So, reevaluation of Nagoya: They are better than us in just about every way.
While they appeared to have had to deal with (and accept) a relatively high death rate early on, we should expect them to be at the "no one dies" tier right now (outside of the possible wars they're fighting), simply because of the resources available to them. Based on their behavior, I'd now estimate the Nagoya group to be at morale 3.
They have substantially better combat experience and skill. They've completed research into numerous areas that we haven't even touched yet. They have truckloads of money, and 5 times our territory, plus 10-20 vassals (rough guess based on 13/14 sizes). They have sufficient resources to make a stand against the Tokyo problem without a legendary. They have substantial PvP experience.
Meanwhile, we have.. tandem casting (as does the Coalition), and an improved rotating tactics that we can't fully take advantage of. We have skills in paperwork and training, but not the advanced skills that the better groups would actually need training in. We have morale, and a much longer institutional memory (but no actual application for such). And a very charming leader.
So, a nice cult, but not much more than that.
Since I ran numbers for the meguca penalty Nagoya could maybe face for 'safe' hunting, it's also appropriate to consider the penalty we took for the same thing.
Running numbers on turns 12 through 20, it looks like we sacrificed 26 meguca months (so an average of about 3 meguca per month) in order to reduce our deaths by 0.44 — barely a coin flip on a single death. Might have sacrificed some cubes, too (up to perhaps 20), but I didn't run through the numbers of how many were spent on non-upkeep/spirals along the way.
helix noted several times early on that he was surprised at how risk-averse we were, when it would be more efficient to allow for deaths. While it's not quite valid to fully extrapolate the above across the entire game history, it would not be completely unsupported to estimate that we may have lost on the order of 80 to 100 meguca-months of capability.
Of course, 2 or 3 lives is just a number, but losing any specific lives could have been a significantly worse issue. Unless it just got papered over. Oh, you lost a scientist? Have a new recruit. Sure, they can be a scientist too. Pick up the research where you left off.
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So, this changes our position in the negotiation. It also changes our expectations in dealing with the class 3 demons. Nagoya is good at what they do. They have a whole year of experience fighting these things, and easily outclassed Kyouko's contribution.
We don't have that experience and skill, and Serena has no experience at all. We are basically betting everything on the aura's effect trumping any other issues. Not that we could help them fight, anyway.
The honeypot trap idea heavily depends on being able to kill weakened demons quickly, in the midst of Serena's aura. I don't know that we can trust that to be the case. Even during Kyouko's fight, she got distracted by personal memories for a bit, and the hope aura's psychological effect could have made that deadly.
Basically, the only person we can allow as any sort of assist is KyouClone, because if she does something stupid to get herself killed, she's replaceable. Of course, if she does something to get someone else killed, then it's game over.
For all intents and purposes, we cannot assist Serena at all during the fights. Which means any group we bring is sitting outside her aura with a great big target on their backs, waiting for a random class 3 attack. And our support group is only weakly suited for such a fight. We have four elites, plus Seto (high risk). We'd be fighting outside the hope aura, which means all the nasty class 3 psych effects are in place. If things look bad, our only hope is that we can escape to inside the aura and still function.
We need Kaoru trained up. Can't keep putting it off. 3 more omakes, and squeezing out training space.
Nagoya is still good enough to handle the escapees on their own.
Secondary vet teams are non-functional for anything except sufficient defense to allow for a withdrawal. Overloading on them will not do any good. Reevaluate expected assignments for next month.
