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The Practice War [Complete]

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Alright. I'll call this over the weekend - I want the Dreams update finished first. I've combined votes down, and deleted those that I've denied. Chastisement has been rolled into Diplomacy, as those will be operating on similar frequencies.

Vote Tally : The Practice War Original - Sci-Fi | Page 640 | Sufficient Velocity [Posts: 15983-16076]
##### NetTally 3.0.2
[25] Why
[7] Diplomacy
[6] Leave

Total No. of Voters: 41

As will surprise no one, Why is still winning in a landslide. Also holy hell that's a lot of voters.
 
As I was more interested in the Chastisement sort of feeling to Diplomacy but the QM's said they are similar enough to squish together... Guess it's time to actually vote and stop hiding from the consequences of picking the 'wrong' choice. :p

[X] Diplomacy
 
[] Unvote
I don't really know if Why or Diplomacy is better right now and there's nothing that's really speaking to me.

Edit:
[X] Believe

Purely to get an idea of how Snowfire would interpret it tbh.
 
Last edited:
Vortex279 said:
Just to clarify, on those dice rolls pictured, all zeros means a nat 100 right? Were we seriously that lucky here?
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Snowfire said:
That is a natural 100, yes.
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And only now I internalize that and realize - when a "tens" dice rolls 00, most of the time it's very, very bad, but on rare occasions it's really, really good. Teases, both of them dice.
Out of curiosity, @Snowfire, do you roll your percentiles together, or one-by-one? ;)

[X] Diplomacy

I know this is probably the furthest thing from the minds of our interstellar allies, but... As Ruby Rose once said, to the dismay of her teammates: "Uum... Yeah, sure. Why not?"
 
[X] Diplomacy
//
It's not how I would feel in this moment, but, I'm not Amanda, and she is The Mender, so ...
 
Alright, this is a somewhat modified tally taking together all the votes that make sense to put together and having removed those vote options I've denied. Diplomacy has actually gotten pretty close to Why, but this vote is starting to drag on a bit. I'll close it out tomorrow evening unless the gap narrows significantly. On the matter of Believe as a vote, I'm afraid my brain has drawn a blank on it. I get what the intent is, but when I feed it to Amanda I just get a flat refusal. I'm not sure why, but I'm not going to try to fight her on this. That never ends well.

Vote Tally : The Practice War Original - Sci-Fi | Page 640 | Sufficient Velocity [Posts: 15983-16087]
##### NetTally 3.0.2
[24] Why
[17] Diplomacy
[5] Leave

Total No. of Voters: 48

@Lightwhispers, @Kufufu, @TheBiggerFish and @JOJOBRN, I've removed your votes from the list as invalid. If you did choose to support either of the main options currently in the running, your vote has a pretty high chance of mattering.
 
To be honest I'm tempted by diplomacy for the implications it wopuld have vis a vis both Amanda and humanity as a whole, but why just matches my interests with regards to the shiplords more.
 
DragonParadox said:
To be honest I'm tempted by diplomacy for the implications it wopuld have vis a vis both Amanda and humanity as a whole, but why just matches my interests with regards to the shiplords more.
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And I completely understand this. There's a reason Why was one of your defaults, and the simple desire to understand why something was done is a very primal thing for humanity.

Kufufu said:
I have no interest in diplomacy with them.
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Equally, this is a very human outlook too, even for PW's humanity.
 
I actually meant my vote, so nope :D

Seriously, I want to see humanity react to Amanda saying something like that in this situation.
 
Diplomacy is tempting, and if the surrounding events hadn't just occured I may have switched to it, but I just have a hard time seeing that as the word uttered in this moment.
 
*looks at votes*
In order:
Having read the arguments in favor of Diplomacy, I feel compelled to add a reminder:
Snowfire said:
Please be aware that whatever you choose to do here will be more of a conversation than a directive, and is basically almost certain to not have consequences beyond this Regular Fleet.
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Snowfire said:
Might it work immediately? Probably not. But if you want to play the long game...
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This is something to keep in mind.
TheEyes said:
Possibly, yes, but we have enough of the Shiplords' motives from the Tribute statement that anything new we learn here isn't going to gain us as much, IMO, as some of the alternatives on offer. More fundamentally, Why strikes me as distinctly passive and reactionary. Why doesn't take any proactive steps; it doesn't seek to make any changes to what's happening. It's just a second verse, same as the first (and in fact might be another round of verse). This moment is pivotal, enough that I think we can aim higher than merely trying to gather more data.
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I don't really agree.

Even in the things we have actually spent effort and Insight studying, like their military, which is a quantifiably material subject, something like Soultear pops up out of the figurative blue to display just how spotty our understanding actually is.
We plain don't know enough.

And I'd rather get more information before acting here, so as to get the intended effect rather than an opposite.

TheEyes said:
I think we have a unique opportunity here to cause an ideological split in the Shiplord hierarchy. There probably already is a minority faction in the Shiplord ranks (or possibly in their civilian infrastructure, if they have one), people who are either more morally enlightened or at least skeptical, who don't necessarily buy the party line about current "best practices" when it comes to Tributing: the Shiplord perspective interlude, if nothing else, made it clear that the Shiplords are not an interstellar hivemind, and where there are individuals there are different perspectives, and therefore disagreements. What a dramatic Forgiveness or Chastisement could do is embolden this minority, if/when the confrontation gets back to the Shiplord Entire. It certainly won't cause a rift immediately, but as the pressure of the Secret War begins to mount it might be enough to cause a schism or even a rebellion.

Wouldn't that be something?
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This is unlikely to be the first time a Regular Fleet has lost ships to a Tribute Cycle species or gotten trashed by one. I'm pretty sure there are G6 nations capable of doing the same like the S-race. It's not even the first time they've lost ships to Practice weaponry though I suspect at no other time has it been quite this dramatic.

Nevertheless this doesn't actually change their known projections. And what we know of Shiplord society doesn't actually show much evidence of minority factions or fractures to be exploited.

Not when Tribute Fleet duty, where you are sent out with deliberately subpar weaponry and guaranteed to eventually die in the course of your duty, is a contested posting.

Any such fractures may well have to be created. Hence we need more knowledge.
TheEyes said:
Like I said in the paragraph you quoted, I don't expect this to have an immediate effect, but combined with other events, such as for example the entire galaxy rising up as one in rebellion (which is our plan as of Unknown Potential) it could help move the needle within Shiplord culture.

And, while it's possible that Shiplord culture is as homogeneous as you are suggesting, I'm not sure it's likely. I'd say it's as least as likely that there is a minority, one that's not vocal, that could be in opposition to current Tribute philosophy. Even in human culture you can see examples of this happening. In human cultures, slavery was considered socially acceptable for thousands of years, right up until it wasn't. That sea change didn't happen overnight, in that there were always groups, sometimes quite large and vocal ones, against slavery, but it wasn't until critical masses of people started to change their way of thinking, helped in no small part by the Industrial Revolution making slavery economically infeasible, that there was a permanent sea change in opinion.

And this is a change that we want to make available, if only because it will make the Secret War more winnable. As it stands, the current plan forces us to fight and likely genocide the entire Shiplord race, and every one of the Shiplords will know it. By presenting ourselves instead as being solidly against an aspect of Shiplord culture, rather than the Shiplord species, we can appear to leave them a route for their species to survive, whether or not they are ultimately allowed to.
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I think you are getting rather ahead of yourself.
Until we demonstrate the ability to do much the same to a War Fleet, this is pretty much in their spectrum of projected possibilities. We've demonstrated they have to take us seriously not that we're a peer or near peer.

Beat a War Fleet, or half a dozen Regulars, then offer Diplomacy to have people consider the offer seriously.

Besides, we have spent the last fifteen years studying this precise military scenario, and we still managed to get blindsided by Soultear weaponry.
I am not particularly confident of our ability to find and exploit fractures in Shiplord society blind.

Note I'd like to caution is that there is no guarantee there is anything like a significant minority faction to be exploited. Even normal human societies in adversity have displayed startling levels of internal unity against external blandishments.

Like the Roman Republic after the horrific losses at Cannes and Hannibal offering them terms.

And its not like the Shiplords, who employ memetic warfare and psyops against Tribute Races, are going to be unaware of the possibility of it being used against theme. Shiplord society might well be as united behind their purpose as Practice humanity is behind their own.

In the meantime?
Information will help us refine our own national strategies military and diplomatic. Determine what's possible. Whether we can talk them down from this shit or if we will have to dictate terms from a dreadnought above their capital.

A bird in hand and all that.
 
SaltyWaffles said:
[X] Diplomacy

I feel like we need to worry about escalating things too far right now, and going with diplomacy--or at least an attempt at it--is a good way of avoiding the Shiplords shoving a War Fleet down our throat immediately.
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You misunderstand the Diplomacy vote.
It's not going to have any effect on Shiplord intentions any time soon, if it ever does.

I mean.....we blew up at least 40% of a Regular Fleet. On candid camera. For relatively minimal losses.They would have to reapond ASAP if only to keep other races from getting ideas.

They are going to shove a War Fleet down our throat as soon as they can get one into the area. None of this will change that.
The only things that affect that is how quickly a War Fleet becomes available to travel to the Earth area.

Logistics, not politics.
 
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