Only if you have the infrastructure to support them. Historically speaking the bedrock of every Industrial Revolution was usually lots of public investment in infrastructure projects. In the UK, France and the Rhineland that was canals. In the US it was a combination of canals (see the Eerie Canal) and lots of highly lucrative public land sale schemes designed to specifically facilitate the construction of railroad networks.
Yes, that's what we have taxation for.
Remember,
Independent Merchants doesn't just mean there are merchants. Its specific mechanical effects are "Your starting income is 50% higher" and "you can always procure at least one of any trade good." I don't know if "railroad iron" or "locomotives" are trade goods, but they very well might be.* Guaranteed abliity to import what we need to make the trains run
on time not unreasonably late would be a plus.
Likewise, higher starting budget will likely translate directly into greater ability to Get Shit Done on the infrastructure front. I don't know if you participated in Poptart's "Terminus Quest," but we had a lot of infrastructure development to do on Virmire, and the cost of doing so was taken out of a fixed turn-by-turn budget. A bigger budget meant we could get more ambitious projects done, and more quickly. I suspect this quest will be using similar mechanics, though strictly
@PoptartProdigy has not confirmed this.
So in conclusion, I don't expect
Independent Merchants to lead directly to a rail network without effort on our part. On the other hand, I do expect that independent merchants, acting via the existing river and lake trade routes (because you don't have to
build rivers) plus surviving roads and a relative handful of rail links
possibly, will help us find the income and resources to rebuild the railways... among many many other things, such as vaccinating our population against the predictable typhus and measles epidemics..
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*(Hell, maybe we could lay our hands on some Victorian locomotives and rails, they have a train fetish which is perhaps their sole redeeming characteristic.
That, at least, they probably have fairly good specimens of)
In order: Strictly speaking, there's nothing stopping the Russians from having a cruise missile regiment in Victoria. However, I have reason to doubt that the Russians placed it there before the quest start: that kind of thing sounds like something somebody would remark on at some point or another, or be used during one the wars the Victorians got up to.
Perhaps. But I'm
quite sure the Russians have a sizeable military base or two in Victoria, or at least an airbase or two from which they could launch long range strike aircraft against us.
They can't launch strategic bombers with cruise missiles for much the same reason as they can't launch nuclear missiles: launching any of those aircraft or missiles on an attack run is not distinguishable, to the Germans or Chinese, as an attack run against them; the Russian government can't justify it to the Germans or Chinese either because the German and Chinese response is going to be "so how about some solar imports?", so the Russians can't launch missiles or strategic nuclear bombers at us.
Uh... that's not how strategic bomber operations work.
Firstly, strategic bombers (like the Tu-95 and B-52) fly
all the time, in peace as well as in war.
Secondly, it's very easy to use a radar set to track where strategic bombers are or aren't going, and it's easy to tell that bombers leaving Russia are heading up to the Arctic Circle to pay a visit to Victoria, not southeast towards Germany or southwest towards China.
The US has used its B-52 and B-1 bombers repeatedly in conventional wars since Vietnam and Iraq respectively, without any nuclear power challenging us. I doubt Russia will face any greater difficulties.
So I am quite sure that if Russia really wanted to, they could fire air-launched cruise missiles at us from heavy bombers with little more difficulty than the modern US would have doing so against targets in Afghanistan... except for any negative international repercussions of attacking us
as such. Which are likely to be small given how obscure they are.
They can stage commando raids, but I feel like this belongs under "patsy invasion" category more than "direct invasion".
Assassination attempts might involve special forces, granted.
I mainly point this out because the ability of our
soldiers to defend themselves may become relevant in ways not immediately obvious.
It's not just international reputation; it's being able to deliver the nuke that's also problematic. None of their delivery methods can really be used without triggering - fuck I forgot about the nuclear submarines.
An air launched cruise missile, strategic bomber, or land-launched short range ballistic missile are both viable options for nuclear delivery, too.
Or they could just strap a nuclear bomb to the belly of a MiG and fly it to us and drop it on our heads; I doubt we have an air defense system capable of stopping them.
Well. Here's to hoping that Russia will decide a nuke is too much effort and bad PR.
Agreed. The point is, it's not actually going to be harder for them to do that than it would be for the US military to, say, nuke Pyongyang. We totally COULD, we most certainly have forces in the general area that could deliver the munition. It's just that we DON'T, because hoo boy would that make everyone in the world furious and there's literally no good reason to do it.
As I said, I was planning on using actions to make up that deficit, and trying to buy with CP what we can't buy in-game no matter how much we want to, stuff like Libraries and Universities, while using Actions to build up a Brown-Water Navy and Rail Companies, for example.
I in general support this logic, but if we take the principle too far we may find ourselves crippled by the need to spend years of early-game effort digging ourselves out of the giant pit our Penalties trap us in.
The real issue is that I took Incompetent Military to pay for either Libraries or Universities; I don't know how strongly we're still insisting on those, but if you put a gun to my head and told me to choose I think I'd end up choosing libraries, because there's a chance we could still end up recruiting experts one way or another anyway.
Also,
Libraries is a prerequisite for
Universities, so you don't actually get to choose.
That being said, I'm interested in how I could make this less min-maxy; would you have any suggestions?
I'd start by sacrificing
Widespread Vaccinations. I
want it, but our ability to buy it is heavily predicated on having CP to burn. I would then sacrifice
Population Boom, because that is a malus you cunningly accepted to gain +2 CP which then necessitated you to spend 3 CP on a bonus to cancel out part of its bad consequences.
Dropping
Widespread Vaccinations and
Population Boom puts me at +1 CP relative to your plan, so if I can shake loose one more, I can also drop
Incompetent Military.
I suggest we simply take a different malus, like
Import/Export Professionals. Which is admittedly problematic in the long run and creates a security weakness, but we can sic our 'good security' on them. Or
Crossed Wires, which is guaranteed to fuck us over badly
at some point, but then again, we'd be foolishly optimistic to imagine that the consequences of
Incompetent Military won't fuck us over somehow too.
...
If you want to do something really interesting, we can pick up
The Greatest Sin, since there would already be a reason for the enemy to send assassins to kill our officials anyway if we take
The Last Echo, and a murder investigation is always fun.
(I'm partly joking, but it might actually be interesting, in that it discourages us from relying overmuch on any one person. This might actually not be such a hot idea with a Marsden start, I guess, because in that case we're getting legitimacy
specifically from her personally and she's the obvious target of any assassins. On the other hand, Marsden is pretty old, and won't last forever herself, either).
