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Hmmph... this junior is a good seed [Cultivation Management Quest]

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    • Yeah, I will say at least part of the logic here is trying to fish for some heaven defying genius to spring up from the mortal population and ensure they're well disposed towards us.

    Like, the Organ Meat Desert is the textbook "Weakest land of the weakest realm of the weakest world in the weakest cosmos" starting point in a lot of ways. Even with that, between our starting position, our policy, and our wealth, we're going to be able to make ends meet for the most part, and the Enemy Attrition score means that enemies laying siege to us is a ... Less than desirable state to be in, while our Defenses aren't tanked enough to completely flip over our absolutely absurd fixed defense strength. While yeah, theoretically, the Green Scale Plains are even weaker, that doesn't get measured as much because they can cultivator to higher levels--and in the end it takes way too many 'Combat Strength +s" to get to jump ranks.

    In the end, the weakest Nascent Soul in existence is still going to shit on an arbitrary number of lesser Cultivators. Organ Meat Desert means that outside of the groups that have Spirit Stones, everyone else basically gets fucked to the point where non-aligned Qi Condensation Cultivators are practically not a thing.
     
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    Alright, I'm digging the Long Chen and ISSTH stuff. I don't think kindness is a good idea since being nice in a Xianxia setting is like taping a 'stab me' sign to your back, but given our backstory, I'm willing to give it a try. I prefer the mountains over the desert. The defence bonus will merge well with our array focus and we can snowball it into an impenetrable death trap. Given our final boss theme, having a mountain fortress so filled with array and formations no one dares come close sounds pretty appealing.

    [X] Plan: One does not simply walk into Mordor
    -[X] The Meatshell Mountains
    -[X] Kindness
    -[X] As Allies

    As with all good overlords, we will have plenty of followers to really draw on that group fight bonus. Rome didn't conquer due to having individually strong soldiers, arguably many other places had superior warriors. They won because of their disciple, tactics and numbers. A well-oiled machine oft beats a hand-carved Mastercraft.
     
    [X] Plan: Turtle Minor

    IDK, fishing for the hero or no fishing, I do think that we really should be maximizing the power of our allies like mad; Our allies are one of the very few things of ours that weren't nerfed to hell by Heaven's Will.

    Playing it like a traditional xianxia sect that is afraid of its own vassals and aims to clip wings of everything it cannot directly rule is a luxury we don't have and runs against the whole idea of Lost Ones besides.
     
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    A brief note on attrition vs defense.

    Defense in the mountains is literally 'fuck you, we know the mountain pathways, can avoid the beasts, can fortify a thousand ancient caves', etc, etc. Finding and cracking open your home is very difficult. Defense is 'if you send a lot of guys at our base, we can kill many more than you expect.'

    Attrition, conversely is less 'random cultivators die' and more specifically referring to the near-complete lack of Spiritual Qi in the desert. How do cultivators recover from injuries? Attack? Defend? Fly? Spiritual Qi. In practice there's enough Qi in the mountains (along with accessible Beast Cores) to recover. In the desert, without access to a mine you just run out of Qi and die.

    A well-provisioned expedition will find it much easier to crack open a desert base than a mountain one, and in the event you piss your enemies off enough that they're willing to damn the cost and throw everything at you, you'd be much better off in the mountains. If they're just doing probing attacks, raids, etc - the sort of minor warfare that cultivation factions seem to undergo near-incessantly - then the desert wins because it literally costs Spirit Stones to keep cultivators going in the desert. Acting against you is a costly endeavour.

    So attrition isn't the plague killing your enemies, it's a constant drain on Qi reducing their ability to operate in your territory for extended periods of time.
     
    Im just Hoping Picking Kindness Wont come Back to bite us. If you are Kind in a Xianxia world You are Either Going to Get taken advantege Of And or Betrayed or Destroyed unless Your strong enough to Stop it. And we sure As hell are Not strong. Also with Both the highest kindness options That means we Barely punish are Sect Members for Doing wrong and When we do Its a super light Punishment. We are Almost 100 Percent Going to Be Treated as weak and a resource By Freaking Mortals. I think you guys are Forgetting we Have Barely any Resources and 99 percent of people In xianxia worlds are Assholes and Are almost Assured To betray us with How lax We are.
     
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    A brief introduction to stats (I don't intend for this to be a particularly stat-heavy quest, but you'll always have a reasonable notion of where things stand)

    Population is exactly as it sounds. More mortals. Mortals cost virtually no upkeep (beyond food, water, shelter) and can farm, plow, write books, build walls, etc, etc. Having a lot of them is generally a plus - while they don't generate heavenly treasures or spirit stones, they serve as both a pool for potential cultivators (increasing the talent of your average disciple as you can pick and choose) and a minor boost to wealth.

    Wealth is the core stat, if there is one. Measured in Spirit Stones usually, more Wealth is better. You can turn Wealth directly into weapons, pills, cultivation prowess, etc, etc. Being rich is the ultimate superpower in a world of supermen.

    Cultivator Numbers is a bonus to your... well, number of cultivators. It's a special bonus given to factions in the Plains and those who pick up certain Heavenly Treasures. Desert factions turn Wealth into Cultivator Numbers, but Plains factions can just have more mortals cultivate due to abundant Qi.

    Defenses are a bonus to fighting in your home territory. The better your defenses, the harder your important areas are to crack. Think of Defenses as the strength of your keep as a medieval lord. They won't keep people from plundering your territory generally, but they withstand a siege real well.

    Cultivator Combat Strength is as it sounds. A large bonus to this might see your cultivators invincible within the same small realm, and a massive bonus might see them fighting across small realms. This is more important than it sounds - often opportunities are only offered to a few, pointers are given between top disciples, and so on. Cultivators rarely fight all-out wars where the result isn't clear from the start, so being able to win competitions and duels matters quite a bit.

    Attrition is a lack of Spiritual Qi. Without Qi, you need to use Spirit Stones or Beast Cores just to replenish your own Qi. In practice, this makes extended operations in territory with Attrition extremely unfavorable. Extended raids and plundering attempts are likely to go far worse than they otherwise might, and may never be begun to begin with - nobody wants to pay a large cost to plunder something. It doesn't improve your core defenses, though. It makes it costly to attack you, but not more difficult - at least for a well-supplied army.

    Mortal Popularity determines how mortals views you. In gameplay terms, mortals are irrelevant. They do what you tell them. But they do generate wandering cultivators, who will love or loathe you based on how you treat mortals (having been mortals themselves). Banditry and rebellions can spring from a low Mortal Popularity. High Mortal Popularity, conversely, sees wandering cultivators happily aid you, and unique opportunies turned over to you for a fair recompense rather than hidden away in hopes of raising sufficient power to overthrow you.

    Regional Control determines your control over your region. Or rather, regional resources. The higher it is, the more you can extract resources from the region - Spirit Stones, Beast Cores, good seeds, whatever. The remainder don't disappear, of course, they're consumed by the minor factions in your region.

    Your Minor Factions have two stats.

    For Vassals, Opinion and Strength.

    Low enough opinion and high enough Strength? They'll rebel? Middling opinion and high enough strength? The same. You must have strength, but low enough Opinion can drive vassals to plot against you regardless of Strength, and if you're weak enough your Vassals will rebel almost no matter what. Given Minor Factions do not have Nascent Soul cultivators (that's why they're Minor Factions), though, they'll very rarely do it openly unless you are unable to suppress them. However, they might look to ally with other Nascent Souls and pay tribute elsewhere - only by offending them very badly can you convert them into Rebel Factions.

    For Rebel Factions, Suppression and Strength.

    The Heavens have dissolved the Divine Senate. Fear will keep the outlying settlements in line. Fear of this Nascent Soul cultivator. Suppression is the willingness of Rebel Factions to act against you. Acting against them or simply wandering around as a Nascent Soul will keep them in line. Strength is their ability to do anything about it. Once their Strength overcomes their Suppression, they'll start to attack you.
     
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    [X] Plan: Turtle Minor

    The best Xianxia protags are Ji Ning and Bai Xiaochun, by virtue of not being complete raging dicks. We should at least emulate them, and preferably go even further. :V
     
    ninjastar said:
    Alright, I'm digging the Long Chen and ISSTH stuff. I don't think kindness is a good idea since being nice in a Xianxia setting is like taping a 'stab me' sign to your back, but given our backstory, I'm willing to give it a try. I prefer the mountains over the desert. The defence bonus will merge well with our array focus and we can snowball it into an impenetrable death trap. Given our final boss theme, having a mountain fortress so filled with array and formations no one dares come close sounds pretty appealing.

    [X] Plan: One does not simply walk into Mordor
    -[X] The Meatshell Mountains
    -[X] Kindness
    -[X] As Allies

    As with all good overlords, we will have plenty of followers to really draw on that group fight bonus. Rome didn't conquer due to having individually strong soldiers, arguably many other places had superior warriors. They won because of their disciple, tactics and numbers. A well-oiled machine oft beats a hand-carved Mastercraft.
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    Might want to change the meat shell to hard shell my dude
    But I like the mountains more than the desert



    [X] Plan: One does not simply walk into Mordor
     
    [x] The Organ Meat Desert
    [x] Justice
    [x] As Vassals

    Deserts aren't just sand, there are also rocky areas where we could build a fortress and hidden green areas.
     
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    [X] Plan: Turtle Minor

    Hm. On one hand attrition simply makes the enemy pay more not actually perserve our clan, but on the other the desert theme seems fun. I'll go with fun I suppose.
     
    Yeah, I think we still want attrition over maximum defenses.

    Because maximum defenses can still be cracked with enough force (And the Centennial Beatdown probably includes a Spirit Severing or better expert to crack our defenses I imagine), but our biggest threat is getting nickel and dimed by minor losses that we just never really recover from.

    Attrition means that the only serious fights we get in are the ones that are to the knife--and our defensive focus and strength in blobbing up means that we excel in all out punchfests on our home ground, especially since the other side is paying through the nose just to maintain operations--let alone actually kill us.

    Beyond that, the ++++ to Wealth means that we can afford to go maximum Good Overlord for our subordinates. Which lets us completely remove the overall Population malus (Probably flavored in this case our engineering managing to turn all the settlements into honestly pretty decent places instead of barren wasteland), let us outsource our good fortune to people who aren't cursed by the heavens by being the one all the good guy knight-errants want to keep in place. Our subordinates being strong is theoretically threatening, but the high opinion coupled with our considerable strength turns that 'Strength' into an asset for us, because it means a lot of minor problems don't become major problems--as long as we're careful not to get too far in the hole anyway.

    As nice as the Mountains are--we take a large population hit right out the gate, we take a double hit to our wealth (Which is going to be our godstat in a lot of ways), and our Cultivator numbers are only marginally above the desert. Yes, it'll turn our Cultivators into killbeasts who know no fear--but we'd struggle to maintain our full potential in this run, since we'd have a hard time affording the Good Guy Overlord approach to our mortals--the Spirit Stone Mine helps our wealth, but it's not a magic wand that lets us endure a four point wealth hit I imagine.

    Green Scale Plains is RIGHT OUT. We cannot afford that defense and combat strength hit with our build.

    Our greatest hopes are to effectively be too much trouble than it's worth for opportunists, too hard to lose to our enemies, and too popular to suffer internal strife--so that we can concentrate our greatest strength on our actual major threats instead of have to spend most of it suppressing our subordinates. I believe Turtle Minor fits this.

    And I'll also admit, I like the narrative of trying to reclaim the site of a mind bogglingly vast tragedy instead of just leave the gaping wound as a gaping wound because altruism doesn't exist in the hearts of Cultivators.
     
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    The thing I like about Plan: Turtle Minor is that is subverts the Xianxia setting, explicitly so in fact. Maybe that means that the very setting itself is against us and therefore we lose but if ever there was a setting worth subverting it's Xianxia. Honestly every part of the Xianxia is hateful and depressing, the utter selfishness, the endless and ultimately pointless pursuit of power, the frankly silly concentration of power in the hands of individuals virtually ensuring tyranny, the fact that in order to become relevant it's practically a necessity to devorce yourself from your humanity and transform into at best and arrogant and uncaring sociopath.

    The reason I don't normally read Xianxia is not only that they usually end up as self congradulatory power fantasies with assholes as protagonists but also that the setting as a whole is simply depressing. Regardless of how much of a long shot it is doing our absolute best to try and change the paradigm the world operates under is worth it.
     
    No7sHere said:
    The thing I like about Plan: Turtle Minor is that is subverts the Xianxia setting, explicitly so in fact. Maybe that means that the very setting itself is against us and therefore we lose but if ever there was a setting worth subverting it's Xianxia. Honestly every part of the Xianxia is hateful and depressing, the utter selfishness, the endless and ultimately pointless pursuit of power, the frankly silly concentration of power in the hands of individuals virtually ensuring tyranny, the fact that in order to become relevant it's practically a necessity to devorce yourself from your humanity and transform into at best and arrogant and uncaring sociopath.

    The reason I don't normally read Xianxia is not only that they usually end up as self congradulatory power fantasies with assholes as protagonists but also that the setting as a whole is simply depressing. Regardless of how much of a long shot it is doing our absolute best to try and change the paradigm the world operates under is worth it.
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    And let's not forget.

    "Protagonist gains infinite power, uses it to look out for their own in-group and leaves literally everything else in the world exactly as it was when it began with. New boss same as the old boss in every way, just more powerful"

    Even putting aside the whole "You have these settings of absolutely staggering scope... Everyone speaks the same language and has the same culture and does things in the exact same manner at every turn, it's quite literally pyramid schemes in every direction."

    I mean, the reality behind it is "This is schlock intended for bored chinese millennials to kill time with, they ain't got time for worldbuilding when you're expected to produce 2,000 words a day or lose your contract". But that doesn't mean there's no room to sit up and take notice and go "Uh, guys, aren't a lot of the fundamental underpinnings to this really fucked up?"
     
    That's one of the things that makes the whole setting so depressing, winning is pretty much pointless nothing changes or gets better, ever.
    (Edit): It's like one of those depressing dictorships, A country has an evil dictator who's oppressing everyone. Someone starts a revolution and over throws the dictator, then proceeds be exactly like him. This continous forever.
     
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    As an aside to Mountain voters. You guys have voted for a bunch of different things (primarily Mountain/Justice/Vassal and Mountain/Kindness/Ally). You might want to consolidate into a plan of some sort if you're hoping to fight against the current dominant position of Turtle Minor in the tally - depending on whether the territory your occupy or your attitudes are more important to you.
     
    Alectai said:
    Our greatest hopes are to effectively be too much trouble than it's worth for opportunists, too hard to lose to our enemies, and too popular to suffer internal strife--so that we can concentrate our greatest strength on our actual major threats instead of have to spend most of it suppressing our subordinates. I believe Turtle Minor fits this.
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    [X] Plan: Turtle Minor

    I am voting for you Alectai thougth the points I am not sure about are that we will be vulnerable to betrayal from our allies(we are after all a clan that the heaven's will reward for killing)

    And kindness?I am not sure we have the numbers to protect the mortals at every turn,protecting them is fine but if the mortals sligth someone much stronger than us and we dont protect them,we migth gain a penalty,furthermore I feel like Justice fits "The lost ones" better

    I am going to vote for you because I like the plan but I have doubts still
     
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