Knightfall
Nui lover and Slaaneshi
- Location
- New York, New York
Why do I have a feeling we are going to create something similar to the MSY from To the stars?
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Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
- Thread starter inverted_helix
- Start date
Well that was easy...
Shortest flight time across the Pacific to Japan is from Seattle/Vancouver, and is 9 to 11 hours. Usually around 10 hours. I think we just have to accept that, it's a bit on the long side, but probably okay for mundanes who will never know why they enjoyed that flight to Japan so much.
So the best plan is probably a long, long travel day. We fly her to Seattle, have her switch planes, and then fly to Japan. We meet her at the airport, teleport hop to the rest location. Let her rest up for a few days to overcome jet lag. Then begin the assault.
Prices are probably in the $3000 range to get five people to Japan from Seattle. Flights from Baja (Loreto) to Seattle range from 24 hours with multiple stops to 7 hours with 1 stop over (to switch planes at an international airport). Looks like one stop flights are $600 per a person, so another $3,000 for five people.
Maybe $100 to rent a car to get them to the airport in Baja. Plus $750 to give them $150 each for travel money to buy food, toiletries, etc.
Round it off to $7,000 up front just to get her to Japan. Plus we probably need to bribe Kyubey to get them all passports.
Oh... and we can't fly them into Tokyo. The other major International Airport is... Nagoya... (no real effect on flight time, maybe another 11 minutes).
Hmmm... this is a little worrisome. It's apparent that Serena and company has no experience with actually fighting demons.
Hopefully most of the class 3 demons will be so weakened that she won't have trouble with them. As we can't commit to having our girls supporting Serena all the time. She'll have to make due with her entourage, and the local Tokyo girls (who hopefully we can persuade to help).
Maybe we can have a rapid reaction force to provide support against especially strong demons (like Mr Beholder).
Maybe we will need to provide an initial strike force to take out the demons patrolling the Yokohama boarders, so that she doesn't get mobbed.
We need to do some more brainstorming on this.
I guess we could assign Seto to teleporting Serena's team around, as Seto could do a quick hop in, transport, and hop back out in less than 5 minutes. That ought to allow... at least 96 transports without pushing the safety limits. We'll have to talk to Seto about that.
Huh... so the Serenes will be a bit more resistant to it. It doesn't mention what happens to a girl who is usually pretty happy, but begins grief spiraling.
Tokyo girls might have some problems... but not as big a problem as a class 3 demon about to eat their face.
Understandable. Bunny cat is still a dick.
Of course we'd give them the full allotment. Wasn't expecting anything less...
All four of her girls can perform above Elite level? That's... interesting. Didn't expect that.
I'm getting a lot of mixed signals about how likely Serena will be able to handle the class 3 demons on her own.
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Not sure if it's necessary or not.
The risk is greatly reduced, so inclined to give only half the original values.
I need to go dig up that list of major cities and start stating out all of them, ugh.
They're largely too scattered for this sort of thing. Most of them have better things to do that check their email.
40 Class 3s, possible Class 4 activity data inconclusive. 32 Grade 3 Contracted, 1000 Contracted of all Grades.
Well I wouldn't call them "extreme" things. I mean at your current level it's hard to move based off the things you've got. But it's still not at a level where it takes extreme things to move.
Well I was thinking about a building of around 15,000 square feet. Doing a total electrical rewire for that would probably cost half the quoted price by itself. The basement was something that people wondered about getting quite a while ago, but it wasn't a serious request.
Hmm did not think that through. Too little sleep. I had looked up at the time that Akiya often rented out for only a couple hundred dollars when rented from local government. But also companies spend like 30-40k on repairing them to good condition. Not quite sure which way I should have that fall.
If you just want one house and leave the rest falling apart then you're probably only looking at like $50,000.
I've seen about that price to, so probably what I'd use.
They wouldn't have survived this long if they had to fight constantly. The "moat" is the only plan they could come up with.
You guys have been reducing them to "evil empire" status when they really aren't that simple.
There's good reason they have a flee on sight for it. An anti-teleport field fundamentally damages their tactics. It prevents both reinforcements and emergency evac. And yes it is a Beholder, as identified earlier, I painted that picture but didn't think a teenage girl was too likely to identify that. Some of them might, but your diplomatic agent didn't.
Because the whole point of the quest was to make a quest about trying to create the a large scale magical group from a small level.
As was correctly identified earlier, being able to train in a reduced cost environment + spam all your most costly abilities in combat makes a difference. That's part of the combat strength that Serena brings. Though it's notable that this is a special case because of how the Aura works. They wouldn't be elite outside the aura, and them going toe to toe with elites inside the aura would be somewhat unpredictable but not in their favor (dependent on how quickly the elites adapted to the environment).
Mixed signals is good, shows I'm doing a decent job.
I actually was meaning to imply island hopping essentially.
Serena hasn't ever encountered a grief spiral. Not in person at least. Caused them yes, but if she's close enough to someone to count as "in person" then they can't really grief spiral.
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Knightfall
Nui lover and Slaaneshi
- Location
- New York, New York
Which means by the time this is over we will be a secret government.
Eh, don't think we really need a basement. We should have reasonably private space in the rear of the church.
That actually could be problematic for them. If we have to retreat back through there, we could end up dragging stuff through their turf.
I think we have a little more flexibility on that. Let's see...
Start: 78 cubes
Purchase:
- Coalition: 3 GCU @ $2500 each
- 15/16: 2 GCU @ $2000 each
Hunting: 98 cubes (estimated)
Total: 181
Expenses:
Upkeep: 69
Hunting: 2 (high estimate)
Research: 5
Production: 1
Spirals: 5
Coalition: 8
Serena: none? (she said she could get enough cubes on her own beforehand, so doesn't add to upkeep til the following month)
Total spent: 90
Remaining: 91
Surplus: 20
Sell for: $70,000 (net $62,000)
Final cash on hand: $130,000 (plus another ~$5k from normal income, but also more special expenses)
Need to upgrade the loan to $700,000 to include costs of rebuilding, which means down payment is $140,000 (more than we have). Loan payment would be $2500 for a 30 year loan, or $4000 for a 15 year loan.
The deal with the Coalition cuts 8 cubes, which would have been another $28k (and could have gotten away with selling another block of 10 for $35k). Oh well.
Maybe not. This is assuming the traditional 20 percent down payment-type loan, right? Maybe there are loan options that require less up-front?
Agreed, I'm just thinking of alternative loan options for the future.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
I thought it was Narita, not Nagoya?
Ugh.
Stability level continues to drop. 27 elites left hurts, and 1000 total contracted is 58% of total sustainable territory size. 200 died in the last couple months.
We need to get to those elites before they're wiped out.
I think a population of about 700 is where Tokyo begins the final slide towards Hong Kong. At that point, there's not enough meguca-power to keep DS at 0, even if all of them were putting their best efforts in on just that. In practical terms, it's already heading that way because they're not going to be able to dedicate 100% of their time to active cube hunting.
Narita is the Tokyo airport. And is on the exact opposite side of Tokyo from us. Not the best starting point.
Hmm I made an error in elite calculation. I double checked because you questioned it. Last check was T28, had thought it was was T26. Revised up to 32. Most of casualties from when their fortified base was overrun last turn. Standard population though really is in freefall.
Also yeah, you don't have to worry about DS being above 0, because it's not at this point.
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@inverted_helix - Error in expenses. Currently listed at $26,870, but should be $29,370 due to the addition of the apartments.
Does that mean there's more or less than 27 elites left, then?
Slightly more, revised up to 32. Considered leaving it as is but only minor "retcon" since you were the only one to comment on that line so far. And it's no more of one than my myriad mathematical fixes in balance sheet after updates.
Fixed
Oops... ought to add some advertising budget.
Oh well, time to bite the bullet on the paperwork. We probably ought to spread it around, rather than a specific girl doing all the paperwork, it'll be an abstracted cost of all the paperwork being done by all the girls.
We ought to spend some time organizing and making our various information look nice. (And translate it into Spanish).
Probably get all our Hunting tips and tech into a nice booklet to publish, and a booklet on Pack Hunting Tactics.
Also all our Duration Research, and the Spell Anchor Research as well.
We want to look like we are professional and on top of things when we push into Tokyo.
Ouch... now that is an understandable reaction.
I doubt we will be able to conceal this at all. Instead I'd suggest warning Nagoya off for a month. At that point they are probably going to spend some time figuring out what we are doing and what the new situation is. That should buy us the time to start bootstrapping, but we are going to need a lot of cash on hand to afford this.
Tokyo. Tokyo is the only place we can possibly expand as quickly as we need too.
Also, we don't want Kyubey to contract more girls. Right now we need the edge we get by being under our territory size.
I think you missed most of the conversation about Serena, we have already located three locations in our Nomadic area that are remote enough for her to live.
Kesi has experience fighting demons, Serena doesn't really.
Well it's more that your group actually generates a lot more paperwork than typical from hunting activities. You guys measure demon strength to 0.1 and that's because you record everything pretty finely. That amount of recording though generates a lot of paperwork. I mean if you're measuring in bulk like just asking at the end of the month if the demons were easy to fight or hard, that's a lot less forms and math.
Plus all the schedules for which girl is actually doing what, where, at which time. That's abstracted away on the meta level, but in universe that's a lot of effort setting everyone's schedules.
To some degree this "paperpushing" upkeep does represent some labor from multiple people though.
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Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Sure, but keep in mind that all the class 3s Serena is going to encounter are going to be very weakened by her Aura, and her retinue will be acting above Elite level. The Class 3s that Serena fights are not going to be anywhere near as strong as they would be outside her Aura.
We have full tandem training completed for all magic types except healing. We have 13 healers, and only 2 of them trained in tandem work. If we want to finish tandem training, it would take 3.0 vets. I suspect it's going to be a low priority this month, though. May still want to get at least some done, though, if we're going to be sending people up to the nomadic area anyway to make charms.
Need to spend money advertising the delivery service. Probably put $1000 into that to help it fill out.
Also noticed: We're back up to 5 morale! Which will be going away almost immediately, as we're likely to (try to) start absorbing girls from the Tokyo area.
I'm inclined towards the Akiya housing option, if we can get rentals on the other nearby ones as well, assuming that doing so means they're no longer likely to attract visitors. A one year business loan on the repair costs would be easy enough (even if technically we could pay it outright).
Need to spend money advertising the delivery service. Probably put $1000 into that to help it fill out.
Also noticed: We're back up to 5 morale! Which will be going away almost immediately, as we're likely to (try to) start absorbing girls from the Tokyo area.
I'm inclined towards the Akiya housing option, if we can get rentals on the other nearby ones as well, assuming that doing so means they're no longer likely to attract visitors. A one year business loan on the repair costs would be easy enough (even if technically we could pay it outright).
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Also, I kinda doubt that the girls from Kyoto are old enough to remember it being the capital. That would mean they were alive before 1868, and I am extremely dubious of the ability of Puella to last that long. Unless they're Hortence it is vastly more likely they will spiral out or get unlucky in a hunt than survive that long.
Nolrai
weak to fangs
- Location
- Porltand
Yeah, I think its much more likely they are combining pride in their city with rationalizing not helping. I mean people have lots of /weird/ opinions in the real world.
Huh... I would have thought that relative dangers didn't matter to the Incubators, just whether the job got done or not. Danger to megucas is not their problem.
That said, I could see the Incubators presenting a bill for all the services they have give to facilitate this whole plan. A cube for the information about legendary, a cube for connecting us with Serena, and 5 cubes for helping us get passports for Serena and her girls (really, you only need Serena! so illogical). A cube for each large organization in Japan that they give us contact numbers for. Ten cubes for the analysis of class 3 demon patrol patterns that we are totally going to want.
They just decided not to charge us anything until we actually used the information to eliminate the demons. Basically a loan of information to motivate us to do something. I have a hard time thinking all of that will get over 25 cubes though.
And at 40 class 3 demons, that ought to be about 200 cubes gross in bounties.
We will probably need those 175 cubes net though to try bribe our way through every problem in Tokyo that gets thrown at us.
If there are 1000 survivors... then that would mean we could put up ~5 cubes to support each 50 cube area? Probably a little more than that if any large organizations have survived.
The life of a GM....
Some help, just looking at the map from the North of Japan down the locations that look like large urban areas are:
Sapporo in Hokkaido
Sendai, north of Tokyo
Niigata, west of Sendai on the Sea of Japan.
Toyama/Komatsu, north of Nagoya
Okayama/Takamatsu, west of Osaka. Okayama is on Honshu, and Takamatsu is across the strait on Shikoku.
The island of Kyushu seems to be a mess of medium sized cities, with Fukuoka the largest, followed by it's near neighbor Kitakyushu. On the west part of the island is where Kumamoto, Nagasaki, Saga, and several smaller cities are all situated around the large bay formed by the Ariake Sea.
By population size, cities in Japan are:
Tokyo (of course)
Yokohama (part of larger Tokyo)
Osaka
Nagoya
Sapporo
Kobe (part of larger Osaka)
Kyoto (part of larger Osaka)
Fukuoka (over on Kyushu, about 2/3 the size of Nagoya)
Kawasaki (part of larger Tokyo)
Saitama (part of larger Tokyo)
Hiroshima (not listed above from looking at the map, very small footprint, must be very dense. Approximately 1/2 the population of Nagoya)
Sendai
Kitakyushu (just under 1 million, about 1/3 the size of Osaka proper, next door to Fukuoka)
Chiba (part of larger Tokyo)
Sakai (part of larger Osaka)
Niigata (about a third the size of Osaka)
Hamamatsu (Area 13/14)
Kumamoto (on the west bay of Kyushu, 1/2 the size of Fukuoka, combined with the other cities in the area probably starts to rival Fukuoka)
Sagamihara (part of larger Tokyo)
Shizuoka aka Mitakihara (where we are, 1/2 the size of Fukuoka, 1/3 the size of Nagoya)
Okayama (about 1/3 of Nagoya, when combined with Takamatsu is about 1/2 the size of Nagoya)
A bunch of parts of larger Tokyo
Kagoshima (southern most city in Kyushu, sub-tropical, 600K pop, 1/2 the size of Fukuoka)
Toyama is only 400K a bit more than half of our population, so that can probably be taken off the list. In fact anything after Kagoshima is probably not a candidate at this point. And I bet a bunch of the above don't even have large organizations. I've colored what looks like the 11 most likely to have their own organizations, and you've already stated two of them. So probably 6 more to go? (Assuming that 2/3 have developed into large organizations, and 1/3 have not?)
Ouch... we need to move fast. I'm not sure we can wait another month to prepare more.
Does mean that we ought to be fine with DS for awhile though.
Yeah, makes sense, I just got caught by surprise.
Hmm... that's... not bad. Not bad at all.
It's mean half our treasury... but possible. I assume this house would be big enough for everyone?
I don't think of them that way. Feudal lords seems better. Still not likely to be our long term friends.
Ehh... it's hard to do, as then you'd have some people planning to stay on the island after the trip, I don't think we could actually assume that we'd have different travelers. Either way the trip costs should be the same, as island hopping is longer, but usually costs slightly less.
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Getting Serena through Nagoya is likely to be a major hassle. Getting clearance to send someone through there area that could be considered "high risk" is liable to trigger all kinds of XCom reactions.
Two options for Tokyo: Narita Airport (about 20 miles NE of Tokyo Bay) and Haneda Airport (literally right on Tokyo Bay). Haneda Airport with immediate pickup via boat seems like our best bet.
Her request for teleport-to-target is a no-go, due to the beholder demon (possible class 4?). Travel on foot, always, except for the special case of if the beholder's aura is down after a teleport. We will absolutely not risk her to that interdiction effect.
Flight plans:
San Diego to Honolulu, nonstop. 6 hr 30 min flight. $315 per person.
Honolulu to Guam. 8 hr flight.
Guam to Manila. 4 hr flight. (Going to abuse a travel agent; Honolulu to Manila via Guam is $600 per person, while a trip to Guam alone is $1300.)
Manila to Tokyo (Haneda Airport). 4 hr flight. $435 per person.
Alt:
Manila to Taipei. 2 hr flight.
Taipei to Shizuoka/Mitakihara. 3 hr flight. $300 per person.
Total cost of $1,350 (or $1,215) per person, so $6,750 (or $6,075) total. Doesn't spend more than 8 hours on any flight. Would take 4 to 5 days.
Also, possibly need some passports made by Kyuubey. Cube cost.
Also, possible extra funds for taxi fair between flights, so she doesn't have to walk back and forth between "rest" areas and the airport.
Edit: Added alt flight path.
Two options for Tokyo: Narita Airport (about 20 miles NE of Tokyo Bay) and Haneda Airport (literally right on Tokyo Bay). Haneda Airport with immediate pickup via boat seems like our best bet.
Her request for teleport-to-target is a no-go, due to the beholder demon (possible class 4?). Travel on foot, always, except for the special case of if the beholder's aura is down after a teleport. We will absolutely not risk her to that interdiction effect.
Flight plans:
San Diego to Honolulu, nonstop. 6 hr 30 min flight. $315 per person.
Honolulu to Guam. 8 hr flight.
Guam to Manila. 4 hr flight. (Going to abuse a travel agent; Honolulu to Manila via Guam is $600 per person, while a trip to Guam alone is $1300.)
Manila to Tokyo (Haneda Airport). 4 hr flight. $435 per person.
Alt:
Manila to Taipei. 2 hr flight.
Taipei to Shizuoka/Mitakihara. 3 hr flight. $300 per person.
Total cost of $1,350 (or $1,215) per person, so $6,750 (or $6,075) total. Doesn't spend more than 8 hours on any flight. Would take 4 to 5 days.
Also, possibly need some passports made by Kyuubey. Cube cost.
Also, possible extra funds for taxi fair between flights, so she doesn't have to walk back and forth between "rest" areas and the airport.
Edit: Added alt flight path.
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Hmm... I guess I didn't think about including next months hunt in the equation. That does allow a bit more.
Yeah, but I think this is a huge breakthrough for a relationship with the Coalition. Probably worth the 8 cubes.
Yes... and we need a lot of cash for Tokyo. I think we need to delay the Church purchase by 6 months.
Narita is Tokyo. Other major International airports in Japan are in Sapporo and Fukuoka. A flight from Sapporo to Mitakihara (Shizuoka) would be another 2 hours and cost an additional $350 per a person...
Well, the Incubators will probably recruit more girls in Tokyo once it stabilizes again. I'm not too worried about this, more that the losses are accelerating, so I think we have to move far more quickly than we initially planned.