Was actually writing a bit about this in some response, but don't know if I actually posted it (and can't find anything in recent posts, so will assume I didn't).
I'm not sure that they have abandoned it. If they make a dedicated effort to take it back, then (at this point) we don't want to try to stop them. If they send a patrol of 1 or two youma (and we're sure it's not a trap), then Serena &co could easily take them, but it's hard to be sure that there won't be a trap like there was last time. I'd be fine with sending some people to hunt the normal demons in the area (up to 0 DS), but they would need to be super cautious and ready to scram at a moment's notice.
The group may have started later on, but Hiko's experience must have been crucially important to its formation. She has a lot of experience with demons and with hunting and enchanting items (and people) and she has great personal reserves of money and magic. Granted, they do have a top down hierarchy where each person is responsible for the people beneath them, so things might not be quite as good for the grunts at the bottom who don't have Hiko taking care of them personally, but I wouldn't say that they are worse off than the Republic - that's a question that we didn't get a clear answer on:
I wonder what's up with the name "Heaven's Chosen"?
Because it's mostly complete and I agree with the parts that are done.
I agree that the open-ended nature is nice, but there does need to be a system to make it manageable (so that inverted_helix can actually write it without getting totally bogged down). I would be fine with action slots as long as they maintain some degree of open-endedness.
Pretty sure that's going to be a quality of every group leader, both IC and mechanics-wise. Every group is going to have their own bonus, and someone with a bit of something special will attract people to them.
Definitely. Well, less demons and more PvP (ie: expecting to be able to win a fight against an entire squad of elites), but enchantment and general knowledge as well.
Personal reserves of money is questionable. She does not appear to be one who seeks out wealth, and character-wise, that trait conflicts with Sachiko of the Magick Company. However she did get to start with her own base (heavily enchanted shrine that she has full control over) — an obvious advantage, compared to Mami's little apartment.
I do wonder if there really is more of a religious background for them, rather than the imperial ties Haman suggested? It's an obvious category for a major group leader, that otherwise is not represented.
I have to agree with the others that action slots would completely change the feel of the quest. Action slot quests are limited primarily by the number of slots they have, whereas here we're limited by a variety of resources. That shifting dynamic of which resource is our bottleneck has been a very interesting part of this quest, one what would be completely lost in the transition.
It's not too bad yet because your upkeep expenses scale with your size in many ways. But the problem comes mostly from stuff like diplomacy actions where it costs you guys a tiny amount of resources relatively but costs me a very disproportional amount of effort to write. Because a lot of the meat of this quest is building out a sort of world around you. A very paranoid, uncommunicative world, but a world nonetheless. I have to come up with character development for all the groups you're interacting with.
That is an advantage to greens over vets yes. Though I think you're probably underestimating the trauma of an environment where you're not the top of the food chain. Human psychology isn't well designed for handling being hunted and herded. It's one thing to face the occasional life and death battle at times of your choosing, but it's another to live under the pressure of being hunted.
This is exactly the feeling I've strived for. The world is bleak and you're trying to secure your tiny little bastion of light. Balancing you right on the edge of disaster continuously is quite difficult. Especially since you're now on the verge of securing your regional security.
Yeah I do too. Though I've often considered that the reason I have only like 10ish readers is because the quest is too complex for 99% of players to enjoy.
I think you're being a bit too cheap on that.
Mostly, though there's a wide degree of variance in that.
I'll say straight up though that groups were not designed to be balanced from the start. Some are stronger and some are weaker. Hiko is certainly the strongest Leader unit in Japan with numerous advantages, but that hasn't really translated to the strongest group in Japan. She's got limits, though you aren't in a position to see them all.
You can expect the Shrine isn't so much a sign of vast wealth as something she picked up quite a while ago and held onto.
Damn insightful players finding the hidden modelling. It's not like I literally had a checklist, but I felt like if you get a bunch of people and have them form governments of their own you're going to get a whole scattershot of different possibilities. Though I think this is especially true in Japan because their feudal era lasted until so recently, they've got a culture that encourages followers, they're very corporate, and they have a democratic form of government. They have the building blocks for virtually any government form. In the US you'd probably see groups much more stilted towards republics.
I like that basically every time they're brought up perspective on them shifts a little bit. They're meant to be a sort of ambiguous straddling of multiple types.
This is going to be one of the biggest issues for you going forward. You're really at the limits of what you can handle with your family style government. I'm not sure how to model a switch in government though. Or for that matter what direction your government will evolve.
The intended here is basically feudal for HC though as with most feudal governments there's strong religious overtones, and Enlightened as a sort of cult.
Hmm this is a fairly reasonable way to simplify without removing the underlying resource mechanics. I might consider that.
I think the restaurant one should probably be 2 vets. Finding good locations for restaurants is a huge component to how successful they are.
The thing is, Hiko doesn't need our tandem casting, or any of our other techs; more than likely she already knows most of them, and even if she doesn't they're not all that important to her, certainly not enough to let go of something as awesome and strategically important as teleport interdiction. In contrast, the one thing she definitely wouldn't have come up with in a century as a meguca is detailed tracking and statistical modeling of DS levels; that's the sort of thing that would never occur to a girl who probably hasn't cracked a math textbook since the late 19th century, and it's our killer app here. Above all other considerations, the one thing we don't want to do is sell our most valuable product at a discount.
Compare their vague and comparative notions of quality of life to what the Serene would say:
Now all we need are some meguca that watched Highlander a few too many times.
You could actually limit this based on a more realistic measure: Just how many girls are really well-equipped to do this sort of negotiation, making sure not to step on anyone's toes, and don't promise anything that's going to conflict with what you told someone else, etc.
Yeah, I was trying to say that that was an advantage she had instead of lots of money. It can be worth quite a bit, but it's not cash on hand.
Heh. I have it in draft form, about 1500 words. Needs polish. Guessing it's going to go up to around 2000-2500 words. Since I got the draft done, I knew I wasn't going to lose what I'd been thinking up before, so it let me go back to working on the planning stuff.Also @Kinematics Still looking forward to the new chef omake
On the other hand, we seem to have screened out the shitposters; I can only conclude that to be a positive development.
Well, one of the obvious ones is that she would have almost certainly gotten a later start on the group formation compared to the Junta and the Republic; in fact she probably only ever considered forming a group of her own in response to one group or the other starting to encroach on her territory.
Heh, in one sense that is a sign of vast wealth. There are few things in economics more powerful than a century or so of compound interest.
I may not be the most unbiased source here, since CK2 style quests tend to annoy me with their inability to split focus, or for that matter, concentrate focus, in ways that ought to make sense. Micro quests like these require a lot less suspension of disbelief for me, so they'll always be better from my point of view.
On the other hand, we seem to have screened out the shitposters; I can only conclude that to be a positive development.
Well to me that made logical sense because a lot of research involves doing things for x amount of time and isn't something that linearly scales speed with resources.
This is a fairly reasonable IC limiting factor too though.
Well it's not really something she could sell to mundanes anyways. So it's an asset, but not really one she could liquidate.
lolOn the other hand, we seem to have screened out the shitposters; I can only conclude that to be a positive development.
I have focused this heavily on making it "realistic" which is why I've stuck at a resources system in spite of the difficulty. It's by far the most realistic way to represent things in an empire quest.I may not be the most unbiased source here, since CK2 style quests tend to annoy me with their inability to split focus, or for that matter, concentrate focus, in ways that ought to make sense. Micro quests like these require a lot less suspension of disbelief for me, so they'll always be better from my point of view.
Hah, I can be the toxic one in some threads. Though usually it's because I occasionally get so incredibly pessimistic people consider it trolling.
This idea also fits well with the whole decentralization issue caused by the influx of new girls that Inverted_helix pointed out. As the administrative load is spread out further, we begin to lose control of the fiddly details.
If the trouble is how long it takes to write up, add a random delay effect to diplomacy?
Fixed.
Can easily bump that up. Their time in Tokyo is, at best, half time, so there's massive amounts of unallocated time in their group.
I took out the fostering action entirely, so that's not a factor in that total. I'll still need to bump up the overall diplomacy action, though, per helix's comment.
Will see about adding that.
Serena's deployment in Tokyo is a great big question mark. Calling it risky assumes that there's an actual plan there.
