I played with idea to let Ivo live, but he indirectly killed our employees with no real gain and attracted unwanted attention to LexCorp madscience side.
I'd actually be willing to let ALL of that slide normally (since all that was simply a consequence of a bad die roll and assigning him to a task that he had a high chance of failing anyway).
The catch is that, well... realistically, Ivo is suffering some kind of organ failure
every turn these days, it seems like. Even if we keep kidnapping transplant donors to keep him alive (which is why he's still alive
now), sooner or later someone's probably going to blow a "Learning" check or "get him to the hospital fast enough" check and we'll lose him. So I don't think we can expect many more turns of A.M.A.Z.O. from him. Nor do I think he'll live long enough for us to lower the DC enough to bring us back to the good old days when we could throw him at the project all by himself and expect progress or at least non-catastrophic failure.
Furthermore, there is the lingering problem of what our endgame is if he
wins; if the project is complete or nearly complete we end up with an ultrapowerful robot Ivo who hates and is hated by pretty much everyone. That might be bad for, say, Superman, but it's probably also bad for
us, and we're at Ground Zero of whatever he does.
[] [Channel] Oz
Cause why not?
Well, we CAN probably pay off the estate of L. Frank Baum if we need to. I'd rather not have to, but we could.
[] [EA] Donate money to Bradley Covington's campaign
As we, low key, do get involved in military matters quite a bit, anyone who gets suspicious of Lex's outright endorsement of a Pro-military candidate is going to cause people to investigate the link more closely and I don't exactly trust the good general to pass all his intrigue rolls. Consistantly, it has been proven that local candidates with larger budgets end up winning elections so a sizable donation will not only simply be more innocuous, effective and our name would merely be in a file somewhere rather than on the late night news.
If Bradley was also a pro-business candidate it would be far less interesting to others if we publicly endorsed him.
He's not so much pro-business as pro-military. Anyway, it would hardly be
surprising if we go to his wine cave or whatever. I mean, shit, we're an American billionaire, we're allowed to get away with the level of supervillainy
real American billionaires already get up to. It might even give us better plausible deniability if we do, because it gives people like Lois Lane something to attack instead of making them wonder what we're hiding.
[] [Bane] Offer to give Bane a large cache of state of the art weapons in exchange for Vincent Edge
I was tempted either offering money or weapons for Vincent but in the end, I had to go weapons. The money was likely going to go to buying guns for his new regime anyway but probably things like old AKs instead of the things we can get. For me, this choice isn't actually about Vincent but rather Bane. He gave us first call at a very important prisoner, beyond actually furthering his legitimacy in his own country. Yes, its a win for him anyway, but its an opportunity for us. I'm sure he would accept the money too but this is about wooing Bane (disturbing imagery aside). Our former contractor is now in control of a country that was the main base of an alien backed gang for years. Having a good relationship with the man in charge could prove beneficial.
If not, good relations would probably allow us more freedom in his country, allowing us more profits if we expand there.
The problem is that Bane showed little interest in Intergang weaponry himself. If he wanted to equip himself with advanced weapons, he's had plenty of chances to do so, and Intergang's kit is as good or better than ours as I understand it. I'd rather just give him cash; I suspect that he'd rather accept cash (which he could in theory use to buy weapons from us) than weapons (that he can't really trade for anything else at a fair exchange rate).
With that said I am totally into the idea of building up positive working relations with Supreme Generalissimo Bane (who may well have found something else more interesting than taking on the Batman now, since this makes him the overlord of a whole country). Having another friend like Count Vertigo is probably going to pay off.
(You know, weirdly, the two words that translate from Spanish as 'bane' best, 'plaga' and 'perdicion,' are both feminine. I'm kind of confused by this)
[] [ICU] Save Ivo's life but install a tracker in him
I'm not vote shaming here, but I'm surprised people would vote to let Ivo straight up die. Considering everyone in our company knows we are currently sponsoring him, saving him will tell the others, "If the boss is going to lengths to save this ass then he must really care for us all." And they would slightly be right. I do care for Ivo at least a little bit and with how much progress AMAZO has made already I want to make sure his Backup is at least ready before he finally kicks it. The tracker is actually for his saftey imo than any chance of betrayal on his part. I want to be able to find him at a moment's notice if he should be suffering another organ failure. If we can't locate him fast enough then its possible he could die before we could get to him again. We've gone this far on AMAZO already, I kind of want to see it through.
Firstly, remember that his fuckup killed several other employees. Our rank and file mooks will probably feel
LESS safe and loyal knowing that a mad scientist whose fuckups kill them is going to get off the hook.
Secondly, we have every chance of being able to deniably let him die, because, well... he's a terminal disease patient with some kind of multiple organ failure. Death is exactly what would normally happen in a case like his. We're not going to tell the bulk of our employees "we let Ivo die because he failed us for the last time and killed a bunch of people and embarrassed us." We're going to tell our employees "
Nobel laureate Anthony Ives passed away of multiple organ failure" and almost everyone who ever met him will shrug and say "good riddance."
If all he wanted was a 'normal' robot body I would sympathize with him more and be more open to letting him finish his project, but just as A.M.A.Z.O. is absurdly powerful, it makes the problem of what happens if he succeeds all the more troubling.
[] [Interview] Refuse an interview with Lois Lane
This is tempting but I thought we already had an exclusivity deal with Vicky Vale. If this is breaking the deal then I'd rather keep to our commitments.
That was a one-time deal, not a long-term deal. It's been years; it would be
really weird for any single person as prominent and rich as Lex Luthor to maintain that kind of deal for that long. It makes Lex something of a recluse, honestly.
I think it's worth keeping Ivo around and have him work on Amazo till he drops, get him to push back the regressed work to close where we were originally and then make him work on actions to reduce the DC and when his body fails him again let him die.
Remember that "making Ivo work" on A.M.A.Z.O. if the DC is still high can backfire horribly, as we just saw. The only way to be confident of avoiding another similar disaster would be for us to stack up hero units (i.e. Lex+???+Ivo) and assist him in rolling an exploding crit.
Well, that or to put him to work on DC reduction, but we've already seen that we get about one turn of that before he rebels and goes back to A.M.A.Z.O. no matter HOW hard it is.
Nothing about Pamela should tell you how our other heroes feel. But yes I doubt anyone but Marie would care.
There's room to keep him alive just to more comprehensively throw him under the bus. Go into the Lois Lane interview with "It's all Ivo's fault, he'll probably confirm himself at some point in an unhinged rant about how everyone but him is incompetent, here's his room number, and while you're there let him know he's fired and we won't be protecting him from whatever criminal charges he's subject to."
Letting Ivo die might be convenient, but him dying and also blaming him for the explosion might be seen as too convenient, and I really want to blame him for the explosion.
That is...
hilariously appropriate, so much so that I'm deleting my "let Ivo die" vote, if not actually flipping to "let Ivo live" based on this argument alone.
