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Usagi Quest (CK3/Princess Maker) (Sailor Moon)

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zernoc56 said:
Okay. The Q Division agents or MCAT themselves should be more than sufficient to handle that. Samui is the Director, and she considers the Empty Faces to be real-life boogeymen. You think she or Sir Fred wouldn't be paranoid enough to quadruple check every square inch of the entire area for traps, sabotage, or Empty Faces themselves?
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I don't think that's sufficient, or at least it might not be. I'd rather triple check with the Mercury computer and Raising Heart just to be safe. And aside from scanning she can also take over minor healing duties from Moon and Venus who are probably going to be exhausted after this. And if there is still fighting to be done when she arrives she can help with that. She's a contingency we can activate who's going to have something to do even if we don't need extra firepower, and we still might need extra firepower.
 
zernoc56 said:
Alright. Obviously my plan isn't going to win, and neither of the leading plans really interest me. I don't really see the point in calling for people to get here at Fuck Off o'clock in the morning and expect them to be immediately useful in wrapping this already long, drawn out slog of an event that's lasted 16 parts. The longest of any event, not counting epilogues, literally can't last much more than it already has, unless as a sick joke this:

actually happens. If it does, we will be here for another 16 parts of this one event. Considering I don't think Lunaryon is the type to do that, Ami and "whoever else" should be just about getting up to speed by the time it's already over. (Hopefully) Legitimately if this lasts for a couple more "rounds" of combat, I will blame GM shenanigans. I am getting sick of getting dropped into combat events where we're playing X-Com and the enemy is playing 600APM StarCraft
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[beta reader hat on]

There is going to be a sincere attempt to consolidate the remainder of this event (however long it is) into fewer updates per round of battle turn, while still handling specific points likely to be of exceptional interest to the players (such as the disposition of the Jewel Seed and actually getting a look at what Fine's going to do). There has also been quite a lot of time and work going into keeping the updates coming fast in general; 75000 words of Midnight Incident updates (not counting other things) in the past sixteen weeks has not been a trivially easy pace to make.

From outside it may look like the duck is leisurely gliding across the surface of the pond, but there's a lot of frenetic footwork taking place below the waterline.

Players have speculated that this event, protracted as it is, is likely to represent the high water mark of Onogoro- something that is to the MCAT-Onogoro conflict as the Battle of Gettysburg was to the American Civil War, one might say. I can absolutely sympathize with the observation that it's dragged and quite a few people want it to be resolved reasonably soon, and I do want to say that I know that Lunaryon cares about addressing this, while at the same time not wanting to just throw up her hands and end the event with a 100-word update that says "it's over, X won, stuff happened." It's a big event in the world of the quest that is likely to have far-reaching consequences for Japan.

I'm sorry that it's getting to you, I really am, but at least there's that.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
I will note that there's a big difference between making, say, two rolls per turn with an 87.7% chance of success, and making three or four rolls per turn with a 79% chance of success. The law of averages is, inevitably, going to catch up with you a lot faster if you do the latter.
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23% failure chance per turn (~4 turns to failure)

VS

51-61% failure chance per turn (~1-2 turns to failure)

EDIT:

Basically: 3x79% instead of 2x87.7% means that we will MORE LIKELY THAN NOT get a Senshi sealed this turn

It is a desperate gambit, not merely "slighly risky"

"Slightly risky" was showing up at all.

EDIT 2: which might even result in failing the action they were assigned to, which would be a double-loss.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
All Snackeys think all blonde twintailed magical girls are Usagi and are terrified of Usagi, not of Sailor Moon. Blonde magical girls with other hairstyles are merely suspected of being Usagi.

...

(I'm serious, Snackeys will now run from, like, Cure Lemonade)
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That means putting Moon on the jailbreak will have some amusing results. Which is an additional arguement for doing it.
 
Simon_Jester said:
and actually getting a look at what Fine's going to do
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Though I suspect Onogoro will really wish they did not get to see/experience what she's going to do. Because while I previously compared her to a GG-verse Spark, with the most recent post I can't help but be reminded of Gilgamesh Wulfenbach's mental state and Madness Place rant at this point in the story line.

She is in full on 'scorch the skies, boil the seas' mode along with elements of 'reality shall obey my commands, or else'.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Well yes, except, uh...

I just went back and looked.

I used the word "creak" twice. I used the word "crack" zero times.
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I just... *re-reads again*

Shouldn't have been reading fast. It was creak.


Simon_Jester said:
Combinatorics... um.

Yes, each individual string of four possible d100 outcomes is equally likely (one chance in one hundred million). But there are a lot more ways to roll "a mix of numbers between 3 and 80, in various orders" than there are to roll four 100s. It's not a contest between "100 100 100 100" and "3 30 65 80." It's a contest between "100 100 100 100" and "all the millions and millions of random boring arrangements."

If you want to know the odds of succeeding X times in a row on rolls with a 79% chance of success, you actually have to start calculating out 0.79 to the power of X.

0.79^2 -> 62.4%, roughly five-in-eight chance.
0.79^3 -> 49.3%, roughly one-in-two chance.
0.79^4 -> 38.9%, roughly two-in-five chance.
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Right, but each roll is separate. Yes, I know the odds of succeeding all four of them, taken together, is lower. But Sailor Moon's odds of success are ~79% and Sailor Jupiter's odds are ~79%. And it does matter, in terms of how severe the outcome is and how effective the counter-measures are, who rolls what. Moon failing and being bound has a different set of circumstances than Mars being bound.

To try and explain it better, while yes I know what the stats say, the odds of Sailor Mar's failing her roll do not get better or worse depending on if Sailor Moon succeeded or failed her roll. If we see three successes, we have no reason to worry about the fourth roll failing, because while statistically all four succeeding seems unlikely, the chances for success on each individual roll are unchanged.

Or maybe a better explanation for my thought process. It would be illogical to assume that we are likely to fail on the 6th and 7th binding attempts, because we have passed the last 5, and the odds of succeeding six and seven times with the 87.5% chance are approx 45% and 39%. Because the odds of success are unchanged for the specific roll, and additionally, Onogoro rolling good is just as unlikely as us rolling good, because these are opposed rolls. IF we roll a 15 and they roll a 1, we met our statistical likelihood of having a poor roll in the pool, but they still rolled worse.

Simon_Jester said:
I should note that last round, both Sailor Moon and Sailor Jupiter were targeted while in the general vicinity of the east gate, though not at the same time.

I should also note that the effect of having two potential targets to get tangled up in the ropes at the same time could be either good, bad, or neutral from our perspective. Best case scenario, they can cut each other loose or the ropes are too dumb to figure out what to do. Worst case scenario, we have two Sailor Senshi wrapped up in a rather awkward position.

[beta reader hat on]

I have no idea what would happen.
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Agreed that we do not know what could happen. My position is that the most likely two scenarios are either they are targeted separately, but staggered in time (therefor can assist each other in escaping) or the bindings hit simultaneously. And if they do hit simultaneously, it is likely that is good for us, because we have indications now that the power absorbing abilities of the rope are based on the charms attached, and while they absolutely have a high capacity... they cannot have an infinite capacity. We absolutely HAVE overwhelmed those draining effects with magic, and two senshi's worth of magic is more overwhelming than one.

I acknowledge, this is not a hard fact I can prove with science and quotes, but I don't see any refutations of the logic beyond "it might not work that way" which is not a good reason to abandon a theory.
 
RadiantPhoenix said:
23% failure chance per turn (~4 turns to failure)

VS

51-61% failure chance per turn (~1-2 turns to failure)

EDIT:

Basically: 3x79% instead of 2x87.7% means that we will MORE LIKELY THAN NOT get a Senshi sealed this turn

It is a desperate gambit, not merely "slighly risky"

"Slightly risky" was showing up at all.

EDIT 2: which might even result in failing the action they were assigned to, which would be a double-loss.
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If you bet that we will not be doing two more turns, it makes sense.
 
Vehrec said:
If you bet that we will not be doing two more turns, it makes sense.
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Better-than-even chance of a Senshi getting sealed, possibly failing their action.

Sounds like excessive risk even if this is the last round of the battle.

Remember: Venus got her "Rains of the Broken Heart" interrupted by sealing, and had to bug out, on round zero of the battle.
 
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It will probably take two more turns even if things go well. Lets assume it all goes our way. Someone stops west enough that it's held. Jailbreak is contained. Jewel Seed Sealed. And maybe a secondary like disrupt godbinders gets accomplished too.

The there's still North rolling in, empty faces running around, the second wave west, and various other cleanup. Now maybe if we do well enough, Onogoro decides to retreat, or we have 5 Senshi against one trouble spot in which case voting and rolling may be redundant, but that's relatively unlikely. I'd say the chance of going at least two more rounds is likely a good bit higher, though it's also unlikely to go more than three, simply for things having fallen one way or another then, unless a lot of draws are rolled.
 
NMS said:
...

Odds of a Dark Kingdom agent watching this battle and getting ideas?
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I'm not sure they have a lot of accurate Senshi lore either. We have some indications that the Silver Millennium made a concerted policy effort to keep potential Senshi weaknesses or methods of punching up to a fully developed Senshi's level ("ontological obfuscation glamours" and "unattuned transcendental nucleus crystals") a secret.

jwolfe_beta said:
Though I suspect Onogoro will really wish they did not get to see/experience what she's going to do. Because while I previously compared her to a GG-verse Spark, with the most recent post I can't help but be reminded of Gilgamesh Wulfenbach's mental state and Madness Place rant at this point in the story line.

She is in full on 'scorch the skies, boil the seas' mode along with elements of 'reality shall obey my commands, or else'.
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Yeah, I think in her last scene, she just threatened the deity-neutering sickle.

You have to be a very specific kind of person in a very specific frame of mind to do that.

Chaosmancer said:
Right, but each roll is separate. Yes, I know the odds of succeeding all four of them, taken together, is lower. But Sailor Moon's odds of success are ~79% and Sailor Jupiter's odds are ~79%. And it does matter, in terms of how severe the outcome is and how effective the counter-measures are, who rolls what. Moon failing and being bound has a different set of circumstances than Mars being bound.

To try and explain it better, while yes I know what the stats say, the odds of Sailor Mar's failing her roll do not get better or worse depending on if Sailor Moon succeeded or failed her roll. If we see three successes, we have no reason to worry about the fourth roll failing, because while statistically all four succeeding seems unlikely, the chances for success on each individual roll are unchanged.

Or maybe a better explanation for my thought process. It would be illogical to assume that we are likely to fail on the 6th and 7th binding attempts, because we have passed the last 5, and the odds of succeeding six and seven times with the 87.5% chance are approx 45% and 39%. Because the odds of success are unchanged for the specific roll, and additionally, Onogoro rolling good is just as unlikely as us rolling good, because these are opposed rolls. IF we roll a 15 and they roll a 1, we met our statistical likelihood of having a poor roll in the pool, but they still rolled worse.
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So to be clear, your reasoning is "because we have passed several successive rolls at favorable odds, we should not worry about the danger of failing one or more of the next several rolls at less favorable odds?"

Or is your reasoning "so long as we don't have all Senshi get caught by the ritual simultaneously, it is of little or no importance if any of the Senshi are caught by the ritual?"

Agreed that we do not know what could happen. My position is that the most likely two scenarios are either they are targeted separately, but staggered in time (therefor can assist each other in escaping)
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Alternatively, Sailor One tries to rescue Sailor Two from the cable spaghetti and just ends up caught in more cable spaghetti...

or the bindings hit simultaneously. And if they do hit simultaneously, it is likely that is good for us, because we have indications now that the power absorbing abilities of the rope are based on the charms attached, and while they absolutely have a high capacity... they cannot have an infinite capacity. We absolutely HAVE overwhelmed those draining effects with magic, and two senshi's worth of magic is more overwhelming than one.
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The closest I can remember a Senshi coming to overwhelming the binding twine's effect with sheer force, where we were not explicitly told that "the casters screwed up" was part of the equation, was when Minako used copious amounts of conjured acid to dissolve her way out of the ropes.

This was also on the very first binding attempt, and is a relatively unusual attack mode.

I'm not sure that generalizes into a fully confident meta-narrative of "oh, well if two of the Senshi ARE caught, they can just power their way out together." Like, maybe it'll work out that way, but if it doesn't work out that way, I hope you won't feel that the author has somehow cheated you or done something 'illogical' by not following your predictions.
 
Evil Overlord List

#61: "If my advisors ask "Why are you risking everything on such a mad scheme?", I will not proceed until I have a response that satisfies them."

Simon_Jester said:
I'm not sure that generalizes into a fully confident meta-narrative of "oh, well if two of the Senshi ARE caught, they can just power their way out together." Like, maybe it'll work out that way, but if it doesn't work out that way, I hope you won't feel that the author has somehow cheated you or done something 'illogical' by not following your predictions.
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Sailor Moon can probably do it eventually, but only after a lot of angst, and possibly an apocalypse or two.
 
Xexilf said:
It will probably take two more turns even if things go well. Lets assume it all goes our way. Someone stops west enough that it's held. Jailbreak is contained. Jewel Seed Sealed. And maybe a secondary like disrupt godbinders gets accomplished too.
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I feel like it would take a number of things breaking our way to ensure that Onogoro breaks in Round 4, rather than being something that we can just assume will happen.

So far we've seen major chunks of the Onogoro attack plan just evaporate off the board before, but only when the roll disparity was something like 100 points between Team MCAT and Team Onogoro.

Notably, we've never seen a similarly huge disparity in rolls between Onogoro and MCAT in Onogoro's favor. About the biggest differential we've seen in their favor was 50-60 points or so, and on those occasions the result was something pretty bad for MCAT like "gate captured, suddenly dozens and dozens of enemies pouring into the compound, our side's troops are either on the brink of routing in a panic or just lost a magical girl."
 
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Simon_Jester said:
Yeah, I think in her last scene, she just threatened the deity-neutering sickle.

You have to be a very specific kind of person in a very specific frame of mind to do that.
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To be fair, its indicated that she has various levers she can pull if Harpe refused to play ball:
"No, no, no! I told her it would be okay! I'm not going to let this- You! You stupid- Don't you give out on her now! If you give out on her, then I will make your bindings BURN-"
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Additionally I doubt the lady is ever in a completely 'normal' state of mind:
Dr. Sakurai, on intuitions older than she is fully conscious of while at the front of her body and spirit, rushed out with a team to recover the "weird glowing rock" in question. And so, by sheer happenstance, she managed to recover one of the Jewel Seeds while its emissions were still at such a low level that not even Raising Heart could have detected it from any reasonable distance. Further guided by the whispers of that ancient genius that so often fill her with the lightning and madness of inspiration, she was able to hastily improvise a temporary containment arrangement that prevented so much as a microbe from touching the Jewel Seed.
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And now that someone she cares deeply for has potentially been taken from her forever, those same whispers of lightning and madness are telling her exactly how she might be able to....balance the scales.
 
Just a reminder, Venus is currently running south at approximately 150 kph. So for those voting for her to do something else, it might take a bit for her to turn around and get there.
 
NMS said:
Just a reminder, Venus is currently running south at approximately 150 kph. So for those voting for her to do something else, it might take a bit for her to turn around and get there.
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She's running at 150 kph. Even if she's a bit delayed by not being a teleporter, she can get somewhere that needs her more reasonably fast. Especially since the most popular alternatives for the jailbreak would be delayed by healing Chris (Moon) or being replaced by Moon after healing Chris (Mars).
 
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NMS said:
Just a reminder, Venus is currently running south at approximately 150 kph. So for those voting for her to do something else, it might take a bit for her to turn around and get there.
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Yeah, but if we're sending Nanoha after the Jewel Seed, then there's not much point keeping Venus on it.

Putting Mars on the Prison Break would probably be better, but "Stay on Target" is less than half the votes of a "get a Senshi sealed" plan, presumably because it came late to party.

I think the Prison Break team can hold out long enough for Venus to arrive, so it's worth keeping EVADE active to avoid getting Senshi sealed.

But feel free to add this to your Mars Command votes:
Code: 
[] Plan Mars Command
[] Plan Stay on Target

and if the "Stop Evading" (AKA: "get sealed") plans ever lose support, then a lot of options open up.
 
The Turn 9 Results update was posted on Oct 24, 2023.
Including the Turn 9 Results update there have been 62 threadmarks since then.
Total words for turn 9 thus far is over 291.2k. (Plus sidestories which I didn't count as they have multiple authors.) Or in other words 3 to 4 full length novels.

So while yes this turn has been going for quite a while and the pacing might not be to taste, in terms of pure output it is a phenomenal achievement.
 
Hmm...of the various plans, I'm choosing to advocate for this.

[X] Plan Mars Command

Mainly because it doesn't have Jupiter trying to do anything about the rockets, while trying to protect helicopters which have been pointed out as being much more susceptible to gravity shenanigans.
 
zernoc56 said:
Alright. Obviously my plan isn't going to win, and neither of the leading plans really interest me. I don't really see the point in calling for people to get here at Fuck Off o'clock in the morning and expect them to be immediately useful in wrapping this already long, drawn out slog of an event that's lasted 16 parts. The longest of any event, not counting epilogues, literally can't last much more than it already has, unless as a sick joke this:

actually happens. If it does, we will be here for another 16 parts of this one event. Considering I don't think Lunaryon is the type to do that, Ami and "whoever else" should be just about getting up to speed by the time it's already over. (Hopefully) Legitimately if this lasts for a couple more "rounds" of combat, I will blame GM shenanigans. I am getting sick of getting dropped into combat events where we're playing X-Com and the enemy is playing 600APM StarCraft
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I'm not sure where you're getting this conviction that this battle should naturally resolve in the next round. To my eye it looks like we're maybe half-way through. One front of the attack has broken, but another is making good progress and a third has merely stalled. If everything goes reasonably but not shockingly well, and we make progress on the other fronts at a similar rate to the previous rounds, we can maybe expect the other fronts to fall by round 6 or 7? That would have the whole battle be somewhere in the 40-80 minute range, which in the grand scheme of battles is pretty quick. Hopefully future rounds will have less word count allowing this whole event to resolve in a reasonable amount of real time, but as far as "will the other senshi have time to show up and do anything" I think the answer is "probably yes".

Also, I should remind you that the enemy commander also has limits on the range of commands he can give. The narration has explicitly told us he discarded the idea of complicated plans in favor of a relatively simple staged assault because he couldn't trust his subordinates to carry them out reliably. A 600 APM StarCraft player he is not.
 
Skelm said:
Also, I should remind you that the enemy commander also has limits on the range of commands he can give. The narration has explicitly told us he discarded the idea of complicated plans in favor of a relatively simple staged assault because he couldn't trust his subordinates to carry them out reliably. A 600 APM StarCraft player he is not.
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He also gave up the idea of micromanaging the control of his own best fires asset (the rockets) in favor of just telling the Hinoyama Clan guys to do what they thought was best after Sailor Moon took his first plan for micromanaging his fires and turned it into a literal farce.

Now, the HInoyama Clan arguably isn't doing an optimal job either, but in fairness they're so far keeping the full-time battlefield efforts of Nanoha Takamachi occupied and still landing hits on the enemy ground force. So that's something.
 
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ReaperofInterest said:
Hmm...of the various plans, I'm choosing to advocate for this.

[X] Plan Mars Command

Mainly because it doesn't have Jupiter trying to do anything about the rockets, while trying to protect helicopters which have been pointed out as being much more susceptible to gravity shenanigans.
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Happy to see more votes for Mars Command, but does anyone actually have an alternative to Jupiter for handling the rockets who isn't Nanoha? Everyone's talking about how dangerous she'd be for the job, but I haven't seen anyone suggest an alternative beyond 'do we really need Nanoha to seal the Jewel Seed?' (yes, we absolutely do) or 'just accept that we're going to be getting shot by rockets.'

Again, I'm fine eating some rocket strikes, I think it's probably survivable, but I'm kind of tired of people talking shit about the easy second best option for handling the rockets.
 
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