At this point we've barely begun to actually work to stop Mengsk. We invested all of zero Free Dice into it this turn, and while we've unlocked further options we've yet to make major progress in anything but Raynor's Raiders, let alone TRUST.
Of course we don't see some clear path forward yet, we don't even have a fraction of the allies we need to make and half the tools we want.
I mean, okay, sure, fine.
But that doesn't really address what I was saying. Sure, we're in the early game and not the midgame or endgame. It's not obvious what our path to victory should look like, or how we could actually kill Arcturus with reasonable confidence of success, let alone handle the post-Arcturus transition.
At the same time, I think we need to acknowledge the shapes of the challenges we're going to face. Since we realistically
can't speedrun this, and since we're going to be spending a lot on Paranoia-reducing options to offset both the Paranoia incurred from our own efforts to build a power base and from our doing commonsense things Arcturus doesn't like, such as SCV factories and terraforming Korhal...
By the time we're in a position to move to our endgame, Mengsk is going to be heavily forted up. The imperial palace is like a mountain, Augustgrad is huge and quite resistant to attack, and Korhal as a whole will be secured by several major military installations we ourselves have been constructing to keep Mengsk nice and calm. There's a reason why even the UED saw capturing Augustgrad as a formidable prospect, so much so that there's an entire mission dedicated just to reducing the outer defenses and even so, the
real "Augustgrad" mission starts with a massive Dominion counterattack wiping out the UED spearhead forces in a mass of nuclear/Yamato fire.
The practical upshot of this is that we're not going to be able to easily shoot our way in with a massed assault, whether that massed assault be by Raynor's Raiders, TRUST troopers, giant crowds of revolutionaries in full
"Do You Hear The People SING" mode, or a combination of the above. And even if we somehow get Mengsk out from under all those defenses, or manage to quickly and 'cheaply' assassinate him without much involvement from allies within the government apart from ourselves,
someone is still going to be inside those defenses and in a position to proclaim themselves successor.
So if whoever is occupying that fortress isn't
us, isn't us and whatever allies we've formed, we're going to be in for a prolonged fight before whatever force we're backing can claim to hold real power in Dominion space. Like most coups, we need to be ready to secure the capital, and we can only have so much of an army in position when that happens, which means we probably need some degree of collaboration with sympathizers in the military and intelligence services... And that loops us back to the problem of "will these guys cooperate with someone who wants to establish the kind of regime that may well decide to shoot them for war crimes, and hell, may decide to shoot
him for war crimes?"
And we're not yet in a position to have an answer to that question! You're right!
But I fear the answer may be 'no,' and I'm not sure how to address that issue if we're not ready to accept some degree of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
