Okay, nice.
The bit about injury vs death, well I thought that was pretty obvious. So I don't think you gave away the game there.
Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
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Okay, nice.
The bit about injury vs death, well I thought that was pretty obvious. So I don't think you gave away the game there.
Agreed, though the exact numbers are nice to have for planning purposes.
With my plan, we're losing an average of 0.35 people to gain 2 people. That's a significant profit. The morale penalty if someone dies is bad, but it's still not incredibly likely and the chance of death will continue going down as the turns go on so long as we can maintain a territory greater than our member count; which means we really want to have more territory. And right now, the only territory available is
1) Rural (and thus incredibly inefficient to hunt)
2) South (with a -10% diplomacy penalty, since everyone seems to hate combat)
3) Territory 6 (which I'm getting this turn)
I was aiming for a 10% casualty rate, which we are now at. What do you consider an acceptable casualty rate? 5%? 0%?
Not that it really matters, considering the voting block you control (honestly, it feels like half the people here vote for you every single time- probably because your plans are always safe with low short-term risk but with correspondingly larger long-term risk in that it expands significantly slower)
Anyway, I'd definitely recommend that we try to get something out of QB in exchange. No point in not trying since QB doesn't hold a grudge.
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Diomedea
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SV only has two major voting trends I've observed. The risk averse, and those who want the lolz. So, trying to be moderately more aggressive is quite hard to pull off. I always try to frame my votes from an IC perspective, and I'd find it hard to justify for Mami to risk a girl becoming a fatality to just gain a month when she has no reason to. We're all living happily here, and the only impetus to expand IC is to improve the lives of the MGs in the areas we take over. There's even less pressure since Incubator doesn't really benefit too much from our grief (thanks Madoka!), though he might start talking to us about a quota (as in, we're currently under-utilizing the land from his perspective.) or he'll be increasing the number of Magical Girls no matter what we say.
MG's don't 'Witch Out' now. So increasing our number of MG's at a steady rate isn't a bad thing.
And I really don't want to let any of our MG's die. We can boil this down into pure spreadsheets and make cold hard spreadsheet logic based decisions...
but according to Spreadsheet Logic (As told to us by the GM earlier) We'd be in a lot worse of a situation than we currently are now.
THUS we shall stick to looking at spreadsheets, but tempering them by focusing on our girls! We gotta keep em happy and alive. Let's avoid risking their lives when we don't have to. And we don't have to risk their lives now just to speed things up a month or so.
And I really don't want to let any of our MG's die. We can boil this down into pure spreadsheets and make cold hard spreadsheet logic based decisions...
but according to Spreadsheet Logic (As told to us by the GM earlier) We'd be in a lot worse of a situation than we currently are now.
THUS we shall stick to looking at spreadsheets, but tempering them by focusing on our girls! We gotta keep em happy and alive. Let's avoid risking their lives when we don't have to. And we don't have to risk their lives now just to speed things up a month or so.
It also might be worthwhile to talk with Incubator about the implications for anti-entropic energy generation of a large organized cooperative group of magical girls generating a surplus of Grief Cubes and capable of manipulating the population dynamics of the Demons.
Specifically there are two points that come to mind:
Specifically there are two points that come to mind:
- Encouraging demon evolution to make more demons (and thus grief cubes) in response to hunting pressure instead of stronger demons.
- direct anti-entropic energy generation by magical girls. For instance, enchanting a perpetual motion machine into existance, using magic to charge batteries, or even annihilating magically created weapons with antimatter to produce a net gain of energy
Huh? This seems entirely unrelated. Am I misunderstanding something?
More people = more resources. Losing a third of a person(on average) to gain two people is a net positive. I'm increasing our MG rate faster than the currently winning vote.
Erm... ever heard of probability? Randomness? The GM has made it quite clear that we've gotten hideously lucky. Yes, on average we'd be in a worse situation. That doesn't mean that the spreadsheet logic is wrong, just that we got lucky.
If the goal is to let no one who is part of the group die, there are ways we can do that. If that is the primary goal that everyone wants, then there's no need to ever expand more. We can up our GC limit for spirals to 20 (saving 97.75% of spirals) and farm. That is a valid option. (Remember expanding more = more potential grief spirals)
If the goal is to minimize casualties/population, there are still several things we could be doing differently (and we'd definitely want to up our grief spiral limit more. Upping it to 5 means trading 1 cube for 1/5 of a person. One more is 1 cube for 1/6th, etc. etc. How many cubes is a person worth to you? Right now, for me, the answer is 4. If there were a way (with no major morale penalties) to turn a MG into 5 cubes, I'd do it.)
If you could save two people by killing one, would you do it? (Assuming no further consequences such as going to jail etc.) The sooner we expand the faster we improve everyone's lives.
This is a game of resource conversions. And losing 0.35 in exchange for gaining 2 is clearly getting ahead. Slight morale bonuses are easy to get, and having one death is not going to be game-ending.
Public poll here:
What total casualty rate is acceptable to you? For many turns we've dealt with a worse casualty rate than my plan (from our ignorance of the territory mechanics). At average 0.7 casualties that's equivalent to where we were just a few turns ago (turn 11 had an average of 1.08 casualties from 9 vets*(18stength+10base-16bonus)%)
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Your logic is not wrong from a cold numerical sense. What you're running into though is that people don't want casualties from a perspective of value of life beyond the numerical resource values. Which is actually a rather interesting development considering I give so little character development. I'd originally intended for you to have terrible casualties and constant recruitment just to keep your numbers up, but the whole feel has kind of shifted away from that, it's an interesting development.
See, this isn't KILL X to save Y AND Z. This is take our time, and we don't need to KILL X to save Y AND Z.
There is no such thing as 'Acceptable Casualties.' Only the ones you must accept to achieve your goals.
For some of us playing this quest, our goals are to have no deaths (or at least no more deaths!), and provide a happy life for our MGs. We want that % chance of losing a MG to be less than 0.0001. We want it to be so close to impossible it'd take the GM rolling all 1's to make it happen.
(And then we'd come in and write omakes to save them anyway!)
Fixed that for you
Oh I totally understand that, sorry if it's sounding like I'm not understanding it or anything. I get that people are voting because they're attached to not letting anyone die. I just find it kinda stupid how they're not taking even reasonably small risks. It's entirely psychologically reasonable, just completely stupid.
I'm eagerly awaiting the Walpurgisnaught-equivalent you no doubt have waiting for us. It'll be delicious when everyone dies because we don't have enough people to fight it. (Because if you don't have anything special in store then we've basically won since we're stable and no small group could really fight us on our own territory thanks to defender's advantage. Seriously, unless we roll straight 1s there's nothing in the systems thus far revealed that could potentially harm us noticeably.)
Every month, several thousand magical girls die. The faster we can expand to them, the faster we can save them. There's no way we can save a reasonable number of them soon, but even if my plan achieves world domination one turn before yours that's still thousands of lives saved. Exponential growth is like that (and this is clearly an exponential growth system)
Ok. 0%. That was the question I was asking.
And yes, "the ones you must accept to achieve your goals" is in fact the definition of acceptable casualties. What are your goals? Mine is to grow the empire, and maximize all of our resources (which includes MGs)
edit: In something like this, everything is a balancing act, a conversion of resources. If we expand we save people. Losing a small number of people to expand faster will net save people. The only difference is that we know the names of some, and the others will be dead before we get there.
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I feel like I should point out at this point that you really don't have that option in this. I mean the issue with that which notgreat is highlighting is that if you take your time Y and Z aren't going to be left.
In this case for instance, one of the Greens in area 6 died this turn. (25% chance of change each turn for greens after all.)
Though obviously you care less about people you've never met.
This is a bit of an oddly designed quest. There's no "On turn X Walpurgisnaught" planned. There's a couple of disasters that players could trigger, a couple planned obstacles to your global takeover, some really bad possible random events, and a very vaguely sketched out long term menace. However the primary goal of this quest is less defeat the physical enemy, and more "Save all Meguca".
Though you also probably shouldn't assume defender's advantage makes you invincible. There's some flaws in that perspective.
I'm trying to be impartial and just make sure people are clear on both sides here though. Since I don't want to influence decisions to much. Also some of my plans are a bit thrown off because A: fuck your dice; and B: I kind of expected players to go flying off my rails by now but they've stayed remarkably on them.
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...people we don't know yet might not die before we save them. Schrodinger's MG theorem!
... don't look at the gem!
I guess your referring to a soul gem here but I'm not quite sure I understand your meaning.
You'd be hard pressed to come up with a powerful enough spell to manage that, but even if you did I'm finding it hard to imagine it would be anything besides a suicide mission.
It's a reference to Schrodinger's box. If you open it you know if the cat is dead or alive.
Well... I want to expand too, and I am willing to take some risks to do it, I just don't feel now is the right time to press. We need to harvest some extra cubes this month. Get a house next month, and then start expanding again.
Note that I specified "small group". Unless an opposing group is either extremely large or very powerful (eg. 3 elites would be incredibly hard to beat) then we're only able to be beaten by extremely bad luck.
Though there could be some special defending rules that haven't been revealed that prevent us from just putting nearly everybody into the fight (we can operate at a significant cube loss since the turn after we can just overhunt and get back to normal)
You're doing a great job so far. Though we can't really go off the rails here since all the low-hanging fruit is either already taken or is banned according to QB (and fighting the incubator empire is a little bit difficult considering they have orbital supremacy... we must bide our time before striking... not to mention that they are technically saving the universe.)
We could've done something crazy with the business plan but anything potentially rails-breaking is going to be either incredibly risky or require the full cooperation of QB.
Also, I'd like to mention that if we had full rules knowledge from the beginning I'm fairly certain we could be here on average. But we got here through sheer luck, no question about it
In order for that to work we must fully isolate ourselves from any direct or indirect actions with them (even things like air molecules that hit air molecules etc. that they breathed, or Madoka's influence on us and them)
Hey, guess what QB has!
I had full rules knowledge when I did my simulations.Also, I'd like to mention that if we had full rules knowledge from the beginning I'm fairly certain we could be here on average. But we got here through sheer luck, no question about it
Also I feel like lacking the knowledge of some of the rules was better for the feeling of the quest.I specifically designed the system so that you guys would be in a tailspin by month 3 and would probably spend a year just struggling to get back to where you started. It was sheer luck that got you guys so far ahead (even if by a lot of empire quest standards you haven't moved very far).
I would also point out on the grand enemy front that you guys really haven't moved that far forward yet.
On the note of rails though, keep in mind suggesting actions is an open offer. Anything vaguely reasonable I'll at least respond to, and possibly add the option either that turn or the next.
What was the initial carrying capacity/demon strength of Mitikahara?I had full rules knowledge when I did my simulations.
I specifically designed the system so that you guys would be in a tailspin by month 3 and would probably spend a year just struggling to get back to where you started. It was sheer luck that got you guys so far ahead (even if by a lot of empire quest standards you haven't moved very far).
I would also point out on the grand enemy front that you guys really haven't moved that far forward yet.
On the note of rails though, keep in mind suggesting actions is an open offer. Anything vaguely reasonable I'll at least respond to, and possibly add the option either that turn or the next.
Also, does researching/training a decrease in casualties apply at full power, half power, or no power for the turn that it's completed?
I'm assuming that with full rules knowledge also come full knowledge of the starting variables, (or at the very least the mappings of the true values to the reported values)
What would the tailspin be of? As long as we could expand quickly enough to not let demon strengths get as high as they did here, and only after that do the casualty research I'm fairly certain we'd be good. The losses we'd have would be compensated for through the gains of diplomacy. Unless we got a diplomacy bonus from having so few deaths? I suppose a few bad rolls in a row with the diplomacy could get us locked in which could stick us in a tailspin, since without being able to expand you're basically stuck with the number of girls your territory can support.
edit: Now I kinda want to try doing a flavorless version of this quest from the beginning just to see if I could do it with average (or worse-than-average) rolls.
edit: I completely agree that the lack of rules knowledge was a great addition to the feel of the game.
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This varies a little, for training I usually apply it full power as I figure that Mami has them do all their training in that at the start of the month before they do anything else. Overall I just apply that based on what makes sense for the action.
20 and -5. (Originally it was planned to be 15 carrying capacity, but I figured that would be too brutal if you didn't know the rules.)
If you had a death or two from hunting early on the negative feedback loop effect on morale causing more grief spirals would drag your general morale down causing more grief spirals. You started at 15 morale. If morale dropped lower than 15 then the grief spirals each turn would by themselves gradually drag morale down invoking more grief spirals. A single death hunting in the first month could easily have resulted in a morale death spiral.
You have quite a large diplomacy bonus baked into your action at this point from your success so far. If you'd tried diplomacy then your success rate would have been much lower. Plus you'd have suffered morale penalty you really couldn't afford if you'd tried to take over territory by force.
Starting at 15 I definitely agree would be incredibly difficult and likely impossible without good luck. Just to feed our people baseline (no spirals) we'd be taking +8% demon strength per turn. And losing enough people to make that sustainable would induce an unsustainable level of grief spirals.
With 20 capacity though, I'm not so sure. Get the solo training, cellphones, and general combat for -7%, get the demon finding training going, and have all veterans+mami solo hunting for 2*(1.5*5+2)*1.2=22.8 cubes at a 3% casualty rate for the veterans.
What would diplomacy have been at back then? It's been at 30% the whole time so far so I just assumed that it was constant. The probability and consequences of failed diplomacy are probably the biggest things affecting the the survival of this hypothetical early empire.
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Yes, but the ability to reduce manipulating a highly energetic stellar entity from being impossible to merely being hard is bullshit enough to prove the worth of an organization of magical girls.
Hence "extreme care". And perhaps done via enchanted items instead of directly. Or by using some magical girl with telepresence powers. Or by ducking into a pocket dimension after the spells are cast but before the spells actually reach the black hole. Or by firing enough demons and grief cubes at the black hole that demon formation is maintained and they keep dying to the gravity so fast that they rapidly evolve into a counter.
But anyway, detonating black holes is pretty much the only way I can imagine Incubator efforts fighting off entropy by any significant amount
[X] Elder Haman
Could we research the potential of bleeding those secondary effects we witnessed?. Do substance combinations have an effect?
I kinda wanna see the effects of iron vs. steel, for instance. Also, ceramics.
I can't help but notice that our combat training is listed as 'basic', what would it take to rank that up?
Finally, PvP is looking to be pretty inevitable, we should consider starting a training regime to prepare our girls for it.
@notgreat if we had any reason to believe there was some big bad traveling around and stomping small towns, I might consider your strategy- right now though I'm not seeing the need to rush.
Also, this particular issue is not as clear cut as plain numbers, since veteran's are a thing, and I don't consider two greens plus morale penalties to be worth a tradeoff of one vet.
Honestly, careless expansion strikes me as risky- if there are rival organizations out there, they are almost certainly sitting in the prime real estate. better to shore up our numbers, training, and research a little before pressing to large population centers.
Could we research the potential of bleeding those secondary effects we witnessed?. Do substance combinations have an effect?
I kinda wanna see the effects of iron vs. steel, for instance. Also, ceramics.
I can't help but notice that our combat training is listed as 'basic', what would it take to rank that up?
Finally, PvP is looking to be pretty inevitable, we should consider starting a training regime to prepare our girls for it.
@notgreat if we had any reason to believe there was some big bad traveling around and stomping small towns, I might consider your strategy- right now though I'm not seeing the need to rush.
Also, this particular issue is not as clear cut as plain numbers, since veteran's are a thing, and I don't consider two greens plus morale penalties to be worth a tradeoff of one vet.
Honestly, careless expansion strikes me as risky- if there are rival organizations out there, they are almost certainly sitting in the prime real estate. better to shore up our numbers, training, and research a little before pressing to large population centers.
That was the point.
That's a 3% increase per turn in demon strength. Which would within a couple turns have been killing off your vets. You're also forgetting that you should have been losing a lot to grief spirals. Around .5 deaths per turn to grief spirals with the morale negatives to match. Also if you'd only been using veterans for hunting I probably would have switched upkeep on training to veterans sooner. (Upkeep costs are variable and meant to reflect the situation. Incidentally you're probably going to see a bump to upkeep costs on training again in a turn or two since they're based off a percentage of your population rather than static values.)
10%. In early iterations of my system it was going to be ?? to players and just morale % chance. However Catty thought that would be placing too much direct strength on morale, and that girls outside your group probably wouldn't be aware enough of your group for it to skew that closely. The latter argument was rather persuasive for me. So now it's less based on that.
Better trainers, more advanced tactical doctrine. Possibly an academy to reach highest level.
