I think Victorian Sympathizers, Disastrous Start, and Compromised are disadvantages that combine together really poorly. It's 4 points of intel disadvantages with no intel advantages. It's asking us to have a very leaky intel situation, and that could be a massive problem.
Yeah. Victorian Sympathizers are almost certainly not going to remain fully loyal in the face of the impending invasion force, and Compromised
explicitly means other people are successfully spying on us. That's a very awkward combination, especially when so much of our strength is contingent on this one UBERLEET HEROFORCE of troops who could be significantly damaged by a relatively small amount of sabotage.
You're all voting for entrepot, but not also voting Securing a brighter tommorow? Any chance I could change your mind on that? It's got worse intel, but better economy and military and has vaccinations; all else, including big importance items like merchants, libraries, and navies, remains the same.
Speaking as the guy who wrote
Entrepot, it was designed around an entirely different philosophy than
Securing a Brighter Tomorrow.
Your plan is built around balancing relatively numerous disadvantages against numerous advantages, expecting our strengths to override our weaknesses.
Entrepot is one of the 'minimalist' plans, where we accept fewer advantages, in exchange for a shorter list of disadvantages. Your plan stacks enough extra bonuses and maluses that even though the
Entrepot customization choices are mostly a subset of yours,
Entrepot is still a radically different plan.
Whether it's
better depends on how you feel about the risk/reward balance associated with taking lots of malus points.
Honestly, I think disastrous start is kind of a nonissue as an intel disadvantage; it makes some intel plans completely hopeless, but unless you're trying to build up spy networks its mostly possible to work around.
Poptart wouldn't call it a malus if it didn't have the potential to cause us problems. In our case the most obvious drawback is that we won't have enough information on the surrounding area when the Victorians come for us. We may not know if they've recruited local allies, or secured a base in nearby territory, until after the fact, because we have limited capacity to perform reconnaissance and no easy way to get information from spies and agents.
Not seeing an enemy invasion force coming at some point in the first four terms is a sizeable disadvantage we may be facing, and that's only the beginning.
I don't disagree that compromised and victorian sympathizers aren't great, btu I do think it's a worthwhile change for having vacinations. In addition to being incredibly difficult to get going on its own, these will also help counteract the, frankly, fairly massive risk of disease outbreak that population outbreak brings.
I'm going to be perfectly up-front with you, while I know that epidemics CAN hurt us badly with
Population Boom, I think the epidemic risk alone is probably something that we can survive as a nation-state IF we are taking prompt humanitarian measures to relieve the overcrowding and keep people fed.
Under
Entrepot our immediate crisis-level needs are:
1) Organizing the new regional government (not
Established),
2) Expanding the food supply (
Population Boom), and
3) Dealing with Chicago's crime problem brought on by smuggling (
Import/Export Professionals)
We are aided in this by:
1) Having good intelligence on what the people we're trying to integrate (
Ear to the Ground), and a pre-existing trade network that connects them to us,
2) Having that thriving trade network (
Independent Merchants), giving us the income to
fund our efforts and physically import food, and
3) Having a strong waterborne military that can run down smugglers (
Brown-Water Navy), and good intelligence on the surrounding area that helps us figure out where the smugglers are operating from
outside our borders (
Ear to the Ground, again)
...
Our medium-term problems are:
1) Repelling the Victorian invasion (
Burns), and
2) Dealing with the overcrowding and disease threats associated with
Population Boom
Our plan for this is going to involve
1) Using good intelligence to get enough advanced notice to specifically prepare against the manner of Victorian attack (leverage
Ear to the Ground), and of course our firepower (
Burns).
2) This is admittedly a weakness of the plan, but not one we can really neutralize
easily without an expensive bonus, that in turn requires us to take an expensive malus, which gives us
another problem that we can't solve without another bonus, and so on in a vicious cycle.
The point of 'terse' plans like
Entrepot is to avoid the vicious cycle, accept that we'll have one or more serious problems that we'll just have to somehow cope with
without any special unique custom bonuses, but in turn that we'll have a relatively limited total number of problems.
Compromised, for instance, has to deal with the fact that the victorians only have really shitty radio; if they want to get messages back home, they have to deal with actual travel time; it's not going to be tactically helpful, and unlikely to be strategically helpful, since our units will be moving faster than the messengers (naval control + logistics + foreign equipment) can reach victoria's military units to inform them of our troop movements. They can't do industrial espionage, since they're retroculturalists, this leak isn't an assasin, etc; lots of the usual options for spies just aren't a thing.
The Victorians like to do deep raiding, we don't have the industry or manpower to hold trench lines thick enough to stop them, and if they have detailed intelligence (even months-old intelligence) on the precise whereabouts of our key facilities and industrial centers it's gonna hurt.
It is possible that they can recruit sympathizers, which would be pretty bad, but it woukld potentially let us hit 2 birds with 1 stone in removing them from government; it's only by scrupulously avoiding wrongdoing that they manage to stay in govt, after all.
I mean, by saying this you're kind of assuming we
win despite being attacked from outside by a strong enemy army that we probably didn't know about until it came close to our borders, and betrayed from within by a faction of Quislings that have already stolen any of our secrets that they want to steal. That could be a pretty tough challenge even for Hellfire Burns. The kind of thing that keeps causing him to wind up on the run from the ruins of a collapsing polity.
