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Terminus Quest: A CKII Mass Effect Quest

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I've seen a couple of people that have wanted to seize the Lystheni navy, but I'm not sure why. This is what they have:
At some point, the Lystheni stole your frigate designs, because they've reproduced them whole cloth. Their corvettes and light cruiser model, on the other hand, are their own make, and pathetic models at that. The entire thing put together is about the size of the Explorer Corps, and by the looks of it, that's all that the Lystheni can currently support without complete industrial collapse.
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Almost every other demand looks more appealing to me.


Two ideas for write-in concessions:
-We could offer them our frigates , corvette, and light cruiser designs.
They shouldn't know that we know that they stole our frigate designs, and thus we could gain something out of its loss. Furthermore, they can't actually produce any of the new models without wrecking their current fleet.
-Offer to buy old models as they are replaced. Having a couple of militia-grade vessels might be nice for patrol duties as our civilian traffic increases, and it could lead to them eventually specializing in selling us the vessels that we need for the war.
 
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[] Plan: Dreadnaught diplomacy
-[] Demands
--[] The immediate release of Virmirean merchants from Lystheni territory (civilians released as a precondition of continued negotiations).
--[] Full disclosure of Lystheni history and society, including their origins and the nature of their animosity towards the Citadel (Lystheni forced to stop being cagey).
--[] Full Lystheni commitment to the Rachni War effort (all Lystheni military assets placed under your command).
--[] Full disclosure and surrender of the stations in Sikel in violation of the Virmire-Lystheni Border Treaty (get the artifacts and the stations on which they sit, along with experimental records).
-[] Leverage
--[] The dissolution of the Virmire-Lystheni Border Treaty and a complete blockade of Lystheni space (claim the LBZ and put defense platforms in every system to make sure that nothing passes).
--[] Taking the Dalatrass as a hostage.
--[] War (make your implicit threat explicit).
-[] Concessions
--[] A commitment to maintaining the sovereignty of the Lystheni state as a priority of Virmirean foreign policy (guarantee the Lystheni's independence).

The only thing the Lystheni cannot afford to lose is the Dalatrass, who is standing not five feet away from us. If we take her hostage the Lystheni face extinction.
 
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VoidZero said:
My amount of hostile and suspicious intent is no more and no less than when we first discovered the spy installation under the embassy.
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For us, Mira and the players, there's no real change in opinion. But with Virmire's citizens? This is the final nail in the coffin that the Lystheni are not to be trusted or given leniency. Before this, most the the Lystheni's crimes had no direct impact on the population of Virmire space. The acts were still done in bad faith and they did steal military secrets, but no Virmirian citizen was directly harmed by the Lystheni.

Then the made it a hostage situation. If we wanted a war, this is the perfect casus belli. Before this, it was all diplomatic issues, treaty violations and Cold War shenanigans, but using uninvolved civilians as leverage cranks things up a notch. What could have been solved in a handful of even handed meetings and maybe a dinner if we could dislodge the stick in the dalatrass' cloacal now has to be done in what will likely be long, exhausting talks that will just frustrate everyone.

We're not going to be willing to compromise as much as we would have because they took our people hostage. They're not going to compromise because they are paranoid and see us as the enemy. So now instead of trying to work things out without a Sword of Damocles hanging over the agreement, we now have a game of chicken where the side that blinks first loses.

Rakuhn said:
I've seen a couple of people that have wanted to seize the Lystheni navy, but I'm not sure why. This is what they have:

Two ideas for write-in concessions:
-We could offer them our frigates (they shouldn't know that we know that they stole this, and thus we could gain something out of its loss), corvette, and light cruiser designs. They can't actually produce any of the new models without wrecking their current fleet.
-Offer to buy old models as they are replaced. Having a couple of militia-grade vessels might be nice for patrol duties as our civilian traffic increases, and it could lead to them eventually specializing in selling us the vessels that we need for the war.
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I was thinking they might be useful as scouts or active ablative armor for our more valuable assets.

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Cmd. Frost said:
snip
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Voting is still closed for another two hours
 
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Faith said:
Isn't Beshkar an Admiral, not a Minister? Should this be Toral K'Sharr?


By all accounts, the Batarian Hegemony was pants on head before the Reapers got to them, and the Reaper brainwashing didn't make them (much) worse until the actual invasion began. Given how indoctrination appears in the games and books its possible that they've been indoctrinated so slowly over such a long period that they're basically unchanged and will remain so until the Reapers actually arrive and start ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL.

I'm not going to comment on negotiations. I'm Australian, we're bad at politics.
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If political failure was a problem, all Americans should be banned.


I'm liking Slayer's proposal, although the intricacies of joint research might be difficult to settle here and now. Demanding our people back honestly gives them leverage, and it's really the only leverage they have here.

I really don't want them to have that power.
 
Actually they can afford to loose the Daltrass because they fertilize enough eggs to have a even pairing of men and women. But that is Meta knowledge.
 
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Getting their history is worthless. We can't confirm their story and it'll just be pumped full of propaganda/lies that could taint our perception and even damage our relationship with the Council.
 
Cmd. Frost said:
So what, you think this is a double?



According to Intel, they have one female, the Dalatrass, everyone else is male.
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Well we have no real intelligence on them. We have reached the limit of what we can do and no jack shit. They are a crazy conspiracy cult with a government.

All we have is meta knowledge that they have a half female population, hate other people with Salarians being at the top, are into genetic engineering, and will do nothing when the reapers come. Of course these is all Meta so....
 
rdc30 said:
Getting their history is worthless. We can't confirm their story and it'll just be pumped full of propaganda/lies that could taint our perception and even damage our relationship with the Council.
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At least we'd know what they want us to know about them, and how they want us to interact with them. It is impossible to have long-term peaceful relations with a group of people that you do not understand and cannot predict, no matter what the technical arrangement of power between the two groups is.

Our choice now is either getting (a version of) their history or going to war. The other demands only exist to sweeten a peace deal.
 
Nurgle said:
Well we have no real intelligence on them. We have reached the limit of what we can do and no jack shit. They are a crazy conspiracy cult with a government.

All we have is meta knowledge that they have a half female population, hate other people with Salarians being at the top, are into genetic engineering, and will do nothing when the reapers come. Of course these is all Meta so....
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Um, no they have no females except for the Dalatrass, and there are only Salarians in the Lystheni.
 
Rakuhn said:
At least we'd know what they want us to know about them, and how they want us to interact with them. It is impossible to have long-term peaceful relations with a group of people that you do not understand and cannot predict, no matter what the technical arrangement of power between the two groups is.

Our choice now is either getting (a version of) their history or going to war. The other demands only exist to sweeten a peace deal.
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I would argue getting a completely doctored version of history is more dangerous than no history. With no history, we can still operate on the basis of pure realpolitik, but as soon as you introduce that fabricated history, then you introduce emotional factors and are forced to operate from a framework derived from whatever narrative the Lystheni want to create.
 
Nurgle said:
Well we have no real intelligence on them. We have reached the limit of what we can do and no jack shit. They are a crazy conspiracy cult with a government.

All we have is meta knowledge that they have a half female population, hate other people with Salarians being at the top, are into genetic engineering, and will do nothing when the reapers come. Of course these is all Meta so....
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Nurgle said:
Uhh no they breed as many female as male. That is in the wiki. But we don't know that in character so it is a moot point.
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This is also meta-knowledge to which I am not privy, so perhaps you could explicate it for us. When I look at salarians in the wiki, it claims a 1-9 split between females and males, and it has maybe 20 lines on the Lystheni. From where are you getting this?
 
rdc30 said:
I would argue getting a completely doctored version of history is more dangerous than no history. With no history, we can still operate on the basis of pure realpolitik, but as soon as you introduce that fabricated history, then you introduce emotional factors and are forced to operate from a framework derived from whatever narrative the Lystheni want to create.
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Even real politick doesn't work if we don't have a framework under which we can model Lystheni society. Half of our problems with them so far have been from treating them as we would another "rational" polity. We don't know what their interests are, how to threaten them, how to bribe them, what they consider to be sacrosanct, how to protect ourselves against the likely avenues of their attack, nor where they are most vulnerable.

With our current understanding, we can only treat them as a maddened-beast. They are something that must be destroyed or, if we lack the power to do that, contained. If we want anything more, if we want to continue getting income from their trade, if we want access to their best and brightest minds, if we want them to help secure our cluster from piracy, if we want them to help us resist the Rachni, Council, and Terminus, we have to learn more.

We've tried friendly diplomacy, we've tried trading with them, we've tried spying on them. We've learned nothing. This is the only way that we are going to learn anything about them, regardless of whether or not it is %100 accurate. It is going to be more accurate than our current model. This is our last opportunity to have them as our partner instead of as an enemy.
 
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Edit: it's been three hours

[X] Plan Dont be stoopid, stupid!
-[x] Demands
--[x] Full disclosure of Lystheni history and society, including their origins and the nature of their animosity towards the Citadel (Lystheni forced to stop being cagey).
--[x] Full Lystheni commitment to the Rachni War effort (all Lystheni military assets placed under your command).
--[x] Full disclosure and surrender of the stations in Sikel in violation of the Virmire-Lystheni Border Treaty (get the artifacts and the stations on which they sit, along with experimental records).
-[x] Leverage
--[x] A continued complete trade embargo (what it says).
--[x] Allowing the resumption of trade, but no longer making terms a concern of the Virmirean government (cut your trading companies off the leash and stop telling them to play nice with the Lystheni's terms).
-[x] Concessions
--[x] The resumption of trade on the Lystheni's terms (give them their lifeline back).
--[x] A commitment to maintaining the sovereignty of the Lystheni state as a priority of Virmirean foreign policy (guarantee the Lystheni's independence).
--[x] A general withdrawal of military forces (stand down the 3rd RWF).

No need to mention war, it's crass to bring it up and would reinforce us as 'enemy' in the dalatrass's mind. ditto our merchants and their spies.. if they mistreat our people, we'll introduce their spies to a cat-o-nine-tales and salt. What we need is their story, or what they think we want to know of their story. We also need to know what they think is so important that it's worth violating the only treaty they've ever signed. If they don't like it, we crash their economy with an embargo. They try to play hardball, we let our merchants off the chain and crash their economy while we get rich.

They play stupid ball, we invade, take our people back and burn their orbitals.

They play ball, they can pretend that their trade sanctions exist at their pleasure instead of ours. We station the 3RWF back closer to the front, and say anyone coming thru Hoc can't go exploring SO w/o our say so.
 
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[X] Plan Soft Touch
-[X] Demands
--[X] Full disclosure of Lystheni history and society, including their origins and the nature of their animosity towards the Citadel (Lystheni forced to stop being cagey).
--[X] Full Lystheni commitment to the Rachni War effort (all Lystheni military assets placed under your command).
--[X] Write-In: A mutually-binding agreement to dimplomatically declare and allow cooperative and unrestricted access to all archaeological finds, be they Prothean or other, from this point forward and retroactively, to allow for joint examination and furthering of scientific research.
-[X] Leverage
--[X] A continued complete trade embargo (what it says).
--[X] The dissolution of the Virmire-Lystheni Border Treaty and a complete blockade of Lystheni space (claim the LBZ and put defense platforms in every system to make sure that nothing passes).
--[X] Allowing the resumption of trade, but no longer making terms a concern of the Virmirean government (cut your trading companies off the leash and stop telling them to play nice with the Lystheni's terms).
-[X] Concessions
--[X] The resumption of trade on the Lystheni's terms (give them their lifeline back).
--[X] A commitment to maintaining the sovereignty of the Lystheni state as a priority of Virmirean foreign policy (guarantee the Lystheni'sindependence).
--[X] Permit the relocation of Lystheni installations in violation of the Virmire-Lystheni Border Treaty (let them have the artifacts and stations).
--[X] A general withdrawal of military forces (stand down the 3rd RWF).
--[X] The release of captured Lystheni intelligence operatives in Virmirean space (give back their spies).
--[X] Write-In: An agreement to avoid military escalation on your part towards the Lystheni until and unless the Rachni threat is dealt with, provided the Lystheni promise the same; the agreement to be renewed upon final defeat of the Rachni.
 
To me, the best case scenario for the Lystheni is to be Space North Korea to our Space China. They can be a paranoid polity that hangs out in their corner of space and creates headaches for galactic do-gooders. That's fine. But the one thing they cannot do is shit all over their neighbor and patron who is completely capable of destroying them at the cost of a minor economic hit.

They've spent the last decade or so shitting on us at every opportunity. This is not the time to be nice and understanding. This is the time to rough them up a bit and set some clear boundaries. At the same time, since we're nice people and all, we should leave them with a way out.

I like the various iterations on:

[ ] Plan
-[ ] Demands
--[ ] The immediate release of Virmirean merchants from Lystheni territory (civilians released as a precondition of continued negotiations).
--[ ] Full disclosure of Lystheni history and society, including their origins and the nature of their animosity towards the Citadel (Lystheni forced to stop being cagey).
--[ ] The resumption of trade, this time on Virmirean terms (resumed trade relations with an open market, economically subordinating the Lystheni to you and proving far more profitable than the previous, protectionist agreement).
--[ ] Full disclosure and surrender of the stations in Sikel in violation of the Virmire-Lystheni Border Treaty (get the artifacts and the stations on which they sit, along with experimental records).

Demand summary: stop fucking with us. Also, we're taking some of your stuff in compensation.

-[ ] Leverage
--[ ] A continued complete trade embargo (what it says).
--[ ] The dissolution of the Virmire-Lystheni Border Treaty and a complete blockade of Lystheni space (claim the LBZ and put defense platforms in every system to make sure that nothing passes).
--[ ] War (make your implicit threat explicit).

Actions have consequences. If you keep up the brinksmanship, it will be painful (for you).

-[ ] Concessions
--[ ] Economic support of Lystheni interests, working towards a common understanding and cooperation (pay them).
--[ ] A commitment to maintaining the sovereignty of the Lystheni state as a priority of Virmirean foreign policy (guarantee the Lystheni's independence).
--[ ] The release of captured Lystheni intelligence operatives in Virmirean space (give back their spies).

We're willing to play nice. We'll keep them independent and keep the government solvent. We'll even let their people go.

I personally don't want to stand down the border fleet until they've earned some trust.
 
Yeah, there's no way in hell they're getting access to any precursor ruins inside our territory, just as I wouldn't expect to get access to any in theirs.
 
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