[x] Repair non-functional radio equipment. [-1 Survival Supplies]
[x] Conduct new experiments on the xenofungus. [+1 Planet]
[x] Open the remaining 4 cryopods containing stowaways. There have to be more surprises waiting, and not all of them are apt necessarily to be bad.
I don't think this was your first vote, but I wanted to extend to you a warm welcome. We're thrilled you've joined us!
Man, I really want to get more invested, but Lal is just so.... boring.
What are some kinds of things that would help you to be more invested?
Unlike a traditional narrative that you receive third-hand, we can take feedback and adjust the course of the story in real time. I'm always interested in the kinds of things readers want to see happen.
What are Yudikon's goals on this island? He does not have enough people to threaten us. He seems really upset that the indentured servants did not go with him. He acted entitled to have their service and made it obvious he would have severely punished them if he could. Currently, it seems that he is trying to contract the rest of his faction. If he is successful, I think he might gather forces to attempt to reclaim the 150 former indentured servants in Warm Welcome or simply leave. If he is unsuccessful, I wonder what he would do? His base has overseers with no one to oversee. He has a lot of supplies and M.U.L.E.s to work for him to prevent hunger but Relief Station lacks the numbers to do much more than survive for the moment. Would he attempt to start trade with us or the pirates? What use is a trading company without anyone to trade with? Would he go searching for survivors to recruit or make into indentured servants? Or maybe he might eventually try to rejoin us and would we want him back anyway in that case?
I will have one of your advisers give you a fresh work-up on Yudikon and more information on Struan's.
This honestly seems way too generous. Seriously, the offer of food, water, energy and medical services increases their range for piracy. We are going to get so much flak for this from anybody who finds out.
The offer of safe harbor should be tied in with impounding any vessel that takes it up, being relieved of their arms and the arrest of their crews, not supplies to carry on raiding in farther seas.
Were our colonists fine with this absurd offer? I for certain am not, because there's biding time by not being aggressive to the pirates and then there's enabling piracy, which is what it seems Lal settled on.
This objection caught me by surprise.
In other cases (e.g., transmitters, Holnists, Spartans), different options have "timed out" after readers repeatedly prioritized other objectives or dealt with only one particular aspect of an issue. When there was insufficient attention to the transmitters, the Peacekeepers simply destroyed them. You lost out on the opportunity to mitigate the work of their impact (say, by relocating them to throw hounds off the scent) and to leverage them (such as by sneaking them into the Struan's luggage), but they stopped being an immediate problem for Warm Welcome, too.
In the case of the Nautilus Pirates, I understood (perhaps incorrectly) that a general consensus had been reached:
- You (collectively) didn't feel militarily ready to fight the pirates for control of the surrounding seas, one corollary of which was that you weren't going to try to arrest Skinner or seize his boat
- Functionally speaking, your choice was between making some form of "nice" with the pirates or risking that they would land and try to attack Warm Welcome
- You were open to a kind of armed neutrality that fell short of trying to sic the pirates on your actual or perceived enemies
- There was no critical mass of voters insisting that the Peacekeepers refuse further engagement with the pirates, except to intern them
- You weren't finished questioning Skinner
I also assumed the following:
- For reasons of operational security, nobody wanted to bring Skinner into the stockade, meaning that the interaction was ready to come to a close
- Lal would feel guilty about correcting the record re: U.N. Relief Station, since doing so removed them from your putative "defense umbrella"
Some of your colonists are relieved that there will be no fight. Others are spoiling to hang Skinner from his own yardarm. Reactions range from deflation to mild disaffection to white-hot anger at this "betrayal" of the U.N. Charter.
Yeah that really rubbed me the wrong way, why are we providing safe harbor to slaving pirates? Even if we won't sell them guns, selling them fuel and food and water makes us a de facto pirate harbor anyways. If any pirates in a survival situation wash up on our shores and agree to submit to internment/giving us a free foil in exchange for food and water and medical attention, well alright we're not going to string you up immediately you can have a real trial and maybe even integrate into society. That's fair. Allowing them to freely come and go and treat us like a gas station is not.
This will be the central issue that Warm Welcome deals with in the next few chapters.
@Trenacker A question. With this safe harbor offer, are we formally committing to providing free food, water, and medical care to any pirate that shows up at Warm Welcome under the white flag or are we merely giving any pirate vessel a chance to dock at Warm Welcome under the white flag and offering them a chance have a go at trying to convince us to provide food, water, and medical care or make a trade under the right conditions?
I want to be clear.
Not "free" stuff. I used the word "offer" in the update. I would have been better-served to use "sell," which is what I meant. Lal agreed to sell them food, water, and energy. Only medical care would be given freely.
The latter would be reasonable but I think the former would be a bit much for our character to commit to without a plurality of player voters voting for it. The former might very well be the correct course of action but it would be a big issue stance to take without a vote for it.
Inevitably, not every aspect of this story is going to be determined by reader vote. While I have no plans to override votes and will probably give you more votes to help guide social interactions, they are not the only trigger for Lal to make consequential decisions. Some of the story of your interactions with Sathieu Metrion is already proceeding without votes. I try to use the
spirit of past votes and recommendations when developing new ideas, but you should expect that gaps will arise between the narrative and the vote, even if only just as a reflection of different interpretations of the same text.
One thing we can do, too, is to bring your Administrative Score into play and let you begin working toward building up your Action Pool. Until now, I have preferred to post as often as possible to build up readership. If debate starts becoming more common, I may delay longer and build larger updates.
The mechanical
writing of updates imposes its own limits on how many opportunities I can give you to vote. When I give you votes on Base Administration or other actions unrelated to diplomacy, I don't necessarily want to freeze the social side of things. It might proceed on its own power until the next time you vote. At that point, I try to write it based on past votes and ongoing discussion.
For those that limit themselves to voting only, readers with the most to say about a given subject are more likely to catch glimpses of their ideas in the updates. When needs are expressed, I try to accommodate them because it's pleasing to me to please you, the readers.
It's a pity we don't know how much the pirates cooperate or if they have an industrial base. I suspect being bandits they're more focused on stealing than building any ships or weapons for themselves, and that's good for us. We're industrializing quickly.
Given how they have maneuvered, I don't think you would have any doubt that those Foils operate under a unified command.
Given how they're still a functioning faction, they must have industry from somewhere; those foils must be coming from somewhere. That said, if this is anything like the game, aquatic bases have poor mineral production compared to land, so we could just bludgeon them to death with an assembly line of foils, in the worst case.
Remember how much material you took off
Unity. It's completely possible that other groups went "all in" on particular equipment, like Foils, when they had a better sense of what they intended to do once planetside.
That said, we now have the capacity to churn out rovers and foils, should we so choose, but how are we going to get people to man them?
In one sense, you could turn your militia into motorized infantry/dragoons, armored cavalry, or marines.
More aggressive exploration, such as a full survey of the island, will likely net you more fallen cryopods.
General Reminder
Our
Discord channel is an ideal place to discuss long-term voting strategy, propose new ideas, make requests for specific content you want to see in the next update, and so on. I reward ideas with votes.
