Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
The purpose of the money was to help us deal with the refugees, IIRC. So yes, it would be being used as intended.
Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
- Thread starter inverted_helix
- Start date
The purpose of the money was to help us deal with the refugees, IIRC. So yes, it would be being used as intended.
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
Firstly, if you'd read helix's posts regarding stasis, you'd know we need the land to set this up, an industrial refrigerator, or permission from Nagoya to make use of theirs (which will also cost money). Our options are spend money to spend less cubes, or spend money to get more cubes. One of them also lowers morale and reduces our manpower for the month (that would be the stasis plan).
No, the purpose of the money is to help us expand faster. That's why it's acceptable to sell fractions of our future income for it. Spending it on things that provide no long term benefits is just hurting ourselves more than necessary.
I'm not saying we shouldn't spend money absorbing refugees, since that's what our future growth is, I'm just saying that we shouldn't spend a huge amount of money and a fraction of our future income to avoid putting people into stasis for one month.
No, Nagoya only requires us to pay for the grief cube costs. Even if they did charge us, they won't be charging as much as they would for grief cubes or they wouldn't be putting people into stasis.
If you have some use for untrained refugees that will allow us to expand faster, fine, but I haven't seen one yet.
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
If we don't get at least some money from the company, we will have fifty dollars to spend after basic upkeep. Basic upkeep does not include morale. Basic upkeep does not include new equipment for refugee girls. Basic upkeep does not include the cubes we will have to buy anyway to support an attack on the beholder. Unless a plan accounts for winning the lottery, there is no way we will still be financially in the black without taking money from the magick company.
Church cost is $800k.
Borrowed now, that's 3.2% per mil prior to killing the Beholder, 2% after. That's 2.56% pre-Beholder, 1.6% after. The difference is 0.96%, not 1.4%.
At our current income, that difference is $413 per month. Over 8 years (96 months), that's a pay back of $39,629. Double that to account for increased income (an average over tripled income), and we're around $80k, which is 20 cubes. That's the effective premium we're paying to get the church started this turn instead of next.
The number of greens we have free to put in storage without really messing with anything is currently 24. They would cost 0.1 cubes each, which means a net savings of 21.6 cubes. While it would be nice to get this reduction, it's not enough that I'd be willing to take the morale hit for it.
Putting people in storage would be a penalty to our morale. While most of our core group likely has a higher morale, overall average is sitting at a 2. That's not good, and a lower morale will have a hidden cost of more cubes spent on grief spirals.
Buying the church is sending the message that we expect to use it. That is, we expect to still be here after the Beholder is dead, and we're not afraid to spend money supporting that belief. That should be a pretty solid boost to morale.
It's also intended to be the central key element of our new governance. The sooner it's ready, the better, because governance is an issue we're running into head first right now.
Aside: Small idea - Order engraved medals for all current members, to commemorate their efforts to fight the Beholder. A quick check indicates we can get 180 personally engraved medals for about $720. (180 = 147 current + 27 new + 6 who died) (Couldn't find anything for military-quality medals.) A signifier for those actually here for this fight.
I'd focus on trying to find ways to use them, rather than pre-emptively trying to put them in storage. We need ideas, and lots of them. Ignore money limits, because we've got cash to burn. We can trim back anything excessive once we have more ideas to sort through.
Borrowed now, that's 3.2% per mil prior to killing the Beholder, 2% after. That's 2.56% pre-Beholder, 1.6% after. The difference is 0.96%, not 1.4%.
At our current income, that difference is $413 per month. Over 8 years (96 months), that's a pay back of $39,629. Double that to account for increased income (an average over tripled income), and we're around $80k, which is 20 cubes. That's the effective premium we're paying to get the church started this turn instead of next.
The number of greens we have free to put in storage without really messing with anything is currently 24. They would cost 0.1 cubes each, which means a net savings of 21.6 cubes. While it would be nice to get this reduction, it's not enough that I'd be willing to take the morale hit for it.
Putting people in storage would be a penalty to our morale. While most of our core group likely has a higher morale, overall average is sitting at a 2. That's not good, and a lower morale will have a hidden cost of more cubes spent on grief spirals.
Buying the church is sending the message that we expect to use it. That is, we expect to still be here after the Beholder is dead, and we're not afraid to spend money supporting that belief. That should be a pretty solid boost to morale.
It's also intended to be the central key element of our new governance. The sooner it's ready, the better, because governance is an issue we're running into head first right now.
Aside: Small idea - Order engraved medals for all current members, to commemorate their efforts to fight the Beholder. A quick check indicates we can get 180 personally engraved medals for about $720. (180 = 147 current + 27 new + 6 who died) (Couldn't find anything for military-quality medals.) A signifier for those actually here for this fight.
Wondering if we can do something like the mentor thing, but more group-oriented instead of individual-oriented. Anything we can do to raise morale up from 0 would be a huge help to our situation. Assuming we accept the new refugees this turn, we'll have a total of 100 refugees that we've accepted into our ranks, and we need to continue adapting them to our culture. 39 of those are not currently assigned duties.
I'd focus on trying to find ways to use them, rather than pre-emptively trying to put them in storage. We need ideas, and lots of them. Ignore money limits, because we've got cash to burn. We can trim back anything excessive once we have more ideas to sort through.
There are numbers less then 400,000, but still larger than 0.
@Kinematics I was talking about the cost of purchasing cubes and misremembered the rate as 3.5% per million.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
I have to say that the arguments you give against getting the church now seem stronger to me than your arguments for it.
Apartments for the new refugees is $8000, and will add $4k per month to upkeep after next month. Delivery business expansion was last rated at around $50k for the Yokohama area. We could push for a larger Tokyo expansion and it might go as high as $100k. Restaurant expansions would just be standard loans.
Eventually we'll want to move everyone from apartments to houses, especially if we go for a house structure. We'll want two more 50-capacity houses at $8k per month, after accounting for about 100 capacity in the church. Those replace the current $16k plus $4k new per month in apartment rents, more or less leaving us cost neutral.
- Location
- The Beach
Couldn't we assign ~2 refugee meguca to one of ours, to encourage them to mingle with one another and adapt to our culture? Have our girls mingle with them and each other.
Instead of having a moral day, find ways to have these groups go do things all throughout the month. Like have a few of them go see a movie one day, or the public pool/community center, or hiking in the woods at a park, or go fishing if some of them are into that. Encourage generally small moral-boosting activities instead of one big day were we all do something.
Is that including the people we will eventually absorb from Tokyo, or just the ones on our doorstep right now?
Dunno. Over the long term, the extra cost is pretty small, while in the short term, the extra morale and government prep is likely to be beneficial. Of course the further you stretch into the future, the more value the cost has, and the less value the startup margins have. I'm not sure it's possible for there to be a 'correct' answer on this, but my gut instinct is to push morale as hard as possible right now, because lots of things can collapse due to low morale.
One key point is that we haven't assigned Beholder assault units, so we don't really know how many 'free' meguca are going to be available yet. Almost certainly not more than a handful, though. 1:2 ratio would be more like the original mentor system, and we don't have the numbers to support that right now.
Interesting ideas. Total meguca cost to allow 1 day per meguca for stuff like that would be 6. 3.5 of that would be from new refugees (vets and greens). It's a maybe.
Only current members. However adding new Tokyo members runs about $25k per 50 added (housing + welcome), and then $20k per month of upkeep after that (stipend, housing, food, etc).
- Location
- Head in the clouds
If we're doing medals, I think I can whip up a small piece of Mami taking those medals to the shrine for the girls we lost in/spiraled due to Tokyo.
Remember that future costs are less important than present costs because we can invest money in the present to provide returns by the time the future gets here. If getting the church now instead of in a month increases our expected future size by more than 1%, either by making us more likely to survive or by letting us expand faster, it's worth it.
I feel like people are learning economics from this quest :lol
Though incidentally I'm surprised that no one seemed to have any ideas to offer regarding possible techs or ideas I could purloin for other groups. I need to really brainstorm that I guess.
Though incidentally I'm surprised that no one seemed to have any ideas to offer regarding possible techs or ideas I could purloin for other groups. I need to really brainstorm that I guess.
I'm currently getting over a bug that's kept me in bed most of the last 48 hours. My brain doesn't want to think too hard right now.
I guess the obvious question is how long it takes to rebuild the church. I vaguely remember it being three months and by that point we'll want to be expanding into Tokyo, so having our centre of government set up by then could be a major speed up.
- Location
- The Beach
Ah yeah. It was just a rough number anyway regarding refugees vs. non-refugee numbers. I don't wanna overwhelm our girls though by putting too many in one group.
Malls too. Girls like to go to the mall and do things. Costs are an issue but I think the moral boost and getting the refugees immersed in our culture are worth it. We will have to see what the numbers look like.
Well we did have a nice discussion on para-meguca :lol. But as far as other groups to have... We've tried enchanting objects right? What if some girl or group just decided they went all in on magically infusing gear. So she (or they) have polls or sticks that are far harder than they should be, allowing them to not waste magic on their own weapons?
- Location
- The Beach
We still want to encourage that behavior in including the refugees beyond just giving them money and saying 'have fun'.
Sure, but we don't have to budget money for it, just time.
I'm calling the stasis plan "Time Travel" because the girls entering stasis will basically be traveling forwards in time. It will involve a morale hit, but we can pitch it in such a way that it doesn't sound too bad. It's definitely better than staying in Tokyo or taking Nagoya's offer. In terms of money, we will need two spaces ~150m apart, one for the industrial freezer(s) and one for the gems. Frozen girls won't actually take up very much space. That's basically two apartments (or an office and a warehouse). I guestimate that this would be roughly equivalent to two small apartments (i.e space for 8 girls), so $2000 in the first month (plus $4,500 for the freezer) and $1000 in subsequent months. We have 65 Greens who won't be doing jobs that are terribly urgent, so they could each spend half of their time in the time machine. Which would yield 29.2 GCU. Those cubes would cost us $116,800 to buy on the market at current prices. And prices for cubes are likely to go up in the future, while availability goes down.
Just because buying cubes and saving cubes using stasis both cost money doesn't mean that they're at all equivalent. We're going to have to borrow some money from the Magick Company, sure, but we should only borrow what we actually need.
As long as everyone knows that the situation is temporary (and it's definitely better for the refugees than Tokyo or Nagoya), then the morale hit shouldn't be too bad. The opportunity cost of what we could do with $100,000 should more than offset it.
Weirdly, despite the influx of refugees, we're still operating with too few girls (too few Veterans, anyway). Part of that is because you intentionally increased our maintenance costs (and they're percentage based) so that we wouldn't have as many girls to do everything (and force you to write long updates). And part of it is that the new girls require supervision from our experienced girls. This turn (and probably next turn) we simply won't have any time to research or negotiate for anything which isn't essential to the Beholder fight.
If we could ask other groups for tech and get it for free (or for trade), then that would be nice, but even then we would have to spend some time in order to be able to understand and use the tech.
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Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
I would, but we're so in the dark on the greater magic system that the entire category is nebulously off-limits. Hunting or pvp tech is somewhat different, but we've already brainstormed most of that for ourselves.
I would have to wonder, though, if a monk-like ascetic lifestyle would have any benefits to group-casting. The issue is that you have to get multiple girls on the same 'wavelength' or 'whitewash' the color of their magic, so what happens if you get the especially disciplined and zen together to try communion casting?
How much healing time would this take? It can't take too much time if Nagoya is able to do it en masse. Maybe 1 healer per 20 girls who are in stasis?
How much would their combat capacity be reduced? The Veterans will already be at significantly reduced capacity due to fighting within the Beholder's miasma. Presumably, that effect would be less if their soul gems were right next to Serena, so could it be a net benefit if Serena were to be the one holding their gems (e.g. fighting at 60% capacity instead of 50% capacity)?
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