Hokay, that's a lot to unpack. Instead of doing a vote or plan right away, I'm going to walk through the overall options and my thoughts on them. With everything being shaken up, recategorized, and recosted, I feel the need to reorient myself. I also agree that we need to decide on some basic short and mid term goals (long term is revolution, obviously).
Investments under Holly and Edie:
There are two focuses to this category: making us more money and investing in the future of our Noble House. The former is by far the most prevalent, but don't let the difference in number of options lull us into skipping investing in our House.
These have pretty variable costs and returns, so I expect there will be more hooks to some of them. For example, investing in a ship and crew is the worst cost-to-income ratio (tied with a couple others, albeit the lower upfront cost makes it the most attractive of those), but it seems entirely reasonable that having a ship we own would open up a lot of options for things like smuggling. Of the actions here, the ones that stand out the most to me are the noble estate (we'll need one before the other nobles even think of treating us seriously), the gambling house (the cheapest +3 clean income we can get and an avenue for further money laundering and discretion generation), investing in our magic shop (a 1:1 cost/income ratio is insane), and turning the Redcaps into our House Guards (not something to do right away, we need to talk things over with people first).
Your actions at Court:
This has three relatively equal focuses. First, there's managing our Scandal vs Discretion meter. Second, there's attending social events to gather Favor with specific aboveground groups. And, finally, there's expending unique resources for Imperial Favor.
It's interesting that this introduces two new groups that we haven't really had an opportunity to interact with before, the Adventurer's Guild and the Mage's Guild. We did talk a little with the latter, I think, as part of licensing our magic shop, but that was a rote transaction rather than social interactions with the Guild itself. We'll probably want to talk to them relatively early on to see what their deal is. And I've been wanting to talk to the radio people forever but never found a good time to slip it in, so now that the Broadcaster's Guild is highlighted as a mover and shaker, that should be on our list as well. Also, we don't know what Imperial Favor does yet, but given the types of things we have to do in order to secure it, I expect them to be extremely powerful. I'm definitely in favor of offloading one of our Essence Pearls if we have one that qualifies.
Intrigue under Filia and Valerie:
Again, three categories here with roughly equal distribution. Category one is securing Holds on gangs/underworld elements, category two is securing Favors from revolutionary organizations, and category three is expending favors and holds on major clandestine projects.
The first two categories are stuff we've already been doing, to one degree or another, so I'm most interested in the big Favor/Hold payoffs. Here we find out what Imperial Favor does, and as expected, it's a doozy. We can literally perform a coup against House Galero within the year if we want to; alternately, we could make the entire Harbor District our official territory complete with freaking tax income. Those are both huge—so huge that we might actually want to tiptoe around them for a while. Making too big of a splash too soon could cause those waves to rebound back on us in unpleasant ways. Unifying the revolutionary factions seems like a better short term goal to me, especially since All Faiths launched their big recruiting drive during all of this. We need to make sure we maintain control or things are likely to get rowdy before we're ready.
Esoterica under Varielle and Leah:
This is an odd category. Right now, it's mostly "let's go shopping", but there are hints (just as there have been all along) that we might be able to research our way into interesting additions to our options. We've barely touched the whole Succubus thing in this entire Quest, and I can't help but think that there's something truly revolutionary (in the "brand new ideas and methods" sense of the term) just waiting to be uncovered there. For now, I'm mostly interested in the Succubus artifacts, gaining a passive Essence Pearl income, and learning to make our own Orbites (with the expectation on the latter that we might eventually be able to use an Imperial Favor to make them
legal Orbites).
Social, in your spare time:
And to round things out, this is our "don't turn into a workaholic monster" group of options. I have to say I really appreciate them being in a category by themselves now, although I hope that Lady Estelle goes out on minor dates with Leah behind the scenes because other wise one date per season or worse is pretty terrible. Also, Melody being a specifically-named option on this list is interesting and dovetails with the Broadcast Guild being highlighted earlier. Maybe we should see if we can get our locally-famous Harbor Tea Band broadcast to a wider audience?
OK, so those are what we can do. What do we have to do it with?
At the moment, we have the following available to spend:
6 Clean Terra
19 Dirty Terra
3 Essence Pearls
Favors with four of the six revolutionary organizations (need Libertines and SLF to unify)
Holds on the Redcaps, the Revolution, the Waterfront (need 2 more to become Marquessa), and two of the major Noble Houses.
Alright, so what are the active Plans?
- Plan Scaling Up: Arms the Redcaps, trades a Pearl for Imperial Favor, talks to All Faiths, invests in passive Essence Pearl production, and goes on a date with Leah.
- Plan: Don't get lost in the glitter: Invests in a gambling house, talks to the broadcasters, talks to the Suffragists, goes to the transmuter, and talks with Valerie about the Redcaps.
- Plan: Defensive: Arms the Redcaps, trades a Pearl for Imperial Favor, gets a Hold on the street rats, invests in passive Pearl production, and talks with Valerie about the Redcaps.
Okay, so Scaling Up and Defensive are pretty close together, with Defensive preferring to further our ambitions rather than checking with All Faiths/spending time with Leah. Don't get lost, meanwhile, is entirely different on every category but the last. None of the listed plans hit all the right notes for me, but I'm OK with 4/5 of it (I'm not sure what we're actually going to accomplish with the transmuter; could be good, could be a waste of time for now, I just don't know) and I don't want to throw a new hat in the ring for that one little quibble so I'll vote:
[X] Plan: Don't get lost in the glitter
I feel like our short term goals should be building up a good cash flow (I strongly suggest investing in the magic shop on a turn where we spend Clean Terra elsewhere, it's cheap and just as much of a return as investing in a ship, hotel, or teahouse), securing our Noble House status with an estate and House Guard, unifying the revolution, investigating the new noble-tier factions, getting an Essence Pearl income, and securing Holds on the waterfront with the aim of becoming the Marquessa. I feel that becoming the Lady of the Harbor would be a less threatening and aggressive use of our first Imperial Favor than taking over House Galero, and should still provide a huge boost in income and options.
