I thought the Cogitare being in decline was because they now have a vital technological/research establishment that isn't the Machine Cult, so there's no great attraction for people to go into the Better Machine Cult.
Pretty much what's going on. It's a priesthood of aesthetics who fervently chase knowledge and replace significant chunks of their bodies with implants.
I want the cogitare to die out, probably not popular, but i just think a human civ without a mechanicus is more fun in 40k.
Where is your tech priest?
Worshipping tech? we left that behind centuries ago, anyone can learn how to make plasma guns, its like, step one of learning how to control a factory.
Worshiping tech isn't what defines them so much. They worship
knowledge, and the acquisition of more. Part of this is going in hard on augmentation, but also learning as much as they can about as many things as they can, to the extent they're closer to monks than normal people.
I think the way I'm going to rule this is that if you get normal scientists and engineers they'll have the same proficiency, but not in both. You
either get scientists or engineers, while the Cogitare are
both. But you'll have to put in effort to maintaining them as a subculture. Which could either be a long-term social intervention or a short one. The short-term one means you get more sooner but they start decaying again. The long-term one means you make them into a stable subculture in Denva's science & tech ecosystem.
We don't need the Cogitare as a subculture to have that. Regular scientists, professors, and engineers can do that.
We cannot just assume Denva will roll badly. Either they or we will roll, and a bad roll will have consequences. The big difference is on whether we get the samples on a success.
Hm... yeah, it also sits badly with me to not get encryption. I really wanted Taste of Chaos immediately, but I may end up scrapping that for now to get Encryption.
People keep building a bajillion bots in these plans. We have a limited capacity for bots; I don't recall the precise number, but I'm pretty sure it's less than or equal to 20k. And our capacity to launch them at a station is even less.
Yeah, will need to update plan.
By the way, with Taste, is there something down the line for "have MS tech shut down when corruption is detected"?
As for shorter turns, my big worry is we want some 400 RP tech, we spend a double research action and it's a boring update. Same with a double construction. Otherwise, seems fine!
See above about Cogitare vs. normal scientists & engineers.
Boring updates means
more updates.
That'd not really work with the current turn.
We'd be unable to do all of:
Build bots for Klyssar assault
Assault Klyssar
Scavenge the ship before it burns in the atmosphere
Unless we'd be allowed to belay the Klyssar assault for a turn, but presumably that'd have negative consequences
I wasn't going to implement it this turn, but the point is taken. And yes, I wouldn't change the action economy at all, I would split the turns in half as a manner of course. Every other update would be "XX.5," and no timers would change.
One way to migrate this is to split updates into two categories; long term actions and "event" updates. So construction happens on a fixed time interval, but events guide how the characters react to some event with what they have on hand.
Hmm. I'm not sure how I would manage that with my writing style - I like to weave together the process of accomplishing things and having people react to it. It would feel weird tonally to swap between a kind of "report" and shorter-term actions. I'll think about it.
Can we do Warp or Psy shield category research without a Psychic Lab?
@Neablis
Since there are a couple plans going around that try that.
Yes. Psychic lab is to help Cia practice & test psytech. Psy shields aren't psy tech.
Honestly we might be getting to the point where it may be better to just design and build a new Spark to take advantage of all the new tech we have like the Passive Stealth Profile.
@Neablis how high can the psy shields for the rebuilt psy lab go?
Calculate it from these:
For non-military installations, you can upgrade them with psychic shielding by spending extra BP up to the 4x the base cost of the installation. The more you spend, the stronger the shielding will be.
Basic Psychic Experimentation Lab (200 BP, 50 CP) Will allow for safer experimentation with psytech and general psyker powers, at the very least confining the damage from perils of the warp. Can be outfitted with inwards-facing psychic shielding.
So - max you can spend is 800 bp, which gives you 160 HP (really 1200 with the 1.5x modifier, plus the base 200 bp cost). So all-told, 1500 bp for an 160 hp psychic lab. Research more psytech to get a bigger lab or better shielding to buff up the HP.
I think my math-brain is more offended you went with 4 AP every 5 years from the start, though. 4:4 would have been much more sensible!
Would you start counting two-and-a-half-years, or round down to 2:2? (presumably giving hostile powers the same action benefit).
I'd do 2.5, or more likely just start counting each update as a half-turn, and not have things necessarily take place within chronological order within that, just giving you the info for your second-half plans in the first half.
@Neablis a questions about the following things in my plan:
- Validity of including the potential results of Superconductive Shenanigans to Repairs for manufactories on Aetherion. I'm guessing the costs will range depending on the rolls, but I just want to know if we can include into the refits cheaper without the exact costs.
- Also, I'm not sure about how putting psychic shielding on non-defensive installations works. Specifically, what is the maximum amount you can put into one, and how is it calculated? Did it change after the blueprint design changes? Anyway, is this valid? [Warp Research Lab (500 VBP, 100 CP) (2000 VBP, 200 HP outer shielding, 200 HP internal shielding)]? And would help (or at least give an extra layer of safety) while researching the Curios?
- Less a validity question, more a question about the potential synergies with boons. What will One-Time Social Intervention (Cogitare NGO) + Permanent Social Intervention (Cogitare recruitment and mission statement promotion) most likely look like, when compared to just One-time action promoting Cogitare NGO?
1. Valid. It's more about how easy it is to make various high-technology components, not about making manufactories
with those components. The end result will be manufactories producing 5-15% more production with no other changes. Unless you get a poor success maybe.
2. See above - 4x base cost for shielding, and you get BP of shielding/5 in HP. It's in the Blueprints tab where that number lives, and it'll go up as you do more research. (More likely you'll get more shielding per BP, so instead of spending 800 bp and getting 160 HP you'd spend 800 and get 400 hp or something). So Warp research lab with 200 internal & external shielding would run you 500+800+800=2100, but you could make it 500+2000+2000=4500 and have each layer of HP be 400. Thank the improved psy-shield tech you did a while back. Yeah, it'd be one of those "extra layers of protection" for researching curios and any other warp-y artifact.
3. I think I mention this above. One-time action is you producing a bunch of media and saying a bunch of nice things about the Cogitare and they get a swell of recruits and become a big deal, but then that tapers off. Good for if you want a lot of cogitare (~thousands) in like 30-40 years (how long it takes to train them), but it won't make them stable in the long run and you'll need to do it again in like 70-80 years if you want them to keep pace with Denva.
If you do the ongoing one then you embed them and their culture more firmly into Denvan culture, as the place smart people go when they want to Learn Everything All the Time and not have distractions like families or retirement or etc. That will set them up as a stable existing institution that grows with Denva, where they're kind of like technology monks that everybody respects because they're
more technology than anybody else. You'd be able to recruit ~100 cogitare every time you returned from here on out.
If you do
both then you'll set them up as a larger, longer-term part of Denvan society, probably with specialized institutions for Cogitare training that are viewed as a larger part of the Denvan R&D production. This would be a way for there to be several thousand Cogitare available for recruitment in 30 years, and tens of thousands in 100.
That's the quote I found regarding that, except we somehow managed to stick 135 shields, > 600 BP on a 200 BP psy lab??
Changed it to 4x.
Ah. I suppose I assumed gas grenades didn't require additional design once we know the formula and dosages.
@Neablis would that require additional research or designs?
No.
@Neablis, if you do you might want to add a cool down of some type to actions to soft limit double turns. Maybe, if you do two of the same action one turn you can't do it at all the next turn? My concern is us talking ourselves into multiple turns of double research actions.
Yeah, fair point. Hmm. Still thinking. Will probably implement whatver I decide on next update.
@Neablis A few questions to iron out my vote...
What is the status of our shuttles and assault shuttles after wedging themselves into the refinery to save it? Do we still have the 2 assault shuttles / 2,000 troop capacity?
Can we build more assault shuttles by themselves without having an established place to stick them / base them out of? Can we base them on Denva during the lead-up to assaulting the nest? If this means just giving them to Denva afterwards, that's fine too.
Do we have any idea of the population of the nest, what it has in the way of space defenses, and whether those defenses have been repaired since the infliction of the damage to the station we observed, that presumably happened as part of the initial attack when the heretics took it over?
Adding #s would help us be sure we're talking about the same things.
1. You crit. They're fine.
2. No, you need a shuttleport. That can be in orbit. You could stick it onto the
Spark or one of the existing hulls you stole from Chaos.
3. I think I mentioned it before - it's like 4-5 million I believe? You don't know much about it, except that the damage has happened, it's not severe, and it's been partially repaired but not fully.
To avoid bringing head-cannon into this. I'll ask - @Neablis, is this a fair breakdown of torpedoes in the setting?
Ish. High-damage weapons with a lot of counters including good point defense, fighters & dodging. But they're
so high damage that they dictate the course of the battle because they force a response. There's not many weapons you can stick on a destroyer that a battleship with even notice, and torpedoes are one of them. And also about the only one that the Imperium (and you currently) have access to. That will change once you finally get to some of the bigger and scarier techs beyond High Energy Physics.
I'm not so hot on torpedoes, so I wouldn't want to make a majority of the ship's offensive BP be spent on medium torpedoes. You could fit a medium plasma battery in there without even completely removing the torpedoes! And we know a medium plasma battery can mess up a cruiser pretty well, because that's a big part of what we just killed one with.
...It mostly comes down to when I look at torpedoes I see a mountain of downsides and few clear upsides.
You killed it with two
heavy plasma batteries. Big difference.
@meianmaru / @KyleDaScourge is the intent for this to start Proto-Starfleet? If so I'm behind it.
Important point - this wouldn't start Starfleet. It would be closer to the old mechanicus, just closer in vibe to the explorators with less objectionable stuff. But not really driven to diplomacy and mediate, and currently their culture is more "learn & experiment & build" than "explore.
If you want to start starfleet, spend one of those boons on influencing Denvan military culture.
My reading is that we don't need to do any redesigns - but may as well confirm that. @Neablis, will small-scale design-integrated psychic shielding require us to make new designs that have the shields, or will all existing designs just automatically have them?
I think it'll remove the extra BP from the design cost. You'd need to redesign blueprints and it would cost extra RP to do that, but then the BP cost would be free/reduced.
Second, even aside from the lead time to having a usable faith, you can build houses with shields a lot faster than the people living in them can become devout. This tech would let Denva make prefab housing with psy shields built in, right @Neablis?
Depending on rolls, yes.
Secondary side note - I'm not going to chase you out of Denva for a while. You've done some exploring, you've found some dangers and it's fine to just sit around for a bit, though I won't give you an exact turn number.
However, keep in mind that every turn you spend here you're not spending
out there, maybe preventing a system from devolving into Chaos or being Orked.
Side note - if you want a general, one way to do that is to hatch your navigator and specialize them into an admiral, or pick up a psyker (probably diviniation or telepathy) and spec them into commander instead of champion. Both doable, if slow.
