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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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Drieder said:
What does:
-Kosyginite,
-Abramovite,
or
-Masherovite,
Mean?
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Blackstar said:
Podgorny's Faction: Podgorny has continued his liberal deviation in both the economic and social spheres, focusing on the social sphere rather than the economic one. He has advocated for a reduction in restrictions for the private sector, introductions of wider markets for enterprise bonds, and in a radical turn opening further to external capital. On the campaign, he has given endorsements to candidates for lower rungs who have advocated for further party openings and reductions on censorship in both the realm of government policy and social policy. Mostly liked by some of the more optimistic and immature candidates rather than anyone serious about their careers, his placement represents a massive reduction in the right-wing threat compared to Aristov's systemic durability.

Kosygin's Faction: Despite consistent foreign policy failures and systemic incompetence in their handling, Kosygin has hung on as the candidate of those for moderate reform, moderate economic change, and a continuation of the current course. Running on incumbent policy in an economy that he had no part in creating, Kosygin has secured a significant number of seats that were directly endorsed by him. The actual government is expected to be formed from a compromise of Kosygin with either Masherov and Abramov or one of them and a traditional technocratic block to secure the support of the state apparatus.

Masherov's Faction: Pyotr Mironovich Masherov has endorsed candidates both in Belarus and across the union, coming in as a politician who advocates for the modernization of the party and increased discipline in the economy. Campaigning on addressing the "excess" and "corruption" in the economy while continuing the reforms to the character of the party. Further, rather than the previous pacifistic stance, he has come as an active proponent of a global campaign of active activity and rollback, not allowing the capitalists to continue their exploitation of international workers. His youth makes the faction one of the weaker ones, but as experience is gained, Masherov is liable to form a significant threat to the ministry system due to whatever perceived issues he sees in it.

Abramov's Faction: Grigory Grigoryevich Abramov is a hero of the great patriotic war and his entire political platform has made sure to mention that at length to secure more conventionally conservative interests. He has still advocated for the further modernization of party structures, but in a measured manner and more focused on the inclusion of worker cadres rather than the current "inteligencia" dominated system. Economically, he has taken a divergent line rather than other factions, advocating for an economy with an end goal of serving the worker and raising living standards while fighting excesses in management. Not changing the goals or organization of the system but making it somehow more fair than it already is.

Voznesesnky's Faction: Continuing the history of measured, rapid, and comprehensive scientific development the technocratic faction is set to guide the Union towards the construction of communism. Running on a platform advocating for the current system and with careful analysis of material conditions policy can be made without biases and excess. Sponsored candidates have come primarily from the major university cities and high-intensity industrial areas, as they have the greatest concentration of those capable of party work. The current emphasis has fallen towards the preservation of the ministry system and protecting the general role of the party and administration. Very focused on the state and is currently opposed by the interests of various radicals that seek to further modify the soviet system.

Ashimov's Faction: Baiken Ashimovich Ashimov has become a practical figurehead for a misguided student movement seeking to accelerate the construction of communism and fight perceived excesses in the Soviet state. These youngsters have come with tentative sponsorships both from new members entering the system and being misguided and a number of those willing to push away every element perceived as Stalinist. Decrying the excess "corruption" , ignorance of the workers' struggle, and the lack of empowerment of class interests in favor of a drive towards constant growth, they have managed to make some inroads in communities impacted by minor side effects of development.

Kleshchev's Faction: The uncritical and excessively Stalinist wart that still exists in the Supreme Soviet despite the considerable errors that were committed during his reign. Advocating for the abolition of the current system and a new consolidation of power in the party, Kleshchev has gathered a group of the obsolete that have yet to realize they are two decades away from any time they could have had power. In less developed areas, the high points of the approach still persist, but as modernization and education come, a large degree of older party members will be rotated out.
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Nervos Belli said:
I would strongly recommend toning down the complexity of options in the bureaucracy or giving them clearer names at the least. A name like "cooperate with anti-corruption investigations" would have been easier to parse and would have gotten the attention it deserved.
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I think The Voz's weird dialect was partly a deliberate effort to fuck with the voter base (Back when I was on the discord, Blackstar once threatened to have The Voz totally rewrite the description of bureaucracy options if we don't take them to make them sound more enticing). I get what she was going for, but in practice is was just painful. If it's not toned down going forwards, this quest will just become more painful to play. I liked it more under Malenkov, when we didn't keep shoving our hands into the SupSov.

What ideology is Masherov, and Abramov and how bad/good would it be to put one of their guys in the chair? (not that any of the Masherovites except MAYBE Anton are good)

Having half of our bureaucacy dice be out of our control is going to sting, a LOT. Any chance we'll get control of some back in future plans or is this wretched existence the new normal?

Oh jeez, I had NO IDEA The Voz was so bad. I'm not good at picking out context clues, I need someone to point out what glaring red flags I missed.
 
General_Urist said:
I think The Voz's weird dialect was partly a deliberate effort to fuck with the voter base (Back when I was on the discord, Blackstar once threatened to have The Voz totally rewrite the description of bureaucracy options if we don't take them to make them sound more enticing). I get what she was going for, but in practice is was just painful. If it's not toned down going forwards, this quest will just become more painful to play. I liked it more under Malenkov, when we didn't keep shoving our hands into the SupSov.
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Im really glad that The Voz is gone, only because the beaucracy options started to read more and more like how Simlish sounds.
 
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We're finally free of the impenetrable optimizerbrained ramblings of Voz McVoz, three cheers for inexperienced youngsters of dubious judgment in positions of incredible power!
 
Hianny said:
Eh fuck Voz couldn't go at a better time and it got tiring constantly covering up his corrupt shit now we can get someone less corrupt and not a Stalin shaped pretzel doing politics
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He really could have, IMO. Now we have to deal with the fact that a guy out to either suborn or tear apart the ministry is on the rise and we have to be very careful dealing with him.

Anyway, I think either Drozdenko or Klimenko work, but they have different styles of play - with Drozdenko we will need to be entirely uncontroversial for the next few years while building up his powerbase, because the moment we start taking risks, Kos's weak protection might not be enough to save the vulnerable ministry from getting torn apart by both Abramov's and Masherov's factions. With Klimenko, we will have to be ride or die with our patron and do anything and everything we can to support him, because Abramov placing his guy in charge of MNKh is a very big investment in this political climate, and if it doesn't pay off, Masherov is going to reign supreme and both replace the leader and tear the ministry apart.

As ministers in their own rights, I think they are roughly equal, with Drozdenko being maybe a bit better, so I think the choice between them is largely what style of play you would prefer.
 
TBH, I thought I toned down the Voz speak for the option/made it fairly explicit what it did:

"[]Take a Palatable Position: The formation of a new general consensus government between Kosygin and Abramov's group is expected to be challenged from several vectors. Some of the younger members elected to the Supreme Soviet have been misguided on the nature of Soviet politics and the essentials of governmental policymaking. Taking a more conciliatory stance and advocating a middle line of a new wave of investigations will allow for the more pragmatic to accept the various imbeciles that exceeded reasonable expectations of excesses. By the time a politically fraught fight over them is over, the majority of the youths will be able to get on with themselves and continue everything as normal. (1 Dice, Rolled) (Supreme Soviet Reform) (Only Available this turn)"

Generally speaking, as long as you follow his assumptions/conception of reality that he is the most correct man in the room at any given time, Voz as a general rule I thought was understandable. Compared to something as droning and bureaucratic as Xi's writing or English language translations of 5yp reports. Hell, even compared to normal ish ones Voz was fairly understandable, if strange in his notions.
 
I think the main fault was because many of us became fixated on the decision on what to do about the moon race we did not give much attention to the options in bureau. It did not help the vote on what to do was tied to the general plan
 
agumentic said:
He really could have, IMO. Now we have to deal with the fact that a guy out to either suborn or tear apart the ministry is on the rise and we have to be very careful dealing with him.
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The problem is that the longer Voz lasted the bigger his patronage network would grow and the deeper the cleaning needed in the MNKH would be. I also agree that while Masherov might be to gungho against the ministry he likely has a bunch of very real and good complaints against it. The MNKH is the second most important position and right now it has no limits or oversight and people like Voz could just do whatever they wanted.
 
I prefer the slow and steady approach of Drozdenko over the ride or die approach of Klimenko. What better way to survive political shitstorms but to stay out of it all?
 
Blackstar said:
"[]Take a Palatable Position: The formation of a new general consensus government between Kosygin and Abramov's group is expected to be challenged from several vectors. Some of the younger members elected to the Supreme Soviet have been misguided on the nature of Soviet politics and the essentials of governmental policymaking. Taking a more conciliatory stance and advocating a middle line of a new wave of investigations will allow for the more pragmatic to accept the various imbeciles that exceeded reasonable expectations of excesses. By the time a politically fraught fight over them is over, the majority of the youths will be able to get on with themselves and continue everything as normal. (1 Dice, Rolled) (Supreme Soviet Reform) (Only Available this turn)"
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I mean if nothing else I think something that expressly says "Only Available this turn" should in general be looked at quite closely.
 
I will take partial credit for this fuckup in bureaucracy as i deliberately didn't pick it as in the last corruption vote we explicitly did not take the dig further in option so i thought we should just continue with that tactic and just didn't explain it to anybody as coal and moon actions took all the focus
 
Currently leaning towards []Anton Bronislavovich Nosilovsky mostly because he's got an amazingly high modifier of... +0. Which is better than everyone else!

General_Urist said:
Oh wow they wrote a program to automatically process the dice rolls? I thought they did it by hand. Cool!
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I actually posted it in-thread here (and the spreadsheet generator here) though I haven't been keeping those posts up to date with the changing modifiers and stuff since it seemed like nobody else was using them.
 
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Nervos Belli said:
I'll be honest, the bureaucracy speak is making it much harder to understand what we're voting on and what any of the issues and options even mean. I had no idea what the option we apparently should have taken meant and I suspect that many of the other voters are in the same boat. Between that and the plans getting much more complicated it's hard to figure out what to prioritize and focus on for people who don't have access to the Discord or are good at reading bureaucrat.

I would strongly recommend toning down the complexity of options in the bureaucracy or giving them clearer names at the least. A name like "cooperate with anti-corruption investigations" would have been easier to parse and would have gotten the attention it deserved.
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@Blackstar , this is not wrong.

Like, I get that we're seeing all this stuff through the lens and perspective of our viewpoint character. But when that viewpoint character is BOTH suffering from a distorted perspective because they're an entitled asshole who rationalizes the fuck out of everything, AND their internal monologue is a gigantic slab of impenetrable bureaucratic jargon, it becomes virtually impossible to keep track of what's actually supposed to be going on, or to try and vote in ways that allow the character to stay in touch with reality.

I get why you're doing it, but I think you may have overcompensated a little, to the point where only a handful of players can follow what's going on except after the fact.

This is a nontrivial part of the reason I don't vote anymore...

EDIT:

To expand on this a bit, I can certainly hope that with Voz gone, we'll get someone whose internal monologue isn't a turgid mass of self-justifying gibberish and is capable of actually realistically assessing situations more often than they pat themselves on the back for doing so without actually doing so.

But if we don't get that sudden rush of clarity, then when that's combined with the inevitable decline in mechanical results we get from not having Voz throwing a +15 bonus at everything we do, the game could get ugly and unplayable pretty fast.
 
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General_Urist said:
What ideology is Masherov, and Abramov and how bad/good would it be to put one of their guys in the chair? (not that any of the Masherovites except MAYBE Anton are good)
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They are all card carrying Marxist-Leninist members of the CPSU that have read much of the theory behind it and evaluated it for their choice of line.

Edit: In practice, expect basically everyone up for selection to well, not be a Stalinist bureaucratic pretzel and far more reasonable, these are your third generation of party leadership and far more reasonable.
 
HanEmpire said:
Kosygin is a pro-Cooperative reformist. He's fine with MNKh and state-owned enterprises, he just wants workers to get more power. He's not a libertarian, and he certainly isn't a capitalist.
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Really? I only ever skim the politics sections because its so dense that its all greek to me, from what i remembered i just thought he was a libetarian hiding his actions as socialism.
 
agumentic said:
He really could have, IMO. Now we have to deal with the fact that a guy out to either suborn or tear apart the ministry is on the rise and we have to be very careful dealing with him.
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Parzival said:
[snip political blocks]
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Do I understand that both the Masherovites and Abromovites are pretty good as far as opposing corruption goes? I don't like those scare quotes under Masherov.

OK, trying to actually analyze the options:
[]Fyodor Anisimovich Surganov
+ has agricultural cred, most likely to convince SupSov to back down on targets and won't propose REALLY GOOD IDEAs if forced to proceed anyway
+ Politically inoffensive, most likely to let us pull up our feet and just do economy stuff instead of having to translate Soviet political speak during our planning.
+/- lacks in bureaucracy dice, but two in three are ours to use.
- Old, does not bring new blood
-- bad general states (-10, upgrade to -5)

[]Vladimir Fedorovich Mitskevich
++ even bigger bonus to bureucracy rolls than The Voz had, and that is very hard to come by
+ young blood
++(?) political experience, won't get trolled by SupSov but also higher risk of dragging us the players into it
--- GARBO general stats (-15 upgrades to -5 by the plan's end)
Vi'Talzin said:
-20 is a very bad malus as it is, but my biggest concern is the dude has no clue on how to do his job and is gonna learn on it. Its not 1928, there is no looming Stalin threatening to shoot us if we don't politick enough and aren't personal friends with him. We are going to be exiting an economic boom, and having a dude with no clue on the job would be bad.
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He has a doctorate in economics, so he won't be clueless. Still probably a bad choice.

[]Anton Bronislavovich Nosilovsky
+ young blood
+ small boost to infra rolls
+ Least garbage stats, (0 upgrade to +5, only one without starting malus)
--basically a puppet of SupSov, they have 3/4 the bureau dice and will boss us around badly

[]Vasily Ivanovich Drozdenko
+Y oung blood with energy to match
++ Plus 10 to infra dice, knows civil engineering, good for solving Infra Hell
+/- lots of bureucracy dice, but SupSov controls a majority of them
+/- meh general stats, (-5 upgrades to +5)
--Explicitly doesn't know economics, could lead to REALLY GOOD IDEAs.

(@Blackstar he has "+5 to all non-Bureaucracy-Rolls", does that mean that all the other characters with a bonus or malus to "all rolls" have bureaucracy impacted also? If Fyodor or Ivan gets -10 to bureaucracy rolls than he's an absolute no-go)
[]Ivan Efimovich Klimenko
+ Young blood
++ Sociologist, great Services bonus and will help cement the legitimacy of the soft sciences, which is desperately needed in the coming years.
+ small boost to infra rolls
+/- not great with politics, not bad enough
- Bad stats (-10 upgrades to zero)

...Y'know, this guy managed to get too separate degrees in rather disparate fields AND managed to advance politically, you would THINK that sort of general competence would get him some sort of "+5 to all dice" trait... :I
 
I get the frustration with the bureaucracy speak but i personally enjoy it as it adds more dimensions to the character and means there is an actual need for understanding of the character to know what they are doing. With that said though i am pretty sure the worst of it is just cause Voz is so far up his own ass and out of touch with reality that it likely will get better with a new pc
 
My personal preference would be []Ivan Efimovich Klimenko, as while he does have -10, he's decent at services, infrastructure, and not bad at bureaucracy either. I'm also interested in what Abramov would be pushing.

[]Vladimir Fedorovich Mitskevich would also be incredibly entertaining. Terrible at his job but if we want to play politics then we can go all in.
 
Drieder said:
Really? I only ever skim the politics sections because its so dense that its all greek to me, from what i remembered i just thought he was a libetarian hiding his actions as socialism.
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Literally Kosygin's flagship reform is wanting to adjust the existing market sector in the Soviet Union away from private enterprises and towards cooperatives. In what possible sense is he a libertarian?
 
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