[X] [Exo] Tell Oswald that you'd need time to consult with the US government
[X] [Submarine] Purchase the submarine from Oswald for yourself
[X] [Menagerie] You'll secretly give members of the Menagerie jobs at LexCorp provided they want out of Gotham in exchange for Selina owing you a favor
[X] [Menagerie] You'll pay for orphanages in Gotham to house some of the child members of the gang in exchange for a favor from Selina later on down the line
[ ] [Menagerie] In exchange for funding and supporting a new branch of the gang operating in X city. Selina Kyle will give you updates on the gang, any information they acquire and allow
Love it how about New york for the city it would be perfect for the menagerie lots of disenfranchised youth no major hero presence to speak of, a very clear and present wealth inequality and an intensive sewer system that they can take advantage of.
While I agree that the dc does make that action risky I would remind that Batman has limited actions. He has to handle all of Gotham and other forces that come in. He also does Bruce Wayne actions sometimes and presumably spends some actions training Dick. He probably dedicates at least 1 action every turn to generic [ ] Fight crime in Gotham
as well.
However, despite all that I would probably not recommend that action unless you want to go in on bringing the Menagerie closer to us. I probably won't vote this time around because I am catching up so I don't know our full position, general approach and current deals we have. Just decided to throw out some analysis for the thread since I can't stop myself from reading new updates to a quest even if I'm not caught up
[X] [Submarine] Get rid of the submarine by transferring it to the US Government and getting them to pay Oswald an "acquisition fee" in exchange for a favor
[X] [Menagerie] You'll secretly give members of the Menagerie jobs at LexCorp provided they want out of Gotham in exchange for Selina owing you a favor and setup orphanages in Metropolis to house some of the child members of the gang in exchange for a favor from Selina later on down the line
[X] [Menagerie] You'll secretly give members of the Menagerie jobs at LexCorp provided they want out of Gotham in exchange for Selina owing you a favor
[X] [Menagerie] You'll pay for orphanages in Metropolis to house some of the child members of the gang in exchange for a favor from Selina later on down the line
None of the Menagerie are going to pose a credible physical threat to Superman- I doubt even Killer Croc on his best day would do more than maybe slow him down a bit, and that only because Superman would be trying not to hurt him too badly. So they'd at most be able to keep him distracted... Eh. I dunno.
There's also the optics to consider. Superman fighting a group that some significant fraction of the population is rooting for could hurt his reputation if managed right.
"What I wanted your help with is actually in selling something" Cobblepot said, refocusing your attention on him "My boys were recently looking around the dockyards for any interesting investment opportunities when they stumbled upon an experimental nuclear sub in the hands of the Russian Mafia. Naturally as an upstanding citizen I made sure that the sub was liberated from their possession before they could hide it again. Now though I need to offload the damn thing and I can't get any member of the government to take it off my hands without trying to also arrest me"
That was certainly something. Apparently Gotham's criminal underworld was now making use of experimental nuclear submarines. It almost sounded like a joke if it weren't for Cobblepot's serious tone you might have dismissed it out of hand.
"You can talk to the bigwigs on capitol hill though" Cobblepot continued "And while I'd like to get a small finders fee for the sub, I just want the damn thing off my hands before it causes a mess of my current affairs"
By "cause a mess in his affairs", Cobblepot probably means his men accidently breaking something and causing a nuclear disaster in Gotham Harbor(a thought that I'm sure has kept Penguin up a night ever since he got his hands on the thing). A nuclear sub requires special training to handle(especially for the nuclear reactor), training that Cobblepot's thugs wont have and cant replace just by reading the onboard manuals(manuals that would all be in Russian anyway). The sooner this thing is in the hands of people who know how not to cause a runaway meltdown with the reactor, the better.
Still, this is a Russian sub that somehow managed to make it's way across the Atlantic and into Gotham Harbor without the US military catching even a whiff of it, that's something Capitol Hill is going to be very interested in. Both in replicating such stealth and in breaking it. Really, in this situation(insane though it is and probably going to get a book and movie made about it decades from now when the file gets declassified), I don't think the Government would even mind paying a crook like Penguin a "finder's fee" for the sub, the sub is a clear example of how Russian submarine technology has clearly surpassed the US Navy and become a dire threat to national security. Securing the sub, no matter how it was acquired, is of vital importance. Too the point where handing the sub over would probably cause Lex and Cobblepot to earn quite the good will with the White House and the Pentagon(and especially the US Navy).
[X] [Exo] Refuse Oswald's offer completely
[X] [Submarine] Get rid of the submarine by transferring it to the US Government and getting them to pay Oswald an "acquisition fee" in exchange for a favor
Well. I feel like that all went quite well. We presented our thing to Matches Malone about as well as could be hoped for (and got a significant amount of useful insight in return), we dropped a line to Huntress, we got an in into some profitable business with Cobblepot via the sub that won't offend the powers that be, and, most interestingly, the Menagerie is looking for a new home.
[x] [Exo] Refuse Oswald's offer completely
not worth it.
[x] [Submarine] Get rid of the submarine by transferring it to the US Government and getting them to pay Oswald an "acquisition fee" in exchange for a favor
Keeps everything more or less aboveboard, keeps Oswald happy, and should be well within our abilities. Looks like a quick and easy win with no real downsides... unless I'm missing something? @King crimson am I missing something here?
The menagerie vote is interesting, and I'm going to have to think about it some more before I come up with an answer that I'm really happy with.
- Killer Croc really, really needs to not be in Metropolis. He's heavily wanted for multiple murders, and the only thing that keeps him safe is his ability to disappear beneath the sewers and effectively murder anyone who follows him. As such, he's basically perfect Superman-bait. honestly, he should probably stay in Gotham. It's his natural habitat in a lot of ways. I mean, I'd love to study the man, but he's too hot for us to hold.
- Building an orphanage in Metropolis sounds like an excellent idea. Actually, we could get some real value out of building an entire sort of orphanage/halfway-house/etc system for taking in metas and other exceptionals who have criminal pasts and/or the sort of tragic past that's likely to lead to criminality and give them a path back to semi-respectability (in some cases feeding straight into the meta school). I feel like if we do it right, we benefit from the PR, we benefit from the indoctrination, and we benefit from blurring the lines between metas and exceptionals in their heads. Makes the metas easier to integrate into society.
- Hiring those who are too old for the orphanage but want to get out of the life sounds useful too. We'd need to find places to fit them in where they'd actually fit, but that's the sort of thing that Lex is pretty good at. They'll leak info to Selina, so that means we need to put them in things that we don't mind leaking. They have their shared ideology, but that just means that we put them in roles that are generally beneficial to the downtrodden and not ones where they need to deal heavily with the obnoxious rich. For various reasons they should also probably not be working too closely with the police. The real problem there is that... well, they're all criminals. We actually have a decent ability to whitewash that sort of thing in Metropolis, and get them legitimately, legally released to us. Our ability to do so based on infractions in Gotham, however, is more limited. Hmmm....
Having Gotham criminals start using Lexcorp exosuits after our meeting with Oswald with multiple witnesses including a freaking Batman is a terrible idea.
[X] [Submarine] Get rid of the submarine by transferring it to the US Government and getting them to pay Oswald an "acquisition fee" in exchange for a favor
I really don't want for a submarine to be the next sword of Beowulf - to good to get rid of but not good enough to waste an action right now to study or even hide properly. Additionally, it is incriminating af
[X] [Menagerie] You'll secretly give members of the Menagerie jobs at LexCorp provided they want out of Gotham in exchange for Selina owing you a favor and setup orphanages in Metropolis to house some of the child members of the gang in exchange for a favor from Selina later on down the line
[X] [Exo] Tell Oswald that you'd need time to consult with the US government
[X] [Submarine] Get rid of the submarine by transferring it to the US Government and getting them to pay Oswald an "acquisition fee" in exchange for a favor
[X] [Menagerie] You'll secretly give members of the Menagerie jobs at LexCorp provided they want out of Gotham in exchange for Selina owing you a favor
[X] [Menagerie] You'll pay for orphanages in Metropolis to house some of the child members of the gang in exchange for a favor from Selina later on down the line
With the exosuits I figure we're going to need to sell them to non-government groups eventually, not necessarily models with weapons but maybe enhanced strength/flight capabilities for construction crews or advanced scanners for search and rescue teams. We're telling Oswald we need to check in with the government, its not a promise that we're selling him anything.
The problem with Oswald's first offer is that money is of no concern to Lex in quest and out of quest I and I think the other questers have no idea what that does for us system wise 36 million dollars is basically background noise.
[X] [Exo] Refuse Oswald's offer completely
[X] [Submarine] Get rid of the submarine by transferring it to the US Government and getting them to pay Oswald an "acquisition fee" in exchange for a favor
[X] [Menagerie] You'll secretly give members of the Menagerie jobs at LexCorp provided they want out of Gotham in exchange for Selina owing you a favor
[X] [Menagerie] You'll pay for orphanages in Gotham to house some of the child members of the gang in exchange for a favor from Selina later on down the line
[] [Menagerie] You'll secretly give members of the Menagerie jobs at LexCorp provided they want out of Gotham in exchange for Selina owing you a favor and setup orphanages in Metropolis to house some of the child members of the gang in exchange for a favor from Selina later on down the line
Keeps everything more or less aboveboard, keeps Oswald happy, and should be well within our abilities. Looks like a quick and easy win with no real downsides... unless I'm missing something? @King crimson am I missing something here?
Not quite sure what you're asking. Are you saying it seems too good to be true? I'm not going to elaborate on it but every choice has consequences. You have to decide for yourself if it's worth it or not.
Not quite sure what you're asking. Are you saying it seems too good to be true? I'm not going to elaborate on it but every choice has consequences. You have to decide for yourself if it's worth it or not.
Specifically, do we have reason to believe that the people we'd be working with in the US government and/or other establishment groups would find the "acquisition fee" part of that exercise objectionably sketchy?
Specifically, do we have reason to believe that the people we'd be working with in the US government and/or other establishment groups would find the "acquisition fee" part of that exercise objectionably sketchy?
No but on the other hand the government also likely would like to not spend money on this. Oswald's acquisition fee isn't going to be a fortune but it wouldn't be miniscule either and if the government can get away with safely not paying him then they'd do it.
I really don't want for a submarine to be the next sword of Beowulf - to good to get rid of but not good enough to waste an action right now to study or even hide properly. Additionally, it is incriminating af
Strictly, it's incriminating, but only because stealing a Russian submarine is illegal in Russia. So is mind-controlling a Russian spy, but we already did that.
@King crimson When you said every actions has consequences I started thinking on this: The US is not too happy with Russia right now, and the whole STRIPE program was in part to get up to par with Rocket Red, so when the US government hears "Russian experimental nuclear submarine off the coast of Gotham" are they going to care that it was Russian mafia that had it, or are they going to use that as justification for more aggressive actions against Russia as a whole? Will that cause us problems with Russia if they find out we helped the US acquire that submarine, or will they just be relieved it wasn't used for anything stupid that could cause the next world war?
No but on the other hand the government also likely would like to not spend money on this. Oswald's acquisition fee isn't going to be a fortune but it wouldn't be miniscule either and if the government can get away with safely not paying him then they'd do it.
Would it be plausible for us to pay the "acquisition fee" ourselves, and then present the sub to the government as a civic-minded citizen? Is that the sort of thing where the goodwill thus gained might be worth the money spent?
[X ] [Menagerie] In exchange for funding the entire group and supporting a new branch of the gang operating in X city. Selina Kyle will give you updates on the gang, any information they acquire and allow us to request missions/operations from them.
[X] [Exo] Tell Oswald that you'd need time to consult with the US government
[X] [Submarine] Get rid of the submarine by transferring it to the US Government and getting them to pay Oswald an "acquisition fee" in exchange for a favor
No but on the other hand the government also likely would like to not spend money on this. Oswald's acquisition fee isn't going to be a fortune but it wouldn't be miniscule either and if the government can get away with safely not paying him then they'd do it.
Do we really have to point out to Freaking Goverment they really should not antagonize source that is capable of finding RUSSIAN SUBMARINE THAT EVADED US NAVY ? Without good reason ?
Also Oswald went UP in my estimation, Into the Slimy but Competent file.
The famous slogan of the French Revolution, "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité!" had a mixed reputation in French history. As of 1870, the Revolution was still within living memory, if only barely. Twenty years earlier, upon crowning himself emperor, Napoleon III had banned the slogan and demanded that it be removed from walls and buildings in the capital. But now it returned with a vengeance, as voices rose among the new, hastily organized city government of Paris. Ardent voices called for it to be painted on walls and banners: "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, ou la mort!"
The unexpected and largely accidental death of General Trochu, much like Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon, was an irreversible event for Parisian radicals. Those members of the Government of National Defense caught in the city by the ensuing uprising made little attempt to restore control, instead fleeing the city by a variety of means. Some escaped through the Prussian siege lines; others were captured.
Even as street fighting broke out in Paris behind him, Thiers, a conservative figure in the Government, met with Bismarck to hear Prussian surrender demands. This was not lost on the Paris working class, and was most unpopular among them. Emboldened, radicals and opponents of the Government ran for mayor in hastily organized elections in the twenty arrondissements of Paris. A combination of ballots and mobs soon left revolutionary leader Louis Auguste Blanqui with sufficient power over the city to begin assembling the improvised government that would be known to history as the Paris Commune.
The Commune Besieged
But the Prussians were still at the gates of the city, surrounding the Thiers Walls from a distance and periodically bombarding the city outskirts with artillery. And the situation was dire enough to alarm even the bravest revolutionary.
Most of the able-bodied fighting men in Paris were in the undertrained and in many cases poorly equipped National Guard militia units. Already, a great proportion of the French Army's best weapons and soldiers had marched off to be surrounded, defeated, and captured in the disasters of Metz and Sedan. Before his death, Trochu had quipped that to hold the Thiers Walls and the hastily constructed earthworks that augmented them, he had "many men, but few soldiers." The population of Paris remained fiercely anti-Prussian and determined to resist, but zeal would only carry them so far.
Nor were these the only advantages held by the besieging Prussians. Their troops were drawn from all over Germany, which had allied behind the Prussian banner in a unity that only grew stronger with each passing victory. The core of the army, von Moltke's well-drilled veterans, were a disciplined and reasonably well armed force that had just shattered the French army, until then the force most had thought to be the strongest in Europe. The Prussian artillery was particularly formidable, arguably the deadliest in the world. Prussian guns were longer-ranged, more accurate, and quicker-firing than their French counterparts, an advantage that did much to neutralize the French possession of Leland Luthor's machine gun design.
By contrast, the Commune was a hastily formed scratch government. Large parts of the population and many of the soldiers of the city garrison questioned its legitimacy. Various units of the army and National Guard formations in Paris distrusted each other greatly. Many of the revolutionaries viewed regular units as cowards who would rather fight fellow Frenchmen than the Prussians; many of the regulars viewed the revolutionaries as murderers who would see Paris burn under foreign bombardment rather than tolerate a compromise government. In the first days after November 3, posturing and skirmishing between units constantly threatened to erupt into civil war within the city; Frenchmen turned rifles on one another more than once.
Iron and Blood
Bismarck, consulting with King Wilhelm I and Marshal von Moltke not far away at the palace of Versailles, was convinced that this was the moment of opportunity.
While Otto von Bismarck's name has become a watchword for cautious, canny statecraft in the century since his death, it bears remembering that this is the same man who, as a feudal landholder in the 1840s, tried to organize a peasant levy to march against liberal revolutionaries occupying Berlin in 1848. Perhaps some vestiges of the fiery man of thirty-three came now to the man of fifty-five. Or perhaps the sight of fires breaking out in Paris and the sound of gunshots in the night convinced him that warfare within the city had rotted out the strength of the defenses. But he argued eloquently for an assault, swayed the king to his side, and persuaded von Moltke, with some hesitation, to put the mettle of the Commune's worker militias and half-disaffected army units to the test.
The initial Prussian assault proved devastating. The Parisian defenders had few of the automatic Luthor guns distributed to the field armies that had been crushed in Alsace and Lorraine two months earlier. Of the weapons that remained, most were wrecked by a hailstorm of fire from the steel guns of the Prussian artillery. Supported by the steam-powered 'land ironclads' that had fought in lesser numbers at Sedan and during the siege of Metz, the Prussian infantry stormed the Thiers Wall in multiple locations, securing a bridgehead in the outskirts of Paris along the arc they'd targeted for their assault. Heavy shells rained down upon the buildings of Paris, shattering many as the populace fled away from the areas under assault and cowered in basements or improvised dugouts.
The Prussians had created, arguably, the first modern army. Under von Moltke and his generals, that army had proven invincible in the open field, and as proficient at siege warfare as any in the world. No one was surprised that they had carried the Thiers Wall.
But now they faced a new kind of combat, one that had never occurred before in all of history: industrialized urban warfare against a determined opponent.
They did not prove equal to the task.
Under the Commune, Paris was not a traditional walled city, with a hard shell of defenses surrounding a soft, easily pillaged center. To be sure, Napoleon III's urban planner, Haussmann, had torn apart many of the tight, intricate alley networks that had enabled the Paris masses' traditional practice of barricading off entire districts during times of civil unrest. But the Commune held enough modern weaponry to defend even the wide avenues of the city, and to make credible resistance in the semi-open terrain of its suburbs. While hampered by a poorly organized command structure, the combination of French nationalism and revolutionary ambition gave them the energy to put up fierce resistance.
Arguably, the inability to organize a field army capable of holding the fortifications outside the city worked out to the Commune's advantage, as the urban militias fell back into the suburbs. Informed by decades of periodic street fighting against the French authorities, they fell back not only in space, but into a different set of tactics.
Soon, every large cluster or block of buildings became, in their minds, a strongpoint. Whenever coordination between the city's loosely organized defense forces permitted, the Prussians might find themselves drawn into brutal crossfires, or with their prized field artillery units coming under rifle fire from stay-behind forces. Where trust between units drawn from different social classes faltered, French nationalism acted as a unifying glue; even those who could not agree on whether to fly the Red Banner over Paris could agree that the Prussian flag did not belong in its place. And the skirmish drills that had served the Prussians well in open-field battles, even against the Luthor gun, were less useful in an environment where few units larger than a company could find physical space to deploy on a continuous front.
The Prussians continued to gain ground, but casualties mounted. Battles against urban militias grew fierce, and daring Parisian defenders often tried to infiltrate behind the attackers' lines. Threatened from all sides, and the Prussians began falling back on the same brutal tactics they had resorted to earlier in the Franco-Prussian War: the taking of hostages, and the execution of these civilians whenever they felt themselves too hardly presse
Even this did not break the French lines in front of them, however, the ones holding them out of the core of the city. More and more, the Prussians brought up the armor that had helped give them the confidence to attack at all.
The Communards, drawing the Prussians further and further into Paris, manned the barricades as the Paris Mob had done against monarchs' armies for centuries, and brought up their own replies: the Liberté rifle and the boisson au Bismarck.
The New Weapons
The Liberté was not strictly a new weapon, but rather a modification to an existing weapon: the Charleville Model 1831 rampart rifle. Weighing fully ten kilograms and with an overall length equal to the height of a typical grown man of the day, the Mle 1831 was too bulky to be carried by marching soldiers in the field. But the French Army kept considerable numbers of the heavy long-range rifles for the defense of fortresses. Quite a few were stockpiled in Paris during and before the siege. Now, they went back to the gunsmiths of Paris for alteration.
The blueprints of the Liberté, also known as the "Red Rifle," were copied and distributed widely throughout the city, and a number of copies were made additional to the modified stock of Mle 1831s. However, the most critical alteration to the design was not to the rifle itself, but to the ammunition. This innovation is definitively attributed to the then-young, and later infamous, radical French inventor Alexandre LeRoi. LeRoi is known for several military innovations, and this would be his first: the armor-piercing bullet.
Instead of the customary .89 caliber lead bullet, the Liberté fired case-hardened steel bullets with lead driving bands, an innovation previously only seen on artillery shells. Loaded with these and a heavy powder charge, the Liberté had more than enough penetrating power to pierce the armor of the Prussian land ironclads, at reasonable firing angles, out to a range of over two hundred yards.
On a cruder yet undeniably effective level, the Communards also fielded great numbers of the boisson de Bismarck, or "Bismarck's beverage." Made from bottles of kerosene, paraffin oil, or even brandy, topped by a burning fuse, these improvised incendiary devices made a surprisingly formidable impression on Prussian forces in urban ambushes. Used in quantity, they even proved a short-ranged but devastatingly effective weapon against the Prussian land ironclads, whose fighting compartments were often less than perfectly watertight.
Auguste Bruno Braquehais' famous photograph, La Pétroleuse, featuring Louise Michel, the colorful anarchist who had been elected to lead the Montmartre Women's Vigilance Committee barely two weeks earlier, standing alongside a burned-out Prussian armored car wrecked by firebombs, would become one of the great icons of the siege.
Louise Michel, in military uniform, December 1870
By late November, the Prussians were beginning to withdraw, having suffered heavy losses to multiple army corps. So many of the Garde-Panzergrenadiers' vehicles were destroyed and non-recoverable that the remainder was approaching combat-ineffectiveness. The Prussians were forced to return to their siege lines.
Von Moltke, to his dying day, never fully forgave Bismarck for the setback, and Bismarck himself was occasionally heard to remark on it as his greatest regret.
As winter tightened its grip on the city in December, Paris remained under heavy bombardment, and hunger was growing fierce. But the city stood unbowed, defiantly flying the Red Banner.
[X] [Exo] Tell Oswald that you'd need time to consult with the US government
[X] [Submarine] Purchase the submarine from Oswald for yourself
[X] [Menagerie] You'll pay for orphanages in Gotham to house some of the child members of the gang in exchange for a favor from Selina later on down the line
