Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
- Thread starter inverted_helix
- Start date
Okay, I'll get working on it again.
Been thinking about it actually.
Basically I think we need to develop a scouting plan, and then it should be ready for voting.
Oh and I need to flesh out the concert plan.
Been thinking about it actually.
Basically I think we need to develop a scouting plan, and then it should be ready for voting.
Oh and I need to flesh out the concert plan.
I'm still here too and still interested.
I had trouble voting even when the plans were normal, so, uh, I don't have much to contribute. Every time I want to post I feel like I should have an omake ready, but time's short on my end. =3=;
I had trouble voting even when the plans were normal, so, uh, I don't have much to contribute. Every time I want to post I feel like I should have an omake ready, but time's short on my end. =3=;
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
We love you FixerUpper, new omakes or no new omakes. You've probably done more to nail down the culture of the SIMP than any other single poster in the thread. Helix possibly included.
I wouldn't go that far, but thanks. :3
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Here is a vote tally to signal my continued interest.
Vote tally:
##### 3.19
[x] Plan 36a
No. of votes: 2
Kinematics, Powerofmind
[x] Plan Maintain and Train
No. of votes: 1
boonerunner
It seems like Kinematics is ahead.
Vote tally:
##### 3.19
[x] Plan 36a
No. of votes: 2
Kinematics, Powerofmind
[x] Plan Maintain and Train
No. of votes: 1
boonerunner
It seems like Kinematics is ahead.
- Location
- A friendly desert community
[X] Plan 36a
I do too.
I do too.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
If I'm honest, it's hard to figure how I could move the quest forward at this point. I had some vague ideas for another 2-3 arcs. Essentially testing combat skills, creativity, and diplomacy not necessarily in that order. I had plans to expand on the nature of the incubators and the demons as parts of two of the arcs, and the nature of the metaphysics of the setting. Two of the three arcs I planned were already foreshadowed. Though from this quest I've learned that my way of thinking is at such a non-Euclidean angle from normal people that I probably would have scrapped the diplomatic arc entirely just to save everyone some hassle.
But I let players get a bit too convoluted in their thinking in the first place I suspect. Which made the quest exponentially more complex in a way that no one could really handle. And now I'm not even sure how I could convert it into something simpler. I wrote the quest in the fashion I did in large part because it allowed me to offload creative elements on to the player base. I didn't have to think up every solution, just create problems and let you solve them. Traditional CKII empire quests I could never manage because it calls upon the writer having all the creativity. And quite frankly my creativity is minimal, I tend more towards numbers.
I could probably write up the next turn based on the current plan, write up the results of your major climatic battle of the arc even. But it doesn't resolve the underlying issue that the original format can't scale with group size, and that I failed to plan for your success. If I'm honest I planned for the quest to end in you all dying miserably long before this point. You know, except Mami who had a worse fate in store than Madokami heaven.
But I let players get a bit too convoluted in their thinking in the first place I suspect. Which made the quest exponentially more complex in a way that no one could really handle. And now I'm not even sure how I could convert it into something simpler. I wrote the quest in the fashion I did in large part because it allowed me to offload creative elements on to the player base. I didn't have to think up every solution, just create problems and let you solve them. Traditional CKII empire quests I could never manage because it calls upon the writer having all the creativity. And quite frankly my creativity is minimal, I tend more towards numbers.
I could probably write up the next turn based on the current plan, write up the results of your major climatic battle of the arc even. But it doesn't resolve the underlying issue that the original format can't scale with group size, and that I failed to plan for your success. If I'm honest I planned for the quest to end in you all dying miserably long before this point. You know, except Mami who had a worse fate in store than Madokami heaven.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
As has been said, I'm not sure how true that is. Originally you only had 3 categories of meguca to keep track of, while now there's like, 30 with all the different training levels and such. I think if you went back to just abstracting everything to the 4 core categories (Green, Vet, Elite, Legendary) with exceptions only for things that really need it (like Serena's retinue), then it should scale up pretty well. In this case, stuff like training time would be needed, but everybody who is part of the organization gets the buffs even before training completes, just to save paperwork on your end and keep mecuga fungible.
But if you really feel like you can't salvage the quest, the beholder fight is a decent place to end things, either in defeat at it's hands, or in a victory that establishes us as the most powerful group in Japan.
Nolrai
weak to fangs
- Location
- Porltand
Hmm, I did not notice this.
I spent like 20 pages in an argument with players about motivations I felt reasonable but were seemingly incomprehensible to everyone else. At that point it's pretty recognizable that I'm the one that isn't particularly normal in thinking.
One major thing I considered was eliminating all the nuances of hunting. Boil it down and calculate 3 values essentially. An underhunt, an overhunt, and a sustained hunt, calculate how many meguca you need per territory doing that, and how many cubes you get per territory for each. Then offer only those three options as hunting each turn. Then any future hunting modifiers would be tiny modifiers onto those coefficients. That would eliminate like 75% of the mathematics.
But the underlying problem is not as you believe having too many different meguca types. In the majority of cases that hardly matters, it only matters in some extreme planning cases. The problem fundamentally is that the system didn't scale with more units.
Each unit you got meant you could potentially take another action slot. This leads to an endless number of actions and also running out of things to do with them. And that's death as an empire quest. If you have an empire quest where players are able to do everything they want and have units to spare as a QM you've failed. And that's what happened here. You got enough units that you no longer had enough things to do each time.
That's what killed the quest in my eyes, and despite a lot of thinking I cannot conceive of a solution. I solved the plans being too complicated problem with the idea of 3 hunting versions and no nuances with just a little thought. What I couldn't solve is that the players didn't have enough to do.
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- Location
- America
Honestly, if you feel like the old hunting system is broken, then reworking it isn't bad. I would actually recommend it.
In any case, we would probably fine with doing some slice of life stuff for a while. Get the new girls fully settled in. Get the finances sorted out. The mundane sort of thing. Then when you feel up for it, you can throw an event at us.
Just popping in to respond; I still am too busy to give this Quest the time and attention is both deserves and demands, but I have been paying attention as often as I'm able.
Let's look at the Nagoya situation, for example. Now, when you as the QM started creating the quest you probably came into it thinking about how to expand the world to cover the major metropolitan areas of Japan and the world, or at least it came to you eventually. But, to us players, the idea of trying to look beyond the narrow confines of the map we were looking at was basically a waste of time, especially since for the first two years of turns there was a massive 30% chance of failure to even glance at our nearest neighbors, and for the longest time we've had something like 80-88% of our meguca's actions dictated to us through mandatory jobs, training upkeep and hunting outlays. Speculating about meguca activity in Nagoya or Tokyo was, to us, about as useful as speculating about meguca activity in America, or about Incubator-made human colonies on other star systems.
That isn't to say that we didn't speculate about such things, but, just like how members of neighborhood gangs in Los Angeles never travel beyond the few blocks of their territory for most of their lives, we never really thought about trying to drive through hostile territory just to scout far beyond our borders when we had so many more pressing things to do back at home. It's the difference between reacting to a situation that's presented to us and being the one to create the situation in the first place.
Well, in some ways this is true, I guess, but I'd say the problem is less that your mode of thinking is so alien as it is that we as players have to think about this quest fundamentally differently than you do when you're creating it.
Let's look at the Nagoya situation, for example. Now, when you as the QM started creating the quest you probably came into it thinking about how to expand the world to cover the major metropolitan areas of Japan and the world, or at least it came to you eventually. But, to us players, the idea of trying to look beyond the narrow confines of the map we were looking at was basically a waste of time, especially since for the first two years of turns there was a massive 30% chance of failure to even glance at our nearest neighbors, and for the longest time we've had something like 80-88% of our meguca's actions dictated to us through mandatory jobs, training upkeep and hunting outlays. Speculating about meguca activity in Nagoya or Tokyo was, to us, about as useful as speculating about meguca activity in America, or about Incubator-made human colonies on other star systems.
That isn't to say that we didn't speculate about such things, but, just like how members of neighborhood gangs in Los Angeles never travel beyond the few blocks of their territory for most of their lives, we never really thought about trying to drive through hostile territory just to scout far beyond our borders when we had so many more pressing things to do back at home. It's the difference between reacting to a situation that's presented to us and being the one to create the situation in the first place.
Heh, and here I was thinking the exact opposite. We've finally had our equivalent of the Industrial Revolution: Improved Rotating Tactics and higher-paying jobs have collectively finally freed up close to a third of our workforce, so we can finally (at least if and when this whole Class 4 demon thing has been dealt with) start working on our other large problems, which we've mostly been ignoring because we've been living hand-to-mouth since Day 1:
- Many of our older vets are graduating from high school, which means
- We have to worry about college for some of them.
- We have to worry about the fact that they still look like they're 13-14 when they ought to look like they're 18-19.
- Working on more fundamental issues with the nature of magic and how to do more than just spam Wish-related powers over and over.
- Exporting our philosophy of "Nobody dies" to other groups.
- Dealing with the neighbors who still hate our guts.
- Growing pains in our expanding organization.
- Being a regional power broker.
- Figuring out WTF is up with Mami's weird abilities.
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You make some fair points, but at times GMing this quest really did make me feel like a total alien.
Heh, this bit amuses me for some reason. I recall towards the start of the quest that someone said they were hoping this quest wouldn't deal with aliens like TTS. And I have given a couple thoughts to what other Incubator farm worlds might look like. Though I expected that each one would have some significant differences from Earth personally. But I had no intention of any other planets ever showing up in the quest.
To some degree this is true. And indeed it was intentional that this quest had parallels to the agricultural revolution (it preceded the industrial revolution and it allowing people to move to the cities is what sparked the industrial revolution). Rotating tactics was meant as a mirror of crop rotation.
The problem was as I said that I was cheating in writing this quest by offloading creativity to players. Effectively compensating for being a numbers driven rather than imagination driven person by outsourcing. But the last plans had somewhere between 10 and 40 excess units that weren't even doing anything. Players creativity as to what to do with their units dried up. Those new jobs the industrial revolution should have created didn't come about, so the quest died. Like if you have an industrial revolution and eliminate huge numbers of jobs via factories but never created the white collar jobs to replace them the civilization would die (when all those displaced workers decide to fight instead of just starve to death). Similarly when I see those daunting numbers of unused points, the civ quest dies.
Honestly number 1 is probably the best idea yet. And could really help me push things along again. I could reign in your resource issues using those factors. Oh you want to go to college, huge costs. Not aging is a problem because you'll need to research being able to keep things under wraps permanently and pay huge cube costs per girl that steadily increase as more girls age into issues.
2. is just spam research options, but I was too generous before in broad research results, I should have been more limited from the start.
3. Hahah diplomacy sucks, honestly I hate writing it because every time in this quest I've tried to write diplomacy I end up feeling like an alien.
4. Well theoretically you do have a numbers advantage over the neighbors that hate your guts.
5. Honestly this is one of my biggest mistakes. I should have imposed a much larger tax on you guys in meguca months from dealing with all these girls that don't know your organization, much larger inefficiencies and graft.
6. Loops back to the diplomacy issue.
7. Heh, I had fun with that. It's interesting to come up with a coherent underlying ability and then just show people the results through the whole story without ever saying what it really was. That was probably one of the better ideas I had in this quest.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Honestly, I wouldn't be too saddened by this going into a finale and epilogue. After all, there's never going to be a true ending to all this, just life going forward. Maybe it IS better to end the story with a climactic battle to save Tokyo from a giant monster and ensure our place as a large-scale group.
Or die, because that is an option with something as dangerous as the Class 4.
- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
So, I've been reading through this quest, having bumped into it on the front page. That said, I noticed it had been some time since the update, and thus was concerned. As it turns out, clearly there's an issue of some sort.
What I'm seeing is mostly that -- regardless of counterarguments -- you're seeing a bunch of issues with the quest as it stands that kill your enjoyment of it. Importantly, you're already referring to the quest as dead. While I understand that people want to see this continue, there's honestly not much to be done on our part when you -- the QM -- is handing out the time of death. That said, you're clearly sad to see it go, and there's quite apparently a large community of players that don't want this to die. Personally I'd like this to continue -- I've been pinging with ideas ever since I started reading, and that's only intensified the more I've read. You've created a fascinating idea and a wonderful quest. I would have loved to be a part of it.
If you are at all interested in continuing this quest, there are a few options -- not mutually exclusive ones, either.
- Find a co-QM to handle the creativity loads. Not every quest is run by one person. In fact, some of the most successful ones I've seen are collaborations. This would lead to somebody else handling the diplomacy stuff if you feel particularly alienated by it in addition to having somebody to help figure out plot threads. That said, some people are reluctant to share the quest they made, and that usually is an indicator of personality clashes waiting to happen -- and if anything kills a quest, those do.
- As a possible variation, find somebody to be an ideas fountain. Not someone to outright run the quest with, just somebody you can trust to reliably come up with new ideas as for what to do. Given that you're already outsourcing to the players for creativity, I imagine the person for this is already here somewhere. In fact, with your current approach this could just be as simple as deepening the outsourcing you already do. That said, at this point you don't really get somebody helping at all with diplomacy given the smaller level of involvement.
- Re-boot, try again. One thing you've touched on is an issue with growing pains with the very mechanics. That said, it can be daunting to implement an overhaul mid-stream. So, you could make a threadmark here with a link to a new thread, and start over from the beginning there with some bugfixes implemented. Has the problem of burning the world to the ground, but there's something to be said for recapturing the old magic. Can alienate players who don't care to see all their effort reset.
- Quest adoption. For when you just don't think you can do it anymore. Sometimes, you're just tired. Now, this one can be hard since not everybody is okay with handing the quest over to somebody else, but there have been some great success stories where a motivated member of the fanbase steps forward to take the reigns when the QM runs out of steam. This one is basically throwing the dice on a new QM, but nobody can say you didn't do something to keep it alive.
- Brute-force it. You have issues with how it's going; you're the omnipotent god of this particular universe. Make the issues not exist anymore. Just re-tool the quest to focus on the things that are fun for you. The possible problems here are obvious; the players are here for the quest as-is, after all.
- Turn the problems into assets. In the Industrial Revolution you had riots when tech replaced workers but no more sedentary jobs became available quickly enough. Currently, the quest has a job shortfall. Most jobs are trivialized because of this since the players can bury them in bodies with more left over, and haven't felt a pressure to build out wide or tall in a way that demands more people to assign. Since you list this as the biggest single problem, make it work for you instead of against you. As you said, we have 10-40 excess "units" (people?) that aren't doing anything, while their "sisters" fight, die, and provide for them. Even in as individualistic a society as the United States that would be a distressing position to be in, let alone Japan. Maybe excess units have doubled grief cube usage as a result of just sitting there while the others go out and -- as has been the case lately -- lay down their lives. Hit our GCU stockpile and the players will find something, I assure you. As it stands, I don't see a lack of creativity, just a lack of incentive to bring that creativity to bear. This isn't the only thing you could do; it's just what I would probably do in your shoes. At the end of the day, it just has to be something. Like you said, there are no consequences for those excess units just sitting there. So...make there be one. This option is probably the best bet for preserving the quest in its present form.
Have you considered the answer here might be more abstraction? Because you are completely right; the game as it currently stands can not handle our current numbers let alone our the predicted numbers (~1,000 IIRC) we are looking at Post-Tokyo.
Thing is that is perfectly fine. Up until now Mami has basically being directly managing a lot of the Serene's functions, and for a small organization that works, but it's not sustainable going forwards. My suggestion would be to, both in and out of character, have the Serene undergo a restructuring Post-Tokyo to better handle it's explosive growth in size.
I would start by cutting our current rank system back down to your basic Green/Veteran/Elite/Legendary. Then I would add a new rank between Veteran and Elite:
- Leaders - The rare Puella who are, through either natural talent or experience, capable of commanding large groups of their peers. I'll expand more on these later.
That said I'm not throwing away all the Wish Magic stuff. Instead I'm suggesting that at the scales we are going to be working at one Veteran's wish magic isn't going to be a significant effect. Instead I suggest that Wish Magic, or any non-wish related specialties, only provide a material benefit at the Leader and above ranks.
With that bit of background out of the way lets move onto the restructuring itself. This would mostly depend upon what specific kind of structure we chose but for now I'm assuming a clan like structure since we've discussed such a system previously. Each clan would headed up by a Leader rank Puella and Mami would deal with them rather then directly with the clan's individual members. We'd effectively treat each clan as a unit to be assigned, much like we currently do with Meguca-Months.
The effectiveness of each clan would be determined by how many Veterans and Greens are members of it, plus what (if any) benefit it's Leader provides. I say members because generally speaking I don't see us removing girls from their clans since the whole point of the clan system was to maintain the close family like feel we currently have.
Now odds are with something like a 1,000 Meguca we'd have way too many girls. Even with clans of say 20 girls we'd still be looking at fifty clans to assign actions. Fortunately I have an answer to this; continual actions.
It's quite safe to assume that we aren't going to randomly close down a restaurant or stop making deliveries in an area so any clan assigned to such an action is going to keep doing it until something significant happens. If we say one clan per restaurant and for couriers one per 200km^2 (10km^2 per girl at 20 per clan) that comes to something like 27 clans right there. I don't remember the exact numbers for farming but I imagine we could lock down a significant number there as well.
- Location
- Head in the clouds
I think another piece with the creativity aspect is that we have been focused on Tokyo upon realization that it's a ticking time bomb. The refugees bleeding into other territories, the demons, our population explosion with the affect on our GC stockpile and just so many greens.
Our group is very civilian oriented as we've seen with our lack of elites. Everything that isn't essential or currently an emergency has been put on the back burner. So with us going to war, the old imagery of fields being left untendeded while the war horns bellow appear to apply.
Our group is very civilian oriented as we've seen with our lack of elites. Everything that isn't essential or currently an emergency has been put on the back burner. So with us going to war, the old imagery of fields being left untendeded while the war horns bellow appear to apply.