Midas Touched (Warhammer 30k AI Quest)

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CryBryNry said:
I hope we can get them to safety before deleting the ship, and even if people die it wont be many, so there's that! My hope is that we can Divide the monster ship's attention by firing low powered lasers. Like uh some of those laser in the FTL game where you fire and drag a laser across a ship. You know do surface level damage. Then we just keep moving away from it, and once the rescue team is done we apply generous amounts of nuclear warheads.

No reason why we can do both boarding and BOMBARDMENT right?
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Boarding focus will still attack the cruiser with space forces, just with the focus of disabling it until it can be evacuated and then destroyed / purged. Also a general thing to keep in mind: Y'all can assign which heroes / units you'd like used in the mission with your votes. I phrased it badly a bit earlier but with the deployments you may assign as many or as few heroes to these tasks as you'd like and they will provide benefits at the cost of potentially being in danger. Only real restriction is not being in system or already busy elsewhere which doesn't really apply yet.
 
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Aight then.

We're going to definitely include Grachis and Ceroix for the attack. The former for his martial stat and the later due to his trait with ships. Might change my vote to Crippling and Boarding or to Boarding in general.
 
@NotCaligula

I'm not very deep in this quest, but I am following it and it seems like every turn the majority of the rolls cannot mathematically be failed. That is bad if the purpose of rolls is to introduce variation in results. If the only possible results are "success" or "critical success" then what is the point?

To some extent I understand why that is. It's because in character creation the voters chose to make enemies of virtually the entire galaxy (taking a bunch of negatives) in return for stacking so many bonus traits that there are huge bonuses to everything. But it's still bad.

A potential solution might simply be to offer more ambitious goals. There could be a more vote options added where players can choose to either take a "safe and moderate returns" choice where failure is almost impossible or a "high risk high rewards" option where a lot more gets done in the same amount of time, but in return the DC is so much higher it is possible to fail. Let me pull in the second vote as an example.

Fabricate Fighter Squadrons (PR-01)
DC 50
28 + 80 (Tech) + 10 (Martial) = 118. Success.
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With a +90 bonus, only a critical failure could stop this from succeeding. So what if there had been a DC 100 option to instead "reach for the stars" and create a more technically sophisticated fighter squadron, but it actually would be possible to fail on a sub-10 roll? Just some thoughts.


[X] Boarding Focus: If you do desire to properly board the vessel it may be worthwhile to engage in a pronged offensive with your space assets bombarding the infected sections and your infantry assaulting those few sections that lack any presence of this infection. How exactly your soldiers might fare is rather ambiguous given the unknown nature of this entity but given that it seems focused on purging the hull of the living for some reason it seems clear something of importance is inside. Even if your ground forces cannot fight it well, they might be able to evacuate and save whatever or whomever still lives in the ship's depths. (Space and boarding focused operation, will use space and ground assets and will likely leave much to salvage or save if executed well. Mutually exclusive with Bombardment Focus.)
 
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Briefvoice said:
@NotCaligula

I'm not very deep in this quest, but I am following it and it seems like every turn the majority of the rolls cannot mathematically be failed. That is bad if the purpose of rolls is to introduce variation in results. If the only possible results are "success" or "critical success" then what is the point?

To some extent I understand why that is. It's because in character creation the voters chose to make enemies of virtually the entire galaxy (taking a bunch of negatives) in return for stacking so many bonus traits that there are huge bonuses to everything. But it's still bad.

A potential solution might simply be to offer more ambitious goals. There could be a more vote options added where players can choose to either take a "safe and moderate returns" choice where failure is almost impossible or a "high risk high rewards" option where a lot more gets done in the same amount of time, but in return the DC is so much higher it is possible to fail. Let me pull in the second vote as an example.



With a +90 bonus, only a critical failure could stop this from succeeding. So what if there had been a DC 100 option to instead "reach for the stars" and create a more technically sophisticated fighter squadron, but it actually would be possible to fail on a sub-10 roll? Just some thoughts.
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With actual infrastructure to build and research stuff now I intend to add a fair few more "out there" sorta actions with high DC's now. I do see where you're coming from with the whole bonus stacking point and I'd like to avoid having the rolls stop mattering because I think that kills the whole point of rolling for them, but for now with most of these being sorta introductory or basic actions I'm generally intending the balance to be a bit overly power fantasy-ish for now. With how many negatives were taken I intend for both capital and time to be currencies that balance out the fact that yeah most standard DC rolls are mostly a question of degrees of success with max tech. Part of it is also a general hesitance from the players to risk doing actions that have reasonable fail rates as well though.

Ultimately I feel for a story about DAOT Humanity that I prefer veering on the side of explicit power fantasy against overmuch balance just because it fits the setting angle better, but I will try and keep an eye on it going forwards. I hope to balance it out mostly with the fact that there's basically threats everywhere that isn't Vareena with the starting choices and with combat generally being harder to stack bonuses without consequences for.
 
Briefvoice said:
With a +90 bonus, only a critical failure could stop this from succeeding. So what if there had been a DC 100 option to instead "reach for the stars" and create a more technically sophisticated fighter squadron, but it actually would be possible to fail on a sub-10 roll? Just some thoughts.
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To an extent, it not really being possible to fail a number of actions seems broadly correct to me. Like, realistically speaking there shouldn't be a 50% chance to fail to produce something relatively basic when we have the schematics and manufacturing facilities already set up - a failure there would imply some deeper malaise within the schematics or the drydock itself, which more-or-less maps to a critical failure.

Some actions should be treated as more difficult, experimental, or risky, and the number of such actions is likely to increase going forward as we start pushing the boundaries of knowledge instead of just applying what we already have access to, but "building basic machinery" being more or less guaranteed to happen seems to make sense in-universe.
 
MrRageQuit said:
Looks like the chance to redeem/steal Konrad is there.

Now, personally I'd rather do Bombardment. No point in taking unnecessary risks here.
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Sadist Batman if I remember correctly? Isn't his whole thing to prove everyone is just as bad as him? I feel it's more likely if he's spent any amount of time there to be an opposing force.

We made Pancea, that's going to get Nurgles complete focus when he can get enough forces to stamp us out.

What do the aliens want in their united deal? They want tech agreements in exchange for what? They domt want to join for them, so what coukd they possibly have? The other option getting the paranoid military faction is just kicking a can down the road in terms of issues.

Also what religions do bothe primitive and 20th century aliens have?

If we coukd make deamon slaying gear without cloning blanks then making our own Grey knights/inquisition would be a lot easier. No paranoia or misinformation. Being able to protect communication hubs and warp travel.

Edit: evidence of emps killing psykers before they caused trouble and may either the Cabal or the shamans messing around early to create blanks?
 
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[X] PR-01 (prowess, ship related duty)
[X] Sila Amanis (prowess, boarding duty)
[X] Grachis Fal (martial, tactical general duty)
[X] Ceriox (something, feed PR-01 intel duty old man)
How about these? Obviously PR-01 will have a go since they're the ship. Sila gets a -10 debuff when working with those she's unfamiliar with, so instead of working with the boarding crew, she can use her divinitation powers to aid PR-01in making calculated crippling shots at the ship AND guiding the boarding crew.
Grachis has 30 martial so he could probably help direct the fighters or join the barding crew with his tactical skills.
Like yeah if we get her divinitation aid (50 prowess) that should be enough to offset her unrefined ability, right? And if we filter intel for her then she doesnt have to talk to anyone, bypassing the -10 Loner debuff. Hopefully.

Edit: @IronBig21 you make a good point about Ceriox Z'azz and his possibly knowledge in regards to ships, but his martial is only 16 while his prowess is 12. Sure he has 2 wounds but hes old. The best he could do is supply us possible intel if hes family with the make and model of our ship so we can make adjustment for a bombardment and boarding crews. Btw is prowess the attribute for direct combat?

Edit again: okay Silas's 4 wounds is fantastic, so even with a -10, 40 prowess is nothing to sneeze at. That would be the most useful to determine the weakness of this new thread, add a buffer for the boarding team, and ensure the remaining survivors survive.
 
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[X] Bombardment Focus

I'm not taking any risks on this. We domt have multiple planets to lose. Don't want any long term issues similar to a genestealer cult happening in the background if this is something like them or the orks. Kill it before it makes land fall or infects something to make landfall.
 
Redshirt Army said:
To an extent, it not really being possible to fail a number of actions seems broadly correct to me. Like, realistically speaking there shouldn't be a 50% chance to fail to produce something relatively basic when we have the schematics and manufacturing facilities already set up - a failure there would imply some deeper malaise within the schematics or the drydock itself, which more-or-less maps to a critical failure.

Some actions should be treated as more difficult, experimental, or risky, and the number of such actions is likely to increase going forward as we start pushing the boundaries of knowledge instead of just applying what we already have access to, but "building basic machinery" being more or less guaranteed to happen seems to make sense in-universe.
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For what it's worth I think it is correct, but also that such actions should just have 'Automatic success' on them so they do not look like free rolls that make the system look unbalanced.
 
@Darkcore41 it's not moving particularly fast, and if it somehow creates a mean of propulsion we can always cripple that to slow it down. If you're worried about possible genestealers or ork like threats we can always issue a state of isolation for all ships, their pilots, and people we can extract from the ships. It should be a simple process, and we do have the tech possibly to scan for issues. Plus we have a psyker with 50 prowess to figure out if anyone is infected with something.
Now that I think about it, Sila has 4 wounds, which means if divinitation duty is no good she can always join the boarding team with only 40 prowess, which is still high.

Edit: there also the whole issue of killing what survivors are left on the ship. If we're lucky we might get a hero unit out of this.

Second edit: adjusted Crippling and Boarding plan to include 4 heroes to reduce the odds of casualties and increase chances for success. Three of those heroes are under no direct threads, and one (Sila) is tanky enough to handle anything, even being throw to the void of space. We could just send a shuttle to pick her up if she takes a nonconsensual spacewalk.
 
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[X] Bombardment Focus

This might come back to bite us if we give up the chance to find out more about whatever this is and it comes back, but if it does appear again we should have built up some more. As is I really don't want to risk any of our heroes if we don't have to, especially since we have no idea what we're getting into.
DragonParadox said:
For what it's worth I think it is correct, but also that such actions should just have 'Automatic success' on them so they do not look like free rolls that make the system look unbalanced.
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The issue with that is that it removes that chance for crits, whether success or failure.

I'd say I'm happy with the system as it is right now, right now our limiting factor has been a combination of action points and resources but we've already had actions outside our specialties that we can and have failed in (like psyker stuff last turn).
 
Karnax626 said:
[X] Bombardment Focus

This might come back to bite us if we give up the chance to find out more about whatever this is and it comes back, but if it does appear again we should have built up some more. As is I really don't want to risk any of our heroes if we don't have to, especially since we have no idea what we're getting into.

The issue with that is that it removes that chance for crits, whether success or failure.

I'd say I'm happy with the system as it is right now, right now our limiting factor has been a combination of action points and resources but we've already had actions outside our specialties that we can and have failed in (like psyker stuff last turn).
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Then one can have the action be at the Crit DC with the stuff that is automatic being automatic.
 
[X] Bombardment Focus
-[X] PR-01 (prowess, ship related duty)
-[X] Grachis Fal (martial, tactical general duty)
-[X] Ceriox (something, feed PR-01 intel duty old man)
 
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