Declaring Exterminatus on Tokyo? An extreme option, but if the situation continues to deteriorate at the current rate it may have to be considered.
Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
- Thread starter inverted_helix
- Start date
Hmm...
Hmm... yeah, that seems like an appropriate proportional response to the situation.
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Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
Are you people freaking nutty? Serena wasn't fighting in that matchup, in the first place, which has been assumed with the 'oh no Serena can't fight 6 demons here's the evidence!' And you, @Kinematics, miscounted, we killed four demons in the third run, for a total of 8, which was likely the cause of the sudden coordinated kill attempt.
Finally, helix has said maybe six times that this is doable, this was always doable, this was doable with just our own forces if we handled it well enough. That does not magically change because one encounter went poorly, even if a big name is gone now. We killed too many at once. I said (clearly not enough times or with enough decibels) that slowing down the hunt schedule should be done to prevent constant strength increases, as we know that even for class 3 demons, they still tailor their anti-meguca strength based on how frequently meguca threaten them, as the tried and true means of controlling DS now that we're short on research for advanced methods.
We'll take the next month extra slow, kill one or two demons like Nagoya, and put the force of our research on a better idea of class 3's and counter-teleport magic. This is not an unsalvageable disaster. This barely even qualifies as a disaster at all (IC it's horrible as hell, but from a numbers standpoint we've only finally had it catch up to us).
Finally, helix has said maybe six times that this is doable, this was always doable, this was doable with just our own forces if we handled it well enough. That does not magically change because one encounter went poorly, even if a big name is gone now. We killed too many at once. I said (clearly not enough times or with enough decibels) that slowing down the hunt schedule should be done to prevent constant strength increases, as we know that even for class 3 demons, they still tailor their anti-meguca strength based on how frequently meguca threaten them, as the tried and true means of controlling DS now that we're short on research for advanced methods.
We'll take the next month extra slow, kill one or two demons like Nagoya, and put the force of our research on a better idea of class 3's and counter-teleport magic. This is not an unsalvageable disaster. This barely even qualifies as a disaster at all (IC it's horrible as hell, but from a numbers standpoint we've only finally had it catch up to us).
Recounting, I see where the error was. I counted the paragraphs marking the "first", "second", and "third" attacks, where the third attack was the disaster. However there were actually several more attacks in the paragraphs between, with a re-start of the numbering, so a quick skim miscounted.
Actual:
First: One kill, one flee
Second: One kill, one flee
Third (unnumbered): Two kills (two runs? later states that there hasn't been any pair without a teleporter)
Fourth (Kyouclone bait, unnumbered): Two kills over two more runs
Fifth: Disaster
Total kills for part three: 6
Total for all three parts: 10 (Haman was correct)
So the disaster run was actually the seventh attack run during Part 3, and the eleventh for the month. And I'd thought we were going to be slowing down.
That does mitigate the growth rate projections. That's 2 upgrades in 11 runs, with maybe 4-5 more upgrades (assuming interdiction) for the remainder, rather than 10+. So that's not quite so obscenely impossible.
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
We thought it'd be good. We thought we'd do good. Mami had told us what was happening, told us it was dangerous and something had to be done. After the Tokyo girls joined, we felt like we had a duty. We thought we owed it to the girls who didn't have Mami to protect them and guide them through their early lives as magical girls.
Everything seemed great, like a field trip to go hunting demons in another city, at first. There were a few close calls, but in those first few weeks we imagined being hailed as heroes by the local girls, swooping in with our neat and tidy plans. Everyone was happy. The third week was scarier, but the science-y girls didn't seem too worried, and they were still making plans and calculating risks, so nobody was worried.
Then they made plans to see how the veterans could handle things. They talked about all the math behind the rotating tactics research, saying this would make things easier on everyone, and that demons were demons, no matter how strong they were. They were so wrong.
---
Screaming, chaos, panic. It was, in a way, surreal. She was a healer, she only ever wanted to help. Looking on as a giant grinning maw bit her friend in half was anathema to her, but she couldn't bring herself to attack, or run, or even cry. All she could do was watch. Watch as Mayako was eaten, as Aneka was crushed to death, watch as their eyes turned dull and glassy and know that there's nothing I can do, I can't help them I can't I can't I can't.
And then it turned to her. The demon had a Cheshire grin, so big it was most of it's head. The teeth still had blood on them. The girl pulled out her teleport charm to get away, to escape to base. It was cracked and ruined from some stray attack. She wouldn't be escaping. She'd join her friends, like she deserved, for thinking she could fight demons and save the world. Save anyone. Unbidden, she screamed, begged, for help that she knew wouldn't come.
"Someone, please help! Help me! Please!"
The monster closed on her in the blink of an eye, jaws wide. She let it, waiting for oblivion. But the end never came. When she opened her eyes, she saw Taya, one of the elite girls, pushing a stone into her hands. Another teleport charm. Taya's teleport charm. "It's okay. You're going to be alright."
"No we're not. We shouldn't have come here. We can't even help ourselves, so how can we help all these people?"
Taya looked down at her, collapsed in the street, and patted her head. "Because it's the right thing to do." Before she could reply, the charm's shell expired, the girl too lost, too confused to maintain it, and she vanished from the battlefield like so many others.
The girl switched places when she returned, took a room in the shrine house, and stared at it for hours. It felt wrong not to pray for her friends, Aneka and Mayako, but she couldn't help but be drawn to Taya's photo, to the scribbles left for her.
Do the right thing. Help. Help even if it hurts. Help even if it kills me.
I can do that, too.
---
Ahhhh look at my shitty omake. Look at how shitty it is. I feel bad for even posting it, but I'm tired and cranky and maybe now I can finally fking sleep.
Everything seemed great, like a field trip to go hunting demons in another city, at first. There were a few close calls, but in those first few weeks we imagined being hailed as heroes by the local girls, swooping in with our neat and tidy plans. Everyone was happy. The third week was scarier, but the science-y girls didn't seem too worried, and they were still making plans and calculating risks, so nobody was worried.
Then they made plans to see how the veterans could handle things. They talked about all the math behind the rotating tactics research, saying this would make things easier on everyone, and that demons were demons, no matter how strong they were. They were so wrong.
---
Screaming, chaos, panic. It was, in a way, surreal. She was a healer, she only ever wanted to help. Looking on as a giant grinning maw bit her friend in half was anathema to her, but she couldn't bring herself to attack, or run, or even cry. All she could do was watch. Watch as Mayako was eaten, as Aneka was crushed to death, watch as their eyes turned dull and glassy and know that there's nothing I can do, I can't help them I can't I can't I can't.
And then it turned to her. The demon had a Cheshire grin, so big it was most of it's head. The teeth still had blood on them. The girl pulled out her teleport charm to get away, to escape to base. It was cracked and ruined from some stray attack. She wouldn't be escaping. She'd join her friends, like she deserved, for thinking she could fight demons and save the world. Save anyone. Unbidden, she screamed, begged, for help that she knew wouldn't come.
"Someone, please help! Help me! Please!"
The monster closed on her in the blink of an eye, jaws wide. She let it, waiting for oblivion. But the end never came. When she opened her eyes, she saw Taya, one of the elite girls, pushing a stone into her hands. Another teleport charm. Taya's teleport charm. "It's okay. You're going to be alright."
"No we're not. We shouldn't have come here. We can't even help ourselves, so how can we help all these people?"
Taya looked down at her, collapsed in the street, and patted her head. "Because it's the right thing to do." Before she could reply, the charm's shell expired, the girl too lost, too confused to maintain it, and she vanished from the battlefield like so many others.
The girl switched places when she returned, took a room in the shrine house, and stared at it for hours. It felt wrong not to pray for her friends, Aneka and Mayako, but she couldn't help but be drawn to Taya's photo, to the scribbles left for her.
Do the right thing. Help. Help even if it hurts. Help even if it kills me.
I can do that, too.
---
Ahhhh look at my shitty omake. Look at how shitty it is. I feel bad for even posting it, but I'm tired and cranky and maybe now I can finally fking sleep.
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Went back and looked at Haman's plan. There were indeed 7 planned runs.
Trying to work through which plans are which... Ah, the link above is to a different set of plans. The other two named plans are part of the post.
Avalanche
Atypical Netizen
- Location
- Australia
Can I ask for an expansion about this point? I have gotten a general impression that people felt that Nagoya's method is too slow in their destruction of Class 3 demons. That they're 'taking too long' or something along those lines.
If you want to stay casualty averse (For SIMP at least), it reads rather like staying with the status quo.
No, and good job on keeping things civil. /sarcasm
If Nagoya (who is much much bigger than us) could not do it, I remain skeptical that we alone would be able do it better than them.
It kind of does imo. We just lost one of our biggest assets, and we can't replace her (readily, at least).
No it is 10. Part 3 you had 6 kills.
She did though. It was just at the end of round 1 because of poor initiative roll.
This isn't exactly accurate. Your contingencies included that >5 demons all forces should attempt to disengage. That's the plan she followed. And quite well, her group didn't even take injuries. But point of fact was that your contingency for that level of enemy forces was that your side would try to flee without attempting to fight. So you can't take this one way or another.
Something to bear in mind is that she's not unsupported. Sure she has no other Contracted as a posse, and doesn't have much in the way of human friends. However she is supported by the Incubators. For better or worse depending on your perspective on their support. They've had to provide far more support than they'd like to in fact. And she's currently been redeployed to (rolls dice) Cairo.
Eh exaggeration. She had one tough-ish fight that she couldn't just curb-stomp but there still wasn't that great a danger. And then this fight where the Serene got trounced and she disengaged following the protocol.
I'll come right out and say that their direct communication range isn't that high.
Correct.
This isn't correct though. I said that it was possible to do it several ways, but all of them would require help from someone. Whether that was recruiting a legendary or assembling a Japanese coalition you needed someone. It's possible with your own forces now including Serena, but it wouldn't have been before without her.
The new count is correct. The confusion is likely because me saying first second third was based off styles of attack rather than direct attack runs.
I did actually say Nagoya could have done it if they existed in a vacuum. Nagoya couldn't do it because they can't deploy their full forces without leaving themselves vulnerable to attack. The 4 biggest groups in Japan are all situated in the area from Nagoya to Osaka and none of their relations are at a safe enough level that they can let down their guard against any of the others. If Nagoya sent all their elites to go fight in Tokyo, their home territory would be pillaged. Nagoya is the biggest in Japan, but only by a few percent.
I wanted the risk to be real, and we've already established that even limb loss doesn't even impact your meguca-months. The only other option I had, and one I seriously considered and still might do is just have only her gem survive. That would be suitably problematic.
Avalanche
Atypical Netizen
- Location
- Australia
Heya Helix,a while back Kyuubey chatted with us about the numbers of Puella and Class 3 Demons in Tokyo. Do we know how many are left in Tokyo?
I guess my attempt to inject a little humor into the proceedings fell a little flat then?
My point before that wasn't that things are hopeless; in fact OOC we know that we probably hit on a winning formula, except that we rolled exceptionally bad at the two worst possible times to do so: right at the beginning, forcing an early adaptation, and right at the end, where everything was the most dangerous. My point was that our IC knowledge at this point wildly diverges from our OOC knowledge, because IC we have no idea about any of the die rolls, and in fact we have no idea that any of this is being decided by (exceptionally bad) die rolls, rather than deliberate high-level strategy being employed by the demons themselves.
That said, looking at this from a high level we've killed a third of the... are we calling them "Tiger" class now?... demons in Tokyo. We're down to ~15 teleporting demons, ~5 non-teleporting demons, and the eyeball, IIRC. 33% casualty rate for the demons, at a cost of 10% casualty rate for us. If the last girl to die had been anyone other than Taya this would be a huge victory; the problem is that it was Taya, and our group is so heavily clairvoyant-dependent that our whole strategy is cast into doubt going forward.
Um, point of order: the final vote was 4-to-3 for the aggressive plan that we eventually ended up following: you, Elder Hanam, Skein, and Unseen Danger voted for the seven-attacks-a-month schedule, while Kinematics, Aranfan and I voted to slow down even further, tailoring our approach to the point where the demons are not grouping up and trying to out-range the demons' adaptation radius. So, um, you kind of did the exact opposite of saying this.
Point of order, die rolls are a sort of collective expression of chance common to many games. It's not like some cosmic entity is rolling in character. This quest is pretty meta, but let's try not to take it too extreme.
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Um, sorry to disagree, but it kind of has to be, for that last attack to have happened:
- Tokyo is roughly 60 miles / 97 km in diameter.
- This was a lure attack, so the attack happened outside of Tokyo city limits.
- We had one teleporter as part of the lured pair, plus four teleporting adds, so five teleporters, out of 15 total in the city.
Weeell... there's something a little different going on here, because in this case it's dice dictating the enemy's strategy, rather than the result of a particular tactic, so there's something fundamentally different going on here from normal dice-dictating-results. But more on this later; I'm already late for work.
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Which still isn't 60 miles. Also it assumes even distribution, which isn't the case. Further there's still another salient detail missing.
Well it's more when a particular strategy is implemented than deciding it outright. I had several difficulty increase ideas in mind before you started and then your tactics pared down which ones would come up, and then dice deciding how quickly.
I think only two people replied on whether to go for full trade on fusion research with the coalition or just their tandem research for yours?
Also players are a bit upset about Taya dying mostly it seems due to confusion over plan interpretation, but oddly not as grief-spiralled as I actually expected (I expected half the players to die of grief spiral basically). Still considering allowing her to just be a gem instead of fully dead though, would give me an excuse to burn a bunch more omake on my list of unrewarded ones.
Also just in general and not connected to the current discussion but something I feel it necessary to highlight. Your girls (and you) draw a lot of parallels to well understood systems for magical phenomena. However that doesn't mean they're exactly the same. Just something to keep in mind as research goes further into the rabbit hole.
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I'm fine with the full trade.
As an I. Given our past interactions I wouldn't be surprised to find that they have nothing and are just bluffing to see what we have, but that's okay; they've got to get tired of being spiteful at some point, and we can start being diplomatic then.
Also, very much frustrated and upset, but I know you try to be a fair GM in this, and I don't want to create a mess in the thread. Mainly trying to nitpick any details in what is clearly a complicated situation, as there's always a possibility of a mistake here or there.
Main grumpiness is over the (lack of) use of Serena's aura in an ambush setup (particularly after several runs where it's found that the support team without Serena's full aura does not fair that well — it's specifically noted as being a lot more dangerous — but having made each plan a month in advance, can't adjust along the way, and for some reason decided that doing ambush runs in dangerous mode was OK, which runs counter to expected behavior), and the typical issue that, if you roll enough dice, someone is going to get screwed.
On the other hand, given the premise, the outcome is believable, even if I don't like it.
suddenly grief-spiralls
But seriously, I am for the trade and curious if we coud research "advanced Tandem Chasting".
The dancing thing is to coordinate the casting, right?
So, if the Casters have enough expierience/training coud they replace the dancing whit someting different?
Maybe a Chant/Poem, Handsigns or a Song. Still not directly combat worthy but less distracting, something for the Backrow fighters.
More reasonably we would drop our dispatch team, or shift back to non-clairvoyant based dispatch team.
Not true. We got 6 kills in part 3, count them:
2 kills.
2 kills.
2 kills.
Equals a total of 6 kills in part 3. We got 2 kills in our initial test cases (part 1), and 2 more kills before they shifted to the pair tactic (part 2).
That's a total of ten kills.
Already corrected in this post.
Nice Omake, but helix did already give the names of those that died.
Huh... that would be... problematic, and would require massive research...
And maybe if we make the wrong choices could end up with her worse than dead...
Indeed. I feel very upset with myself for not specifying that, as I expected Serena to use her full aura too in that scenario, but that's what I get for getting lazy and not being Batman.
Yeah, I just read that, I was responding before moving to the next page of posts. Sorry about that.
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
Didn't see that part. Just read 'two previously unnamed vets' and rolled with it.
On the clairvoyants being there as well it was just carrying over from the previous entry on that same plan which did specifically include them. That's similar to pronoun use. A previously specified group is generally thought to be the same when named again unless you respecify the group. I stand by that being the reasonable interpretation. And congruent with your general desire to "alpha strike".
The aura is more questionable. In previous cases when you were using the support team you didn't want her full up aura, and you had been intending to rotate your tactics so the demons didn't adapt so quickly. So I believed that it was only her minor aura intended. The end result in that situation wouldn't be changed much though.
Head bobble.