 stealth (Sora and Mariko)

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Basically thinking that clairvoyants and stealth are the two big places we need Tandem Casting for scouting, and possibly another bonus to our dispatch team. Barriers because they are the first place we need to combine tandem casting with soul anchors, etc.

Expected Incomes are here:

Grief cubes: 57.7 - 10 (trade) + 88.6 (net) = 131.8 - 61 = 75.3 - 3 (research) - 6 (fun with magic) = 66.3 (before spirals)

Money: $36,240 + $29,000 - $25,030 -$7,000 -$1,000 = $32,210

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This should give us the month long grief cube reserve.

@Kinematics could you remove the X from your plan for next month? That way I can run the vote counter and get a count of the votes for the trade deal.

Thanks

 

[TheEyes]

On the subject of duration and insulating materials, I'm wondering if we can use the secondary properties research to enhance a magic insulator's magic insulating property.

 

[racnor]

Could use Sayaka's magic, or Kaoru's magic to potentially give them a speed boost.

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The item would need to be attached to the underside of their feet for that to work. Seems awkward.

No the idea was for Taura to charge a telepathic charm, and then release it for a quick burst of extra telepathic magic to stack with her own telepathic magic. Basically a way to get Tandem casting with just yourself.



Even better! Trapped, and behind enemy lines? Open a can of illusionary Kyouko. Terrify your opponent!



.

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I doubt tandem casting works with items, since they can't control their output.

And i do like the idea of surprise Kyouko.

 

[TheEyes]

Regarding anchored teleports and lack of safeties, I have two words:

Teleporting. Bombs.

 

[boonerunner]

Interesting idea... I wonder if Taura will really want to experiment with that.

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You don't actually have another telepath for her to tandem cast with.

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Aren't all girls capable of some telepathy (just like all veterans are capable of using illusion to disguise their age)? Or is that telepathy all facilitated by Kyuubey?

Even better! Trapped, and behind enemy lines? Open a can of illusionary Kyouko. Terrify your opponent!

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Moderately useful. Could confuse demons, but the terrifying aspect is only going to be good for other meguca who know Kyouko's reputation (i.e. Nagoya).

I vote that we use Spell anchoring this turn to create emergency items for each of our hunters: Healing, Teleport, Kyouko Illusions. @inverted_helix: would there be an additional cost for this? And what would the benefit be? Note that these would be the single-cast versions because we haven't trained up tandem casters yet.

 

[Aranfan]

Why?

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Because if we go "off and on" with it there have been implications of negative morale effects.

 

[Elder Haman]

I vote that we use Spell anchoring this turn to create emergency items for each of our hunters: Healing, Teleport, Kyouko Illusions. @inverted_helix: would there be an additional cost for this? And what would the benefit be? Note that these would be the single-cast versions because we haven't trained up tandem casters yet.

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Well, for one thing we probably have to spend some time replicating what Nagoya sold us to make sure that it all works and figure out how to follow the directions.

That might be cheap, say 1 vet and 1 cube?

Then we would need to spend time on practicing casting the actual effects we want, which I'm guessing will be at least 0.5 vets of the required type. This will tell us how effective they are and the change to casualty risk.

Then there would be the actual creation and support of the charms, which I'm guessing will have an extra cost in cubes.

I'd like to point out that this months hunt does not require any of these things. We are at total safety so there is no reason to rush untested magical charms into production.

Because if we go "off and on" with it there have been implications of negative morale effects.

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@inverted_helix Can you confirm this? I thought grief management was an optional thing, not something we had to keep doing forever once we started it.

 

[TheEyes]

Because if we go "off and on" with it there have been implications of negative morale effects.

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Maybe we can have her transition to more of a councilor role, now that we don't need to scrape for every single cube? Just a girl that all the others can talk to, who still keeps up with the grief cube tracking so she has the long term data and can help people more. Maybe we can enroll her in community college psych classes?

 

[boonerunner]

Hmm tough tough questions. My first instinct is to say same formation and 10 hunters total. Though if you draw up one of your nifty charts of relative benefits I might be swayed. I'm just thinking that in character she probably doesn't have much downtime in fighting of her own, so calling her for a transport when she's doing something else would have substantial inefficiency.

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Note, I'm assuming the 40% Dispatch bonus from the turn after this one.

When IRT are used, Elites would normally need to hunt in pairs and veterans would normally need to hunt in packs, so Seto hunting in a pack would reduce her effectiveness from 7.04 GCU to 5.94 GCU, and she would save 2.25 GCU from being used to teleport the other 9 girls, which is a net gain of 1.15 GCU.

When RT are used, Elites would normally hunt solo and veterans would normally hunt in pairs, so it would reduce Seto's effectiveness from 8.10 GCU to 5.94 GCU and the effectiveness of the Veterans from 9x5.28 to 9x4.46 and save 2.25 GCU from teleportation for a net loss of 7.33 GCU (which obviously isn't worth it). In this case, we'd probably leave Seto to hunt solo and only teleport herself.

Maybe in addition to being able to teleport a pack of herself plus up to 9 girls, Seto could also get double the normal production bonus for her own teleportation.
For Solo Elite (which would be used in the RT situation), Seto compared to a normal Elite (who has to pay 0.25 GCU to be teleported) would produce +1.31 GCU. For a Pair Elite (which would be used in the IRT situation), Seto could teleport herself and her Elite companion and produce an additional +1.66 GCU compared to a pair of elites without her. Or if she leads a pack of Veterans (compared to a normal Elite hunting in a pair), Seto would produce an additional +2.69 GCU. This bonus isn't nearly as good as Kyouko's (obviously), but it's fairly reasonable. Treating Seto as a special case like this might be a bit annoying to work out in the monthly hunting figures, though.

Alternatively, maybe Seto can lead a pack of up to 20 girls instead.

--Nomad: Seto full time for ~4 cubes

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Note that the Nomad territory has a nominal production of 3 GCU, so overhunting it would increase DS. Are you proposing that we alternate turns of hunting with turns of not hunting? And I'm not even sure that it's possible for Seto to get 4 GCU, since it's so hard to hunt that area (based on the figures given by inverted_helix, a "normal" Elite would only get 2.3 GCU here even with teleportation).

 

[Powerofmind]

I doubt tandem casting works with items, since they can't control their output.

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Consider for a moment what tandem casting does. You take two meguca, have them cast a spell by combining magic for more power than they can normally pull up alone. If you were to translate that to enchanting the idea doesn't change much. They cast the spell, shell it with the enchanted layer, and it's still fresh as it was when it went in. I, myself, look forward to anchored heals and anchored tandem heals being used as a casualty reducing measure to let us do IRT safely.

 

[racnor]

Consider for a moment what tandem casting does. You take two meguca, have them cast a spell by combining magic for more power than they can normally pull up alone. If you were to translate that to enchanting the idea doesn't change much. They cast the spell, shell it with the enchanted layer, and it's still fresh as it was when it went in. I, myself, look forward to anchored heals and anchored tandem heals being used as a casualty reducing measure to let us do IRT safely.

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But tandem casting is the act of two people merging their magic together, which is why it requires both people to be trained in it. An enchanted item can only output magic on it's own, and cannot adapt that output to take someone else into consideration. Using it as a tandem cast partner would be like trying to tandem cast with one participant refusing to cooperate.

Also, you seem to be talking about enchanting items with tandem spells, not casting in tandem with an enchantment.

 

[Elder Haman]

Note that the Nomad territory has a nominal production of 3 GCU, so overhunting it would increase DS. Are you proposing that we alternate turns of hunting with turns of not hunting? And I'm not even sure that it's possible for Seto to get 4 GCU, since it's so hard to hunt that area (based on the figures given by inverted_helix, a "normal" Elite would only get 2.3 GCU here even with teleportation).

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yes, I think we should alternate hunting in the nomadic area. And I remember helix saying that Seto (but not other teleporters) could get 2 GCU out of it with half her time spent there. Obviously a full Seto could pull 4 cubes.

But tandem casting is the act of two people merging their magic together, which is why it requires both people to be trained in it. An enchanted item can only output magic on it's own, and cannot adapt that output to take someone else into consideration. Using it as a tandem cast partner would be like trying to tandem cast with one participant refusing to cooperate.

Also, you seem to be talking about enchanting items with tandem spells, not casting in tandem with an enchantment.

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He's talking about both.

And it should be possible to store half a tandem cast in a charm, release it, and coordinate your own magic to match it for the tandem casting. Will take some research though.

 

[Aranfan]

anchored heals

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This is an excellent idea.

 

[Powerofmind]

But tandem casting is the act of two people merging their magic together, which is why it requires both people to be trained in it. An enchanted item can only output magic on it's own, and cannot adapt that output to take someone else into consideration. Using it as a tandem cast partner would be like trying to tandem cast with one participant refusing to cooperate.

Also, you seem to be talking about enchanting items with tandem spells, not casting in tandem with an enchantment.

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Yes. Yes I am.

 

[TheEyes]

This is an excellent idea.

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So is anchored barriers. Or, even better, reactive barriers/heals: anchor a barrier spell to a hunter's shield, or heal spell to her armor, and the spell goes off right when the girl gets hit.

 

[racnor]

So is anchored barriers. Or, even better, reactive barriers/heals: anchor a barrier spell to a hunter's shield, or heal spell to her armor, and the spell goes off right when the girl gets hit.

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I doubt that hitting things would break the sealing enchant, since our regular enchantments stand up to those impacts just fine.

 

[Powerofmind]

So is anchored barriers. Or, even better, reactive barriers/heals: anchor a barrier spell to a hunter's shield, or heal spell to her armor, and the spell goes off right when the girl gets hit.

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Anchored spells aren't reflex activated just because you cracked the case, or, that's how it appears given the description. It's a complex timed mechanism, and you can't just cut all the wires like you would a bomb and expect it to go off anyway. Cracking it open probably ruins the orientation of the spell, firing it randomly, or not at all. As for anchoring barriers, the mechanism is basically instant. It might be good to block one bullet with good reflexes, but barriers require constant magic to be fed into them unless you've got a peculiar type of barrier, so once the charge in the anchor is gone, the barrier's gone.

We're better off using:
Anchored heals(which don't require much direction other than basic mending) to reduce casualties.
Anchored teleports(which can allow us to pull girls off of evac with the right finagling of time units spent anchoring).
Anchored basic magic(blaster girls with simple ranged magic could anchor for the melee girls, it might boost the effectiveness of hunting a bit).
Anchored tandem of the previous three(bigger healing spells on the double, group teleports, fixed emplacement-grade magic artillery) and tandem 'enhanced sense' anchors, like clairvoyance(and when we have it, telepathy) to let vets with the appropriate abilities function a step or so higher in a pinch.

There's also possibility that you could anchor some high-range demon-detecting clairvoyance spells, tandem or otherwise. Since the information overload is minimal(X demons at Y locations rather than 'here's byakugan sight without any experience in it'), it could be used to boost hunting efficiency a bit.

 

[TheEyes]

I doubt that hitting things would break the sealing enchant, since our regular enchantments stand up to those impacts just fine.

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The idea would be to put the sealing enchantment on a thin or fragile coating, maybe paint or nail polish, so the material itself fails, releasing the spell.

 

[boonerunner]

I doubt that hitting things would break the sealing enchant, since our regular enchantments stand up to those impacts just fine.

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Remember this:

Interaction between soul anchoring and insulation materials? Easiest use case might be a small thermos, put the magic charm inside, the containing magic in the thermos, and then just open the thermos when you want to release the magic...

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That was something intended for you to pick up on. Nagoya didn't develop enchantment duration research. It is entirely possible to create something a mundane could use this way. I'd have had Keiko point it out in character if no one picked it up.

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With some research, we ought to be able to enchant a sheet of metal with healing, then paint it with polyurethane varnish to preserve the spell. When the polyurethane gets damaged, the spell would come out and heal the girl who just got hurt. This would probably be best on the inside of the armor so that glancing blows and scratches don't trigger it.

 

[racnor]

Remember this:

With some research, we ought to be able to enchant a sheet of metal with healing, then paint it with polyurethane varnish to preserve the spell. When the polyurethane gets damaged, the spell would come out and heal the girl who just got hurt. This would probably be best on the inside of the armor so that glancing blows and scratches don't trigger it.

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But MGs sustain enchantments on things they touch. That's why Mami could enchant everyone's shields.

 

[boonerunner]

But MGs sustain enchantments on things they touch. That's why Mami could enchant everyone's shields.

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It's true that MGs can sustain enchantments on things they touch (which is why anchoring works in the first place). But I don't think it's obligatory. Plus, this would be different than anchoring because the protective shell for the spell would be the physical insulation rather than a magical shell. We could probably get this to work (with a bit of research).

 

[Kinematics]

On Tandem Casting: I'd guesstimate maybe 10 of our girls have unique magic (telepathy, inertia control, animal talking, etc), while the rest have magic in common with at least one other person.

That means maybe 52 girls need the training. At 1 meguca month per 4 girls, that's 13 meguca months to completely train everyone in Tandem Casting (basic).

If we can manage 2.5-3 vets of training per month, we can get the entire group trained up in about 5 months, which is about the time we'd expect Tandem Fusion to be likely to be finished. That way we don't have to worry about having just a few specialists; the entire group capable of providing tandem support. Also probably useful as a baseline for when we start training Fusion casting.

Just something to possibly target.

Not that I know of. Probably incorporates the name Serene somehow. Maybe the Japanese equivalent? Japanese love word play jokes.

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OK, I'll try putting something together for the omake.

Okay, then I'm going to add 1 vet to the Join Imperium actions and target Area 10 as well, that way I don't have to repeat the fluff.

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Um, he just said we don't need to use the 3 vet option for getting them to join, because it's not a large group. So you're using a total of 4 people?

On the house party: The way I'd want to do it is to be clear that the party isn't to get them to join, it's to get them a chance to get to know our group, so that they'd know whether or not they'd be comfortable joining. Basically, don't use the party as the sell, use it as an "improve relations" action, and then try to sell them on joining after that.

@Kinematics could you remove the X from your plan for next month? That way I can run the vote counter and get a count of the votes for the trade deal.

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Done.

Aren't all girls capable of some telepathy (just like all veterans are capable of using illusion to disguise their age)? Or is that telepathy all facilitated by Kyuubey?

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I believe the natural telepathy range was something like 100 meters (or maybe a few hundred meters, at most). It's possible for relatively short-range stuff, but useless for city-wide communication.

 

[Sereg]

Some ideas (I believe I mentioned a couple before, but let's see):

Demon detection research (maybe enchant detectors?)

Demon herding (to move demons to more convenient locations for battle)

Demon immobilisation research (to allow more time for backup to arrive and tactics to be discussed)

Demon spawning research (discover where they are most likely to spawn to make patrolling more effective and to be prepared for their creation)

Demon migration research (work out where demons are most likely to enter the city from outside our territory)

Improved demo strength research (get a better idea of when we're at risk of our demon strength getting too high)

Reaction to unknown magic training (simulations of powers never before encountered to prepare for hostility with magical girls with unusual powers)

Ambush training (good against demons and magical girls)

Demon bait research (see if we can enchant something that attracts demons. It'll make hunting more convenient)

Demon scarecrow research (see if we can similarly enchant something that repels demons)

Trap training (again, trap setting can help against both magical girls and demons)

Probe, scrying and divination training (see if we can use magic to enhance our ability to find out what's happening in other territories)

Economics and trade research (improves mundane income, mundane expenses and calculating what to offer other magical girl groups in negotiations

Etiquette, diplomacy and negotiation training (for diplomacy and negotiation)

Logistics training (for better resource and transport management)

Improved specialisation (get the girls n the jobs they're most suited for)

 

[Powerofmind]

It's true that MGs can sustain enchantments on things they touch (which is why anchoring works in the first place). But I don't think it's obligatory. Plus, this would be different than anchoring because the protective shell for the spell would be the physical insulation rather than a magical shell. We could probably get this to work (with a bit of research).

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A physical insulator only slows the natural rate of decay on enchantments, which are necessary as part of the anchoring mechanism to contain the spell. It's the act of blanking the enchantment around the spell that causes it to go off, not the removal of some physical layer above the spell.

It may just be easier to figure out how to enchant a computer to perform magical acts according to a program, or figure out a cheesy fused-casting trick combining a clairvoyant and barrier meguca's spells to perform super-long-range defenses.
...
New idea. Combine any meguca and a strong clairvoyant's magic for no-spotter fire support or general support magic from our FOB's. The possibility of far-casting healing magic or spread-casting a regenerative booster is really really interesting.

 

[Kinematics]

New idea. Combine any meguca and a strong clairvoyant's magic for no-spotter fire support or general support magic from our FOB's. The possibility of far-casting healing magic or spread-casting a regenerative booster is really really interesting.

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That's fusion casting. We'll be able to experiment with that once we get that line of research completed.