Dealing with the shortfall costs 5000, gets rid of 1000 upkeep, and probably drastically lowers the cost of doing other martial actions involving the military since we won't be stretched thin anymore. It has a dc of 14 if we put Will on it.
Yes, it costs 5,000. As things stand, if we choose it the plan will cost 14,000. I have said for a while that rounding out our military capabilities was important, and I love the irony of assigning a snow leopard to teach people how to fight like leopards. There's literally no one better for the job. I want to expand our military next turn, once we see what kind of windfall the hoard gives us. As it stands, though, I really don't want to make assumptions about how much gold is in it, and my plan budgeted accordingly. I also haven't assigned people to an adventure because I think guaranteeing DC passes is more important than going after shinies. Once we get Faria feeling better and hopefully Selous as a hero unit, I'll feel much more comfortable with our hero roster to handle both adventures and assigning heroes to high-DC nationals.
My budget would leave us with 17,500 gold, accounting for the increased income and before we count the dragon hoard. Adding the military expansion would leave us with 16,000, accounting for both increased cost and decreased expenses. It's a difference of 1,500. Not much, but when our profit margins are so narrow, it's more than it looks. Again, I want to save doing more costly actions until we see how much our windfall is, and use
that to pay for things like military expansion and reducing upkeep costs.
[X] Plan: Integration and One Adventure
I have a number of issues with this plan. First, Marlin has a number of higher-DC actions with no heroes attached, instead going on an adventure and assigning the one hero not on one to a personal instead of a national. It doesn't take the Intrigue action to put spies in Agrabah when we need intelligence
yesterday about the Sand Witches. It's
incredibly expensive (17,200 on a treasure of 18,000, which will leave us only 9,200 gold if we don't get a success on Something Fishy - another high-DC, high-cost action with no heroes attached - and notably,
not the dragon hoard, which is a guaranteed income windfall). Also, Something Fishy only gives us a net increase of 1,500 gold, and doesn't offset the massive expenses of this plan in the least. If you want a Stewardship action that isn't the dragon hoard and gives us a lot of income without being hard, I'd suggest making and selling crossbows. Learning is cheap, but I've already made my preference for finishing off the star charts known - we've already put a lot of money into it, and it's very useful for navigation and the larger meta-issue of what happened to the world. Lastly, it doesn't do the Aladdin personal to recruit Selous, where we had a very potent hero unit literally fall into our lap. If people want to vote for it, fine, but please take these concerns of mine into consideration instead of just voting for it because it has an adventure in it.
I would like to point out, though, that training a mount generally means starting when it is young, whether it be a horse, an elephant, or a dragon-horse-lizard-thing.
