Well, on the other hand they're probably not bothering with school like Mami's group is; that frees up another meguca-month per person, at the expense of not having a formal education beyond middle school. They may or may not have started sooner as well, and/or with more Elites in their starter group to boot: they would kind of have to in order to survive a Class 3 around our Turn 12-16, as was indicated on our background info. I mean, a Class 3 at around that time would have wiped our group with barely a pause, but according to @inverted_helix Nagoya fought off more than one around then.
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Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
- Thread starter inverted_helix
- Start date
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Like seriously @inverted_helix, how are we supposed to compete with Nagoya right now? Because unless Madokami decides to turn on Nagisa and Sayaka's witch-form powers I can't see any way for us to do so. They can crush us like a goddamn bug and we can't do shit to them.
Nagoya also sounds like it's a merger of several different groups. If the divides were less deep then they were in Tokyo it's possible Class 3 demons showing up would force enough of them to work together to conquer the rest of the city.
I'm not sure why you're do insistent on trying to fight them head on. We don't have to have a war.
Also, 4 times our size isn't nearly as much as you seem to think it is. PvP gives a massive defenders advantage, so while they could wipe us out it would take a huge amount of resources, even by their standards. I really don't think we're worth that much effort unless we attack them outright or start creating Class 3 demons everywhere.
Yeah no way. Maybe that's an effective technique against a muggle opponent, but a demon is a magical opponent that can stop a charm activating like a magical girl. That's how I'll explain it.
Something to keep in mind there is that Mami's ability to be persuasive is just mundane. You still aren't quite aware of her true ability. And it's pretty hilariously strong.
That's more players running with a higher end interpretation than I ever intended than rebalancing.
Something I've been trying to understand is why people seem to think that as huge an area as Tokyo is some sort of single binary result situation. Even in your wildest possible success you were never going to be able to hold all of it even if Nagoya didn't exist. And equally so Nagoya can't either. Some will favor the group that's been supporting them longer, some will favor those that finally made the situation better successfully rather than just continuously stalling.
This is not a binary situation. It's far more complex than that.
From the Incubator's perspective, she's every bit as strong as any of the others. She's just strangely hesitant to use that power. But this is kind of a get what you paid for thing as well. Serena was the easiest one to recruit, you had only to ask her and success was virtually guaranteed. The rest would have been far more difficult. Kesi was the one that you guys seemed next most inclined to go for, but you'd have had to negotiate some sort of peace agreement between a lot of groups that are still fighting each other. You correctly deduced you'd need to show that peace could be made and held, but several of the major groups in Japan are still warring with each other.
This is a hard mode quest.
What you fail to grasp is that in many senses the NM is the outlier. Nagoya started with around a dozen groups. The NM is so strong now because they were the lucky ones to survive. Consider if you throw 10 groups into a meat grinder that will kill 90% of them, one group does come out the other side. Is that one group that survived ridiculously successful? They survived against 10:1 odds? I don't really think so, because they didn't beat the odds, they were the 1 that proved the odds. Otherwise it would be 10:0.
And in many ways they lost against Class 3s early on. It's just that whereas for you if you lost half your vets you'd probably throw up your hands and quit, they ate the losses and carried on trying anyways.
The NM is the merger of 4 groups that were able to put aside their differences when the city was falling to pieces around them and work together.
This is something I don't get either. Aranfan has been claiming this whole time that you're a diplomacy focused group, but the moment you guys realize you aren't the biggest most powerful group around your response is despair that the military stick isn't useful for everything? Basically every empire quest ever has rivals bigger and more powerful than you. The response is not "oh noes we lose gm is mean". Not everything comes down to who wields the biggest stick.
Diplomacy isn't only an option when you can crush the other side militarily. And just because you have the potential strength to win a fight with the other side doesn't mean that it's actually a good idea to fight them either. Diplomacy is there so that both sides can find a way to work together and both benefit.
I'm probably one of the most negative and pessimistic people you'd ever find. But this quest is all about the world being terrible and you guys finding a way to make it better. It's about the bringing out the best. And it's so frustrating sometimes when people get this way.
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Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
It's more panic that we exist at Nagoya's sufferance. Even if we had Homura and could just timestop murderface everything we still wouldn't except in retaliation. On the other hand, our first interaction with Nagoya was them shooting at us first and they are large enough to crush us like a bug and not even notice.
Edit: Unless we have a strong enough military position that them taking us over by force would bleed them too much to be worth it, then the quest only continues on GM fiat deciding they won't take us over by force. Currently it seems to me that we aren't strong enough to keep them from just crushing us at a whim.
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That's like saying Belgium only exists at the sufferance of France.
It's losing far too much of the context.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Is there a Germany to make us useful as a buffer state?
PvP has a large defender's advantage, so taking us out could easily cost them 100+ people and soon we'll have Serena. There are several possible ways they could deal with her, but they're all expensive one way or another. It would take a lot to push them to wipe us out, and at that point we'd probably deserve it.
Avalanche
Atypical Netizen
- Location
- Australia
Mate, any group large enough with Vets and Elites in their roster would -by now- know damn well not to start shit with other Puella Magi groups.
Nagoya is even less likely than other groups to attack other Puella teams because they and Tokyo are the consequences of exactly that.
We already have that. We don't need to be invulnerable to attack, we just need to be too expensive to be worth attacking, which we get for free just by being a significantly sized group.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
I guess I'm just panicking over nothing then.
Man. Good job @inverted_helix , you're actually managing to make us spiral RL over a bunch of words. Hopefully I'll be calmer and less panicky in the morning after some sleep.
Man. Good job @inverted_helix , you're actually managing to make us spiral RL over a bunch of words. Hopefully I'll be calmer and less panicky in the morning after some sleep.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
I'm sorry. I'm just attached to the Serenes as you've described them and worry for them.
While I can certainly appreciate a good rant against a seemingly unfair situation, ultimately it's just letting off steam, and you have to buckle down and solve the problem that's actually in front of you.
Nagoya is, and has been, helping Tokyo, but they still have several marks against them:
The Serenes, on the other hand, are pretty much the opposite. We're here to solve the problem, full stop, including plans to stabilize the politics of the area, whether or not we have actual control. We're a high-morale group with a very low death rate; our concerns are very much the well-being of the locals, which would be crystal clear if they ever meet Mami. And of course, we're all about the diplomacy and cooperation.
We're the group that a lot of Tokyo will want to join, while Nagoya is the group that a lot will feel obligated to join. And if we use a light touch on the political control, I think we'd get even more who would be at least willing to ally with us, even if they don't come under our banner. Which is fine, because every independent group can provide specialization value to everyone else.
For any potential conflict between Nagoya and the Serenes... We should just do what we're trying to do with the Coalition, and everyone else — work to get them to realize the benefit of cooperating with us, and dial down the antagonisms. We can all get along, and be better off for it.
Our goal at the moment hasn't changed. Everything starts and ends with clearing Tokyo. We cannot and will not fail at that. So let's keep focus on what's needed there, and avoid labeling anyone "the enemy".
Nagoya is, and has been, helping Tokyo, but they still have several marks against them:
- They haven't actually solved the problem. People are still dying, and the class 3 count is still going up.
- Their offers for 'rescue' are unwelcome. You'll be stuck in cold storage until the problem is solved, and/or Nagoya gets massive additional support capabilities. See #1.
- They themselves are a low-morale group that lived with a pretty high death rate. Sympathy for the Tokyo locals, while present, is probably not exactly overwhelming, and those locals can sense that.
- They are not a diplomacy group. They are a criminal/combat group. Even with the power advantage, they are not well-suited to holding large portions of the Tokyo territory.
The Serenes, on the other hand, are pretty much the opposite. We're here to solve the problem, full stop, including plans to stabilize the politics of the area, whether or not we have actual control. We're a high-morale group with a very low death rate; our concerns are very much the well-being of the locals, which would be crystal clear if they ever meet Mami. And of course, we're all about the diplomacy and cooperation.
We're the group that a lot of Tokyo will want to join, while Nagoya is the group that a lot will feel obligated to join. And if we use a light touch on the political control, I think we'd get even more who would be at least willing to ally with us, even if they don't come under our banner. Which is fine, because every independent group can provide specialization value to everyone else.
For any potential conflict between Nagoya and the Serenes... We should just do what we're trying to do with the Coalition, and everyone else — work to get them to realize the benefit of cooperating with us, and dial down the antagonisms. We can all get along, and be better off for it.
Our goal at the moment hasn't changed. Everything starts and ends with clearing Tokyo. We cannot and will not fail at that. So let's keep focus on what's needed there, and avoid labeling anyone "the enemy".
Clearly we're not supposed to compete with them, not in the way you're thinking. We've got a lot of balancing to do going forward: making ourselves look big enough to not be worth attacking or strong-arming, but small enough or weak enough that we're not an actual threat. Makes dealing with the Coalition seem so much easier.
Right; I think that was mentioned before too. It's not unfair or anything; it's just even more intimidating than I thought, because they're probably been two to three times our current size for over a year now, and not just recently grown to that size (with the attendant growing pains) like I was half-hoping.
Depends on how unrepentant they are. One thing we could do with any truly unrepentant ones would be to condemn them to living in Serena's aura, though obviously neither Mami or Serena herself would go along with that. It's this kind of growth potential that could have made Serena as powerful as the other Legendaries; it's also the kind of ruthlessness that she shies away from, which makes her weaker than the others.
Well, one reason that Nagoya might not be able to do it is because they don't have tandem charms, and thus can't teleport the demon far enough down that it can't teleport back up. OTOH we'd be giving up the cubes that the demon drops, which could be extra-bad for Class 3 cubes that will eventually "cook off" underground; that strikes me as all sorts of dangerous in the long term, so even if it were allowed we probably shouldn't try it.
There are people that think that? I certainly don't; my main issue of concern is that, if and when Tokyo does finish shaking out we're going to be sharing a long and porous border with a group that is both much larger and much more militant than the Serene; that's not a stable situation at all, even if by some miracle we end up with more than 25% as much Tokyo territory as Nagoya will get, something that is looking less and less likely now that we know how long they've been at things over in Tokyo and how many more resources they have than we do.
So far we've seen:
- Her canon abilities with ribbons and ribbon-muskets.
- Her inability to grief spiral.
- Her noticing there was something odd about the sisters-who-aren't-really-sisters.
- That time she basically saved Seto, though that might just be the manifestation of an omake bonus.
There is right now: Tokyo. My major concern is that won't be the case after the Tokyo Cleanse, and we'll be sharing a large border with a highly militaristic and expansionist faction; that's going to be our main source of conflict in the wake of Tokyo.
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What about the other way around? Like teleporting a brick wall into a demon?
But Serena was so sad, sitting neglected in the corner while everyone argued between Kesi and Homura! Serena needs a hug, too.
Ah, I thought it was only the Tokyo area that needed to be pacified. We needed a plan for all of Japan? Ouch.
Also speaking of.. I have a little omake for the trainee group. Been trying to hold off til the Nagoya stuff has finished posting, though.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
It occurs to me that, considering how Class 3 averse Nagoya is, they may be amenable to measures to prevent hostilities from breaking out between us and them after we've carved up Tokyo between us. At least before those tensions start manifesting.
I think we could probably finagle joint morale days for the tokyo parts of our organizations. This would allow our girls and theirs to socialize with each other, get to know one another as people rather than as "the other". As such it would reduce tensions, keep any group rivalries friendlier longer, and delay hostilities and incidents that would produce hostilities.
Of course, there is a hidden benefit to us: our girls will be there month after month after month while the Nagoya girls will drop like flies in comparison and our girls will be happier, and this is something the Nagoya girls are sure to notice. This means it may let us "brain drain" them.
I think we could probably finagle joint morale days for the tokyo parts of our organizations. This would allow our girls and theirs to socialize with each other, get to know one another as people rather than as "the other". As such it would reduce tensions, keep any group rivalries friendlier longer, and delay hostilities and incidents that would produce hostilities.
Of course, there is a hidden benefit to us: our girls will be there month after month after month while the Nagoya girls will drop like flies in comparison and our girls will be happier, and this is something the Nagoya girls are sure to notice. This means it may let us "brain drain" them.
We already know that a girl who is addicted to Serena's aura can survive for "minutes" outside of it, so some level of detox is possible. We also know that the most well adjusted person on Earth would not be affected by Serena's aura. So it ought to be possible to rehabilitate someone who is addicted. Obviously, these steps would require a great amount of observation in order to be performed, but you can directly measure how close someone is to dying simply by looking at their soul gem, so we ought to be able to handle this without any risk of life. The potential issues I see are:
a. It doesn't work. Serena's aura is simply too addictive for normal counseling to bring people to a level where they can survive without it.
b. It works, but it is prohibitively expensive. 20 GCU per girl or something.
Of course our teleporters can teleport items. We just watched Nagoya do it and the surprising thing was not that they were able to do it, but that they had the innovative idea of using pink balls to make sure that teleportation was safe. Teleporting conventional explosives (or barriers or whatever) has been tried by Nagoya (to a limited extent), but they haven't had access to hope bombs...
We have finished the general research on anchors. All that is needed is to cast a spell on an object and then to cast another generic spell as a shell around it. As long as you maintain that generic spell, the anchor is set and will be released as soon as the generic spell decays. This is a basic anchor, not a tandem anchor, so it doesn't require any additional research or training.
We do need extra research in order to figure out the range and effectiveness of a hope anchor in order to make it safe for meguca use in the case of a critical spiral (i.e. in order to stabilize the girl enough to teleport her to Serena). Or in order to create a slow-release version of the anchor. But if we're fighting the Beholder and we just need to teleport a bunch of hope bomb into its stomach? We can ask Serena to make those anchors right now.
There's always Police-girl (Seras from Hellsing). I'd say that she's a bit of a better fit for Nagoya than Yoko is, actually.Wasn't sure if anyone would get that reference actually. But when it came to sniper-girls who else could there be
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Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
<3
Some people can't play a decent CK2 ironman. You win, you lose, but it might as well be impossible to lose utterly when you've got a full sized kingdom.
Only thing we need first is to know whether the "hope" effect is actually a spell. For now, all we know is that it's an aura, and my default assumption is that that's a completely separate type of magical effect than anything we've dealt with yet.
The fourth one was just me fluffing an omake bonus, the rest are all connected. In the next turn you'll get another big hint. With what you have now it would be a miracle to figure it out. But with the hint plotted for next turn you'll stand decent odds of figuring it out.
Everything is connected. You judged you'd need a grand alliance to keep the area stable, but many of the groups you'd need for a grand alliance are currently at odds. You'd have to overcome those animosities.
This is something @Avalanche identified earlier. Nagoya knows better than anyone that there's too much risk in groups fighting each other. You'd have to push hard to justify the risks.
This is actually a growth in abilities from the start. Originally you couldn't teleport items without the teleporters. What they're doing here though is making a teleport charm and firing it off immediately with it only teleporting itself and not them.
The issue is that Serena's aura is an entirely passive effect, not something she intentionally triggers.
Oh I forgot about her. I never really liked Hellsing that much though so didn't occur to me.
I've always been bothered by how most empire quests are super easy mode, basically everything always goes well. You can go from iron age to scifi in a couple years in some of them. That's why this one is hard mode.
That sounds like something to go for later, but right now we could try to get them to agree to let people go if they want to join us, in return for our help in clearing our the city. Follow up by making sure that our propaganda and contact details are widely circulated.
She can probably cast hope effects as targeted spells, but her Aura would have made that redundant so it might take a research project for her to learn how.
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
I don't think people are respecting the biggest issue with Tokyo. Even with both us and Nagoya taking on huge tracts of it, we'll be doing less deliberate hunting and more peacekeeping, at least that's what I've taken from helix on the matter. Tokyo might as well be Afganistan or Iraq for all the factions in it constantly blasting at each other. After the initial recruitment, we'll have to crack down, possibly violently, on continued infighting. We may need to join Nagoya in playing impartial third party with much bigger guns to try to force some semblance of peace onto them.
Leaving yet another incomplete omake here.
Yeah, writing omakes is... kind of what I do instead of participating in rapid-fire discussion because with time constraints the way they are, it`s pretty much one or the other. Ups and downs to that, and one of the definite downs is I don't comment much. I don't think I mentioned it before, but @inverted_helix I am kind of stupidly excited about all these complications.
I know not everyone is, but I am so here for this.
Yeah, writing omakes is... kind of what I do instead of participating in rapid-fire discussion because with time constraints the way they are, it`s pretty much one or the other. Ups and downs to that, and one of the definite downs is I don't comment much. I don't think I mentioned it before, but @inverted_helix I am kind of stupidly excited about all these complications.
I know not everyone is, but I am so here for this.
What Friends Are For - Sakura Kyouko
Kyouko peeled an orange. The rind came apart dry and crumbly in her hand.
It was the unexpected collateral of a fully stocked fridge: waste. The girls had been about to throw it and its friends away before she'd claimed the bunch. Before oranges skipped past the line of edibility, they lost their juice, turned into this yellow-white pulp-textured mess that was honestly disgusting.
Didn't mean you couldn't eat them though.
She dropped the skin on the ground, pried one piece off from its neighbors, then popped it in her mouth. She made a face. Took a swig of water from the bottle. Swallowed.
Broke off another as she kept an eye on Mami's door.
It occurred to her that this could probably be considered creepy. Skipping cram school, foregoing sleep, eating half-dead snack foods as she kept obsessive tabs on someone's house while in disguise - sunglasses, hat, nothing fancy. She'd already stared down a boy that was looking at her funny, nodded to and then avoided a neighborhood patrolman and ghosted past the guard of megucas that really should have had better situational awareness. The last was something she mentally added to Sayaka's training regimen, that girl was going to get herself killed one day playing hero.
That's the road they were all headed down, mostly, but Sayaka was going down it faster than most.
She finished another piece, eyes front. Had to keep them there: when she wanted to be, Kyouko knew Mami was slick.
It was something no one else had really picked on. She'd only recently figured out why, and the answer was - Christ it was ironic.
Tomoe Mami had no friends.
Kyouko had known Mami for a while, really known her, it was why she'd given in and joined her little social experiment. Mami was good people, would probably get to see the pearly gates and everything.
She wasn't happy though.
The key thing you had to understand about Mami was that in her perfect world she wouldn't be a leader. She didn't want minions, servants, mooks - she wanted friends. She would have been happy, incredibly, probably deliriously happy, to be where Kyouko was. An older sister figure, someone to be relied on, but not deferred to.
Leadership was a ball she'd picked up because literally no one else was as good as she was. A consequence of competence, of being who she was. But leadership carried its own burden, its own distance.
So the girl who wanted friends, who wanted peers, got to be lonely at the top instead so everyone else could be happy.
It was funny. Mami'd been more honest before she became a patron saint of lost causes. Before she had become 'Mother Mami'. People needed her to be a certain person, act a certain way and she did. She was ripping her own soul out and replacing it with something called Serene.
In some ways, it was admirable. The exact opposite thing Kyouko herself had done. Selflessness instead of selfishness.
But in some ways it was the same. Kyouko could see the end of that long, winding road Mami was walking down, because, after all, she'd walked it herself. Kyouko had run herself into the ground trying to be the person she thought she was, to live down to her own expectations; Mami was... splitting as she tried to fit into enough different costumes. Compartmentalizing, to put a ten dollar word on a ten cent idea. She thought people needed her to be a certain person, act a certain way, and every person's idea of who she needed to be was different. She was losing herself to all those different masks, all those different expectations.
All because no one was willing to tell her to stop.
Friends would have. Friends stopped their friends from doing dumb shit, but here no one dared. She was not their peer, she was their leader. It was a surprisingly big diff.
Kyouko would have let this go, but if she was about to do what Kyouko thought she was going to do, then someone had let this nonsense go on for long enough.
And that someone was her. After she'd joined, she'd been a shit friend.
Kyouko ate her oranges, and watched the sun set in the reflection of Mami's door and windows.
And waited.
Kyouko peeled an orange. The rind came apart dry and crumbly in her hand.
It was the unexpected collateral of a fully stocked fridge: waste. The girls had been about to throw it and its friends away before she'd claimed the bunch. Before oranges skipped past the line of edibility, they lost their juice, turned into this yellow-white pulp-textured mess that was honestly disgusting.
Didn't mean you couldn't eat them though.
She dropped the skin on the ground, pried one piece off from its neighbors, then popped it in her mouth. She made a face. Took a swig of water from the bottle. Swallowed.
Broke off another as she kept an eye on Mami's door.
It occurred to her that this could probably be considered creepy. Skipping cram school, foregoing sleep, eating half-dead snack foods as she kept obsessive tabs on someone's house while in disguise - sunglasses, hat, nothing fancy. She'd already stared down a boy that was looking at her funny, nodded to and then avoided a neighborhood patrolman and ghosted past the guard of megucas that really should have had better situational awareness. The last was something she mentally added to Sayaka's training regimen, that girl was going to get herself killed one day playing hero.
That's the road they were all headed down, mostly, but Sayaka was going down it faster than most.
She finished another piece, eyes front. Had to keep them there: when she wanted to be, Kyouko knew Mami was slick.
It was something no one else had really picked on. She'd only recently figured out why, and the answer was - Christ it was ironic.
Tomoe Mami had no friends.
Kyouko had known Mami for a while, really known her, it was why she'd given in and joined her little social experiment. Mami was good people, would probably get to see the pearly gates and everything.
She wasn't happy though.
The key thing you had to understand about Mami was that in her perfect world she wouldn't be a leader. She didn't want minions, servants, mooks - she wanted friends. She would have been happy, incredibly, probably deliriously happy, to be where Kyouko was. An older sister figure, someone to be relied on, but not deferred to.
Leadership was a ball she'd picked up because literally no one else was as good as she was. A consequence of competence, of being who she was. But leadership carried its own burden, its own distance.
So the girl who wanted friends, who wanted peers, got to be lonely at the top instead so everyone else could be happy.
It was funny. Mami'd been more honest before she became a patron saint of lost causes. Before she had become 'Mother Mami'. People needed her to be a certain person, act a certain way and she did. She was ripping her own soul out and replacing it with something called Serene.
In some ways, it was admirable. The exact opposite thing Kyouko herself had done. Selflessness instead of selfishness.
But in some ways it was the same. Kyouko could see the end of that long, winding road Mami was walking down, because, after all, she'd walked it herself. Kyouko had run herself into the ground trying to be the person she thought she was, to live down to her own expectations; Mami was... splitting as she tried to fit into enough different costumes. Compartmentalizing, to put a ten dollar word on a ten cent idea. She thought people needed her to be a certain person, act a certain way, and every person's idea of who she needed to be was different. She was losing herself to all those different masks, all those different expectations.
All because no one was willing to tell her to stop.
Friends would have. Friends stopped their friends from doing dumb shit, but here no one dared. She was not their peer, she was their leader. It was a surprisingly big diff.
Kyouko would have let this go, but if she was about to do what Kyouko thought she was going to do, then someone had let this nonsense go on for long enough.
And that someone was her. After she'd joined, she'd been a shit friend.
Kyouko ate her oranges, and watched the sun set in the reflection of Mami's door and windows.
And waited.