You on the other hand portrayed yourselves as rather blunter and more self serving than expected (particularly with the veiled threat with something mostly unrelated), and that may not have a monetary value but it is a consideration. The threat wasn't even particularly threatening because if you look at the map, you have to cross through someone else's territory to get to her, which is why she hasn't had any refugees reach her. But it does speak about who you are.
The refugee issue is absolutely related, as that is the primary reason we have to borrow from Sachiko instead of a a bank.
Furthermore it shows a disconnect from reality to depict our position as self serving, when we are trying to help girls not die, and reduce the pressure on all the other small magical girl organizations.
It's Sachiko that is clearly operating from a self centered position that is focused on preserving her own assets and her future position instead of concern for the current needs of the magical girl population. It's the height of hypocrisy for her to accuse us of being self-serving.
You have more faith in banks than I do if you think they wouldn't. But part of the issue is that you don't actually need this money to stop the outbreak. You need this money to benefit from stopping it.
I find this incredibly disturbing. I can totally understand Sachiko misunderstanding us like this, but you are presenting this as the GM stating a fact that is simply untrue. And I cannot comprehend how you came to this conclusion.
You are right that we don't need this money to stop the youma outbreak. You are simply factually wrong in accusing us of needing this money to secure a position in Tokyo. Which you ought to know since you know our balance sheets, and have been here for over six months of discussion on the issue. The only way you can make such an accusation is by a willful disregard for where our money is going and by selectively focusing on some comments by a few at the expense of the majority of the thread.
We need this money for the refugees. We wouldn't even be approaching Sachiko for money if it were not for the refugee problem. Heck, we even sold a ton of grief cubes to Nagoya so we would have a war chest that specifically included a budget for funding expansion in Tokyo. It's just that first of all, the clearing of Tokyo is taking much longer than planned, and at a much greater expense, and second refugees are devouring our entire budget.
The initial 2 months of refugees has stripped our warchest to the limit, including all the money we had set aside for eventual expansion of the courier service. Just look at where all our money is going! It's apartments and equipment for refugees, or equipment replacement for the teams fighting in Tokyo.
Furthermore we now have a housing need for Serena (which is directly related to clearing the youma problem) although we could (barely) manage to handle that without going to Sachiko.
The immediate needs are all refugees! Now of course, since we are borrowing money, we have to think about all other monetary needs in the near future (which includes expanding into Tokyo) but that does not change the fact that refugees are the overwhelming driving force behind borrowing money now. And in fact the refugees of past turns are why we don't have the resources to fund expansion in Tokyo anymore.
Now I can totally understand Sachiko being confused, and thinking we are selfishly focused on expanding into Tokyo, but for you as the GM to think that is nothing short of astounding. What thread have you been reading? Especially after you have made absolutely clear to us that if we leave Tokyo unorganized that this crisis will just happen again. Which means that expansion in Tokyo for stability is not at odds with an altruistic motive. Most of the arguments in this thread have been primarily over how direct our control needs to be to achieve this level of stability, and how much we can expand without making that expansion destabilizing.
If we were self serving, we could have locked all the refugees out, pushing them onto the other organizations around us, undermining them, and driving them to collapse, while saving all our resources for seizing control of Tokyo.
But no, apparently our "lets all work together so we can save everyone!" is considered the height of selfish actions?
And pointing out obliquely that we are taking on refugees and thus lessening the burden on the rest of the other magical girl organizations, and that maybe loaning us money actually does benefit her is somehow considered "unrelated?" That's just bizarre. And you know that the connection, because I even said so. Lots of people said so.
Sachiko really is starting to come across as narrow minded, seeing herself as "safe" and oblivious to the pressures being created and how they effect all the other organizations around her.
And yeah, that generates some resentment. Now I'm able to ignore that because I see no reason to cut our nose off to spite our face, but it accentuates that Sachiko ought to be running a business, not a government.
Yeah, a bit of a problem, especially with such low voters and plans (I mean, I think there's usually only 2-3 plans, and they don't look simple to put together).
Then take a plan and modify it.
I think Kinematics was suggesting our meguca expert weigh in.
Our what?
This idea is rather ridiculous.
Even with its current population of meguca, if the youma were cleared the demon strength would gradually start to rise back to normal because the magical girls still there would naturally want to hunt demons in order to build up GCU for their own use and there's virtually no danger to them even in solo hunting as a green at this point.
There's no need for some sort of external organized hunt. Nor any money or logistics involved. Individual self interest would drive them to hunt like it always does.
The underlying issues as you put it are themselves not much of an issue for quite some time as in the short term there's going to be a huge glut of of cubes and territory relative to the number of magical girls. They simply don't have the numbers to drive demon strength up high enough to repeat the problem. And they're not going to have any desire to do so either.
The Beijing scenario only occurs because of the safety net.
Claiming Tokyo is for your benefit, not Japan as a whole.
This is monstrously unfair. You have made it explicitly clear to us both IC and OOC that cities around the world are locked into cycles of youma outbreaks that can and have caused entire cities to be
exterminated. You have made it clear that this is happening
right now in Osaka, where despite the present example of Tokyo the local organizations are continuing to hunt to a level of DS that generates youma.
Sure, the glut of cubes will mean that for the first six to nine months after clearing the youma that Tokyo will be peaceful, but what happens after that? Realize that there will be obvious conflicts, both by outside powers coming in to grab a portion of the Tokyo pot, and by Tokyo organizations (both new and old) attempting to seize power. The stockpile of cubes will in someways make things worse, because organizations will be able to devote more resources to war instead of to hunting, depending on their cube stockpile to preserve them through the war.
You even explicitly told us that the Incubators would not dispatch their pet Legendary to clear Tokyo (despite being only a couple hours away by plane) because the Incubators considered Tokyo to be likely to revert to another youma outbreak shortly after being cleared, unless we could provide evidence that we would politically stabilize the city. You can't turn around now and claim that Tokyo actually will be naturally stable after all. Why won't the Incubators dispatch their pet Legendary then?
Not to mention, if we did clear Tokyo, and then did not expand into Tokyo -
why wouldn't the Tokyo girls assume they have a safety net?
Wouldn't they assume that the Serenes will just dispatch Serena again if another youma outbreak happens?
This has been an extremely exhausting campaign, straining our resources to the breaking point, and diverting us away from major plans that we had for both internal improvements and technological research. Are we just going to keep on doing this? Unless we expand we will not be able to afford doing this, we lack the monetary power of Magick Corp, and the meguca power of Nagoya. Our main advantage is our hunting to territory efficiency ratio which, obviously, requires expansion of territory to leverage properly.
Is this short term, or med/long term? If that's med term, I'm surprised she's actually offering us this. (Short term makes sense). Edit: If she's thinking med term, possibly point out that we're looking to get territory capable of supporting (what, 1000-1200 meguca I think?), and thus are almost certainly going to have a population increase (even if just from Kyuubey being Kyuubey, but more likely also from refugees returning, or being brought out of storage or whatever).
