Hrrm.
So here's what I've been thinking.
Our current play has been 'be the biggest hound, so nobody else can smack us down.' Problem is we're no longer 'big enough hound to smack EVERYBODY down.'
That said, we don't necessarily NEED to be the latter.
One could even argue we don't need to even be the biggest hound
by our lonesome. All we need is one or two houses to be in our corner and suddenly our problems of personal power go away.
But lemme go look back over the options:
Teaching newbie:
[] Political Etiquette
[ ] Constitutional Law
[ ] Crisis Management
[ ] Governance
Etiquette-probably the most useful bit because I'm thinking all we need is our vassals properly in line and obeying us and we can be almost as much of a paper tiger as we like- changing the game from 'knock over the Emperor' to 'knock over the Emperor+2-3 provinces' will make anyone thinking about it shut up unless they're REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY killy. Like Harzivan levels of killy versus everyone else, and that still nearly went wrong for the others.
Etiquette will keep the kid from gaffing and doing a stupid that makes her allies nervous and her enemies gleeful.
Law...Hrum. I'd say Law is on a back-burner. Not that it's not useful to know that but She's Da Empress. She MAKES Da Law. So knowing the law is simply to prevent her from gaffing in the direction of 'we already do that ma'am.' Low priority.
Crisis Management-probably 2nd in the priority queue I think, because if we screw up little Ahri being able to save our fluff wuffy tails would do ALOT to prove she's a strong Empress. I'm almost tempted to have ourselves get in a bit of a public pickle before she swoops in and clears the issue except we're her hammer and that'd probably spook people if she had another hammer's worth of power, in essence, or something like that.
Governance- later but does need to be done at some point. We miiight also be able to get away with defaulting this to the Council as it's kind of their jobs to make sure she can do this.
On to the next point!
[ ] Disband 13th Fleet.
[ ] Keep 13th Fleet.
[ ] Reduce 13th Fleet.
Okay. So Saltmeister loggie-man (never tell him I'm referring to him like this btw-there's casual and then there's insulting, and I think this crosses the line to the latter.) Wants to strip the fleet for parts to reinforce other fleets, because atm it's just sitting there telling the Nobility to sit down and shut up.
Reduce does not sound wise- it's basically paper-tigering in exchange for limited additional 'we can hold this' reinforcement. Maybe if we could dip into that a little bit before we get to recall our fleet and turn around to hammer them it'd be a good play but I'm not liking it otherwise.
Disbanding the fleet versus keeping it! Keeping sounds like if we need it the hammer will be availible versus having to shut-up and get in the queue like everyone else. I'd LIKE to do the latter frankly, trust in the system is how it gets buoy'd past hard times? But if everything falls apart anyway we're going to regret not keeping our hammer. So lemme get back to this after I look over other options elsewhere.
- "If I marry him, Hoou's scion will immediately revolt," you grumble. "Taihou's had her eye on him since forever and Kanda's been fleeing her grasp since forever. And no, I don't think of him that way."
Taking a brief moment to indulge in this- I can't help but imagine Taihou chasing Kanada around before Kanada leaps into Yui's arms saying 'SAVE ME!' which is hilarious. Thank you Saltmeister loggie-man!
[] Small Task Force
[ ] Medium Force
[ ] Heavy Task Force
It's Sumeragi, our SWORN RIVALS! I'm not inclined to try and get the drop on them since it sounds like even freaking civvy conspiracy types know enough to say they're up to no good-we're probably going to catch them red-handed.
So I'm inclined to go Heavy and make absolutely sure when we confiscate their crap we have enough guns to do it with.
...Except that last sentence says by implication what the benefits of going sneaky will do- if we catch them red-handed we can hit them with full force of the law and swipe their crap and use it to hold the Empire together a while longer, versus expensive civil war that starts everything falling apart.
After that bit of thinking it over, I want to go SMALL, weird as it sounds-if we vanish into thin air Sumeragi gets the fun of being the guy who bumped off the Empress's Hand. You don't do that unless you're about to rebel and cause trouble. If they're the troublemakers, it boils down to this: Do you want an aggressive polity like that as your neighbor should the Empire arrangement collapse? No? Then you go with the Empress and help beat the stuffing out of them! In THEORY they could use their guns to say 'you don't want a piece of this' but I feel like a Gazette publication or something simmilar where we basically say 'hey Sumeragi why are you arming up for war? Going to send more dudes to help us?' where we put the spotlight on them but offer them an out in the form of handing over their troops to us/pointed towards actual imperial needs.
