And therein lies one of the major downsides of mass-accepting so many meguca so quickly; the issues you mention completely wreck the internal trust and stability SIMP previously had.
Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
- Thread starter inverted_helix
- Start date
The problem is that your original members are the minority at this point. 58% of your members joined in the last 3 turns.
Your original culture is wrecked by going from everyone to the minority.
And the people you took in for the most part are used to fending for themselves not being part of a group at all. Collecting cubes for your personal rainy day fund is only natural.
Though also that would only be 6% of the population at this point.
You also have no real mechanisms meant to prevent this sort of thing. Early on in the quest I outright asked players how to handle cube storage as Mami was just hoarding them in her closet at the start, and the consensus was just dividing the supplies up evenly amongst the abodes. No security measures exist to prevent someone just walking off with a bunch.
Honestly you're lucky that it was 15% of intake in bits instead of a whole storage location just being emptied out.
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Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Okay then.
@TheEyes , @notgreat ,
I have an idea. We have Mami spend a personal action, or half of one or however that works, cracking down on corruption. At the same time, we give each girl 1.1 GCU this month, 1gcu for normal expenses and .1 for the purpose of establishing rainy day funds. We do this for the next few months.
This shows that we understand and agree with the reasonableness of their motivation, but disapprove of their actions.
What thinks the thread?
- Location
- The Beach
I think its a good idea. But it might be worth folding it into a greater action where Mami spends time going around visiting everyone.
Having her as some kind of distant leader would make it more justifiable in an MGs eyes to hoard.
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Well, I'm glad we finished the Eyeball, even if five girls died.
Now we have to organize Tokyo and make sure our internal culture stays upbeat and happy.
Now for the Rumors
Apparently a giant Rock wasn't enough to close that Hole in Spacetime.
Now we have to organize Tokyo and make sure our internal culture stays upbeat and happy.
Now for the Rumors
That was to be expected, with Meguca and Demons all over the Place. Atleast Nagoya should be able to send a few Girls hunting next turn.
And even more Chaos and Death. shit.
Multidimensional invasion when?
Apparently a giant Rock wasn't enough to close that Hole in Spacetime.
Well, with Tokyo save things should get better.
It's not about Size. It's about how many Legendarys/Cheats you have.
So we still have to hunt down the Leftovers.
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
Corporate measures against fraud generally include security measures (guards, cameras, regular counts) of cash or product, and limiting cash access to trained and trusted individuals who have some degree of seniority in the organization.
Basically all of these measures would mean stratifying some of the girls into a management or bureaucratic security class, whose sole purpose in the Serenes would be to ensure corruption didn't happen. You would then need people to watch the watchers lest they use their enhanced powers to steal in bulk, and use even more stringent loyalty programs...
Generally, in order to reduce the natural elements of corruption, the only answers are 'wait until the girls assimilate' or 'become the security state'. Of the two, I prefer assimilation, as difficult as it is due to the bloated immigration we had and are likely to have again when we claim chunks of Tokyo, the Serene's basic model is probably in the lowest corruption bracket of any government style.
Also, @inverted_helix, you should call the various groups of girls Chapters. As much as it pings one's 40k senses, Chapter Houses generally refer to sororal 'families,' which is generally the SIMP culture we want to keep, the fraternal loyalty of the individual members to the 'sorority.'
I like that term a lot more than clans. I didn't really like clan as a unit because that always struck me more as a much larger unit and kind of the full governmental model you're working on, not what the smaller scale blocks are called.
Chapter does have a slight religious tone, but it fits with your ongoing cult vibes.
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
I doubt it's as strong a tradition in the east, but Chapter also refers to sorority groups that tend to consider themselves almost familial in nature with their other members, even at great distances. "I'm Serene, Mitakihara Chapter," brings more immediate feelings of sisterhood (at least in the west) than clan membership.
Linguistically I expect that terms matching these concepts do exist in Japanese, if somewhat different in exact nature. I mean Japan does have a history of strong familial bonds and clan based government organization.
But in terms of linguistic effects as I am not fluent in Japanese, and I doubt anyone that reads this thread is either, I stick mostly to what sounds good in English.
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Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Question. How many Personal Actions does Mami effectively have? Can it be split like the chapter/clan actions, making it effectively 2 actions, or is it just one?
For reference, CK2 quests usually give 2 or 3 personal action slots.
Hmm, I'll allow you two. I'm not sure whether I should notate it as splitting the single unit in half to match notations or just straight up two. Keeping in mind you're still splitting your time either way.
Admittedly I could have given you 16 chapter units and erased splitting into halves, but I was kind of carrying over something nice from before and I did a bunch of really irritating math trying to figure out how to simplify hunting and arrived at a group of 20 being good for 45 territory and didn't want to scale it down.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Naturally two personal actions is Mami spending her time on two things during the month. Chapters being splitable is fine, since they're groups and we're used to thinking in .5 of a unit.
@Powerofmind But having specialist bureaucrats and criminal investigators is inevitable as we get larger. Even very high trust societies (like, say, Japan) need them and infact having reliable investigations is a very important part of becoming a high trust society. Why should any of the refugees not stash cubes when they assume everyone else is doing it to and we have no way to prove otherwise?
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Obviously, we should crack down on corruption officially while also giving them a legitimate source for a rainy day fund. Everybody gets 1.1 GCU, 1 for the month and .1 for a rainy day. This is also show that the Serene administration is responsive to their needs and fears.
This is basically Fun With Magic with a different portrayal, right? I guess that's fine, we're not going to be short on cubes for a while once we grab a chunk of Tokyo.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
It was inspired by Fun with Magic, but it shouldn't have any masquerade problems.
I suspect some of our older girls will just burn the extra cubes, since they don't expect to ever need them.
I would advocate continuing the Fun With Magic paradigm. It's the same cube cost, but it encourages creativity and fun rather than paranoia. Anyone who really is paranoid WILL stockpile the extra (there's no way around that), but such behavior should not be officially encouraged. We want people to trust (and rely on) the organization rather than their own personal stashes.
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Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Sure, but we don't ask people to fork over their stashes when joining. Hell, remember that influx of cubes we got when a bunch of our girls decided to put their rainy day funds into the organization? As I see it, acknowledging that Rainy Day funds are valid and providing an alternative to theft will make assimilation easier. And I do plan to pair it with cracking down on corruption.
Seems reasonable, but I'm gonna wait until we get the finalized system before making plans. There's a lot of nice simplization there, but I need details before I can start making new programs/spreadsheets.
I'm somewhat worried that this was too much simplification, but without details that's pure speculation.
What I listed was essentially the new mechanics at this point. I am still taking suggestions on revising them, but otherwise figured they were workable.
Likely there will be a new round of inflation of details as time goes on though, or even more direct revision.
Obviously if you have ideas please lay them out. But I intentionally cut down the complexity this much because the people that wrote the ultra-complex plans all left.
You kinda need to recost literally every option to state their benefits and costs now that you've changed the base unit from megucamonths to chaptermonths. We could just multiply everything by 20, but that leaves a ton of things that quite simply don't make sense- for example, research was low-manpower but high-resource cost. Making every research cost just as much but also take .5 chaptermonths is a massive nerf. Have elites just completely disappeared? How does territory interact with hunting in chapters?
Actually, can you clearly state what the hunting mechanics now are? What are the inputs and what are the outputs?
I don't understand what the current system looks like as a whole and thus can't offer suggestions beyond requesting more clarity.
edit: It might be helpful if you were to offer an example plan, and show how to calculate its expected effects.
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I can assure you, this is intended. Honestly the old system was burning itself down and I could barely spit at the fires. So instead I blew it up. Research takes action slots.
The old system only worked when you had a miniscule number of people. Because honestly the quest mechanics were designed with the idea of a quest about 10 turns long ending in everyone but Mami being dead, and Mami very sad. The idea that you'd succeed this wildly wasn't thought of. Even if I'd known; quest mechanics holding together for 36 turns is actually a good enough run for a set of mechanics that I think I'd have been okay with running with it and just changing mechanics later anyway.
So now that I can no longer keep patching the old system I decided to move to a more common action slot system that will at least be able to hold together better. As someone mentioned earlier when I was consulting ideas, as the GM if I need to I can completely rewrite things to make them work. I literally could not see a way forward while maintaining the same degree of precision and realistic costs that I had before. I have to move to a more action slot based system as otherwise the quantity of activity explodes to a point that neither I nor players can handle. Which also means abstracting a lot of things.
If you want I could just declare this thread closed, open a new thread as a sequel with the new system. I didn't because I just didn't see a reason to start a new thread when there's no thread page limit and there'd be a ton of references that would only make sense after reading the first thread.
I'm unsure how I'm going to track it. Part of the problem of course with the old system as you scaled up was coming up with interesting things for elites to have. So eliminating them might be the best choice. Or I could have them as a pool you can use to provide a bonus to projects where they'd be helpful.
Essentially I'm just eliminating 90% of the mechanics that took tons of math. Only @Kinematics and @Elder Haman were willing to do that math on a regular basis and they're both gone. So there simply wasn't anyone left that would do it and I had to eliminate it. Thus reducing it to just remove casualty chance in normal circumstances. And you just assign chapters to hunt based on how much territory you're hunting.
A chapter can hunt up to 30 territory in a sustainable improved rotating tactics manner to get 1.15x the territory in cubes.
(Or in an all out effort without rotating tactics 59 cubes in a low demon strength territory like Tokyo.)
This is actually very carefully balanced to closely mirror the original hunting mechanics results with almost all the math eliminated.
Things are a little complicated in math because of shift between systems, but should level out pretty quick.
Something along the lines of:
1 Business Chapter: Business
3 Hunter Chapters: Hunt in Tokyo, go full tilt
1 Standard Chapter: Hunt non-Tokyo areas
3 Standard Chapter: Recruitment and territory claiming in Tokyo
Personal Action: Introduce self to as many of the new members as possible
Personal Action: Aftermath diplomacy with Nagoya and Kyoto
Free: Increase GCU allowance per member to 1.1 to let them have some more magic.
Free: Maintain standards in monetary expenditures per girl acquiring housing as needed.
Serena to track down remaining Class 3s.
+Whatever fluff you'd like. Keeping in mind that fluff regularly does give bonuses. Fluff can include things you'd like to say to people, particular elites to lead chapters in their activities, etc.
Money is mostly staying the same, it's just probably going to combine line items. So something like 400 per girl, including new recruits. If you do the math this actually is within single digit percent of current costs, just simpler in how you get there.
Cubes from this you'd get 3*88.5 = 265.5 from Tokyo, 30*1.15 = 34.5 from your own territory. Giving 300 GCU income.
Cube costs base would be 169*1.1 = 185.9 GCU before spirals
As to Serena I don't want her to be a full unit, because she's not capable of doing a full chapter's worth of research or the like. But she is a powerful hero unit in terms of combat. So likely I'll just have her as a sort of unit that can only be applied for certain actions even if many turns you aren't going to use her. Kind of like a military keeping tanks. You really don't get to use those much, but they are nice enough to have that you don't really want to get rid of them.
Research on the other hand will be massively more expensive yes, but I was always planning to up its cost as you picked off low hanging levels anyway. So just saying you have to dedicate action slots to it isn't unreasonable anyway. That's how it works in most quests.
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Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Hmm. Why not give her Group 1 action slot, that is non-divisible, which can be used for military or research. We do want to have Serena's group do a lot of research after all, what with how we're going to sink a bunch of resources into figuring out how to mitigate her aura and keep her group from insta-spiraling outside of it.