No. I didn't manage to elaborate on it but this is a Lex that's more explicitly involved in crime. The slicked back hair and rumpled suit were meant to convey a sort of skeeviness and seediness to him.
He's a sort of Gordon Gekko type with ties to the criminal underworld who hates the government for looking into his business dealings and preventing him from making more money.
Results: You've fulfilled the terms of your deal with Ra's excellently. You will be able to meet with Oswald Cobblepot, Bruce Wayne, Lincoln March and Selina Kyle at bare minimum. Talia's opinion of you has gone up. Ra's is interested in meeting with you again. Generally your trip to Gotham will be successful.
Lincoln March was a mayoral candidate and the C.O.O. of March Ventures. In reality he is a rogue member of the Court of Owls who believes himself to be Bruce Wayne's presumed-dead brother, Thomas Wayne Jr.. Lincoln serves as the mainstream continuity version of the villainous alternate reality...
batman.fandom.com
Do we want to get involved? While Talon Serum is very tempting, the Court of Owls is a mess.
We've got our hands full with Metropolis. Gotham is a thing to poke at when we have a specific incentive, as in this turn, and should otherwise be left to its own devices.
Is it a good thing for us to get involved with Cobblepot? It's probably profitable, but is it worth Batman's attention?
Edit: I'm not familiar with a lot of details regarding DC, so I'm not sure how legitimate Cobblepot's businesses are. I just know he owns a club, deals in weapons (probably illegally), and is also known as Penguin. I've only recently learned that there's more to the character than Danny Devito's version of him.
We can probably outsource it to Veronica Cale's company they do specialize in video games.
@King crimson can we please have an option to outsource the development of certain projects? Like say have another company hire workers for us on a constant basis or fix or improve the super computer when it brakes. Also can we please get an idea of how understaffed or overstaffed lex corp is I feel we have too little workers for our size but I am not sure.
Edit: I'm not familiar with a lot of details regarding DC, so I'm not sure how legitimate Cobblepot's businesses are. I just know he owns a club, deals in weapons (probably illegally), and is also known as Penguin. I've only recently learned that there's more to the character than Danny Devito's version of him.
It's a sliding scale with Cobblepot. He's been depicted a few different ways and a lot of stuff has bled over into most modern takes on him.
The oldest take I am aware of is that he is a master thief who uses his ridiculous appearance to get people to underestimate him and then underestimate his crimes. Then Burgess Meredith came along in the Adam West Batman tv show and the character became a lot more gentlemanly, whereas before he didn't have those traits. Following this in post-crisis continuity Penguin became more lethal and gained devices that could let him control birds en masse (something which a lot of more modern takes somewhat carry over). Danny DeVito's version then came out and abandoned almost all of the previous characterization for its own take. That being said two important elements from the film, he has ties to Gotham old money and he desperately wants respect from "normal" people (in fact the whole Penguin runs for mayor thing has been done multiple times following that movie). Three years later the Iceberg Lounge appeared in comics and Penguin went semi-legal still dealing arms and such but not actively personally committing crimes. He slowly got more and more out of being a criminal and even went as far as being an informant for Batman although he never was a "good" person. He then got back into crime after things with Batman went sour. Sometime during this whole process elements of Norman Bates have been tossed into the character as time went on although not all of it has stuck.
So to answer your initial question Oswald Cobblepot is difficult to pin down. He's been everything from a serial killer to a corrupt mayor to a gang leader to an arms dealer to a legitimate club owner and more. How criminal he is tends to be up in the air. However he is pretty consistently not a good person, is deeply self-interested and has a history of criminality of some kind. In quest he was an illegal arms dealer and was considered a major player in the criminal underworld even if the police never managed to nail him for anything and he has opened up the Iceberg Lounge which appears to be legitimate and he has stepped out of being more directly involved in illegal arms dealing (the public is aware that he sells guns he just does so legally).
That probably doesn't definitively answer your question but that probably gives you more context ot come to your own conclusions.
@King crimson can we please have an option to outsource the development of certain projects? Like say have another company hire workers for us on a constant basis or fix or improve the super computer when it brakes. Also can we please get an idea of how understaffed or overstaffed lex corp is I feel we have too little workers for our size but I am not sure.
Not as you've described it. I've repeatedly stated that I will never allow an action that allows you to constantly generate workers after a single investment. It's either too powerful or useless in how the game is balanced. Likewise I'm also leery of giving you options to let you auto-generate stuff. I am willing to toss in an option that would let you outsource production of media (tv, games, movies etc.) but first you have to set up the facilities for it in Lightyear Entertainment (of which you've only set up for children's television and news). Supercomputer repair is a tentative possibility (I'd have to do balancing checks) but it will be a big investment, be suboptimal for continuous repairs and would still cause you problems if the Supercomputer breaks (you'd lose use of the supercomputer for one turn minimum). I will consider the option though.
You're starting to be understaffed with the inclusion of this new building. Another one goes up without more recruitment and you'll start experiencing penalties.
In quest he was an illegal arms dealer and was considered a major player in the criminal underworld even if the police never managed to nail him for anything and he has opened up the Iceberg Lounge which appears to be legitimate and he has stepped out of being more directly involved in illegal arms dealing (the public is aware that he sells guns he just does so legally).
It'd be interesting. Say we meet him and have him sell arms to Bito. Let's have Batman be the "Tool of Authoritarianism", an "Enemy of Democracy" in Markovia.
Penguin can just claim he was merely supporting democracy abroad.
Supercomputer repair is a tentative possibility (I'd have to do balancing checks) but it will be a big investment, be suboptimal for continuous repairs and would still cause you problems if the Supercomputer breaks (you'd lose use of the supercomputer for one turn minimum). I will consider the option though.
Yeah. As it stands, the supercomputer seems to get knocked out of action every time it fails a dice roll by a significant margin.
And because most supercomputer actions are high-DC, and we can't put multiple hero units on them, it fails a lot.
The damn thing has been spending almost as much time offline as online, and when you factor in having to spend a mandatory action on repairing it, it's almost a net decrease to our action economy, to the point where we'd have been better off spending the initial action recruiting an additional hero unit and the subsequent actions we spent on repairs on raising that hero's loyalty instead. Because then we'd have a free AP that was less likely to go away every time we roll low on a d100 and have to be replaced by spending an action point.
I think that for supercomputers to be justified and not just a white elephant, we'd need one or more of the following:
1) Low-DC but low-benefit supercomputer actions, something like "do massive statistical analyses of Handshake data to target advertising better" or "do molecular analyses of random organic molecules looking for interesting pharmaceuticals." That way you at least have the option of taking a low-risk low-reward strategy that doesn't blow up your supercomputer all the time.
2) Reduced risk of blowing up the supercomputer on a failure- or at least a clearly defined option to do so, something like "[] Improve supercomputers," specifically. Now, I emphasize, I mean not no risk, but reduced risk.
3) A way to automate repairs so the thing isn't actively eating a second action every time it fails a die roll, even if it is, say, applying a penalty to the next supercomputer roll or something.
Of course, the other possibility is "hey, you guys have invested almost no effort into supercomputer upgrades; it'd be awesome if you'd put the effort into making it awesome." Which is entirely possible, but kind of opaque to us because the option to improve the thing is hidden behind the name of other options like "learn more about computers."
You're starting to be understaffed with the inclusion of this new building. Another one goes up without more recruitment and you'll start experiencing penalties.
Thanks. Keeping us informed of that REALLY HELPS. The 'worker number' mechanic is in this weird uncanny valley place where we know it's important but can't gauge the effects mechanically, which makes it hard to manage.
Logically, Lex should have a pretty good sense of what the bottlenecks and limitations faced by his own company are, so it's good for us to hear this information.
I think that for supercomputers to be justified and not just a white elephant, we'd need one or more of the following:
1) Low-DC but low-benefit supercomputer actions, something like "do massive statistical analyses of Handshake data to target advertising better" or "do molecular analyses of random organic molecules looking for interesting pharmaceuticals." That way you at least have the option of taking a low-risk low-reward strategy that doesn't blow up your supercomputer all the time.
Well im sure Veronica might be one of the few Women alive that could keep up with Lex, at this instance im talking strictly business. Besides i dont think the twins could handle Lex.
1) Low-DC but low-benefit supercomputer actions, something like "do massive statistical analyses of Handshake data to target advertising better" or "do molecular analyses of random organic molecules looking for interesting pharmaceuticals." That way you at least have the option of taking a low-risk low-reward strategy that doesn't blow up your supercomputer all the time.
2) Reduced risk of blowing up the supercomputer on a failure- or at least a clearly defined option to do so, something like "[] Improve supercomputers," specifically. Now, I emphasize, I mean not no risk, but reduced risk.
3) A way to automate repairs so the thing isn't actively eating a second action every time it fails a die roll, even if it is, say, applying a penalty to the next supercomputer roll or something.
Of course, the other possibility is "hey, you guys have invested almost no effort into supercomputer upgrades; it'd be awesome if you'd put the effort into making it awesome." Which is entirely possible, but kind of opaque to us because the option to improve the thing is hidden behind the name of other options like "learn more about computers."
I think in this case the problem is a mix from column A and column B. You have done next to nothing to improve your Supercomputer once you got it but it's also a bit underpowered.
I'm debating on making repairing it easier and including more low DC options and likely will be making some balance changes to make it more useful.
That being said I don't think your critique on how visible the way to improve it is actually is relevant, when there is literally an option called "improve the Supercomputer you already have" every turn you haven't had to repair it (I haven't checked every action phase but I know that on turn 20 you for sure had it). The option to improve it wasn't hidden at all. Improve computers is a secondary more roundabout way to achieve the same thing. As such a critique on it being hidden from you isn't one I feel is particularly fair. There wasn't an improve supercomputers action but there was something pretty close to it.
Thanks. Keeping us informed of that REALLY HELPS. The 'worker number' mechanic is in this weird uncanny valley place where we know it's important but can't gauge the effects mechanically, which makes it hard to manage.
Logically, Lex should have a pretty good sense of what the bottlenecks and limitations faced by his own company are, so it's
I personally was going to include this information in the action phase for the next round. I felt it would be weird to include a strong potential malus on an action that had succeeded pretty clearly (although in hindsight I should have) and I was planning on including that information in action phase 22 in both the general speech and the specific bit of flavor text regarding both stewardship and diplomacy actions.
I was asked about it earlier and in future I'll try and communicate that information better.
Fair point, but I'm also talking about the long-term game applications.
Another option would be to have an option to decommission the supercomputer and permanently commit its hardware to some specific task (say, put it in a new specialized laboratory). For example, I know DAMN sure that in real life a particle accelerator isn't much good without a lot of computer support to process its experimental data; some of the biggest and most famous 'big data' processing systems on Earth originated from researchers at CERN trying to figure out how to sort out all the information they were getting.
This might result in a lower DC or an enhancement of the lab facility, for instance. It would also be a good 'hand me down' option for old and obsolete supercomputer(s) if and when we obtain a new, superior model.
[This would be kind of problematic if the computer had sapient AI, but we don't have that yet, so lol ]
Well im sure Veronica might be one of the few Women alive that could keep up with Lex, at this instance im talking strictly business. Besides i dont think the twins could handle Lex.
On the other hand, the d'Aramis twins are specifically pharmaceutical executives. Lex's sheer omnidisciplinary mad science cred lets him outmatch them if he works at it, but the two of them have enough specialized content knowledge that they would hardly disgrace themselves when working with Ms. Cale, I think.
I think in this case the problem is a mix from column A and column B. You have done next to nothing to improve your Supercomputer once you got it but it's also a bit underpowered.
Part of that is because (now that I think about it and reread options that I forgot about LIKE A MORON)...
Upgrading the thing is harder than building a new one. It creates a sort of double-bind. Psychologically, and I know this is irrational, people don't want to build a second one because the first one is so cruddy. But they also don't want to upgrade the first one because it'd be easier to build a new one.
I'm debating on making repairing it easier and including more low DC options and likely will be making some balance changes to make it more useful.
Yeah. Low-DC options would be good- something that is very likely to succeed, and very unlikely to fail messily, but doesn't necessarily have high payoffs even if you do very well. Something like "use learning program to optimize advertisement" is good for the company and is exactly the kind of thing a real tech billionaire would do with the supercomputer.
Another interesting option would be to let us burn the supercomputer action for a turn to provide a flat bonus to the DC of another action; the only problem would be that some actions should realistically be ineligible for this. Maybe it would be best to just say that this can only be done for Learning actions, because realistically a supercomputer capable of analyzing almost any kind of material or data would be useful in just about any imaginable kind of science.
Then we'd effectively be trading off an extra action for a higher likelihood of succeeding on an existing action, which would be a reasonable choice. Plus it avoids weird situations like having us use the supercomputer to analyze kryptonite, while simultaneously using a normal Learning action to analyze kryptonite, and having these two actions proceed almost entirely separately from one another despite logically being closely related.
That being said I don't think your critique on how visible the way to improve it is actually is relevant, when there is literally an option called "improve the Supercomputer you already have" every turn you haven't had to repair it...
I personally was going to include this information in the action phase for the next round. I felt it would be weird to include a strong potential malus on an action that had succeeded pretty clearly (although in hindsight I should have) and I was planning on including that information in action phase 22 in both the general speech and the specific bit of flavor text regarding both stewardship and diplomacy actions.
I was asked about it earlier and in future I'll try and communicate that information better.
In general, if state-of-the-company information is ONLY written into the flavor text for the actions, it's gonna get overlooked. With over 600 actions and only a few hours of moratorium to discuss our planning before vote bandwagon formation begins, there isn't really a lot of time to read over those options in depth to see if the text has changed unless you were already planning to take those specific actions anyway.
So such information would, realistically, need to be duplicated at the beginning of the turn post. Actually, that would make a good spoiler or list to add at the top:
"Oswald has asked to work on TV for six months, Carol wants to expand Ferris Aerospace, and if you don't hire more workers your company's going to start being penalized for understaffing soon." Or whatever the equivalent would be for a different turn.
Not so much telling you 'this is what you the players plan to do,' that's not your job. But telling us 'this is the stuff I as the QM will smack you with specific mechanical penalties for NOT doing.' " Because it gets spread out over like half a dozen different updates, and sooner or later we're going to just straight-up miss something you told us because it happened two weeks and fifteen thousand words ago.
I'm looking forward to all the goodies we can select from our various learning actions, there might be something there to help out with our supercomputer.
@King crimson I'm just curious on this, but wouldn't it be possible for the supercomputer to work over a few turns on a topic, fill up like 5-30% (based on upgrades) per turn or 1D10 plus relevant stat to achieve the knowledge? That way we still have an incentive to utilize it, and it won't be as prone to breaking down, but it won't be too OP since we have to dedicate 3 or more turns for it to give us information. I'm just throwing this idea out there for consideration. I'm interested in building a second supercomputer after we see the DC next turn (if our learning picks have a chance at lowering it) if it can boost the probability of success or a second chance at it.
I'm looking forward to all the goodies we can select from our various learning actions, there might be something there to help out with our supercomputer.
@King crimson I'm just curious on this, but wouldn't it be possible for the supercomputer to work over a few turns on a topic, fill up like 5-30% (based on upgrades) per turn or 1D10 plus relevant stat to achieve the knowledge? That way we still have an incentive to utilize it, and it won't be as prone to breaking down, but it won't be too OP since we have to dedicate 3 or more turns for it to give us information. I'm just throwing this idea out there for consideration. I'm interested in building a second supercomputer after we see the DC next turn (if our learning picks have a chance at lowering it) if it can boost the probability of success or a second chance at it.
I suspect that us developing better supercomputer tech won't lower the DC of building the computer (there may be special exceptions like improvements to, say, cooling the computer), so much as they'll give us a better result when we actually take the action.
By defeating Austria and uniting the northern parts of Germany under Prussian influence, Otto von Bismarck had upset the balance of power in Europe. This raised great consternation in France, ruled by Napoleon III, nephew of the great general. Napoleon III had proclaimed himself emperor after winning the Second Republic's first and only presidential election twenty years earlier. He had administered the 'Second French Empire' for the intervening time, largely without undue difficulties.
This was about to change.
Napoleon III demanded that the North German Confederation, dominated by Prussia, grant concessions in Belgium and on the west side of the Rhine River, to ensure that France could remain secure in the face of the more powerful and united North German state. Bismarck refused. He had no interest in making the French feel safe. After all, many German officials and officers believed that war with France was inevitable, or even a prerequisite for successful German unification. And it would be much better for Bismarck's efforts to integrate the remaining South German principalities if France was the aggressor in such a war.
Finally, the crisis Bismarck had anticipated emerged. In 1870, a Prussian prince became a candidate for the throne of Spain. The result echoed the War of the Spanish Succession that rocked Europe in the time of Louis XIV. Once again, a French monarch insisted that a Germanic contender for the Spanish crown cede his claim, for fear that France would be caught between Germanic and Spanish threats. Napoleon III even escalated these demands, requiring that the Prussian royal house swear never to allow any member of their extended family to sit the throne of Spain.
These demands were delivered by the French ambassador to a surprised King Wilhelm I of Prussia, who was taking a vacation in the resort spa town of Ems at the time. King Wilhelm I of Prussia sent a private telegram to Bismarck, describing the French demands and asking for advice. Bismarck, seeing an opportunity, released the telegram to the press, as was theoretically his right.
But it would be a selective release.
Bismarck quoted all of the ambassador's demands from the 'Ems Dispatch' verbatim. But he removed all the conciliatory language that his king had used in politely refusing the ambassador, leaving only an uncharacteristically blunt statement of rejection. This led the German public to believe that the French ambassador had insulted their famously courteous king. But simultaneously, it led the French public to believe that the German king had insulted their ambassador.
Bismarck compared his action to waving a red flag in front of a bull.
The comparison was accurate. Crowds carrying patriotic banners marched in the streets of Paris that very day, demanding war. Adolphe Thiers, the leader of the monarchist faction in the French legislature, argued for restraint. After all, regardless of any guarantees for the future, the Germans had already promised not to put the specific Prussian candidate being discussed on the throne of Spain. But this call for moderation only got him shouted down and called a traitor in the Assembly.
The French began mobilizing their troops the next day, and issued a declaration of war against Prussia only five days after the original release of the edited Ems Telegram.
The South German principalities immediately aligned themselves with Prussia, just as Bismarck had planned.
The Clash of Arms
Neither the French nor the Prussians had been idle in preparing for this war, and both were well armed with high military technology of the day.
Napoleon III had been very active in building arsenals to mass-produce the chassepot rifle, a breechloader superior to the Prussians' needle guns, and a variety of artillery. Even beyond this he had bought up armament sold as surplus by the U.S. government in the wake of their devastating Civil War. The Confederate surrender in 1864 had left the Union military with all sorts of advanced equipment it had little pressing need for, and that would be expensive to fully maintain.
By 1870, several Union Navy ironclads, including the famous U.S.S. Thunderer that fought at Hampton Roads, were now in French service. And while the Johnson administration's War Department had intervened aggressively to outbid Napoleon III for the production tooling itself, Leland Luthor had sold production licenses to his famous machine guns to the French, who were already manufacturing their own Luthor guns and cartridges in considerable quantity. Prussia, meanwhile, had made preparations of their own, including deals with Luthor Steam & Steel for other products of his factories.
At the end of July, Napoleon III left Paris to take command of the newly formed Army of the Rhine, with pomp and circumstance echoing the glories of his famous uncle's conquests, sixty years before. Unfortunately for French plans, the Prussian field marshals had not been idle, and had drilled and pre-planned their forces even more carefully than expected. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers poured into and out of tightly synchronized troop trains moving all over Germany, arriving by the Rhine faster than the French could deploy to respond. The French were outclassed, despite Napoleon III's own efforts to improve his own mobilization schedules after seeing what had happened to the Austrians in 1866.
The French army crossed the German border on July 31, and in the initial clashes proved the superiority of their newer rifles to the old Prussian needle gun. But while the French could advance a short distance in this way, the geography of the Saar region made it easy for the Prussians to defend and delay them, while offering no easy way to move supplies forward and push deeper towards Prussian territory. And the swift Prussian mobilization created vast, looming threats on Napoleon III's flanks, as multiple Prussian and Bavarian armies assembled to repel the French invasion.
The first large-scale battle of the Franco-Prussian War took place at the town of Wissembourg, where an unexpectedly large Prussian force leapt upon an outnumbered French force. And it was here that the seemingly formidable armament of the French forces got its first true stress-test. Cracks in the edifice began showing almost immediately.
French Luthor gun on carriage, built to 1869 standard
The French, in integrating the Luthor gun into their forces, had made the same error Meade had made in his early deployments of the weapon at Gettysburg. They mistook it for a type of artillery, and tried to keep it far back from the enemy. This would cost the Second French Empire more dearly than it had the Union.
Helmuth von Moltke, unlike Robert E. Lee, was not about to order his troops to leap up and charge recklessly into the teeth of a well prepared enemy line across open fields. His staff had prepared for this eventuality. The Prussians, the first European army to encounter automatic weapons fire on the field of battle, had developed a plan to meet the threat. And in part because of the limitations of the French use of the weapon, this plan would prove adequate.
Time and again during the Franco-Prussian War, French Luthor gunners tried vainly to 'bombard' the Prussians with sprays of bullets from a thousand meters or more. The Prussians, in a move that prefigured much of modern infantry tactics, dispersed and crept closer, firing prone when and as cover could be found. In this, they could rely on support from their own artillery, who had relatively good luck targeting the French machine guns. Napoleon III's Luthor guns were mounted much like Meade's at Gettysburg. Their bulky artillery chassis raised their target profile, compared to the more portable tripods the Union had adopted in 1864. Thus, the French Luthor guns were usually firing from well beyond their effective range, were larger targets, and were unprotected by the kind of earthworks Grant had ordered adopted for fixed machine gun positions during the 1864 campaign that broke the Army of Northern Virginia.
As in Union service, the Luthor guns spewed continuous plumes of powder-smoke that drew attention from the enemy artillery, But this time, the machine guns were poorly protected from the bursts of exploding shells. And unlike the undersupplied, crudely equipped, scanty Confederate artillery, the Prussian field artillery was superbly trained, well supplied with quick-firing Krupp guns, and very numerous. French machine gunners were simply drowned in artillery fire, bombarded from ranges of up to three thousand meters by artillery they could not reply to. The French's own muzzleloading cannon, similar to those used by both sides in the Civil War, were helpless to counter this barrage.
More exposed to long range bombardment than the machine gun teams of Grant's army in 1864, and less well coordinated with their own infantry, the French Luthor gunners were usually unable to stop the Prussian infantry from closing into rifle range. Firing prone from behind cover as no Confederate force had been able to do, Prussian skirmishers quickly rendered any remaining French machine gun positions untenable, despite the relative inaccuracy of their aging needle guns. Even when this did not lead to successful Prussian assaults against a French position, this- and the ongoing artillery bombardment- left the French infantry defanged and demoralized, creating openings that the adept Prussian military staff could exploit.
The Iron Fist Closes
The defeat at Wissembourg was followed soon after by further losses at Spicheren and Reichshoffen. In day-long combats, the French found their forces stretched thin, shelled and eventually driven back by the advancing Prussian infantry. While the Prussians paid dearly for the victories, within less than two weeks the entire French army had retreated to the fortress-city of Metz.
The retreat was further complicated by the III Corps of the Prussian 2nd Army, whose commander had become confused about the situation, made a heroic and spectacularly ill-advised assault on the main French army, a force that outnumbered him five to one. Despite the total lack of support from the rest of the surprised Prussian army, General von Avensleben routed the French troops directly in front of him and captured the town of Vlonville, placing him squarely on the French line of retreat from Metz.
This, naturally, caused the French great consternation, and they were forced to go on the attack. The Prussians scrambled to reinforce von Avensleben, even as the III Corps was crushed by overwhelming French numbers and scattered by repeated charges from the French cavalry. This was to be the last large-scale cavalry action in Western Europe. But by the time the French overran the III Corps, night was falling- and by the next morning, two more Prussian corps had marched into position and launched assaults of their own. Despite vastly superior numbers, the increasingly confused and disordered French were pinned in place by these units long enough for the rest of the Prussian army to arrive and cut off their retreat.
Two more days passed, while von Moltke brought up the rest of his army and launched a massive assault on the encircled French at the town of Gravelotte, roughly ten kilometers west of Metz. With a five-to-three numerical advantage thanks to his mobilization efforts, the German field marshal pressed the offensive in an attempt to finish the French off. The battle was hard-fought and the French held on through the morning and afternoon. But in the evening, their resistance broke, after the French rifle and machine gun positions at St. Privat were silenced by an enormous artillery barrage from the Prussian 2nd Army for long enough from the Prussian 1st Guards Infantry Division to capture the town.
The Cemetery of St. Privat, by Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville, depicting the Battle of Gravelotte
The French withdrew their forces, having inflicted casualties on the Prussians in that same ratio of five to three… but they were a besieged force, and the Prussians were not.
This was not to say that the French had no reinforcements on the way, though.
Napoleon III had taken person command of the still-assembling Army of Châlons. He attempted to lead his army on a long, looping route of march to skirt around the Prussian forces and link up with the besieged army. Unfortunately, this same long route would give von Moltke ample time to prepare a trap for him...
Author's Note: I am releasing this next string of chapters starting today for two reasons. First, today is the 150th anniversary of Bismarck's release of the Ems Dispatch in our timeline. Second, today is also the French patriotic national holiday of Bastille Day. While this chapter didn't go so gloriously for France, they'll get their moment. Just wait.
By defeating Austria and uniting the northern parts of Germany under Prussian influence, Otto von Bismarck had upset the balance of power in Europe. This raised great consternation in France, ruled by Napoleon III, nephew of the great general. Napoleon III had proclaimed himself emperor after winning the Second Republic's first and only presidential election twenty years earlier. He had administered the 'Second French Empire' for the intervening time, largely without undue difficulties.
This was about to change.
Napoleon III demanded that the North German Confederation, dominated by Prussia, grant concessions in Belgium and on the west side of the Rhine River, to ensure that France could remain secure in the face of the more powerful and united North German state. Bismarck refused. He had no interest in making the French feel safe. After all, many German officials and officers believed that war with France was inevitable, or even a prerequisite for successful German unification. And it would be much better for Bismarck's efforts to integrate the remaining South German principalities if France was the aggressor in such a war.
Finally, the crisis Bismarck had anticipated emerged. In 1870, a Prussian prince became a candidate for the throne of Spain. The result echoed the War of the Spanish Succession that rocked Europe in the time of Louis XIV. Once again, a French monarch insisted that a Germanic contender for the Spanish crown cede his claim, for fear that France would be caught between Germanic and Spanish threats. Napoleon III even escalated these demands, requiring that the Prussian royal house swear never to allow any member of their extended family to sit the throne of Spain.
These demands were delivered by the French ambassador to a surprised King Wilhelm I of Prussia, who was taking a vacation in the resort spa town of Ems at the time. King Wilhelm I of Prussia sent a private telegram to Bismarck, describing the French demands and asking for advice. Bismarck, seeing an opportunity, released the telegram to the press, as was theoretically his right.
But it would be a selective release.
Bismarck quoted all of the ambassador's demands from the 'Ems Dispatch' verbatim. But he removed all the conciliatory language that his king had used in politely refusing the ambassador, leaving only an uncharacteristically blunt statement of rejection. This led the German public to believe that the French ambassador had insulted their famously courteous king. But simultaneously, it led the French public to believe that the German king had insulted their ambassador.
Bismarck compared his action to waving a red flag in front of a bull.
The comparison was accurate. Crowds carrying patriotic banners marched in the streets of Paris that very day, demanding war. Adolphe Thiers, the leader of the monarchist faction in the French legislature, argued for restraint. After all, regardless of any guarantees for the future, the Germans had already promised not to put the specific Prussian candidate being discussed on the throne of Spain. But this call for moderation only got him shouted down and called a traitor in the Assembly.
The French began mobilizing their troops the next day, and issued a declaration of war against Prussia only five days after the original release of the edited Ems Telegram.
The South German principalities immediately aligned themselves with Prussia, just as Bismarck had planned.
The Clash of Arms
Neither the French nor the Prussians had been idle in preparing for this war, and both were well armed with high military technology of the day.
Napoleon III had been very active in building arsenals to mass-produce the chassepot rifle, a breechloader superior to the Prussians' needle guns, and a variety of artillery. Even beyond this he had bought up armament sold as surplus by the U.S. government in the wake of their devastating Civil War. The Confederate surrender in 1864 had left the Union military with all sorts of advanced equipment it had little pressing need for, and that would be expensive to fully maintain.
By 1870, several Union Navy ironclads, including the famous U.S.S. Thunderer that fought at Hampton Roads, were now in French service. And while the Johnson administration's War Department had intervened aggressively to outbid Napoleon III for the production tooling itself, Leland Luthor had sold production licenses to his famous machine guns to the French, who were already manufacturing their own Luthor guns and cartridges in considerable quantity. Prussia, meanwhile, had made preparations of their own, including deals with Luthor Steam & Steel for other products of his factories.
At the end of July, Napoleon III left Paris to take command of the newly formed Army of the Rhine, with pomp and circumstance echoing the glories of his famous uncle's conquests, sixty years before. Unfortunately for French plans, the Prussian field marshals had not been idle, and had drilled and pre-planned their forces even more carefully than expected. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers poured into and out of tightly synchronized troop trains moving all over Germany, arriving by the Rhine faster than the French could deploy to respond. The French were outclassed, despite Napoleon III's own efforts to improve his own mobilization schedules after seeing what had happened to the Austrians in 1866.
The French army crossed the German border on July 31, and in the initial clashes proved the superiority of their newer rifles to the old Prussian needle gun. But while the French could advance a short distance in this way, the geography of the Saar region made it easy for the Prussians to defend and delay them, while offering no easy way to move supplies forward and push deeper towards Prussian territory. And the swift Prussian mobilization created vast, looming threats on Napoleon III's flanks, as multiple Prussian and Bavarian armies assembled to repel the French invasion.
The first large-scale battle of the Franco-Prussian War took place at the town of Wissembourg, where an unexpectedly large Prussian force leapt upon an outnumbered French force. And it was here that the seemingly formidable armament of the French forces got its first true stress-test. Cracks in the edifice began showing almost immediately.
French Luthor gun on carriage, built to 1869 standard
The French, in integrating the Luthor gun into their forces, had made the same error Meade had made in his early deployments of the weapon at Gettysburg. They mistook it for a type of artillery, and tried to keep it far back from the enemy. This would cost the Second French Empire more dearly than it had the Union.
Helmuth von Moltke, unlike Robert E. Lee, was not about to order his troops to leap up and charge recklessly into the teeth of a well prepared enemy line across open fields. His staff had prepared for this eventuality. The Prussians, the first European army to encounter automatic weapons fire on the field of battle, had developed a plan to meet the threat. And in part because of the limitations of the French use of the weapon, this plan would prove adequate.
Time and again during the Franco-Prussian War, French Luthor gunners tried vainly to 'bombard' the Prussians with sprays of bullets from a thousand meters or more. The Prussians, in a move that prefigured much of modern infantry tactics, dispersed and crept closer, firing prone when and as cover could be found. In this, they could rely on support from their own artillery, who had relatively good luck targeting the French machine guns. Napoleon III's Luthor guns were mounted much like Meade's at Gettysburg. Their bulky artillery chassis raised their target profile, compared to the more portable tripods the Union had adopted in 1864. Thus, the French Luthor guns were usually firing from well beyond their effective range, were larger targets, and were unprotected by the kind of earthworks Grant had ordered adopted for fixed machine gun positions during the 1864 campaign that broke the Army of Northern Virginia.
As in Union service, the Luthor guns spewed continuous plumes of powder-smoke that drew attention from the enemy artillery, But this time, the machine guns were poorly protected from the bursts of exploding shells. And unlike the undersupplied, crudely equipped, scanty Confederate artillery, the Prussian field artillery was superbly trained, well supplied with quick-firing Krupp guns, and very numerous. French machine gunners were simply drowned in artillery fire, bombarded from ranges of up to three thousand meters by artillery they could not reply to. The French's own muzzleloading cannon, similar to those used by both sides in the Civil War, were helpless to counter this barrage.
More exposed to long range bombardment than the machine gun teams of Grant's army in 1864, and less well coordinated with their own infantry, the French Luthor gunners were usually unable to stop the Prussian infantry from closing into rifle range. Firing prone from behind cover as no Confederate force had been able to do, Prussian skirmishers quickly rendered any remaining French machine gun positions untenable, despite the relative inaccuracy of their aging needle guns. Even when this did not lead to successful Prussian assaults against a French position, this- and the ongoing artillery bombardment- left the French infantry defanged and demoralized, creating openings that the adept Prussian military staff could exploit.
The Iron Fist Closes
The defeat at Wissembourg was followed soon after by further losses at Spicheren and Reichshoffen. In day-long combats, the French found their forces stretched thin, shelled and eventually driven back by the advancing Prussian infantry. While the Prussians paid dearly for the victories, within less than two weeks the entire French army had retreated to the fortress-city of Metz.
The retreat was further complicated by the III Corps of the Prussian 2nd Army, whose commander had become confused about the situation, made a heroic and spectacularly ill-advised assault on the main French army, a force that outnumbered him five to one. Despite the total lack of support from the rest of the surprised Prussian army, General von Avensleben routed the French troops directly in front of him and captured the town of Vlonville, placing him squarely on the French line of retreat from Metz.
This, naturally, caused the French great consternation, and they were forced to go on the attack. The Prussians scrambled to reinforce von Avensleben, even as the III Corps was crushed by overwhelming French numbers and scattered by repeated charges from the French cavalry. This was to be the last large-scale cavalry action in Western Europe. But by the time the French overran the III Corps, night was falling- and by the next morning, two more Prussian corps had marched into position and launched assaults of their own. Despite vastly superior numbers, the increasingly confused and disordered French were pinned in place by these units long enough for the rest of the Prussian army to arrive and cut off their retreat.
Two more days passed, while von Moltke brought up the rest of his army and launched a massive assault on the encircled French at the town of Gravelotte, roughly ten kilometers west of Metz. With a five-to-three numerical advantage thanks to his mobilization efforts, the German field marshal pressed the offensive in an attempt to finish the French off. The battle was hard-fought and the French held on through the morning and afternoon. But in the evening, their resistance broke, after the French rifle and machine gun positions at St. Privat were silenced by an enormous artillery barrage from the Prussian 2nd Army for long enough from the Prussian 1st Guards Infantry Division to capture the town.
The Cemetery of St. Privat, by Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville, depicting the Battle of Gravelotte
The French withdrew their forces, having inflicted casualties on the Prussians in that same ratio of five to three… but they were a besieged force, and the Prussians were not.
This was not to say that the French had no reinforcements on the way, though.
Napoleon III had taken person command of the still-assembling Army of Châlons. He attempted to lead his army on a long, looping route of march to skirt around the Prussian forces and link up with the besieged army. Unfortunately, this same long route would give von Moltke ample time to prepare a trap for him...
Author's Note: I am releasing this next string of chapters starting today for two reasons. First, today is the 150th anniversary of Bismarck's release of the Ems Dispatch in our timeline. Second, today is also the French patriotic national holiday of Bastille Day. While this chapter didn't go so gloriously for France, they'll get their moment. Just wait.
This omake as usual was very enjoyable to read. I honestly like Bismark as a character (his actual social policies are really nasty and not something I think we should emulate) a lot and I think he's a fascinating historical figure. In general Bismark is a lot of fun to read about and considering the fact that he accurately predicted a lot of things about the first world war IRL, I'm curious to see how things would play out here.
So a brief update on the schedule of things. I plan to get the next part of the results up by Friday. I'll be busy in the next two days or so (the amount of legal information hidden behind paywalls or made as obscurely difficult to find as possible is incredibly annoying). That being said I'll be doing a quick ask me anything to celebrate the one year anniversary of the quest. Feel free to ask me any question you want answered and I'll at the very least respond to it. The AMA will close by Friday.
On top of that I'll once again remind the thread that if people want to get involved in a creative thing but don't want to commit to writing Omakes, I'll be creating a conversation which involves the writing/creation of an Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld TV show that I'd make using a lot of the same elements as are in the quest. So far the only person who has explicitly shown interest is Torgamous (while others are a bit more ambiguous). If you are interested let me know explicitly before Friday. Thank you all for your patience.
So a brief update on the schedule of things. I plan to get the next part of the results up by Friday. I'll be busy in the next two days or so (the amount of legal information hidden behind paywalls or made as obscurely difficult to find as possible is incredibly annoying). That being said I'll be doing a quick ask me anything to celebrate the one year anniversary of the quest. Feel free to ask me any question you want answered and I'll at the very least respond to it. The AMA will close by Friday.
On top of that I'll once again remind the thread that if people want to get involved in a creative thing but don't want to commit to writing Omakes, I'll be creating a conversation which involves the writing/creation of an Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld TV show that I'd make using a lot of the same elements as are in the quest. So far the only person who has explicitly shown interest is Torgamous (while others are a bit more ambiguous). If you are interested let me know explicitly before Friday. Thank you all for your patience.
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