Could you tell me where that was said? Because all I can find is the Morrow in Russia Interlude where he's pissed off at Russia and wants to use his androids to "advance humanity" which I freely admit has some unfavourable connotations.
You just said he was hostile to the Russian and American governments. And we know the US government sent a kill-team (the JSA plus supports, I gather) after him and his robots in the '60s. I think it would be very much overoptimistic to assume that he's on good terms with the US government, or vice versa.
You're right but if we get Morrow we won't have to put anywhere as much effort into it
The effort we put into watching Morrow (with his penchant for creating robot duplicates, decades of experience, and entirely unknown larger agenda) is VERY likely to more than offset the difficulty of engineering crits and passing a bunch of DC 200+ skill checks.
Also I doubt he's actively considered a terrorist considering how deeply he's been hidden by the government and DOMA would almost certainly rather he was working with us than as a rogue agent
Just because they keep information on him a secret, doesn't mean he's not an enemy to the US government.
Also if you're right about all of this, which you might be, then should we really be connecting Avruskin with Morrow either?
Because I'm not especially worried about the prospect.
T. O. Morrow is like a viper from my perspective. You don't want to cuddle up to him, you don't want him in your tent, but he's inevitably going to be
out there.
OK, two poisoned. DOES indeed fight Nightwing with his bare hands, though I'm not sure if Nightwing's supposed to be immune to poison or if he's been affected.
What's Nightwing's martial? Probably in the same general weight class as Batwoman or Rose Wilson. 15-20, I'd say? I can see Lex getting up there- but if it's WORTH getting him up there, you should be lobbying for actions that will do it. Like [] Combat Training .
That's different, Pamela has many easy counters compared to a fully uploaded Ivo.
Besides the fact Lex knows he controls Pamela where as Ivo was never loyal to anyone but himself and his all consuming desire to not die.
What do you think Ivo would done to lex after completing the project and uploading himself?
I mean, he might very well have done Lex no harm. He might even have done Lex a favor or two. But he certainly wouldn't be hanging around loyal to Lex afterwards.
I'll agree to disagree until I find it, or until I find you right.
I have already linked to the action where Lex and Ivo collaborated. Their co-op got
worse and it was
explicitly because Ivo is such an asshole and difficult to work with that Lex found him personally intolerable. Brilliant, but intolerable.
We're not guaranteed bonus tech, unless we get near the D.C, and though that is great, that doesn't actually counter my point. Ivo gave spinoff tech while reaching for a higher goal, they were bonuses to climbing the ladder to completion. And while you can say those other options were neglected, nothing stopped our apparently vast other learning heros from picking them up, same as Ivo outside us seeing more important things at the moment, or being too busy.
The only thing that stopped us from researching all those robotics and engineering techs the normal way instead of relying on getting them as spinoffs was
our action economy. The fact that we spent roughly ten actions on A.M.A.Z.O. didn't help with that particular problem. Going forward we can very easily push that research more vigorously (especially now that we have many more actions than we did then). But the point remains, every turn for most of the game up to this point, we were spending an action on A.M.A.Z.O.
almost every turn. It added up. The concept of 'opportunity cost' is important here.
The benefit to helping Ivo is also the benefit of completing the A.M.A.Z.O operation, the two are intertwined as Ivo's entire goal was to reach that.
Yes, it's almost as if we could've slowly helped him out but decided not to and became disappointed when he couldn't live up to our lofty expectations. But surely that can't be the case.
What do you even mean by "slowly helped him out?" The only meaningful thing we could do to help Ivo complete A.M.A.Z.O. steps was to send Lex and at least one other hero unit
Didn't Ivo have like a 33 learning compared to a 25 learning unit making Ivo superior. Of course if you want to measure Ivo and Lex against Lex and Meena, go ahead, I wish to see the math from this in which she comes out better.
Ivo was recruited at Learning 30 and co-op with Lex of, as I recall, 0.5. The +3 Learning and the traits came later from crits- and Meena, or another Learning hero like her, would be able to earn boosts from crits too.
Meena was recruited at 25 Learning and co-op with Lex of 0.7. So if Lex has learning X (doesn't matter), then a Lex-Meena co-op has combined Learning of X+(0.7*25) or X+17.5.
Ivo, for most of his time with the company, would give a Lex-Ivo partnership Learning X+(0.5*30) = X+15. Even after Ivo got the +3 boost, we're talking X+16.5.
Co-op stats matter. They matter tremendously when you stack hero units. A hero unit with a lower stat but a high co-op is very often more useful than the reverse. That's why we always have no trouble finding something useful for Roxy to do- she has wonderful co-op scores with a lot of other heroes.
So please, stop blustering about this. No, Ivo was not 'obviously' easy to work with, or super-duper-rewarding. No, there was no obvious easy path to 'gently helping' Ivo or whatever that would have fixed the fact that his project had an insane DC, besides the obvious ones of "spend a lot of AP" and "spend a lot of Lex's time."
We spent most of the game trying to deal with the fact that Ivo was simultaneously insistent on working on very hard projects, and unable to work with others to efficiently complete those projects. If it hadn't been for his spinoff tech trait we'd probably have pulled the plug on him a lot sooner.
I mean, using that logic a D.C 120 action of diplomacy is the same as a D.C 320 because they're both difficult to reach?
No.
OK, let me explain the math.
Suppose you want to beat DC 150. In theory you could just stack up +51 points of bonus and pray to get a 99 on the dice. But realistically, there would be a high risk of failure. Unless you rolled a 49 or higher on the dice, you'd end up rolling beween 52 and 99 on a DC 150 die roll.
Since blowing a check by that large a margin (under the DC by 50-100 points) usually results in Bad Shit Happening, this is a good way to end up with one of your hero units in the hospital, or a bunch of dead mooks, or a public relations scandal, or worse on your hands.
So when we try to hit DCs of 150 or higher, what we usually do is engineer a team whose combined bonuses stack up
very high. +70, +80, ideally +90 to +99. That way, the probability of us scoring an exploding crit on the dice (by rolling a die roll that, combined with our bonus, exceeds 100) is much better.
...
But once we've done that, suddenly we are virtually guaranteed a reroll... and we get the hero bonuses
twice. We're rolling 2d100 + (double bonus), not d100 + bonus, most of the time, then. And once your'e rolling 2d100+95+95 or something, successfully making a DC 225 check isn't much harder than making a DC 150 check. You'd still
prefer the DC 150 check, because you'll pass by a greater margin, but DC 225 is totally achievable with the right hero team.
Though in either case you'd be very well advised to just
lower the DC by taking supporting actions first, if the project is that important. I mean, if we were willing to do that for Ivo (which I gather you are) we should still be willing to do it for the sake of the project with Ivo dead.
...
Also tho it may not be my place to enter your conversation jonasquinn, I'd like to say that 5000 is in fact a big deal, and I'd like to request you not disrespect how much work was put in to reach such high exp.
Having done it myself by writing out 1500-2000 word omakes ten times over, I agree... but if we have such hard-won reserves of XP available to do things like grind up the Martial stats of characters we rarely use for Martial actions, we have hard-won reserves available to do things like pump up a Learning 25 character to Learning 30, at which point
oh snap they're overall more useful than Ivo was when we found him, except in the single very narrow lane of A.M.A.Z.O. research.
Moving on to your topic about helping him along, yes, investing AP into him.
So you're suggesting that instead of spending 1 AP/turn most turns to just put him on the project, we spend... more AP/turn on it? Just how much of our resources per turn would it take to help Ivo achieve his apotheosis?
Well, just Lex isn't locked down into the Ivo project just because he helps unless we continue to put him into the Ivo project. The DC is annoying as is Ivo's co-op but we got a decent success only out of that roll, which while not unimpressive may be a hint that Ivo's constant high expectations demand better results. We rolled on the lower side and passed only due to bonuses.
Yes. But the point is,
even on a success the co-op score went down, not up. Let's not change the subject here. Maybe it wouldn't have gone down on a booming super-critical success, but maybe it would have done. We don't know. The point is,
@King crimson NEVER pulled any punches about telling us how Anthony Ives was an unmitigated ass and extremely unpleasant to work with. This single problem was a crippling disadvantage for his work. Shit, if he'd had decent co-op scores A.M.A.Z.O. would be
done by now, because we could have put him on strong crit-inducing teams. That's how we got Dr. Isley's plant integration formula done, and that's how we've made progress on Dr. Helfern's bone growth formula.
We're going to see this problem re-enacted with Louise Lincoln, in all probability, by the way.
Note how you said next few years just to lower the D.C to what Ivo did. Read that again and tell me that this is somehow better for the project?
Better compared to what? I'm still pretty vague on what you actually think we should have done, specifically, to make it possible to complete the project before Ives just plain died of total congestive failure of the everything.
Ivo had been ungrateful to near all but Lex. He depended on us and he knew it, and even believed we'd save his life cause he did in fact have faith in us, more then he had in most.
...I don't know what kind of high-proof rose-tinted lenses you've been reading Ivo's character through, but the man was
not prone to more than the faintest glimmers of gratitude or faith in other people.
Say it again, I dare you.
Were those skyscrapers rated to laugh off antitank rockets? Because ours is.
Look, let's be serious here. Is Pamela powerful? Oh hell yes. could Pamela massively fuck shit up if she went all ragemonster on us?
Yes. Would I ever, ever want to badly piss her off if I could possibly avoid it?
NO.
But I'm pretty sure that in a fight between Dr. Isley and
all of LexCorp security,, LexCorp would win. Not easily or without losses, but they'd win.
Conversely, I'm pretty sure that all of LexCorp security combined
wouldn't win against Wonder Woman, the Flash, or Superman... and A.M.A.Z.O. is a lot stronger than they are.
The difference between us empowering Poison Ivy and us empowering A.M.A.Z.O. is a pretty big one.
I mean...he has done very well against Batman and technically defeated him so....
Yeah, but as a rule Riddler doesn't defeat Batman in an MMA match. An MMA match deprives him of all his advantages and strengths, and unfairly advantages Batman.
The same argument applies to Lex Luthor.
I was kinda sad we let Ivo die. I mean, I understand the reasoning behind it, and I even agreed with it. But I still couldn't help but emphasize with him.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I
empathize with him. And yet. And yet.
1) If he'd been willing to settle for a more 'normal' robot body with non-godlike power requirements and abilities, he'd probably have seceded quickly and he'd be alive today.
2) If he hadn't been
such a dickhead to everyone around him, we could have stacked him on co-ops with several other hero units for several turns. And, again, the project would probably already be over and he'd have gotten to live.
