Midas Touched (Warhammer 30k AI Quest)

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Redshirt Army said:
I do personally think Realmer Syncretism is probably the best option - it provides a shared communal tie that will help bond our polity together instead of leaving all the cultures as disjoint, while at the same time its syncretic nature means that local beliefs and traditions will be respected instead of brushed aside or ignored. It also means that there's an organization who's job already involves looking into the belief systems of everyone we encounter, instead of leaving any potential nastiness or subversion festering until it hits a critical threshold.
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Any organization that checks things shojld be a separate entity and not apart of the religion in question. Preferably atheists so they don't have any bias. Secondly I think creating the inquisition lite should be a separate action and a separate decision.

As for a united religion that has the same problem as having one religion. It's impact on politics and keeping them out of the state. They've already been infiltrated once and thats when they couldn't do as much dmg. One religion with a hand in politics would be devastating if we choose a Centralized development. If it's de Centralized then it's that rulers problem and losing ine planet isn't going to be as bad.

This may not brush off smaller religions but we'd have to change their beliefs to make a more coherent system. So jnstead of eraser, we're just replacing/manipulating faith. Who gets to decide what's OK and what's not for a religion? The MC? The problem with that is the Mc is the religious figure of a faith already so instituting changes coukd be seen as all other religions being subservient to the mcs religion. Sort of an imperial cult and emps being on top of local belief situation.
 
Shadowrobot6 said:
I feel like people didn't read this part

Some once liberated may love you, while others might hate you. It will not be a policy that has a middle ground.
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Yeppp.

A focus on military expansionism in this way will open up the government to favor war as a direct method of dispatching possible threats, but may also cause significant destruction in its wake. Some once liberated may love you, while others might hate you. It will not be a policy that has a middle ground. Opens options to declare war immediately and will push future warp expeditions into a militaristic direction.
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That whole description is very yikes.

If we want to be different from the Imperium, then vote to take a different approach from the Imperium, is my bottom line.
 
Shadowrobot6 said:
I feel like people didn't read this part

Some once liberated may love you, while others might hate you. It will not be a policy that has a middle ground.
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I did end up editing to Negotiation because it is what I want our first recourse to be, albeit with gigantic looming fleets to compel jackasses to open up to us, but the QM did explicitly say we have flexibility, and aren't just describing what our polity will always do.

This vote and discussion has been frustrating on the grounds of I'm not sure what Liberation vs Negotiation vs Economic actually does, in mechanical terms, given we still have flexibility.

Lots of strawmaning going around trolo.
 
Moonless-seas said:
I mean, just as you said, picking an option doesn't lock us out of the others if we meet a Before-mind-control-retcon!Tau or alike we can just be best buds and not pressure them to join or anything. Like we will probably be with the Eldar.
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Excpt the tau were expanionist and have very much a tau man burder on themselves, you can be allies at best until they want to conquer your planets.

Picio said:
Making Navigators should not be a problem as for Astronomican we will simply rebuild beacon network of confederacy.
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I dont think it so easy ether, in theory they come at dark age of tech and probably we dont have the combination to do it and quite frankly I dont think we can easly make the beacon network.

Redshirt Army said:
If we want to be different from the Imperium, then vote to take a different approach from the Imperium, is my bottom line.
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Issue is, if you want a expansive faction that take territory it will by default to have agresive politics, specially at he ratio it expand. At some point it means we will probably quite a little bit a dick to others since we will have trouble taking a No for a answer.
 
Razios said:
Problem is all of this were blanket terms, tau have small scale AI and they havent a full scale robot war.(and by the way the imperium have nuke and they have use it, quite a damn lot).
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Mostly due to those being pretty basic AI. They have the intelligence of pets.

Razios said:
The workship of the emperor happen before lorgar, he just grab all of them and transform it into something else, even Malcador tell the emperor that for all his insistance in creating a empire that outlive instead it creating one that really too much on him.
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It may have started but it wasn't encouraged. In fact it emps destroyed Logars planet for codified and spreading it.


Razios said:
I mean I feel a lot of voters want to eat their cake and have it too "I want a expansionist faction that by necesity have to be very militaristic but it wont be bad because we will tell everyone they can be our friend by pure good goodness in our hearts and just kill the meanes who are bad because we kinda determinate it can be, we members can have freedom to do what they want except when they piss off which means they deserve what they got"
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Every system of government ot approach will have massive pros and cons. Negotiation for example is the main stay of the Tau. Yet they have a belief in the greater good over the individual and a class/caste system, with eternal on top. While emps may look outwardly bad the Tau which look nice are a little more systematically bad.

Razios said:
And yet see the interex and the diasporex and quite others. there is not such thing as santioned xenos in the imperium and las time it was just to dry them because their blood have rejuvinating properties. Plus horus rising talk about other zXe
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Horus attempted to negotiate with the interex. It's just that chaos had already taken some of his sons. They stole a chaos sword and that caused the war between them. So that can't be used as an example.

The diaporex are the ones that better illustrate your point.

Shard said:
Honestly not a fan of Centralization generally. It's peaks might be higher than Decentralization, but it involves quite a lot more time and work to get to those peaks. Time and work from us that's already facing stern competition from everything else we want to do. There's already like, what, 30 to 40 actions we want to do just in regular turns alone?
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It's a trade off, more direct power makes it faster to push needed laws through. Like anti chaos rituals, or building and sending armies. While decentralization means we'd have to take time to convince everyone to adopt a policy or keep a minimum amount of soldiers.

Also not everything will be standardized similar to 40k pdf forces.its a difference between 40k Imperium and the Tau.

Shadowrobot6 said:
I'm worried this will make us try to liberate a Imperial world instead of trying to negotiate with them first. Which depending on how far along the great crusade is would be really bad for us.
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Any contact with an imperial world will lead to the same result. The tau negotiate and bring in imperial worlds and they're still an enemy that needs to be destroyed. Well just have to dodge imperial worlds until we're strong enough regardless of method.

Picio said:
Making Navigators should not be a problem as for Astronomican we will simply rebuild beacon network of confederacy.
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Will that work when chaos can just disrupt those?
 
This all just seems terminally imperium brained.

"Actually the 30K Imperium's approach was fully justified and reasonable and any attempt to do anything else was doomed and pointless and would be secretly worse anyhow, and everything bad about the 40K Imperium was a result of Chaos meddling anyway."

I reject that premise outright. If Emps had succeeded and won against Chaos it would still have been a Bad End for humanity, the problems were baked in from the start.
 
Redshirt Army said:
This all just seems terminally imperium brained.

"Actually the 30K Imperium's approach was fully justified and reasonable and any attempt to do anything else was doomed and pointless and would be secretly worse anyhow, and everything bad about the 40K Imperium was a result of Chaos meddling anyway."

I reject that premise outright. If Emps had succeeded and won against Chaos it would still have been a Bad End for humanity, the problems were baked in from the start.
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Well the genre wouldn't be grimdark otherwise. If emps had succeeded he would have went back and dealt with Admech like he wanted, have humans govern themselves, squashed any religious sentiment and then focus on infirstructure and social engineering. Most of the mistakes in the system came from his rush to unite humanity and outside interference like his children being taken. He wouldn't have negotiated with Mars for example had his children not been taken.

Edit: 30k imperium was a rush job that was only supposed to last until he set up a system to fix Chaos. He just didn't have a chance to fix things afterwards.

If this quest had a similar premise where we got a timeskip where we couldn't change anything I bet we would see all the ways our decisions would go wrong without our input.
 
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Darkcore41 said:
It's a trade off, more direct power makes it faster to push needed laws through. Like anti chaos rituals, or building and sending armies. While decentralization means we'd have to take time to convince everyone to adopt a policy or keep a minimum amount of soldiers.
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Again, that trade off applies less and less as the polity grows bigger, as the more we absorb the harder it'll be to handle everything centrally instead of devolving power to individual member states.

Centralised does grow faster to begin with, but it's easier for Decentralised to maintain it's growth rate as we grow.
Darkcore41 said:
Well the genre wouldn't be grimdark otherwise. If emps had succeeded he would have went back and dealt with Admech like he wanted, have humans govern themselves, squashed any religious sentiment and then focus on infirstructure and social engineering. Most of the mistakes in the system came from his rush to unite humanity and outside interference like his children being taken. He wouldn't have negotiated with Mars for example had his children not been taken.
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You seem to be implying that the Emperor is not himself one of the reasons for the setting being grimdark, for how he built the Imperium? In your own words, if he could've done things as he wanted he would've attempted to crush religious sentiment even more than he already did, as well as done even less diplomacy in favour of just conquering outright groups like the Admech.
 
Karnax626 said:
You seem to be implying that the Emperor is not himself one of the reasons for the setting being grimdark, for how he built the Imperium? In your own words, if he could've done things as he wanted he would've attempted to crush religious sentiment even more than he already did, as well as done even less diplomacy in favour of just conquering outright groups like the Admech
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Admech is one of the biggest issues in the setting. They're using servitors, human skulls for computers, and chokes out any tech progress outside they're organization.

As for religion in 40k, you either allow Chaos to persist through them, create a religion to fill the hole or go full atheist. We see that trade off in these very choices and emps goal was the elimination of Chaos not lessening its potential dmg.

Edit: Granted I do think making humans a rational state was impossible.

Karnax626 said:
Centralised does grow faster to begin with, but it's easier for Decentralised to maintain it's growth rate as we grow.
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If we say your right and we grow fast later with decentralization. Would it be worth it? Look at 40k Imperium, they're troops aren't armed the same. Not every planet gets the same level of support and the local taxes are being used in different ways. They have to be decentralized because they're so large and communications are bad, I do think we have the tech to make up for that.

The Tau has a more Centralized approach and they're Army is fairly consistent, same with their infirstructure and their local laws. They're also not hands off when theirs a local struggle for power.
 
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Darkcore41 said:
Well the genre wouldn't be grimdark otherwise. If emps had succeeded he would have went back and dealt with Admech like he wanted, have humans govern themselves, squashed any religious sentiment and then focus on infirstructure and social engineering. Most of the mistakes in the system came from his rush to unite humanity and outside interference like his children being taken. He wouldn't have negotiated with Mars for example had his children not been taken.

Edit: 30k imperium was a rush job that was only supposed to last until he set up a system to fix Chaos. He just didn't have a chance to fix things afterwards.
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You're giving the uber-authoritarian far, far, faaaaar too much credit, in my eyes.

Just the fact that he took up the title of "Emperor" says volumes.
 
But there are pros of having diversity in army because then we would have many different stragedies and specialty like for example the Catachans are good against Space Marines or if you want to face Chaos send Cadians who are used to dealing with them or if you want Black Ops use the Tempestus Scions.
 
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Lord4StarCommand said:
But there are pros of having diversity in army because then we would have many different stragedies and specialty like for example the Catachans are good against Space Marines or if you want to face Chaos send Cadians who are used to dealing with them or if you want Black Ops use the Tempestus Scions.
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If you have Iron Legions that shot black holes at full auto diversity is slightly redundant. :D
But i agree speciality is useful in many cases and we should not create an army with one size crumps all mentality.
 
Darkcore41 said:
Admech is one of the biggest issues in the setting. They're using servitors, human skulls for computers, and chokes out any tech progress outside they're organization.

As for religion in 40k, you either allow Chaos to persist through them, create a religion to fill the hole or go full atheist. We see that trade off in these very choices and emps goal was the elimination of Chaos not lessening its potential dmg.
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You're missing my point. We're arguing that the Emperor's goals and methods were bad, you argued that they were only bad due to outside influence and then claimed if it hadn't been for those outside influences he'd have done even worse things (more religious persecution, more conquering by force instead of integration via diplomacy).

Not sure if this is getting too off topic now.
Darkcore41 said:
If we say your right and we grow fast later with decentralization. Would it be worth it? Look at 40k Imperium, they're troops aren't armed the same. Not every planet gets the same level of support and the local taxes are being used in different ways. They have to be decentralized because they're so large and communications are bad, I do think we have the tech to make up for that.
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The Imperium is an example of a Centralised polity though, that's the problem. Everything major has to be co-ordinated through the central Administratum, which is why there's stories about armies arriving at a planet decades after the invasion's over, because a proper response couldn't be organised within the local (relatively speaking) area.
 
[X][CENTRALIZATION] Decentralized
[X][EXPANSION] Negotiation
[X][RELIGION] Realmer Syncretism

Don't expect my choices to win at this point, but one never knows.
 
Karnax626 said:
Again, that trade off applies less and less as the polity grows bigger, as the more we absorb the harder it'll be to handle everything centrally instead of devolving power to individual member states.

Centralised does grow faster to begin with, but it's easier for Decentralised to maintain it's growth rate as we grow.
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Darkcore41 said:
If we say your right and we grow fast later with decentralization. Would it be worth it? Look at 40k Imperium, they're troops aren't armed the same. Not every planet gets the same level of support and the local taxes are being used in different ways. They have to be decentralized because they're so large and communications are bad, I do think we have the tech to make up for that.
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And here is some of my frustration with the current options Centralization vs Decentralization. They seem too extreme and both bad.

Centralization seems like Rome, with 'provinces' rather than member states, requiring 'trusted heads to manage the whole mess'. Aka governors of regions and ministries picked by central entity. Even though we're trying to be a democracy?

Decentralization seems like Holy Roman Empire, says we're not expected to even invest in our member states, and they have direct autonomy over their actions.

I want something like the ideal of the USA (not trying to get political just examples here), member states that can make their own laws and govern themselves, subject to federal oversight and guarantees of human rights from the (democratically amalgamated) central authority. Lots of taxes invested all around, no 'core' and 'outer' territory (again ideally, ideally).

Is that Centralized or Decentralized according to this paradigm? Because seems like could be argued as either of the options.

The rights is a big thing for my vote, I don't want any citizens under PR01's umbrella to lack human rights. I think that would lead our lovable ShipGod to the shitty and tragic logic 'need to accept oppressive feudal behavior from member state for now'. But I could be strawmanning too. (Edit: this tips me over to Centralized barring further clarification)

Revoting here with the new tags
[X][CENTRALIZATION] Centralized
[X][EXPANSION] Negotiation
[X][RELIGION] Cantaran Spirituality
 
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