Go back and look. The only time we got an increase in co-op between Lex and Ivo, as far as I can recall, was when we specifically spent an action pulling strings to get him the Nobel.
We'd get a bonus tech every turn. We'd get
multiple bonus techs every turn just by taking the heroes we had helping Ivo and putting them on our many other options like "learn about engineering" that have been sitting there, often neglected, throughout the duration of the quest. We can get techs like the ones Ivo was giving us as spinoffs any time we want to. It's easy. We just haven't been taking those actions.
I'm not saying the power of the A.M.A.Z.O. robot is being overestimated. I'm saying the benefits of
helping Ivo complete the project are being overestimated.
Yes, but there's a difference between "we succeeded because we stacked hero units until we only had a 5% chance of failure, then rolled a success" and "to succeed, our hero units had to flip a coin three times and get 'heads' each time." Ivo+Marie on a DC 350 action is the latter category of luck-based success.
It proves my point excellently: Meena had decent collaboration with a lot of other hero units, and so could easily be put on teamups that would do well (e.g. provide the +40 bonus Ivo+Marie provided on the 'alien tech' roll). The reason I am
forced to compare Meena+Pamela or Meena+Felicity or even Meena+Carol to such teamups is because
Marie Dahl was the only one who could really work with ivo. Lex+Ivo+??? would have outperformed Meena+(any one person)... but if we're going toget Lex involved we should properly compare Lex+Meena+??? to Lex+Ivo+???, and Meena is pretty likely to win that one over the long haul.
...
I'm not saying Ivo was somehow morally blameworthy for being desperate to work on his pet project, but Lex Luthor is not a charitable organization and we do not hire Learning heroes because of what
we can do for
them. We hire them for what
they can do for
us. A high-Learning hero unit with no strings attached and no catches may be much more helpful to us than a higher-Learning hero unit with lots of strings attached and lots of catches.
It went from being too high for us to reliably succeed without a crit-generating megacollaboration, to being too high for us to reliably succeed without a crit-generating megacollaboration. Either way,
realistically we still have to wait for other tech to clear and lower the DC before we screw around with it anymore; the only difference is that we won't have Ivo's impending mortality trying to make us take extreme risks in an attempt to force the learning curve.
Also we have been given reason to think (seriously,
read the QM's posts, it's in there) that Morrow has a goal of taking over the world or otherwise doing something that's probably bad for LexCorp. So whereas at least Ivo wasn't
specifically plotting to destroy us all with his godlike robot body, Morrow very well might be.
OK, but that's just an argument that two powerful Learning heroes are better than one, which is trivially obvious, and has nothing to do with whether one Learning hero is more useful than another.
Furthermore, if we actually
put effort into speccing Meena for robotics, I bet she'd be very good at it. If we spent 5000 XP on her (hardly a big deal compared to what's been thrown around lately) and threw her repeatedly at Learning tasks related to robotics, she'd soon get traits (remember that Ivo wasn't "born with" the free spinoff tech trait, he got that from a crit!) and become quite effective at it. More so than Ivo was, because, again, co-ops are powerful.
Or we could hire a second roboticist and put in that effort for
them.
...We work closely with the US government and Morrow hating them would still be a problem even if we are screwing over Russia. Morrow is, so far as I know, still a wanted international terrorist, which is yet another problem associated with having him on our payroll.
Yes, but
who? Are we talking about characters not exactly famous for their hand to hand combat proficiency, or are we talking about people like Batman or Lady Shiva or Richard Dragon who are mighty and skillful with bare hands or melee wepaons?
I'm not saying we have to stick to an "IC script"
all the time, I'm saying that sometimes part of the charm in playing a character is in playing that character's limitations. Playing an evil mastermind who knows better than to get into a slugging match with the heroes because he'll lose, but who has countless minions and assets and tools to throw at them, is
different from playing an evil genius who is conveniently also an uberleet combatant who can just casually stride up to the heroes and beat them to a pulp.
If she can have Martial 23 as a nine year old girl, it would be logical for her to have Martial in the 30's as a grown woman. That part
makes sense. The point is that she has the background, natural interests, and archetype that lead logically into great skill in personal combat. Someone like, say, the Riddler does not.
If you saw a story in which the Riddler just casually cracks his knuckles, walks up to Batman, and beats him to a pulp in a fistfight, explaining it as "I've been studying martial arts for a few years," it would seem kind of, well...
cheap, wouldn't it?
That's not what we expect or particularly want from the Riddler- that even if the Riddler
wins, we expect him to win by cleverness, cunning, and being one mental step ahead of his opponents. That's his
thing. Lex Luthor is a different character, but shares that important trait.
So stop taking ideas and drawing them to extreme and absurdist conclusions. That's not what I'm saying, and I think you know it.
Does he fight them with his bare hands? No, no he does not.
He puts on an exosuit. Or gives himself powers. Or
does something. And I have no problem with Lex
doing something to become powerful. If we ever figure out how to give Lex kryptonian powers I'm all for it. I'm planning specifically to set in motion a chain of events that can give Lex a combat-boosting exosuit as little as two turns from now if you like.
I'm all in favor of Lex
doing something, leveraging his existing cunning, knowledge of science, and determination, to gain greater power, including power that manifests in a fight. But that's not the same as him just, y'know, suddenly happening to be strong and skillful enough as a fighter to defeat Ignition with no more equipment than he normally carried on his person as of Turn 5 or so.
Like, we haven't taken any actions to train his physical body or upgrade his personal weapons or put him in an exosuit or
anything. He still has the powers and abilities of a tech billionaire who just happens to be an omnidisciplinary scientist. As opposed to, say, Bruce Wayne, who has the powers and abilities of a tech billionaire who just happens to be a world-class martial artist and detective.
What would "helping him along" look like, exactly?
Invest AP in completion of the project? We did that. Put regular hero units on it with him? Because of Ivo's terrible co-op scores they'd add like +5 per hero unit on the project. Put Lex on it? Then we're getting into the place where Lex is locked down and committed to working on the project turn after turn, which is exactly what others are talking about.
Look, I ran the numbers on this at the time. The only way for us to get good bonuses out of a Lex+Ivo collaboration was to pile on extra hero units on top of Lex to the point where we were reasonably assured of rolling a crit. But Ivo himself would be only contributing, like, +15 or +20 to the die roll at that point, and when we tried it (because
we did try it) their co-op
FELL, on a success, because of how hard it was to work with Ivo and how quickly he antagonized people.
And by the time you stack up enough heropower to have a crit reliably... the difference between DC 175 and DC 250 becomes relatively academic.
We can easily spend the next few years researching enough improvements to AI, nanotech, and brain uploading to lower the DC by as much as Ivo ever did... and we'll gain the benefits of
that technology in the time between then and now, whereas with A.M.A.Z.O. most of the tech is black box stuff we can't actually use for anything other than its intended purpose EXCEPT the spinoffs.
Also, the project would,
I repeat, end with Ivo (one of the most bitter, obnoxious, dismissive-of-others people in the world) getting an unstoppable robot body. With no compelling reason to be good to us other than gratitude, when he was a consistently ungrateful man during his biological lifespan.
That might have gone very poorly for us.
Anthony Ives in the prototype A.M.A.Z.O. body would have been able to destroy our entire building and everything in it with a casual thought and a few moments of effort.
Pamela Isley, as she is now,
can't.
There is a very dramatic difference there.
