Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
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Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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@LoLyPoPx3 We also stop (officially) supporting the Algerian freedom fighters
EDIT:And I guess the hawks in our government get dunked on, which is a win in my book
EDIT:And I guess the hawks in our government get dunked on, which is a win in my book
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Maybe I missed it, where it states that?
- Location
- Lost in the internet
That's the American demand if we de-escalate
Yeah, missed it. Thank you
The catfish were never a major protein source even before we flipped to being mostly urbanized and people stopped fishing for their main protein source. They're broadly seen as a trash fish and their popularity has only decreased since we introduced the moolags
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[X]Advocate for Biding Time
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- UTC+0
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- He/Him/They
Well, the good news is he wasn't senior enough to be directly involved in this, the bad news is that his political patron just got a big hit so it will definitely be more challenging to become head. I don't think he is well served backstabbing Klimenko, he needs those two years to prepare for that power struggle for it, he is very young and cultivating his power base in the Ministry and the Party. He's done well so far in that regard, but he needs all the time he can get.
- Location
- The great frozen north
What a bloody mess. The Red Navy has prestige and America gets to look like a peacemaker (for all of three months before Ashbrook fucks it up), but France is the real winner. They got what they were trying to do in the first place. The naval battle is inconsequential. They only lost three ships, it will not impede their ability to hold blockades elsewhere. At most, they'll have second thoughts before trying to openly blockade the EAF or such. Meanwhile the moment the naval skirmish happened our brass immediately put the strategic nuclear systems on full readiness, showing that our side has just as twitchy an atomic trigger finger as the French.
Well we tried at least.... and failed horribly.
A dark, overly pessimistic, part of me wondered if Blackstar was getting bored of running what was increasingly a normal modern-day nation quest and decided to nudge things in a direction that guaranteed our impulse to be based in the face of the capitalists would eventually lead to the dice opening the nuke silos. Well, that definitely won't work now because these events have shown the voters that taking anything but the most cringe option when confronting the west has a two in three chance of at minimum crashing our economy with a mobilization scare. Klimenko's "lucky" he'll be retiring soon anyway whether nor not the plan fails because of this, but future PC's wont have the luxury. Might as well lube up now and prepare to get fucked by Ashbrook, trying to resist will only make us more likely to fail (whether the Plan or the entire quest) harder.
Why even is the head of the MNKh so decisive in whether or not we escalate anyway? I thought the whole point in playing as Stalin's economist rather than Stalin himself was that we had very limited control over things like foreign policy and military strategy? I hope that with the doves being vindicated in this mess it will no longer be the case and any future crisis will automatically (try to) be de-escalated.
Because if every five years we have to pause our economic work to have a vote on whether we prefer for the indigenous peoples of Africa to die in French concentration camps or Soviet fallout plumes, that will do nothing but seriously drag down the experience of this quest.
Good riddance.
[X]Advocate for Accepting the Terms
I just wanted to build railroads for the global proletariat ;_;
Well we tried at least.... and failed horribly.
Mood.
A dark, overly pessimistic, part of me wondered if Blackstar was getting bored of running what was increasingly a normal modern-day nation quest and decided to nudge things in a direction that guaranteed our impulse to be based in the face of the capitalists would eventually lead to the dice opening the nuke silos. Well, that definitely won't work now because these events have shown the voters that taking anything but the most cringe option when confronting the west has a two in three chance of at minimum crashing our economy with a mobilization scare. Klimenko's "lucky" he'll be retiring soon anyway whether nor not the plan fails because of this, but future PC's wont have the luxury. Might as well lube up now and prepare to get fucked by Ashbrook, trying to resist will only make us more likely to fail (whether the Plan or the entire quest) harder.
Why even is the head of the MNKh so decisive in whether or not we escalate anyway? I thought the whole point in playing as Stalin's economist rather than Stalin himself was that we had very limited control over things like foreign policy and military strategy? I hope that with the doves being vindicated in this mess it will no longer be the case and any future crisis will automatically (try to) be de-escalated.
Because if every five years we have to pause our economic work to have a vote on whether we prefer for the indigenous peoples of Africa to die in French concentration camps or Soviet fallout plumes, that will do nothing but seriously drag down the experience of this quest.
Good riddance.
[X]Advocate for Accepting the Terms
I just wanted to build railroads for the global proletariat ;_;
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- Location
- UTC+0
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- He/Him/They
Because Klimenko is in the Politburo, and so was every GS before him. That position comes with that baggage. We can have a MNKh head not be in it, Klim wasn't at the start of his term as a matter of fact. But the issue is that its a position every MNKh head will naturally aim for getting, and considering the amount of political power inherent in the position, its pretty much inevitable they are included in it if they stay Minister for any lenght of time. We are an important politician, and those get a lot of say in the government, even in areas they don't necessarily have formal authority over.
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- Location
- The United States
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- She/Her
You are influential and even have the choices because you got onto the presidium and politburo thanks to your alliance with Romanov, you well, wouldn't have had access to the decision otherwise. And no, escalating is not in general a trap option, for example, major troop movements in the previous option would not have even resulted in a major French reaction outside an enhanced state of readiness. You can generally escalate and get away with a lot, it's just for some reason the thread chose to run a French blockade, giving missiles to Gadafi would have been far less incendiary than then this as it would have been him giving the orders/shooting at random civilian shipping. The issue is that your people do not have the best idea of the forpol involved and Klim certainly doesn't. He is however effectivly the second chair of the soviet government with how it is structured and thus gets a voice at the meetings, especially when the politburo is balanced.
- Location
- The great frozen north
The lesson I'm taking from that is that Klimenko's ForPol knowledge (EDIT: And that of the politburo as a whole, given nobody spoke out to correct him) is in the Drunning-Kruger peak, and that any tags like "chance of WW3" or the lackof thereof are utterly pulled out of his ass and should be ignored.
RE: the "previous option" (I'm assuming you mean the Austrian crisis), I think our desire to not escalate there was motivated more by the belief taking a soft line against Austria was a much better idea than bullying them than anything else.
RE: the "previous option" (I'm assuming you mean the Austrian crisis), I think our desire to not escalate there was motivated more by the belief taking a soft line against Austria was a much better idea than bullying them than anything else.
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Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
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Honestly, I'm skeptical France came out ahead here. They lost three ships, risked going nuclear over Algeria, certainly did not win any diplomatic brownie points with the US....
Oh yeah, we 'offically' stopped our care packages, but well, does that compensate for it? Algeria is still a hotbed that now is going to be watched a lot closer by the US, to avoid any repeats, and even with a new POTUS coming in, he's not going to give them a blank check.
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
Every time we swap to a new guy in the chair, we try to find someone who'll give us accurate information so we can make votes like every other quest, with full clarity of information and consequence.
I think we forgot that we can get the guy who shoots straight on the economy, we can get the guy who'll tell us how the west is thinking, we can get the guy who can command an atomic army, but you can't get two qualities much less three in the same guy.
We're paying a weregeld. That's a long understood sign of "you are at fault".
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
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Oh please, that's par the course for this mess. And an acceptable cost in my books.
Red Rationalist
Spinning in eternity
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- Andro-Orlando Hair Saloon
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- They/Them
Huh, I wasn't expecting us to get fooled again by tags. Mea culpa, I suppose.
Not quite. We're dealing with Klims impression of foreign policies, so the vibes he gets from the conversation about it. He will notice if the foreign minister starts shouting "You maniac, you blew it up!" and his tags will reflect that. He's likely just easily taken in by the biases/manipulation attempts of the experts and has no way to reason those things out. Take the every tag with a lot of grains of salt, but you can use them as rough mood indicators. It's not useless info, just heavily distorted .
Hah, knew it.
Well, ultimately, things didn't go too badly. We picked the option that needed luck and didn't luck out, but we didn't lose significantly, and instead got a lot of experience as a thread about how these crises go. Considering we're entering a long stretch of the Cold War heating up, and that we will probably be in a position to vote on these issues again, soon enough, this all was an important lesson.
- Location
- The great frozen north
What seems to have happened was people feared arming Gadafi would provoke the French towards outright attacking Libya in retaliation, Perhaps alongside the USA after Gadafi recklessly attacks merchant ships or the American navy too, at which point we either abandon our ally (for an even bigger L than we take with this deal), or we defend them and have even more chance of WW3 than this crisis.
Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
I'll be honest, I don't care that IC we don't have great information, from an OOC perspective, these incomplete information and entirely luck dependent mini-games are anti-fun and extremely frustrating. You don't seem to have learned anything from the Malenkov debacle and the Voz-speak issues, which is that giving the players a handful of misleading and incomplete hints sprinkled between the thread and Discord consistently leads to suboptimal choices and recriminations. If people are consistently picking the options you consider the worst, that indicates that something in your setup is flawed. I enjoy the regular turns in this quest a lot, but the crisis votes have consistently been frustrating and acrimonious, and I think you should reconsider your approach to them.
If this was a video game where we could replay things, then trap options would be fine. But in a quest as active as this one, they are extremely unpleasant in my opinion.
Gaddafi broes we are so back
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- Northern Virginia
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I dunno, I think it's part of the fun. Well, fun in the dwarf fortress sense.
If that happened, what would happen next is that we'd supply arms to both Algeria and Libya through Egypt, without getting into direct firefights with the French, with the risk of WW3 very low. It's just, well, yeah, we didn't think beyond the tags and the order the options were given in - the further down, the more dangerous is the escalation! - and underestimated how much the French would be willing to get into a fight with us. Next time, we will need to consider the actual facts of the options instead of just mechanics-speak, as it can clearly be misleading.
Malenkov debacle and the Voz-speak issues were peak MNKh, though. Fucking up after being given imperfect information is the core of entertainment in the quest.