The year is 1891, and the engine of Progress in the world has surged forth ceaselessly in the past two decades. The sound of constant construction rings out in every city in the world, steel mills churning out the bones of the modern world and coal mines providing the blood. Every year some fantastical new technology changes life for the better and upends the old ways of doing things as soon as it's adopted. Massive advanced airships ply the skies, an aeronautical corps the logical next step after ocean shipping. Clockwork machines do hard labor, freeing men to educate and improve themselves. The deeply strange phenomena of electricity, radium ores, and exotic rays are just beginning to be probed by the world's most daring scientists, and news of these investigations are carried into the homes of the wealthy by invisible wireless transmissions.
The ominous news of a summer with temperatures a full fifteen degrees cooler than usual has put the whole world off-guard, however. It's a 'climate anomaly' that scientists are struggling to explain, and so far none of the theories you've read hold up to actual scrutiny. But something about it has you worried... Crop failures are all but certain, and when the food is gone chaos is soon to follow. You've already bought up large amounts of food to tide over your employees for this winter, but what if it gets worse?
Surely this climate anomaly won't last for multiple years. Every major scientific publication is proclaiming that things will probably go back to normal next year.
But what if it doesn't?
What if it lasts for years? What if it gets worse?
This quest is pretty much entirely inspired by the Sole Survivors quest on QuestionableQuesting, by ShaperV. Huge shout out to them, for the inspiration and most of the worldbuilding - they've already done a lot of my work for me.
I'm borrowing the overall format, most of the worldbuilding (most of which is inspired by the game Frostpunk), and a lot of the mechanics, and a lot of the background info. Maybe a bit too much is borrowed, to be honest, but I figure it's probably fine. I'm not going to go out of my way to invent new stuff when there's ideas that already look pretty good in front of me.
I don't know what ShaperV's overall plan for the story was, but I have my own overall plan, and it's one that doesn't depend on me doing lots of math, which has always been a quest-killer for me even when I invent neat systems that involve numbers, as I sometimes seem to be compelled to do. This'll be more narrative focused than, say, Industrialization Quest - you'll be making strategic level decisions, not trying to figure out the plan that makes the numbers the biggest.
The year is 1891, and the engine of Progress in the world has surged forth ceaselessly in the past two decades. The sound of constant construction rings out in every city in the world, steel mills churning out the bones of the modern world and coal mines providing the blood. Every year some fantastical new technology changes life for the better and upends the old ways of doing things as soon as it's adopted. Massive advanced airships ply the skies, an aeronautical corps the logical next step after ocean shipping. Clockwork machines do hard labor, freeing men to educate and improve themselves. The deeply strange phenomena of electricity, radium ores, and exotic rays are just beginning to be probed by the world's most daring scientists, and news of these investigations are carried into the homes of the wealthy by invisible wireless transmissions.
The ominous news of a summer with temperatures a full fifteen degrees cooler than usual has put the whole world off-guard, however. It's a 'climate anomaly' that scientists are struggling to explain, and so far none of the theories you've read hold up to actual scrutiny. But something about it has you worried... Crop failures are all but certain, and when the food is gone chaos is soon to follow.
You've already bought up several thousand tons of food, to be kept secreted away in out-of-the-way warehouses on four different continents. But that's barely even a start when preparing for something on this scale. Old Alesander Onassis won't miss a trick like that. But what if it gets worse?
Part of you insists that surely this climate anomaly won't last for multiple years. Every major scientific publication is proclaiming that things will probably go back to normal next year.
But what if it doesn't?
What if it lasts for five years? Ten? What if it gets worse?
You'll have to be ready. Just in case. Perhaps it will all blow over in a year or two and you'll have wasted your efforts. But your life has taught you to be prepared for the worst, because you never know when it will come...
You are Alexander Onassis, quite possibly the greatest shipping magnate in the world. You worked your way up from the humble position of rigger on an ancient sailing vessel at age 14, to captain of your own ship by the time you were 25, and now you are the owner of a massive transportation network that spans the entire globe, moving millions of tons of cargo in standardized containers every year. Aside from your considerable assets on the ground, you own a huge fleet of airships, seaships, railroads, and even submersibles and a few automata. If anyone can build a bolt-hole, a safe place to ride out whatever is causing this climate anomaly, you can.
You'll be damned to burn in Hell for eternity if you saw trouble looming on the horizon like a sullen storm, waiting to strike, and did nothing to prepare for it. You have a responsibility to your investors and your employees, as captain of the ship of industry just as you were once captain of a single vessel. And when a storm might be coming, a captain takes action.
Winter is coming. This is going to be a grim survival story set in a world where global temperatures are plummeting wildly out of control. Can the questers of Sufficient Velocity do better than the characters or institutions in your favorite post-apocalyptic story? I suppose we'll find out.
You can't save the whole world. That's not the kind of story this is. You are but one man - a very powerful and wealthy one, but still just one man. Take heart in the hope that you are not the only one preparing for the coming troubles. But be warned that there will be a disaster on a global scale. That means millions of people will die horribly, whether it be by starvation, freezing, or the violence of a societal collapse. All you can do is your best. Also keep in mind that the year is 1891, and by modern standards practically all of the NPCs are racist, sexist, prudish religious bigots, and will have similarly unacceptable by modern standards attitudes topics like child labor and capital punishment.
You are playing a character who is a logistical and business genius. He doesn't personally understand every bolt and tube on his airships, but he can keep up in technical conversations with the people who do. He will deal with hiring good people and keeping them motivated, arranging for all the supplies to come in and go out at the right time, working out schedules and pay for hundreds of ocean and air ships, choosing who to delegate what tasks whenever there is a clear 'best choice', throwing out obviously bad project ideas, and all manner of other detail-heavy tasks. The decisions that end up in the hands of the players will be choices of strategic direction. Do we build here, or there, given this list of tradeoffs? Do we try a risky operation to rescue someone you very much want to work for you, or not? Who should we tell about the shelter we are preparing?
Detail and mechanics bloat is a thing that slows me down when I let it get out of control... Not to mention, when things are falling apart and the possible end of the world looms near, you have to scramble to complete an absurdly long list of priorities and projects with very little time. Instead of a complicated turn and action structure, going by ShaperV's queue system there will be action queues - structure construction, researching, acquiring, headhunting, and vehicle construction are examples of action queues. Each will automatically progress according to its list of priorities and we will trigger a vote when a slot is empty.
For example:
Build Queue
- An ordered list of the next 3-4 major construction projects you want your people to tackle. These may be worked on concurrently, but the first one on the list will be the highest priority and constructed as quickly as possible.
Projects Queue
- A list of up to three projects that you are personally overseeing. The first in the list receives more of your time and attention than the other two, and the second more than the third.
If the build or project queue is ever empty, or the situation abruptly changes or new information comes to light that might affect things, there will be an update and a vote on what to do next.
May 7, 1891.
Sterling, Illinois.
You're taking a brisk walk around the airship yard in Sterling as you ruminate on the problem, passing one hangar after another with great flying vessels undergoing maintenance, repairs, or upgrades - and even new constructions. It's also a huge exchange and distribution center, with railway lines snaking in and out, trucks constantly coming and going, and thousands of your standardized steel shipping crates sitting in neat rows on the large concrete square in the middle of the rows of hangars and airship docking towers.
Sterling's a good place for something like this - far from the hustle and bustle of a city or even a particularly major town, relatively close to a lot of your major lines, with a good pool of American talent and very good access to advanced equipment and raw materials. You have half a dozen other maintenance centers and over a hundred small warehouses and docks or airdocks, of course, but Sterling is the largest. It's halfway to being a company town by now, with how much of it you've bought up over the last decade.
Trouble is coming soon, of that you have no doubt. The food supplies hoarded away in a dozen warehouses on four different continents are a comforting measure against the specter of crop failures, which are sure to come after such a cold growing season. The quality of one's stores is one of the most important things to keep in mind when preparing for anything, and you're prepared to feed all your employees for a year or so in case of famine.
You need to prepare a place to hole up and survive, in case this weather anomaly continues on to make bad harvests for two or three years, or even five. Things will start to get bad by then. No government in the world is prepared for a famine that lasts five years. Most of you shies away from the very thought that there could be five years of bad harvests... But you know that's just fear talking.
The leading scientific journals are all saying there's no call for alarm. The explanations proposed for the cooling effect so far are all obvious nonsense. There have been no massive meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions spewing dust into the air and blocking warming sunlight. You scoured news brought in from your ships all over the world in enough detail to know if anything like that had happened. But you are still very uneasy. With no reasonable explanations for the eerie cold weather, you have to assume the worst case scenario and prepare for it to continue, and maybe get even colder.
With a massive fleet of airships, ocean-going ships, and even several railroad companies at your beck and call, there are quite a few places you could set up your bolt-hole, your insurance against the climate anomaly getting worse. This leads you to the first pair of decisions you have to make. Where will you build this shelter, this colony? You've spent a solid week poring over locations all over the world to judge their relative merits.
You could build it right here in Sterling. It's the center of your power and you already have major facilities here, so it would allow you to begin major construction projects almost immediately. You have a huge distribution center, warehouses, airship docks, and even shipyards here already for Christ's sake! If you put enough of your money into it, you could set up heavily weatherproofed buildings and greenhouses enough to feed a few thousand people in just a few months. However, the town is busy enough that it's inevitable people will notice your preparations, and the vast metropolis of Chicago is only a few hundred miles to the east. In the worst case scenario, you could become famous as a frost-proof city, the only safe place to go when things really get bad. You could end up completely swamped with refugees, or with meddlesome police or government agents poking into your affairs and interfering with things in very troublesome ways, maybe even trying to nationalize your shelter, taking it out of your control.
You've looked some sites in America that would be relatively accessible, and already contain convenient industrial facilities. One in particular catches your eye - A decade old steel mill in the easternmost part of Tennessee, with an active coal mine not ten miles away, nestled into a vast coal seam. There is also an iron mine about twenty miles away, with an above-ground rail connection to the steel mill. A company town called Carnegieville is nearby, and it's all owned by Andrew Carnegie. Overall, it would be an excellent place to build a shelter. It has well-established production of steel and coal, the two essential materials for all modern technology. It's far from any major cities, meaning you won't be as inundated with refugees. You think you could buy it off him, but doing so with any kind of speed or urgency would be pricey. Not to mention you'd have to spend precious weeks getting to know the staff and the area, and Mr. Carnegie would certainly surmise that you intend to turn it into a fortress against the cold. It would be hard not to recognize what such a place would be good for and make the connection.
If the scrutiny of your fellow industrialists is too much to risk and you would rather keep your safe haven more secret, there is a place in Australia called Karara where recent geological surveys have identified decent iron deposits, and there are seams of coal relatively close by. Neither location has been developed at all so building the mines and a steel mill would add more delays until you're ready to even begin constructing a shelter or colony, but on the other hand... Neither location has been developed at all, and Australia is civilized enough under the rule of the British Empire, while also remaining remote and sparsely populated. Building mines, a steel mill, and a company town there would let you effectively control the entire area without attracting undue attention, but it would also add about three or four months of delay before you can start construction in earnest. It would be harder to get people, material, and machinery out there, but on the other hand, there are no major cities nearby that would send waves of desperate refugees your way, and British rule is weaker all the way out in the colonies, so you would be freer to pursue the project.
The last option is to carefully explore the already-cold reaches of northern Canada, Greenland, Siberia, and the northern reaches of the Baltic states. Those places have not yet been fully surveyed, and it is a rather dubious prospect to go to somewhere that's already bitterly cold when you expect it to get colder, but there are regions noted to have abundant untapped mineral supplies, too remote to be worth mining and processing. If a trustworthy crew in a modern airship found a location with both coal and iron in the isolated reaches of the world, you could build a base that is truly secret, with nobody outside those you trust knowing where it is. No matter what happens to the rest of the world, such a place would be safe and isolated, and you could ride out the climate disaster and the chaos of famines and revolution in total safety. With your transportation empire, access to difficult-to-reach places is much less of an issue for you than it would be for practically anyone else. If you find such a place, it will not be impossible to build a safe haven there, but the search could take months before you even begin construction.
It also matters what your plans are for the shelter, exactly. You could try to keep your preparations as secret as possible, to keep governments or anyone else from messing things up. You could put most of your efforts in one location, but also build smaller colonies in other places as contingencies and backups, or to secure sources of resources like zinc, copper, nickel, niter, and so on that you'll still be able to access by airship later on. If you're willing to talk to the others in your social class about your worries, you could bring up your concerns with them and propose mutual collaboration and joint contingency plans, with more cooperation and additional backups... But that brings the attention of other wealthy and powerful people to your own preparations, for both good and ill.
Scope of Plans
[ ] Survivalist - Keep things as secret as possible, limiting the number of people who know about your shelter plans. Best not build it in Sterling if you want to do this, though it could still work if you buy up the Carnegie company town.
[ ] Colony network - You can build shelters and colonies in many satellite locations, while reserving the main effort for one central location. With your air fleet, you'll probably be able to maintain a trade network even if things get really bad.
[ ] Industrialist alliance - As Colony network, but you'll also reach out to the various industrialists you know and share your concerns with them. You'll propose making some joint contingency plans, which could be helpful.
[ ] Something else.
Location
[ ] Sterling, Illinois.
[ ] Carnegieville, Tennessee.
[ ] Karara, Australia.
[ ] Survey the north for a truly isolated place. In the meantime you will start basic preparations in another location in case nothing can be found.
-[ ] Which?
The last matter for the moment is the overall shelter design. You could build a fairly conventional town, except with heavily weatherized buildings and greenhouses. You could bring in the technical staff and equipment you'd need to provide heat and water and security during an extended social upheaval and get to work expanding right away. It would be quick and easy to set up, as you have plenty of people with plenty of experience building conventional structures. This would work especially well with Sterling or Carnegieville, as they have existing structures, and not so well with Karara or a base in the cold north.
But if you end up facing arctic conditions even in the warmer parts of the world, that won't be enough. Conventional wooden homes can't handle that sort of cold even when built in the heavily-insulated style of Canadian homes, and neither can greenhouses. There's also the human problem to consider. If things get truly dire there could be a general collapse of civil order, and if you start getting mobs of desperate refugees, or even the military or actual governments, roaming the countryside, you might need to fight them off. So the second option that occurs to you is to construct a sort of industrial fortress consisting of large, sturdy buildings to house workers and industry, with walls around the complex and recruiting some professional soldiers to turn the guards on your various ships into a real fighting force. Growing crops for such a settlement would probably be a challenge, with far less space for greenhouses, but surely there is some scientific genius or new technical advance that can solve this problem for you. Indoor farms lit by incandescent bulbs, perhaps? Larger, sturdier buildings would have a variety of benefits, but be slower and more expensive to construct.
You could go even more extreme, and tunnel deep into the earth, creating secure and insulated bunkers. It would be the safest result by far, totally secure from the cold of the world above thanks to the Earth's inner heat, hidden and hardened against intruders. But there's a number of challenges to something like that. Tunneling is slow, as you know from hard experience. You can't run a coal-fired generator deep underground, you'd need complicated ventilation systems and suffocate very quickly if they ever failed if you wished to use coal generators in a bunker, so you would need some advanced technological solution to generate power and support your shelter. Perhaps a radium generator? You've heard rumors of experiments along those lines. You would need to recruit one of the rare geniuses who comprehend such technology, and maintain their health and goodwill lest your lifeline suffer some catastrophic failure...
Or you could build a small temporary town or camp, just enough to support your operations, before expanding into one of the other options. If you don't have something ready by the winter it could end in disaster, but such an approach would speed up the construction, so it might be worth it...
Which approach will you have in mind, as you begin to make plans for construction?
[ ] Weatherized town.
[ ] Industrial fortress.
[ ] Deep bunkers.
[ ] Temporary camp for the summer, then quickly set up another option.
Voting
Please make a PLAN VOTE. Include your plan name at the top, bolded. For every vote option in the update, fill in the details with a tag like [Scope]. Write at least a sentence or two describing the intent and purpose of your plan at the bottom of the plan, so readers can more easily digest it.
DO NOT MARK X's IN THE INDIVIDUAL LINE ITEMS OF YOUR PLAN.
Instead, after laying out your plan, vote for it at the bottom of your post. Votes for plans should ONLY contain the plan name. I will search the thread for the plan originator when I call the vote.
Plan Paranoia
[Scope] Survivalist.
[Location] Survey the north for a truly isolated place.
-Karara for the alternate if nothing can be found.
[Approach] Deep bunkers.
This plan is supposed to keep us safe no matter how bad things get! Societal collapse will screw us over in a thousand different ways, unless nobody can find us. Sure we'll only be able to put like fifty people in the shelter, but we'll survive the end of the world no matter what.
Planing things out
[Scope] Colony network - You can build shelters and colonies in many satellite locations, while reserving the main effort for one central location. With your air fleet, you'll probably be able to maintain a trade network even if things get really bad.
[Location] Karara, Australia.
[Approach] Temporary camp for the summer, then quickly set up another option.
-[Approach] industrial fortress
We set up a temporary camp while we get the lay of the land then we can choose where and what to build that lets us get the most resources with moderate safety. I dont feel like running out of resources and then dieing by just not having any more resources to build stuff.
Plan Hail Mary
[Scope] Industrialist alliance - As Colony network, but you'll also reach out to the various industrialists you know and share your concerns with them. You'll propose making some joint contingency plans, which could be helpful.
[Location] Carnegieville, Tennessee.
[Approach] Deep bunkers.
I want to go hard, all the way. Get some other backers, like Carnegie, to build hardcore settlements a bit out of the way.
[X] Plan Hail Mary
I think you're making this more complicated then this rest needs to be, but fine.
I legit thought that option was set up a temp base then decide on which option after the temp base is set up. Like i would go with bunker if all the main resources are close by and if they arent I would go with the industrial fortress. close by being 2-3 hours drive out.
Edited my plan decided to just do industrial fortress since plan hail marry does the bunkers.
Location I'm least sure on. Australia is warmest, near the equator, but Tennessee is next best and better suited to early and deep investment, especially with industrialist allies.
Of course, if we do get industrialist allies, we'd do well to make sure that security forces get fed out of our pocket.
You can't run a coal-fired generator deep underground, you'd need complicated ventilation systems and suffocate very quickly if they ever failed if you wished to use goal generators in a bunker
Plan Kararan Refuge
[Scope] Industrialist alliance - As Colony network, but you'll also reach out to the various industrialists you know and share your concerns with them. You'll propose making some joint contingency plans, which could be helpful.
[Location] Karara, Australia.
[Approach] Temporary camp for the summer, then quickly set up another option.
-[Approach] industrial fortress
[X] Plan Kararan Refuge
[X] Planning things out
Basically like Planing things out, but with the Industrialist Alliance instead of going it completely on our own. If we're going for a trade network it can't be bad to have more people to trade with, right?
I also don't want to do Carnegieville because that sounds like it was basically where the last quest was based, so I'd like to do something different in this one, while Karara sounds like a good place to set up shop.
Also, shouldn't it be spelled 'Planning' not 'Planing'?
Ooh, interesting quest. And by Rockeye. Promising.
[X]Planing things out
Not a huge fan of the typo or the fact that it's not quite a plan vote, but I agree with all the options. I err, don't really trust our fellow industrialists to not fuck it up. Call me paranoid, but I want to centralise our leadership as much as possible so that nobody else gets a chance to pull shit. I'm also a bit biased towards setting up in Australia, for obvious reasons.
Call me paranoid, but I want to centralise our leadership as much as possible so that nobody else gets a chance to pull shit. I'm also a bit biased towards setting up in Australia, for obvious reasons.
Given the time frame, it's highly unlikely that any of them are willingly going to let, well, any of them set themselves up as a boss. This is mostly just a tipoff of 'hey maybe you guys might want to consider setting up a shelter too' while seeing if anyone is willing to work with us, and honestly at this point in time I expect most of them to blow us off. But getting our name out there ahead of time will encourage them all to listen to us when they realize we were right all along.
And not telling them at all won't keep them from trying to do things, everyone is going to realize what is happening sooner or later, it'll just mean they'll be more desperate when they do figure out what happens instead of having their own home bases to retreat to. In my opinion we're a lot more likely to face a takeover attempt if everyone figures it out late and has nowhere else to go then if everyone has their own shelter.
Given the time frame, it's highly unlikely that any of them are willingly going to let, well, any of them set themselves up as a boss. This is mostly just a tipoff of 'hey maybe you guys might want to consider setting up a shelter too' while seeing if anyone is willing to work with us, and honestly at this point in time I expect most of them to blow us off. But getting our name out there ahead of time will encourage them all to listen to us when they realize we were right all along.
And not telling them at all won't keep them from trying to do things, everyone is going to realize what is happening sooner or later, it'll just mean they'll be more desperate when they do figure out what happens instead of having their own home bases to retreat to. In my opinion we're a lot more likely to face a takeover attempt if everyone figures it out late and has nowhere else to go then if everyone has their own shelter.
That's kind of the point of building out of the way. People don't desperately flock to us and take drastic action to get inside. I feel we're more likely to face a takeover attempt from our fellow industrialists, many of whom are probably pretty ruthless, when they know and are part of a network that they want to be at the top of when everything 'inevitably blows over'. The more pieces involved, the more likely it is for word to leak and for the whole thing to be blown, thus negating the idea of building somewhere distant and out of the way. It's going to be a lot harder to take over fortified bunkers from the outside than it would be from the inside.
The timeframe not letting anyone set themselves up as a head is a problem. It means there's no single guiding strategy behind operations, just a fling of confused work aiming towards a dozen different scattered thoughts. I'd take an agreed-upon 'leader' of the coalition as a bonus, but I can't see that sort of thing happening without detrimental power struggles and possible lasting resentment and usurpation attempts.
I don't want to deal with a flood of refugees, so isolation and or secrecy are my picks. Also, the more people prepare the less noteworthy we become.
[X] Plan Kararan Refuge
I like it!
Although some points for exploring the cold north:
- all the locals, and potential refugees, already know how to survive extreme weather. They will be a useful population to hire from/rescue.
- no one is going to travel AWAY from the equator to look for sanctuary.
That's kind of the point of building out of the way. People don't desperately flock to us and take drastic action to get inside. I feel we're more likely to face a takeover attempt from our fellow industrialists, many of whom are probably pretty ruthless, when they know and are part of a network that they want to be at the top of when everything 'inevitably blows over'. The more pieces involved, the more likely it is for word to leak and for the whole thing to be blown, thus negating the idea of building somewhere distant and out of the way. It's going to be a lot harder to take over fortified bunkers from the outside than it would be from the inside.
The timeframe not letting anyone set themselves up as a head is a problem. It means there's no single guiding strategy behind operations, just a fling of confused work aiming towards a dozen different scattered thoughts. I'd take an agreed-upon 'leader' of the coalition as a bonus, but I can't see that sort of thing happening without detrimental power struggles and possible lasting resentment and usurpation attempts.
I mean, maybe? But first everyone is going to go for making their own hideaway just because that's easier and simpler, especially if we have our own security which we should do anyway, and it'd not like we're actually going to be able to keep them from knowing about us. I think you have a major misconception in how this is working because of what you said about how likely it is for word to leak in that you think what 'Planing things out' does would be a secret from our fellow industrialists. It won't. They're going to know, and they're probably going to know by the end of the year. What building in the boonies away from the cities does isn't 'hide from our fellows' it's 'hide from the common survivors so we do not have a screaming hordes worth of city civilians running over our safe spot while avoiding government interference'.
If you want to hide from our fellow industrialists, you'd need to vote for 'Survey the north for a truly isolated place', because that's the one that builds our base in a secret location no one else knows exists.
They're going to know we exist in Australia, and they're going to know we have a refugee. If you expect that to lead to take over attempts, then expect take over attempts. Personally, I believe people having their own hide-aways, working or not as long as they think it'll work, will save us more trouble and more interference then trying to make a base and refusing to talk to any of our fellows about it. And especially the influence bonus we can get by being 'in front of the pack' will be worth it for dealing with them as things go on, because they'll likely have useful stuff, or experts, we'll want to be able to have some level of access to. But the only way to keep people from knowing we're building a shelter is to hide it completely, and Karara is not the complete secrecy option.
Edit : Also, on moral grounds, the sooner everyone else is building a shelter the more people alive at this after everyone else freezes to death.
I mean, maybe? But first everyone is going to go for making their own hideaway just because that's easier and simpler, especially if we have our own security which we should do anyway, and it'd not like we're actually going to be able to keep them from knowing about us. I think you have a major misconception in how this is working because of what you said about how likely it is for word to leak in that you think what 'Planing things out' does would be a secret from our fellow industrialists. It won't. They're going to know, and they're probably going to know by the end of the year. What building in the boonies away from the cities does isn't 'hide from our fellows' it's 'hide from the common survivors so we do not have a screaming hordes worth of city civilians running over our safe spot while avoiding government interference'.
If you want to hide from our fellow industrialists, you'd need to vote for 'Survey the north for a truly isolated place', because that's the one that builds our base in a secret location no one else knows exists.
They're going to know we exist in Australia, and they're going to know we have a refugee. If you expect that to lead to take over attempts, then expect take over attempts. Personally, I believe people having their own hide-aways, working or not as long as they think it'll work, will save us more trouble and more interference then trying to make a base and refusing to talk to any of our fellows about it. And especially the influence bonus we can get by being 'in front of the pack' will be worth it for dealing with them as things go on, because they'll likely have useful stuff, or experts, we'll want to be able to have some level of access to. But the only way to keep people from knowing we're building a shelter is to hide it completely, and Karara is not the complete secrecy option.
Edit : Also, on moral grounds, the sooner everyone else is building a shelter the more people alive at this after everyone else freezes to death.
The wording of the non-vote explanation of Industrialist Alliance includes "But that brings the attention of other wealthy and powerful people to your own preparations, for both good and ill.", which implies to me that they wouldn't know of our plans without that option, or an 'obvious' build location like Sterling. You haven't said anything that makes me think otherwise yet, you've just said that I'm wrong and gone over the top of me without explanation. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little annoyed by that, but whatever. I also brought up the idea that involving more people on this isolated project is going to make a leak to the public more likely, as that kind of increase is naturally going to increase the number of holes in informational security. Just re-raising the point, because I feel it's still a valuable point.
I'll also question the assumption that Industrialist Alliance will have everyone build their own little nooks. The option, to me, seems to imply a closer level of cooperation. "Mutual collaboration and joint contingency plans". Thus they will be integrated into our own efforts, giving yet more ability for factors and people entirely outside our control to fuck things over.
I don't particularly expect takeover fuckery from other industrialists on our solo venture, even if/when they find out. It'd require decidedly more hostile means than seizing control from the inside of the power structure and complexes, and seeing as we're building bunkers with armed guards I doubt many will want to try an actual assault when they could work on their own settlement.
I also think it's a bit presumptuous to assume we're the only one who fears what's coming, especially among our social and financial class. Other people probably will have their hideaways and contingencies in progress, we won't necessarily be 'in front of the pack'. "The explanations proposed for the cooling effect so far are all obvious nonsense. There have been no massive meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions spewing dust into the air and blocking warming sunlight." That seems like information that any well-connected and wealthy person could have access to with a bit of attention, and it's highly unlikely to me that we're the only one paying attention. Indeed, I'd not be surprised if many of the scientific journals publishing "no cause for alarm" are aware that there is but are trying to keep public pandemonium to a minimum.
The inevitable moral argument. That's fair, but also consider that the more people we try to shield under our umbrella, the more likely it is that we'll overextend and collapse, making the entire effort for naught.
The wording of the non-vote explanation of Industrialist Alliance includes "But that brings the attention of other wealthy and powerful people to your own preparations, for both good and ill.", which implies to me that they wouldn't know of our plans without that option, or an 'obvious' build location like Sterling. You haven't said anything that makes me think otherwise yet, you've just said that I'm wrong and gone over the top of me without explanation. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little annoyed by that, but whatever. I also brought up the idea that involving more people on this isolated project is going to make a leak to the public more likely, as that kind of increase is naturally going to increase the number of holes in informational security. Just re-raising the point, because I feel it's still a valuable point.
I'll also question the assumption that Industrialist Alliance will have everyone build their own little nooks. The option, to me, seems to imply a closer level of cooperation. "Mutual collaboration and joint contingency plans". Thus they will be integrated into our own efforts, giving yet more ability for factors and people entirely outside our control to fuck things over.
I wasn't intending to 'go over the top without an explanation', so if I gave that impression my apologies. However, it does seem to me that the fundamental issue here is that we have different fundamental expectations of, for the lack of a better way to put it, 'how things work' both in the time period and in the quest.
As such I would like to ask @Rockeye if they would be willing to clarify on the baseline levels of knowledge building at Karara is likely to cause amide our fellow industrialists and the public in general, and what levels of cooperation and integration we would expect in character to result from attempting to work with said fellow industrialists, and the general level of alarm we believe our fellows have at this point verses the general level of believing this will all blow over in a year or so, because otherwise I expect we'll spend the next ten pages going over the same ground with each other on this irregardless of if you or I are closer to being right or if we're both wrong.
Edit : Oh, also, while I'm asking a question anyway, is this functioning on approval voting, or approval voting ish, like ShaperV's quest did, or are we each to only vote for only one plan?
[X] Plan: Last Autumn+New Home
[Scope] Colony network - You can build shelters and colonies in many satellite locations, while reserving the main effort for one central location. With your air fleet, you'll probably be able to maintain a trade network even if things get really bad.
[Location] Karara, Australia.
[Approach] Temporary camp for the summer, then quickly set up another option.
[Approach] Weatherized town.
So we're pretty much playing Last Autumn at start. No pressure. Honestly my plan has the name because it really is trying to go from one scenario to the other.
Don't want to reach out to industrualists because I don't trust them to actually be good at running things or to have control. Colony Network because we want some redundancy and hopefully can get Britain on board or at least coopt some nearby towns.
Australia because it seems the most interesting choice 'sides the city and I'd rather not deal with that one.
The approach is simple, get it built and working. Hopefully they'll be time to make it better later on but for now my first goal is that we have something at all.
Canon is dubious as a source here but something fun to note. One of the leading theories for the Frost is that somehow Earth has fallen out of orbit and may be drifting away from the sun. no real effect on us just appreciate that Frostpunk has major cosmic horror thematics just hanging about.
[Scope] Industrialist alliance - As Colony network, but you'll also reach out to the various industrialists you know and share your concerns with them. You'll propose making some joint contingency plans, which could be helpful.
[Location] Sterling, Illinois.
[Approach] Weatherized town.
[X] Plan Save as many as possible.
I choose Industrialist alliance, because it is what save the most people, as simple as that.
Same thing for my other choices.
You could build a fairly conventional town, except with heavily weatherized buildings and greenhouses. You could bring in the technical staff and equipment you'd need to provide heat and water and security during an extended social upheaval and get to work expanding right away. It would be quick and easy to set up, as you have plenty of people with plenty of experience building conventional structures. This would work especially well with Sterling or Carnegieville, as they have existing structures, and not so well with Karara or a base in the cold north.
I also thought they would be a good combo, and initially thought to make a similar plan to yours, then I noticed this. Also, you forgot to select a scope in your plan.
Plan Dig Deep
[Scope] Industrialist alliance - As Colony network, but you'll also reach out to the various industrialists you know and share your concerns with them. You'll propose making some joint contingency plans, which could be helpful.
[Location] Sterling, Illinois.
[Approach] Deep bunkers.
[x] Plan Dig Deep
The Deep Bunkers concept isn't very popular, and for fairly solid reasons- underground construction is a pain in the ass, and we don't have the scientific experts that we'll need to make it work on hand so we're betting on our ability to get them. But it is the single best option when it comes to not freezing to death, so I'd like to try and make it work.
Because underground construction is so difficult we need to site it in the location where we have the greatest possible advantages in terms of resources and construction speed, which means Stirling. And if we're going to be building in Stirling, then we need to play to its advantage as a transport hub by ensuring that other places keep existing so that we can import all the resources that we'll need to keep running- and manage the transfer of resources to those other places so that they can keep running, too. That means Industrialist Alliance so we have the maximum possible number of trade partners.
The major risk of Stirling is government or popular realization that we're making something frost-proof, but that's manageable. If we're going to focus on underground construction instead of weatherization or fortress, we can publicly talk about the underground construction as being intended for security, or secrecy, or a testbed for long-term isolated living in hostile areas, or what have you. We just don't sell it as "safe from the cold". It won't hold as an excuse for that long but it doesn't really have to; as long as the popular consciousness doesn't seize on us as a cold-proof location early the refugee numbers should be limited. Governmental interference can be minimized by getting local politicians and military men on-side via any of the usual methods, as the choice of Industrialist Alliance will ensure that while we're a possible target for targeting for nationalization in the name of the public good or simple conquest out of self-preservation, there are a lot of other targets out there too- and probably some more conveniently located for any given other person. And if all else fails, subterranean construction means that we can shut some very heavy doors and wait until any invaders freeze to death outside.
Overall I think this plan can be both highly successful and a lot of fun.
