I'd have thought you'd be more protective of dear young Julia, Caesar. But I suppose a Caesar for a bride wouldn't be too terrible...
I mean, as noted, being one of the handful of men in Rome with fairly solid assurance that Julius Caesar
won't seduce your wife is worth a lot all by itself.
I can't help but wonder if it would help if the plan makers used the X only for the name of the Plan and left all the other brackets empty. I believe that used to work to cut down on the tally, but they might've changed that.
[] Plan Publicola
[] Plan Publicola Plus
It didn't used to be
necessary. But things are, of course, in flux.
Ehh, he is not wrong. To quote myself:
So in general the xp equivalent of boosting a often used skill, lets take Command, one Level (15-16k), would be to boost Logistics to something higher than the generic officer, which is all the way up to Accomplished at Rank 10.
These generic officers should almost always be available. If we talk about more skilled subordinates, such as Rufus, Mercator or Pompolussa, outsourcing specialised actions becomes even more likely.
I don't want to count on this kind of thing indefinitely. It creates a lot of point of failure situations, and also will make it difficult for us to train up promising clients when we get into middle and old age.
It's like, being genuinely bad at Logistics is a
weakness. It's a weakness that in theory you can bypass, but it's still a weakness. And it's a weakness that you can buff out of the character fairly easily with a handful of Personal actions.
Why not?
I mean, during the campaign against Gemino, for instance, we
didn't succeed in finding anyone genuinely good at Logistics. We had "generic officers," but that was literally the first Logistics roll we'd ever seen,
@Telamon himself was still fleshing things out, and quite frankly we were fighting the war in tutorial mode.
We can expect to make loads and loads of Logistics rolls; getting good at it ourselves
eventually in case our pet quartermaster dies or defects or whatever is just basic prudence.
Edit: Let me just add this to expand a bit on my reasoning for pushing to be so frugal with our Bonus XP:
For one I see Intelligence and Military as our main Stats. While self-study is still quite easy for low ranking secondary skill (Logistics, Engineering, Seafaring, Siegcraft, Espionage or whatever new skill the QM adds to tempt us...), it will become harder and harder in the other two.
Note the difference between
stats and
skills.
Leveling up stats can be done only with difficulty through personal actions, and often seems to come about as a side-effect of some other desired goal (we didn't write to Cicero the first time in hopes of intellectual stimulation, but we got Intelligence XP; we definitely didn't brush up on our Greek with Theo for that reason, but here we are!
)
About the only thing that can still give us truly significant
stat XP gain at the level of our stronger skills (e.g. Intelligence and Military) is prolonged association with someone even better at them than we are. Sertorius provided a quite substantial trickle of Military XP this way; I suspect that prolonged association with Cicero would do something similar for our Intelligence XP just from keeping up with the guy, as might something like going to Athens or Alexandria to study under prominent scholars.
Skill gain, on the other hand, we can pick up from all over the place. Book study is a good way to grind out glaring deficiencies, and after that we can pick up XP from all over the place. Consider how we've gained Command XP from so many different sources, for instance; I suspect it's the fastest single increase in XP we've had so far.
Also we are roughly 13k XP away from Renowned Military (+4). This turn we are gonna take either 2 or 3 Military study actions and as the campaign get going we are surely going to see more gains there as well. Wouldn't it be nice in the near future to have ~ 5k bonus xp banked, ready to level up before an important battle? (The Military boni is applied to basically every battle roll our our direct command.)
I'd love that and it IS a good idea given that we're fairly close, now that you mention it. It'd be
great to pull that extra +2 bonus out of our hat and start actually surprising or impressing people.
That's what we get for breakig sacred oaths. Remind me, what blasphemous acts did Marius and Sulla commit again? I think one plundered Apollo's temple at Delphi, the other read the Sybilline Books without permission.
The former was Sulla (I wrote omakes about it and everything!). The latter was Marius (or at least, Marius is
rumored to have looked at the Sybilline Books; I don't know if it's confirmed in-story).
...Historically, the Sybilline Books were lost in a temple fire in 83 BC. That is, next year.
In the context of
this setting such an event could be disastrous since prophecy seems to actually work here. On the other hand, events may have butterflied that, depending on the sequence of events by altering the political balance in Rome.
