Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)

[Diomedea]

[X] Pack Hunting: Magical Girls will hunt in groups vastly reducing the danger, but because they are not covering as much area their efficiency is reduced. Death is significantly less likely.
Cost: 5 Green, 2 Vets. 7 total Meguca; Reward 1.25 Grief Cubes per Meguca assigned; 10% base casualty chance

[X] Gather money, illegally: Magical Girls assigned to this role will commit crime to gather mundane currency which can be used to improve living conditions, using powers to commit simple burglaries or cheat in games of chance. Your Magical Girls have joined in search of a better life they are unlikely to much enjoy this and wish to avoid harsher crimes. You also lack connections with the criminal underworld, so the take is not all that good. There might also be complications with other criminals or the law.
Cost: 1 Elite Meguca Reward: ~$3,000 per month per Meguca assigned, but it is highly variable

[X] Gather money, legally: There are not a great number of jobs that will take young girls as workers: working as a bike courier, waitress, or maid are likely options. This project benefits from regularity, and discontinuous execution may have negative side effects. Chance of success 25% per Meguca, following up on a previous month's success brings the chance to 100%.
-[X] Current 4 keeping jobs $1,000, 2x $1,200, and $1800 guaranteed success

[X] Stipend: Giving your magical girls a small amount of money to spend on themselves. At their current level of lifestyle this no longer really further boosts their morale, but will help prevent its decay.
Cost: $50 per Meguca; Reward: Maintained morale. Chance of success: 100%

[X] Continue Maguca upkeep-1 meguca

[X] Central Dispatch, Demon Finding: Dedicating the most sensitive Veterans to snifing out demons and pointing them at others means they get much less tired and can search for longer finding more demons. Requires cellphones, only once per turn.
Cost: 2 Veteran Meguca; Reward: +25% grief cube acquisition from hunting actions, -1% hunting causality rate.

[X] Training, Pack tactics: Your Magical Girls aren't very used to working together and relying on others. They often get in each other's way and fail to support each other. Friendly fire can even occur. Working to improve their coordination will help to reduce their casualties when working together.
Cost: 2 Meguca, 1 Meguca maintenance; Reward: -4% casualty rate on Pack Hunting

[X]Training, Solo Tactics: Sometimes solo Magical Girls are taken out by surprise from their blindspots, training may help them learn to use their demon sensing ability to avoid being taken by attacks from outside of their vision.
Cost: 2 Meguca; Reward: -3% Dispersed Hunting casualty rate, -1% Pack Hunting casualty rate

[X] Investigate Demon Strength: Something has caused the demon population to grow much more dangerous, and finding out what is causing it is critical. Mami fears that they have run into the very reason magical girls are territorial by nature. She'll need to devote a good deal more veterans to scanning the territory and analyzing the demons to figure out what is wrong.
Cost: 1 Veterans; Reward: Information on cause in the increased strength of demons

[X] Ask Kyuubey about Demons: Mami realizes that if this is the reason that magical girls are naturally territorial Kyuubey will know something. Try to bribe him into revealing the issues and possible solutions.
Cost: 1 grief cubes; Reward: Limited details on demon population dynamics

I want a better life for our Magical Girls. We're already eating into our reserve this turn, so I'd like to get an extra cash boost this turn, regain our grief cube reserve next turn, then establish more legal avenues the turn after allowing us to move into a house. A single illegal money gathering mission shouldn't be too harmful, particularly if we focus on stealing already "dirty" money (Re-purpose it for great justice!). We should also increase the number of Girls to 25 if we can and then focus on starting up a front company (Magical Girl Deliveries, at your service~!).

 

[Elder Haman]

Yes I spent some time adjusting the map to add new prospective territories.

I ended up splitting it into 4 sections based on urban concentrations rather than 3. Also in evidence of how silly I can be sometimes what you thought was water was me shading an area adjacent to the ocean in blue like an idiot. I'll pick a new color and repost it shortly.

Also I'm thinking that I'll just use one color to represent independent holdings since I can't find enough colors that show up well enough on my map. The perils of a google earth based map.

Click to shrink...

Cool, it see the city under that water now. So there are four areas: West, Northwest, Northeast, and East Peninsula. I suggest you use the color red as that shows up the best.

Hmm... leaning towards Northeast and Peninsula then.

Yes I spent some time adjusting the map to add new prospective territories.
While to a degree I'm aware of that I was just mentally deeming them rural based on general density. What I might do instead is just enlarge each of the prospective territories a bit to incorporate some of that greenery.

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Yeah, that would be the simplest.

You'll find there are ways to stabilize the demon power issue with the demon investigation tasks this turn. I'm not throwing certain doom at you. This quest is about throwing some difficulty at the players and making them earn their happy ending.

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Hmm... that sounds promising. I figured we were just going to need to conquer several territories and then rotate where we hunt.

Nice that you picked up on that. You could of course tell your couriers to ease up a little. Also if you started your own business you could likely conceal their speed a bit better.

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I think I'd like to just tell them to be a bit discreet and avoid showing off when people can see them.

Another thought I had. We have teleporters and healers right?

Just as we designated a Central Dispatch, we could designate Evacuators - teleporters who are assigned to the job of evacuating girls who get into trouble/injured. Benefit is a decrease in chance of combat injuries/deaths. Maybe a death roll gets an evacuation roll to mitigate the death roll to an injury roll? Probably should apply to both Pack and Solo Hunting. Reoccurring choice just like Dispatch.

We can also designate a Medic - a healer who is assigned the job of healing injured girls. Reward would be eliminating the extra grief cube cost for healing injuries. Reoccurring choice just like Dispatch.

Of course we will have to start keeping track of what girls have teleporting or healing as wish magic.

Also, when will our 5 veterans we started with start leveling up to Elites? They've now lasted a full year which is a pretty long time.

Question: Are you tracking each of our Magical Girls individually? Or are you tracking them by classes? The 14 Greens at the start, the 2 greens we recruited turn 2, are they different classes?

Hmmm, another thought here. In "To The Stars" grief spirals can be significantly slowed down and are stopped if you remove the Soul Gem from the body (I guess the hormones in the body stop effecting the soul, and so grief spirals don't continue). Maybe that is a future possibility. Although I expect girls are going to be very unwilling to let someone take their Soul Gem. Maybe high morale prerequisites and some negative associated with that policy?

 

[Elder Haman]

[X] Pack Hunting: Magical Girls will hunt in groups vastly reducing the danger, but because they are not covering as much area their efficiency is reduced. Death is significantly less likely.
Cost: 5 Green, 2 Vets. 7 total Meguca; Reward 1.25 Grief Cubes per Meguca assigned; 10% base casualty chance

[X] Gather money, illegally: Magical Girls assigned to this role will commit crime to gather mundane currency which can be used to improve living conditions, using powers to commit simple burglaries or cheat in games of chance. Your Magical Girls have joined in search of a better life they are unlikely to much enjoy this and wish to avoid harsher crimes. You also lack connections with the criminal underworld, so the take is not all that good. There might also be complications with other criminals or the law.
Cost: 1 Elite Meguca Reward: ~$3,000 per month per Meguca assigned, but it is highly variable

snip

Click to shrink...

We don't need a cash infusion. Cash flow is not our problem. Grief cubes are the main constriction right now. We are saving money each turn right now. Once we get to enough to buy a house we can send someone else to get another legal job and then afford the upkeep.

Getting a house is a medium term goal. We need to spend our resources on the demons and hunting right now. In the meantime, just maintaining our legal income means we will have enough money for a house, probably about the time we solve the demons/territory/grief cube issues.

No reason to draw attention from the law, criminals, or take the hit to morale that illegal money operations will give us.

 

[inverted_helix]

Question: Are you tracking each of our Magical Girls individually? Or are you tracking them by classes? The 14 Greens at the start, the 2 greens we recruited turn 2, are they different classes?

Click to shrink...

I'm tracking them based on class. Right now I have a vague cheat sheet of names I've used and what class they were assigned to but only a handful of your meguca have them. I'm keeping in mind the possibility you might later end up with a lot more meguca at which point tracking their names would be a hassle. Though incidentally at this time you have 13 Greens left from the starting group, and 1 left from later recruitment.

Of course we will have to start keeping track of what girls have teleporting or healing as wish magic.

Click to shrink...

I've considered starting to do this, it would be a lot of work though and render you more vulnerable to the dice gods killing off your cores though than you are now. I'm not sure if that's a plus or a minus. It also doesn't scale as well if you ever start building up a lot of girls.

Hmmm, another thought here. In "To The Stars" grief spirals can be significantly slowed down and are stopped if you remove the Soul Gem from the body (I guess the hormones in the body stop effecting the soul, and so grief spirals don't continue). Maybe that is a future possibility. Although I expect girls are going to be very unwilling to let someone take their Soul Gem. Maybe high morale prerequisites and some negative associated with that policy?

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That runs into a how would you know this IC issue if it works at all. Though Mami knows in character that a person knocked unconscious (by various means) slows down their grief spiral to a degree, but they can die of it even unconscious and it is impossible to talk them out of it that way. So she hasn't seen it as a useful tactic.

Also, when will our 5 veterans we started with start leveling up to Elites? They've now lasted a full year which is a pretty long time.

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Veterans are just based on learning to use your powers well and gaining valuable experience with them. Elite is not based just on experience but on how much power you've got. Having trouble putting it in to words the difference in my head. Not every girl can reach the heights of Elite, you need something special from the start to get there. You'll likely pick up a couple from recruiting (like Kyouko for instance), and I'll probably award some for major milestones or critical rolls. Getting a Legendary would basically take recruiting Homura, or maybe a gift to Mami from Madokami.

Though I have been considering if I should modify how the ranks play out though, since it seems like it's a bit lacking in differential as you stack up modifiers on all of them.

No reason to draw attention from the law, criminals, or take the hit to morale that illegal money operations will give us.

Click to shrink...

You know it's really strange I expected people to go the crime lord route. You'd have been a lot wealthier by now if you had. Mind you that would have resulted in the problems you just listed.

 

[Diomedea]

We don't need a cash infusion. Cash flow is not our problem. Grief cubes are the main constriction right now. We are saving money each turn right now. Once we get to enough to buy a house we can send someone else to get another legal job and then afford the upkeep.

Getting a house is a medium term goal. We need to spend our resources on the demons and hunting right now. In the meantime, just maintaining our legal income means we will have enough money for a house, probably about the time we solve the demons/territory/grief cube issues.

No reason to draw attention from the law, criminals, or take the hit to morale that illegal money operations will give us.

Click to shrink...

We currently only take in about $800 a month. A single illegal operation pulled personally by Mami (to reduce morale hit. It's her own decision, so she's not being forced into it) will net roughly $3000, or almost four months worth of profit. A few isolated actions will also mitigate the negative responses from Yakuza/Cops, as this wont become a regular thing, just a one time boost, which will (probably) result in a 50% increase in our available cash.

 

[mastigos]

You know it's really strange I expected people to go the crime lord route. You'd have been a lot wealthier by now if you had. Mind you that would have resulted in the problems you just listed.

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What about trying to steal from criminals? How feasible would you as the DM judge that to be?

Also, things for the enchanting team to try enchanting:

• grief cubes
• still living plants (an uprooted sapling used as a staff for instance)
• rope
• (very very carefully and only with volunteers) magical girl soulstones
• Kyubey itself
• chemical weaponry (hairspray flame thrower)
• multi-person weapons to see if MG enchantments can stack. Maybe a nice long spear or battering ram.
• pillows (pillow fights are serious business)

 

[wtdtd]

Also, things for the enchanting team to try enchanting:

• grief cubes
• still living plants (an uprooted sapling used as a staff for instance)
• rope
• (very very carefully and only with volunteers) magical girl soulstones
• Kyubey itself
• chemical weaponry (hairspray flame thrower)
• multi-person weapons to see if MG enchantments can stack. Maybe a nice long spear or battering ram.
• pillows (pillow fights are serious business)

Click to shrink...

Awesome!
This will be what we research next!

 

[Hieronym]

Just speaking broadly:

No particular reason to switch out of pack hunting (not that desperate for grief cubes) but I don't think anyone did.

Given the trend of the moment, let's stay legal and keep a lid on any criminal syndicate/weird problems that will eventually appear if we start with illegal activities. In the long-run I agree that we'll need more $$$, primarily to invest in the higher end housing/business, but not right now. I'm conservative and don't want to invite more problems when we already have problems. ...and it seems we have enough cashflow to easily pay for research at the moment, so it doesn't seem like a big deal on that front. [x]-4 megucas already allocated

[x] Pay Stipend No reason not to pay stipend; plus the girls are used to it by now and we'll need that easy morale.

[x] Central Dispatch (-2 veterans): No brainer at the moment.

[x]Training: Pack Tactics is obviously necessary because of the casualties we're having and because we're unlikely to switch out of pack tactics any time soon. (-2 meguca this turn, 1 maintenance)

[x] Recruiting via Kyubey is a long-term investment that costs no girls. At the moment the biggest cap we have on anything is manpower, so using no manpower to try to get manpower seems like a good choice. We can always stop in the future if grief cubes become a problem.

The research lines feel important to me, besides the obvious [x]Investigate Demon Strength (-1 veteran) and [x]Ask Kyubey about demons (-1 cube).

Thus far that expends 6 normal megucas, 3 veterans, 2 grief cubes (too lazy to do money, but we should be net positive no matter what)

The real choice this round is to allocate the remaining 8 normal megucas, 2 veterans, and 1 elite between:
Hunting (need more cubes, they're probably our second most important resource at the moment, after manpower)
Solo Tactics (-1% to pack hunting. Not very efficient but no maintenance and might be useful if we get desperate for cubes in the future)
Enchanting Research (long-term investment, only thing here that needs veterans. Duration charge first since we already started and the reward/cost is therefore better than the other one.)

Weighing, I would say:
[x]Enchanting Research: Let's just eat the -2 veterans, -3 cubes, -$500 now for the promised: "Allow Mami's grade of enchanting to be carried by all girls" which sounds highly useful. After that, we can see if the situation stabilizes.
[x] Remaining 8 normals+Mami to Pack hunting. We need them cubes. We can solo tactics next month if we have the slots. Notice that if we had more manpower I would have done solo tactics just to get it done. (+11.25 cubes, just under 1 projected casualty)

 

[Elder Haman]

We currently only take in about $800 a month. A single illegal operation pulled personally by Mami (to reduce morale hit. It's her own decision, so she's not being forced into it) will net roughly $3000, or almost four months worth of profit. A few isolated actions will also mitigate the negative responses from Yakuza/Cops, as this wont become a regular thing, just a one time boost, which will (probably) result in a 50% increase in our available cash.

Click to shrink...

We have income of $1,000 + 2x $1,200 + $1,800 = $5,200 income
We have upkeep of - $3,000 - $400 (Apartment and cell phones)
That gives us $1,800 to work with, $1,000 of which we are giving out as a stipend.

This is a perfectly fine cash flow. Once we get more greens, we can send another one out to look for a job. I'm also not so sure that Mami acting as a criminal won't hurt her morale, and possibly team morale too. Remember how Sayaka reacted to Kyouko's activities? If we had Kyouko on the team to take on the dirty jobs it might be different...

 

[Catty Nebulart]

If we had Kyouko on the team to take on the dirty jobs it might be different...

Click to shrink...

I think putting Kyouko on those duties alone might very well damage her morale if we had her.

 

[inverted_helix]

So apparently there are now 4 different votes, lol. I'll come up with some sort of composite update if the deadlock doesn't break in another few hours.

What about trying to steal from criminals? How feasible would you as the DM judge that to be?

Click to shrink...

You can specify that but that's going to increases your issues with the criminal element and this isn't Worm with legalized vigilantism.

Also on a more amusing note I think that strengthening pillows kind of defies the point of a pillow fight.

 

[mastigos]

Also on a more amusing note I think that strengthening pillows kind of defies the point of a pillow fight.

Click to shrink...

Well that depends. Can the wish-magic that PMs run on determine that "enhancing" the pillow means "make it softer and fluffier"? It's actually a good test for if the enchantment can be context sensitive

 

[Chimeraguard]

[X] LightMage

 

[Elder Haman]

LightMage is pretty close to what I want so:

[X] LightMage

Although I will note that due to my guess on the cause of the Demon Strength that the cost of investigation decreases by 1 Vet, and the cost of asking Kyuubee by 1 grief cube. Also LightMage forgot to pay the 1 Green for the upkeep on training, so the adjustments are:

Hunting: 7 Green, 2 Veteran, 1 Mami
And only 3 grief cubes to Kyuubee instead of 4

 

[Catty Nebulart]

Also on a more amusing note I think that strengthening pillows kind of defies the point of a pillow fight.

Click to shrink...

What about making the pillows fluffier and less likely to break?

 

[inverted_helix]

Well that depends. Can the wish-magic that PMs run on determine that "enhancing" the pillow means "make it softer and fluffier"? It's actually a good test for if the enchantment can be context sensitive

Click to shrink...

What about making the pillows fluffier and less likely to break?

Click to shrink...

Well you should investigate secondary enchanting properties then

Although I will note that due to my guess on the cause of the Demon Strength that the cost of investigation decreases by 1 Vet, and the cost of asking Kyuubee by 1 grief cube. Also LightMage forgot to pay the 1 Green for the upkeep on training, so the adjustments are:

Hunting: 7 Green, 2 Veteran, 1 Mami
And only 3 grief cubes to Kyuubee instead of 4

Click to shrink...

@LightMage I'm going with this minimal set of adjustments to the lightmage plan then unless there's any change shortly.

 

[LightMage]

Heh math failure on my part. The off by one error. Something that plagues us poor programmers to no end.

Seems good.

 

[inverted_helix]

Turn 6​

The month begins a bit gloomily and you resolve to try to keep their spirits up telling them to enjoy it and distributing their allowance for the month. You also organize a few days of group exercises focusing on covering each other and reducing friendly fire. They would need each other's strength more than ever now. (-4% pack hunting casualties)

Mami decides that investigating the rising demon strength is a necessary task this month and the dispatch unit's sensing and patrols makes it suited to the task. She devotes one more girl to the task and assigns them to go around the city not just sensing demons and directing girls to them, but making further observations and reaching deeper with their mystical senses. They are not just to detect them but observe them from stealth and see how they act.

None of the girls are particularly stealthy, but neither do demons tend to be observant so it proves a fairly simple task to observe them without fighting. Their observations are interesting. Demons are far more fluid than they expected. Conceptually they had heard that demons were the result of negative human emotions, but in a magical girl's usual fights with them they tended to be quite physically solid. Observation for longer periods than the space of a usual fight though let them see that demons forms are quite mutable. The demons spring into existence seemingly from nothing and often fall into infighting against each other in the absence of magical girls to unite against. The demons seem to change form slowly all the time, but the majority of them seen now are rather well adapted to facing the normal strategies of Mami's group despite the fact that the girls have been sweeping areas completely of demons rather than leaving some alive.

The veterans also observe that during the time taken at the start of the month for training the demons general form seemed to adjust to combat each other more effectively to some degree rather than magical girls, although this effect was minor enough that it took extensive notes and observation to detect. Observing fights directly reveals to the sharpest mystical senses paying close attention that at the death of a demon some sort of ripple propagates.

Mami also requests some information and assistance from Kyuubey who complies for a few grief cubes. He states that it is the observation of the Incubators that demons appear in places where there are concentrations of humans based on the negativity thereof. In general it takes the negativity of a vast number of humans to fuel enough demons to provide for a magical girl safely. The quality of life for the humans in question tends to make surprisingly little difference in the number of demons produced, but Incubators lack sufficient understanding of magic and emotion to explain why. They have some theories though. He then diverts without expanding on that statement. (-3 grief cubes)

Typically it takes at least around 20,000 to 25,000 humans to support a magical girl sustainably, he estimates that Mami's territory is only sufficient to provide 20 grief cubes a month safely. It is this which drives magical girls to be territorial. A sufficiently large demon population remains adapted to infighting, while too heavy a magical girl intervention drives adaptation to fighting them instead.

These adaptations occur far more rapidly than normal evolution can justify and in spite of efforts that would prevent normal evolution such as eliminating entire populations via orbital bombardment to eliminate not just the existent demon population but the human population from which it was derived. When a new human population was relocated into the area the demons that appeared displayed their previous adaptations along with some new ones designed towards dealing with the weaponry used before, if not sufficiently to be effective. The Incubators have largely given up on determining the cause. Mami was quite glad she'd asked Kyuubey about this privately and had him leave before she said anything she might regret.

Kyuubey returned a few days later with a freshly contracted girl eager to join Mami's group.

When Mami had shook off her malaise from the conversation with Kyuubey and finished the new training she'd organized to get the girls to work together better she lead them on a smaller hunt this month with much more caution than last month. There were a few close calls but with their new training and an extra dose of caution everyone was able to make it through the month safely. (+22 grief cubes)

Unfortunately one of the couriers besides Akeno wrecked their bicycle this month and had to pay for it. She also seems to have drawn a bit more suspicion by the fact that the bicycle was reduced scrap metal in a canal and she showed up for work the next day fully healed. Kyuubey advises you to be more careful as he was forced to modify the memories of the courier manager in order to preserve secrecy. (+$5000)

This month three of your original green magical girls have reached the point that they can proudly call themselves veterans. Amazingly with the safe hunt and no major problems in any of the girls lives it seems there weren't any grief spirals this month.


________________________________________________________________________________________
Resources

• 12 Green Meguca, 8 Veteran Meguca, 1 Elite Meguca (Mami)
  • 1 Meguca upkeep on demon finding training (+20% grief cubes)
  • 1 Meguca upkeep on pack tactics (-4% pack hunting)
  • 2 Veterans upkeep on dispatch service (+25% grief cubes, -1% hunting)
• Grief Cubes 20
• Money: $6750
  • $400 upkeep on cellphones (-2% solo hunting)
  • $3000 upkeep on apartments
• Morale: [Medium] With three girls making it to veteran status and no deaths or even notable injuries this month there was quite the resurgence in spirits. Though there is some concern about grief cube supplies.
• Assets
  • Tiny household shrine: Somewhat reduces losses to morale from deaths.
  • Basic Shields: -2% Casualties
  • Basic General Combat Training: -2% Casualties (May decay with losses or recruitment).
• Mitakihara Demon Status: Strong

Turn 7 Options

Spoiler: Demon Hunting, Specify amount dedicated

[] Dispersed Hunting: Magical Girl will individually hunt demons throughout your territory and gather the grief cubes for the central supply. This can be dangerous.
Cost: Variable, specify number of Meguca dedicated; Reward: 2 grief cubes per Meguca assigned. 20% base casualty (significant injury or death) chance.


[] Pack Hunting: Magical Girls will hunt in groups vastly reducing the danger, but because they are not covering as much area their efficiency is reduced. Death is significantly less likely.
Cost: Variable, specify number of Meguca dedicated; Reward 1.25 Grief Cubes per Meguca assigned; 10% base casualty chance

Spoiler: Money Gathering, Specify amount dedicated

[] Gather money, illegally: Magical Girls assigned to this role will commit crime to gather mundane currency which can be used to improve living conditions, using powers to commit simple burglaries or cheat in games of chance. Your Magical Girls have joined in search of a better life they are unlikely to much enjoy this and wish to avoid harsher crimes. You also lack connections with the criminal underworld, so the take is not all that good. There might also be complications with other criminals or the law.
Cost: Variable, specify number of Meguca dedicated; Reward: ~$3,000 per month per Meguca assigned, but it is highly variable


[] Gather money, legally: There are not a great number of jobs that will take young girls as workers: working as a bike courier, waitress, or maid are likely options. This project benefits from regularity, and discontinuous execution may have negative side effects. Chance of success 25% per Meguca, following up on a previous month's success brings the chance to 100%.
Cost: Variable, specify number of Meguca dedicated; Reward: $1,000 per month per Meguca assigned. (For current 4 keeping jobs $1,000, 2x $1,200, and $1800 guaranteed success.)

Spoiler: Money Spending

[] Improve Housing: More Apartments: Currently the girls are packed in around 5 to an apartment. You could get some more apartments and reduce the crowding.
Cost: $6,000 and 1 Veteran Meguca; Reward Normal Apartment minimum housing level (for up to 25 Meguca), ongoing cost +3000$ per month or you get kicked out. Payable at the begining of the month. (not repeatable)

[] Improve Housing: Small house: Instead of a dinky apartment you could pool your resources for a small house, giving everyone a bit more room. Will still be quite a few people per bedroom, but gives more of a feeling of home.
Cost: $10,000 and 3 Veteran Meguca; Reward Cramped Small House instead of homeless as minimum housing level (for up to 25 Meguca), ongoing cost 5000$ per month or you get kicked out. Payable at the begining of the month. (not repeatable)

[] Stipend: Giving your magical girls a small amount of money to spend on themselves. At their current level of lifestyle this no longer really further boosts their morale, but will help prevent its decay.
Cost: $50 per Meguca; Reward: Maintained morale. Chance of success: 100%

[] Increased Stipend: Giving the girls more money will further improve their morale a little bit.
Cost: $100 per Meguca; Reward: Increased morale. Chance of success: 100%

[] Start your own business: It will take more than a bit of creativity to start a real business, and some significant startup funds. You'd likely also need some help from Kyuubey to cover up the details with some false identies. It would provide a much greater ability to rotate girls through the roles though and more flexibility in how much to provide each month as well though.
Cost: 20,000, 4 grief cubes, 3 Veteran Meguca; Reward: Your own business, more ability to rotate roles, slowly increasing income starting below the current legal income but able to go higher. Chance of Success: 60% (future attempts build on this and are only ¼ the resource cost)

Spoiler: Training

[] Central Dispatch, Demon Finding: Dedicating the most sensitive Veterans to snifing out demons and pointing them at others means they get much less tired and can search for longer finding more demons. Requires cellphones, only once per turn.
Cost: 2 Veteran Meguca; Reward: +30% grief cube acquisition from hunting actions, -1% hunting causality rate.

[]Training, Solo Tactics: Sometimes solo Magical Girls are taken out by surprise from their blindspots, training may help them learn to use their demon sensing ability to avoid being taken by attacks from outside of their vision.
Cost: 2 Meguca; Reward: -3% Dispersed Hunting casualty rate, -1% Pack Hunting casualty rate

[]Training, Raise Veteran: Raise one of the Green Girls to be a veteran
Cost: 3 Meguca, 1 Veteran Meguca; Reward: Raises one Green Meguca to veteran status.

Spoiler: Miscellaneous

[] Enchanting, Secondary Properties: Further investigate the secondary properties that individual materials exhibit. Including buying some simple tools to test more properties.
Cost:2 months of: 2 Veteran Meguca, 1 Grief Cube, $1000; Reward: Information on deeper effects of enchanting.

[] Enchanting, Duration/Charge: It was noticed that the effects of enchanting rapidly faded when the object was set down. Also the stronger magical girls could produce somewhat greater effects. Perhaps you could investigate ways to extend the charge period, or allow Mami to charge effects that other girls could maintain so that others might benefit from the stronger characteristics she could imbue.
Cost:1 month remaining of: 2 Veteran Meguca, 3 Grief Cube, $500; Reward: Allow Mami's grade of enchanting to be carried by all girls, step towards long term enchantments.

[] Demon strength meter: It should be possible to compose a set of guidelines and record keeping standards to allow you to more accurately gauge the current strength of the demon population.
Cost: 1 Veteran, 1 Green; 1 Green upkeep; Reward: Demon strength listed as a specific number (the modifier to the casualty rate) so long as some sensing action is done that month (currently the dispatch action)

[] Scout Area X: You can deploy a veteran to scout out one of the territories around you stealthily. They should be able to gauge the demon strength there and the magical girls status there without tipping them off, hopefully.
Cost: 1 Veteran; Chance of success: 70%; Reward: information on demon strength, support capacity of the territory, and status of current magical girls in the territory, bonus to diplomatic efforts.

[] Expand territory X, by force: The demons in Mitakihara have grown strong, but you could try to take over adjacent territories where they aren't as strong. The magical girls in those areas probably won't take kindly to this.
Cost: PvP combat; Reward: New territory with weaker demons

[] Expand territory X, by diplomacy: If you can convince them to join your group you may be able to safely incorporate others' territories. (Replaces normal recruitment option)
Cost: 1 Green, 1 Veteran; Reward: Meguca from territory recruited, new territory; Chance of Success: 30% (Mami bonus applicable)

[] Recruitment, via Kyuubey: Ask Kyuubey to tell other Magical Girls in the area about you. He'll want something in return though, and he makes no promises of the efficacy.
Cost: 2 grief cubes; Reward: 1-3 girls; Chance of success: 50%

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I'm going to post this now that I've completed the writeup since it was a lot longer than usual. I'll edit in the options for the next turn in a while. I just want to get this up asap since it was so delayed. Came off a little worse than my standard I think but really want to keep the quest moving.

A really high roll on the grief spiral roll and no low rolls on hunting this month made for a quick turnaround from your condition last month.

Edit: Options added.

 

[mastigos]

@inverted_helix do demons drop grief cubes when they kill eachother? Because I could see a strategy revolving around leading demons to other demons and then just scooping up the spoils

 

[Diomedea]

The demons get stronger due to over-hunting? Ah...that's unfortunate. We need to take a look at the nearby territories and hope one of them has a low Magical Girl to Demon ratio. 20,000-25,000 humans per magical girl? That implies that there exists between 280,000-350,000 Magical Girls. A lot of those humans may be living in areas not dense enough to support demons, so roughly 250,000 Magical Girls world-wide for maximum grief harvesting. There should be about 5000 Magical Girls in Japan alone. Fun.

Hmmmm, we can only safely harvest 20 cubes per month, and we need around 25ish per month currently. At least we still have a nice stockpile that should last us for a bit if we decide to limit hunting.

Ah, Incubator. Your experiments with the orbital bombardment of your client race is so cute!

 

[inverted_helix]

A lot of those humans may be living in areas not dense enough to support demons, so roughly 250,000 Magical Girls world-wide for maximum grief harvesting. There should be about 5000 Magical Girls in Japan alone. Fun.

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I thought it a fairly reasonable ratio myself. 250,000 world wide might seem like a lot, but it's not really that large compared to the human population. (I also wanted to have a reasonable number of meguca in your starting city so I couldn't have the ratio be too much higher. I think the ratio in TTS was 1 in 10,000.)

Also you misunderstand a little bit on my explanation of demon densities. A smaller group of humans will still produce demons occasionally, but not enough for a magical girl to live off of. With rural populations you'd need to cover a massive amount of territory to sustain yourself. So you might get by being a nomad, though it's a much riskier lifestyle since you run into the danger of dry spells. And you can't really prevent other magical girls from having swept your path before you got there.

@inverted_helix do demons drop grief cubes when they kill eachother? Because I could see a strategy revolving around leading demons to other demons and then just scooping up the spoils

Click to shrink...

No this has not been observed. Though there are other ways you can use this information to mitigate the effects.

 

[Diomedea]

Snip

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Ah, I think you took me the wrong way. I didn't mean to imply that the number was too high or anything. I actually thought it was rather reasonable, and was just doing the math for informative purposes (mainly to see what Mami's group is compared to the whole of Japan's MG population). As for the country thing, I was assuming something like that was going on, actually, but I decided to round down to 250,000 rather than choose 300,000 as my nice round number (which, given MG turnover in 'easier' areas like cities, I imagine rural, nomadic MG girls mostly die like flies so 300,000 didn't seem as reasonable).

 

[inverted_helix]

Ah I see. And yes rural nomadic meguca do tend to die like flies. They also have even more trouble grouping up since with the huge amount of area it can take them to hunt from it becomes even more infeasible to cover twice as much with two people moving together. Unless they have some sort of high end wish given movement ability. Though Incubators simply contract more girls to make up the extra losses so the number stays relatively stable.

 

[mastigos]

@inverted_helix how do demons affect the human population? Particularly in the rural areas where a demon doesn't have to worry much about magical girls or competing demons

 

[inverted_helix]

@inverted_helix how do demons affect the human population? Particularly in the rural areas where a demon doesn't have to worry much about magical girls or competing demons

Click to shrink...

Steadily increasing emotional negativity leading to eventual skyrocketing suicide rates. They can't kill as directly as witches could, but given time they can depopulate a village, though they don't have the exponential growth potential that witches do. Nomadic magical girls are critical to preventing the collapse of human agriculture as a result.

Also doing a surprising amount of world building, a bit worried about how people feel about it (if I'm making it too much of an original world as opposed to PMMM/TTS) but I'm filling in details that I feel like were largely lacking anyways. I mean what happened in PMMM canon with witches in rural areas? It would face the same population density issues for supporting a full time magical girl they do in this case, but there the witch population could grow out of control exponentially and eventually hit a city like a tidal wave overwhelming defenders.