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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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Personally, I am all for biases and jargon in option descriptions. If that means voters sometimes fuck up and make mistakes because of inattention or misreading, that simply adds character to the quest. It's supposed to be hard to play optimally.
Hianny said:
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.
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It was all bound on him, so as long as Voz was out one way or another, it wouldn't be much harder of different from now to "clear" the ministry out, in my opinion. Political climate would be much better, though.
 
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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The private market reforms that people meme about were done under Mikoyan. Kosygin was the guy who realized that the private market's growth will eventually normalize employer-employee exploitative relationships in the Union. Therefore, some of the first things he passed after becoming the General-Secretary were pro-cooperative economic reform packages to make the private sector more socialist by making private enterprises give more power and profits to workers instead of capitalist entrepreneurs.

Kosygin is a committed communist.
 
Teen Spirit said:
Klimenko is my personal choice ATM.
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He's overall the coolest guy for the job, but if that -10 of his hits the bureaucracy dice than I do not want the experience of a 10% chance of rolling less than zero on reforms and political maneuvers.

Well, depends on how Blackstar handles sub-zero rolls really. I might be overreacting because of trauma from The Tattered Eagle on SB, where a non-1 low roll than falls negative due to maluses causes even MORE damage than a straight Natural 1 does.

But speaking of trauma, if one candidate is substantially more likely to just let us do economics instead of having to translate political shenanigans every other turn, I'm tempted to vote for them on that basis alone.
 
Kos main problem was an unwillingness to send all the guns to revolutionaries wearing red hats which is a very unpopular position to take so i get where the Voz is a liberal wrecker idea comes from
 
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agumentic said:
He'll lose his pension at worst.
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If that stops him from enjoying his retirement then he's really, really bad at this whole "corruption" thing he's supposedly been up to his eyeballs in for decades. :p

Blackstar said:
TBH, I thought I toned down the Voz speak for the option/made it fairly explicit what it did:
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The problem isn't so much that this option in isolation was illegible, as that the cumulative effective of a dozen-plus turns of all the options being like that left a lot of us with our eyes glazed over. One may speculate that it greatly reduced the number of people who were even mentally able to go "wait, SHIT" and process how bad it could be for Voz to fail to fend off that anti-corruption drive.

RentingViewer said:
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
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Also, this.

Drieder said:
From what i understand:

...And Kosygin is a libertarian and capitalistic communist.
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I don't think that's a fair characterization of Kosygin. Remember that the guy's got to work with the system as it exists, which means making alliances with a lot of senior Party members who are constantly trying to indulge in empire-building. I think that starting from where he started, realistically his choices were "get quietly shoved aside by the rest of the Supreme Soviet" or "try to oversee a degree of liberalization," simply because the Party wasn't going to tolerate tight centralization and strict anti-corruption.

We needed the two decades or so since Stalin's death and the rising standards of living we've experienced, just to bring into the forefront a new tranche of Party members who are reasonably enthusiastic about routing out corruption and spreading the influence of the working class over the system. In the immediate aftermath of Stalin, nobody dared to stand up and say they cared about it, and I think Mikoyan and Kosygin deserve a lot of credit for managing to navigate that transition to the point where we've actually got a shot at the third generation of party leadership making things significantly better.

Of course, the flip side of that is that one can argue it's time to put Kosygin out to pasture... :p
 
General_Urist said:
He has a doctorate in economics, so he won't be clueless. Still probably a bad choice.
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Not Economics, Political Economics (also known as Politecon), as opposed to Mathematical Economics which is the product of the Economic Institutes that stole all our service dice a while back. The latter gives us good bonuses and people who studied how to become good ministry men, the former good party men that can lecture said ministry men on dialectics and ask "why the hell did you miss our plan goals for agriculture?!"
 
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Vi'Talzin said:
Not Economics, Political Economics (also known as Politecon), as opposed to Mathematical Economics which is the product of the Economic Institutes that stole all our service dice a while back. The latter gives us good bonuses and people who studied how to become good ministry men, the former good party men that can lecture said ministry men on dialectics and ask "why the hell did you miss our plan goals for agriculture?!"
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Political economics is inferior to non-political economics of course, but The Vox was still able to get a bonus to all dice (not just politics) from it.

I'm having second thoughts about the sociologist. He doesn't have management experience, which is very bad for the new head of a large organization. And it might legitimize putting the economy under the control of political candidates who have no idea how to actually run an organization. A trend like that would hollow out the competence of the MNKh very quickly.
 
Simon_Jester said:
If that stops him from enjoying his retirement then he's really, really bad at this whole "corruption" thing he's supposedly been up to his eyeballs in for decades. :p
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Corruption in USSR is more of a power thing than money thing. Voz didn't build mansions, he placed people who were loyal to him in charge of various important stuff.

That said, his cancer is going to stop him from enjoying anything much sooner than any punishment.
 
Speaking of poorly communicating to the player base, I have to call out the update for being confusing on what modifiers do or don't effect reform dice. Because looking at The Voz's statblock:

Blackstar said:
  • A veteran of the 4th 5-Year Plan (+5 to all rolls)
  • Excellent Organizer (+5 to all rolls,
  • Doctor of Political Economics (+5 to all rolls, including reform rolls)
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This set of phrasing tells the player base that a modifier to "all rolls" does not impact reform rolls unless specifically noted otherwise, which is consistent with what we've seen so far: Voznesensky's political econ degree is IIRC the only time we have ever had a modifier for bureaucracy quality dice.

In the current update, we have several characters with traits that claim to modify "all rolls", none that nominally modify "all rolls, including reform rolls" equally, and two that explicitly only apply to NON-bureucracy rolls. This implies a different case, that a modifier to all rolls does modify reform rolls unless specifically excepted.

Which is it? And if it did change, why do such a change now when we're already at the height of confusion?
 
Well, once again a vote is called before I'd even read through all the proposed plans, let alone decided how to vote...

PeaterDuck12 said:
Can I just say that the fact that a whole quarter of our energy needs are being filled by hydro is amazing
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I read that as being "a quarter of the electrical capacity added this plan".

General_Urist said:
Do you know any reputable sources suggesting 'nuclear incineration'? Because that sounds like a pretty bad idea. For one, this will turn your garbage into radioactive garbage. For another, my understanding is that nuclear reactors don't actually get very hot: The special alloys that makes them tick can't take the high temperatures a dumb lump of steel and refractory brick can.
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I was talking about using heat from a nuclear reactor to pyrolize the plastic waste, incinerating the hot gasses that are cooked off and using the sludge left over as bunker fuel for ships, making new plastics or burning for power as well.

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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Voz's excessive and opaque jargon is one of the reasons why I've not been terribly keen to defend him.

Plus, I've really been looking forward to a new set of eyes looking things over because I have been getting worried about what problems might be accumulating in Voz's blindsides.

Blackstar said:
Hell, even compared to normal ish ones Voz was fairly understandable, if strange in his notions.
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Darn, that is pretty damning of how opaque and jargon-filled the various Marxist-Leninist organizations in the world are/have been...

(Then again, it took me something like a decade to learn the misleading language and jargon non-Maxist-Leninist organizations in our world use, something something animal spirits something something tightening the belt, supply side something something technocratic centrism.)

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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Well, Voz considered him a bit right wing, but Voz was kinda going paranoid control freak on us...

Simon_Jester said:
Of course, the flip side of that is that one can argue it's time to put Kosygin out to pasture... :p
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Yeah, I am not sure... Masherov sounds like someone who could Gorbachev the Soviet Union potentially (once he gets more experience he could be fine). Abramov seems alright. But in general I have liked Kosygin's calls and wouldn't mind if he got another 5 years or so...

Regards,

fasquardon
 
General_Urist said:
Political economics is inferior to non-political economics of course, but The Vox was still able to get a bonus to all dice (not just politics) from it.
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Yup, but I think its important remembering that while those dice maluses and bonuses are important to note, the traits themselves tell us a lot about a character. Sergo only having a primary education gave us a big malus yes, but it also meant a lot of important things for running to the economy and projects just weren't in his radar. The latter was arguably more damaging to us than the malus itself. I pointed this out in the discord when the preview for this guy came out and Blackstar confirmed my concerns.

Sandyman
-We are thinking of this too mechanically
-That -20 means he is flat out not prepared for this and will have major issues
Blackstar
-yep, which is the far larger issue

Like, don't get me wrong, he has his own case. Dude is a political animal, but he is explicitly bad at the part of being MNKh head that is running the economy. Which is a deal breaker imo
 
The political economics maxxer is really good at arguing his case and justifying it with proper marxist jargon from what I understand. Im fairly certain we can minimize his negative impact on the economy by delegating properly but that means finding someone in the current system that Voz set up to actually trust and delegate to. Which an issue when our job is supposed to be tearing this whole thing up and cutting out the rot.
 
Speaking of The Voz and his corruption ring, since that got burst open does it mean a bunch of the young STEMlords he brought into the party have also been purged or shoved to languish in backwaters? That would really suck long-term.
 
Adronio said:
The political economics maxxer is really good at arguing his case and justifying it with proper marxist jargon from what I understand. Im fairly certain we can minimize his negative impact on the economy by delegating properly but that means finding someone in the current system that Voz set up to actually trust and delegate to. Which an issue when our job is supposed to be tearing this whole thing up and cutting out the rot.
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Delegating helps, yeah, but can only go so far when you have no clue what your ministers are talking about. So even if we did that sucessfully, I think it would hobble economic performance too much to be worth it imo
 
General_Urist said:
Speaking of The Voz and his corruption ring, since that got burst open does it mean a bunch of the young STEMlords he brought into the party have also been purged or shoved to languish in backwaters? That would really suck long-term.
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No, Voz hasn't brought them into the patronage networks. They're all legitimately dedicated communists out to get rid of corruption. They're young and idealistic.
 
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Damn I'm gonna miss Voz. The different voices the options are written with depending on who we are playing as are one of my favorite parts of this quest.

Anyway we should go with whoever likes trains the most and is not a Kosyginist. If a tiebreaker is needed, we should pick whoever hated kkkars the most
 
[]Ivan Efimovich Klimenko...

He beings a lot to the table. As a sociologist, he's very well prepared to understand the impact projects will have on the people, in a less Numbers Go Up-brained way than Voznesensky. Plus it brings in a fresh and humanist perspective in general. It will synergize well with his transportation engineering degree, he will be a great planner of urban and public transport systems. And he is not under too much SupSov control.

But the "Lacking Management Experience" and "little actual economics experience" scares me, both from possible narrative effects of him not knowing how a big organization works, and direct mechanical effects of potentially bombing reform dice. Is it worth toughing out or is it a deal breaker?

EDIT: Spelling
 
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After thinking about it my conclusion is that i would just play it safe and pick []Fyodor Anisimovich Surganov. Sure it is really not a good person for long term but as we can't fix agri he is going to be gone next 5YP. My hope is that we get a winner in the knife fight between Mash and Abromov, Kos likely begins retreating further from politics, and students settle more into their new power so things will be a bit more stable politically by then and the choice we pick won't immediately lose their leader in a political knife fight.
 
Goodbye to our Wonderful Wizard of Voz, you strange strange man. Initial read through makes me favor the sociologist the most, but I'm open to discussion.
 
Halfway through catching up with this quest I settled on only reading updates and never meaningfully contributing to it because everything became too obtuse and spreadsheet based. Props to the people that do contribute cuz it seems like it takes a lot of dedication and effort.
 
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