We are approaching this from completely opposite directions. You are starting with: "what is the wise way to organize things to avoid conflict, yada, yada, yada - okay now how do I sell this to people?"
Indeed.
However, I'd argue that "being able to sell the idea" is not itself a quality metric to use for "What should we do?". Lots of really bad ideas can be sold with the right spin.
Being able to convince Kesi to help would involve having a plan to make sure Bad Things aren't going to happen again, and Beijing itself is an example of a strong overlord not being a sufficient brake on internal conflict.
My expectation is that if we treat the Tokyo girls properly we will be able to completely assimilate then and form a single polity. Furthermore, I expect that we will do so faster and more effectively than the other groups.
I agree with this. That's part of why I do want to treat them properly, and help them grow independently.
My expectation is that if we treat the Tokyo girls properly we will be able to completely assimilate then and form a single polity. Furthermore, I expect that we will do so faster and more effectively than the other groups.
The first three months will be hard, but three months following that we ought to start seeing differences. Our Tokyo girls don't have any deaths from hunting, the other areas still have girls dying. The other areas have more money probably, due to willingness to engage in crime, but then we start opening restaurants, and legal jobs become available. Our Tokyo girls get to live a semi-normal life. Other Tokyo girls have to be criminals and take risk while hunting.
Within a year I expect that most of our Tokyo girls will be fully loyal to the Serenes. The instability that starts to come about as the other groups partitioning Tokyo start jockeying for position will only cement their belief that they lucked out in joining our group. Furthermore this loyalty will make us a harder target in the competition for Tokyo power. Additionally, our conservative nature will make us less threatening.
On the one hand, your outline does have merit as a potential outcome. On the other hand, you're actively promoting instability for most of the Tokyo area just for the sake of making us look good.
Then my other point takes hold: there is insufficient reward to compensate other large groups for the cost of regulating Tokyo. You can't get a grand alliance for this plan.
Look at Nagoya's comment. They want to control Tokyo. It's instinctive.
We can't fight human nature we don't have sufficient magical surplus to make it so competition won't drive conflict. Instead we need to work with human nature so that the inevitable conflict is directed in a way that does the least harm (and allows us to come out on top).
What I'm aiming to create is a market.
If we divide up the territory among 5 groups, none of them is going to have the manpower to properly hunt Tokyo. Thus, the hunting must necessarily be done by the Tokyo natives, who are being forced into those groups. The groups gain benefits, but the Tokyo natives become subservient entities.
If those Tokyo subjects decide they don't like their ruler, how do we control that? Well, you'd mentioned the dogpile enforcement. Basically, all 5 of the overlord groups would have to agree to mutually support each other in the case of rebellions among their Tokyo subjects.
That means
even if our group treats all our people nicely, we're still on the hook for being the enforcer for all the more problematic entities. While you say we'd look nice compared to the rest, we're still actively helping the rest perpetuate their regimes, which does not help our image.
However, your point about providing proper incentive for the cooperation among the various external groups is valid. There needs to be some reason for them to cooperate with the plan if we split Tokyo up into a bunch of m-ward states, and it has to be a non-tax incentive.
What sort of support is required in order to keep things stable? In other words, what are we asking outside groups to provide?
1) Training. Pack hunting tactics, for example. Not much is needed to start things off, and once started they can maintain it on their own, but we may still need to prime the pump, as it were.
2) Demon strength tracking. They need accurate DS readings to be sure of how far they can hunt. Not actually a huge burden, since all the territories will have a predefined size which largely dictates how much they can hunt. However the city isn't going to start at 0 DS, so they'll need to be able to ensure its exact state. This would take a small bit of work for our group to give instructions to each m-ward, and possibly periodic verification.
3) Policing. And maybe lawyering. Ugh. However, a group can hire out excess personnel to all the Tokyo groups to ensure there's no funny business of people crossing territory they shouldn't, or poaching, etc. It's a tax with a purpose. It would require very strict rules over the police, though.
Market gains (or what opportunities for gain are we providing?):
1)Need for supplies, particularly armor. This is actually a case where a criminal-oriented group would probably be able to make things much easier. If they can manage a steady import of the kevlar stuff, that's an entire city to sell to, even if only at a small profit margin. It keeps masquerade issues from coming up all over by routing it through someone already suited to handle it.
2) Small loans. If Group A can supply thousands of suits of kevlar without breaking the masquerade problem, and Group B has the financial resources to give out small loans to all the groups, Tokyo A can get a loan from Group B to pay Group A for the kevlar suits for hunting, and then pay Group B back with interest. Group A makes a profit on the kevlar trade. Group B makes a profit on the loans. Tokyo A is granted immediate access to higher quality gear which makes their hunting more efficient, allowing them to dedicate more people to jobs to pay off the loan, and end up in a stronger, more stable position at the end.
3) Jobs. With the chaos of Tokyo, almost no girls are going to be able to get better than $1000/month jobs. Businesses developed by larger groups that could potentially expand into Tokyo, though, could give them easy options (ie: Not having to go through the random chance process to see if you got a job at all) for a good bit more money. Criminal groups won't have built up jobs for their organizations, but legal groups likely would have. So while the criminal groups can do the 'black market' trade of large quantities of kevlar or whatever, the legal groups can provide the money to pay those expenses and loans.
4) Place to sell goods. Want to sell barrier charms? Can you make 8000 charms per month? (That's about what's needed to cover all the Tokyo hunters.) Well, probably not (would need 40 meguca for non-tandem types, or 120 for tandem). But that's a massive market that requires a huge number of meguca just for a
single charm type. I'm sure a few of the m-ward states would be happy to specialize in this sort of production (branding!), to sell both among the Tokyo natives and the outside groups. The more advanced groups could sell the premium (tandem) charms. And that doesn't even get into all the crazy ideas we had for personalized magic stuff.
One group of 30, with 15 dedicating to hunting (earlier estimate, including support), 5 to miscellaneous, and 10 to making charms, could make 2000 per month — enough for 100 hunters (about 10 groups). It would also cost 4 GCU to make. How much would a group be willing to pay for that? 1 GCU and $1500? It would be saving them 0.6 GCU and 1.5 meguca of their own time. $1500 is 1 meguca of work time, and certainly 0.4 GCU is worth 0.5 meguca time saved. Meanwhile the manufacturing group is making 6 cubes and $15,000 per month from their efforts. Win-win.
Downside: Start needing market regulation (safety guidelines, etc) and customer protection. That would add to the above cost schedules.
Anyway, more and more options open up. How do we sell it to the other large groups? I say Mami brings out the easel again, for one of her specialized presentations to show them all the massive benefits that can be had, at the cost of doing what they'd probably have to do
anyway.
Basically, the other groups can take control over territory, fight against everyone else to keep that territory, fight the Tokyo natives that they need in order to
manage their territory,
still have to do the training and policing and equipping and housing and get jobs and everything else, but mostly by themselves, without the benefit of a strong trade economy.
The only benefit is to be the "big guy" on the block, to show off how much power you have against the other groups. Anyone for whom that's the primary motivator (to the extent that they'd prefer the split territory plan over the market scenario) is probably not someone we'd
want to be in a split-territory coalition with anyway.
