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Terminus Quest: A CKII Mass Effect Quest

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Tolack said:
Hmm... @PoptartProdigy what is the expected reaction by the Assembly and the populace if we Veto this? Both Mira's expectation and our advisors?
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From the front page:
Public Opinion said:
As a democratically-elected leader, the attitude of the people is of more immediate concern to you than more autocratic states.
A brilliant military leader, and able administrator, a politician commanding incredible success, and a firebrand of a young woman who still has much of her life in front of her, your various successes in tandem with your efforts to reinstate the Virmirean Colonial Congress have set the pieces for the beginning of a legend that will likely outlive you by a wide margin. While the storm of public opinion has abated somewhat, you are still widely beloved.

Polling

Mira T'Vael (Asari, military and radical reform platform): 99% public approval.
Sugoma Damnir (Salarian, development and social moderate platform): 1% public approval.
Shuri Amaelen (Asari, pacifist and radical liberal platform): 0% public approval.

Prominent Demographics Data
At the moment, demographics determine voting to a far lesser extent than issues. To be more precise, the issue of planetary survival is so omnipresent in the public consciousness -- and your administration insufficiently offensive to distract from that -- that the overall demographic of, "Virmirean," largely supercedes more internal divisions, with the Virmirean issue of, "Oh gods, please let us still be alive this time next year," thus driving the populace's voting behavior. That said, there are recognizable divisions.

Candidate Sugoma, for instance, commands the largest slice of corporate support of any candidate due to his campaigning for a focus on industrializing Sentry Omega. His stated position is that the government's first concern should be a robust and powerful economy on which to support its military, which many corporations like to hear. Aside from this, internal demographics play, at present, a very small role. People want not to die, and you have proven extremely capable of preventing that unhappy outcome.
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Like both I and Simon have repeatedly pointed out, we can comfortably afford to veto any bunch of bills for the short to medium-term.
Adhoc vote count started by uju32 on Jan 13, 2018 at 4:56 PM, finished with 8114 posts and 107 votes.
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[X][TIMING] Veto, you belligerent idiots.

[x][BUOYS] General Distress Call
[x][BUOYS] Update the Maps
[x][BUOYS] Reconnaissance Pulse

If we're going for the distress call and hoping that the Council hears it and will (eventually, somehow) send aid, we shouldn't also go declaring our independence at this time.
 
[X][TIMING] Veto, you belligerent idiots.

Not 100% set on this but want to at least narrow the margin to keep both options viable. Also initially leaning more toward Veto anyway.
 
In that case, I have another question. You guys are saying to use the threat of independence to gain concessions from the Council. How do we know that would even work at gaining concessions? I'd assume the threat of economic sanctions, military sanctions & threats, public smear campaigns, and whatever else they'd come up with would be their response to threatening them with our independence.

So what do you see us doing if we veto this vote and use our possible breakaway as a bargaining chip? How do you expect the Council to react to that? How soon do you expect to be able to even begin such discussions with them? I can't see it happening until the war is almost won. Is whatever you're considering worth not starting on having an independent Virmire for 200+ years before engaging in discussions?

Please, convince me.
 
Personally I'm in favour of an independent Virmire, just not at this exact moment/turn.
I'd rather have more information (gained by using the buoys for example) before making a decision we can't take back, but could do later without real loss.
 
Tolack said:
In that case, I have another question. You guys are saying to use the threat of independence to gain concessions from the Council. How do we know that would even work at gaining concessions? I'd assume the threat of economic sanctions, military sanctions & threats, public smear campaigns, and whatever else they'd come up with would be their response to threatening them with our independence.

So what do you see us doing if we veto this vote and use our possible breakaway as a bargaining chip? How do you expect the Council to react to that? How soon do you expect to be able to even begin such discussions with them? I can't see it happening until the war is almost won. Is whatever you're considering worth not starting on having an independent Virmire for 200+ years before engaging in discussions?

Please, convince me.
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Yeah, this is a serious false dichotomy. I'm down for declaring independence as soon as next turn, probably. We don't have to engage in complex negotiations with the Council necessarily, but we will be receiving new info from using the comm buoys, so there's very little reason beyond PR to act now instead of in six months or so.

So, question for you: what do we lose by a small delay to gather information? 'cause all I'm seeing is a hit to our approval ratings, which are currently a cool 99% and so can tolerate some damage.
 
Tolack said:
In that case, I have another question. You guys are saying to use the threat of independence to gain concessions from the Council. How do we know that would even work at gaining concessions? I'd assume the threat of economic sanctions, military sanctions & threats, public smear campaigns, and whatever else they'd come up with would be their response to threatening them with our independence.

So what do you see us doing if we veto this vote and use our possible breakaway as a bargaining chip? How do you expect the Council to react to that? How soon do you expect to be able to even begin such discussions with them? I can't see it happening until the war is almost won. Is whatever you're considering worth not starting on having an independent Virmire for 200+ years before engaging in discussions?

Please, convince me.
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It goes something like this.

Mira points out to a Council envoy, probably some asari matriarch, that three quarters of the Virmire legislature and (presumably) a corresponding fraction of the citizenry favor independence even in the middle of the war, with all the associated risks and drawbacks. Mira herself probably has sympathies along these lines even if she doesn't think it's the best strategy.

Realistically, if Virmire does not get a beneficial offer from the Council that represents the tremendous sacrifices the planet made, and acknowledging Virmire as a regional power on par with, say, the Vol Union... Well, there is no realistic chance of Virmire consenting to remain within Council space. All Mira has to do is stop plying her veto stamp.


Now, the Council can fume and posture and threaten to do terrible things, but we already knew they could do those things, and have supermajority support for independence anyway. Either we get a much better deal out of the Council, or we walk. Most Virmireans would prefer to walk.

This is a classic way for people to lever their way to a better bargaining position or higher status. "We have things you want, we're grossly unsatisfied with the status quo, give us more recognition or we walk."

And there is no fundamental reason this has to wait until the war is over. I think we should do it as soon as we regain contact with the Citadel, because that is the time at which the Council is most likely to be desperate- before the krogan make their entry on the galactic stage, or before they have been able to make a decisive contribution.
____________

*(note that 200 years from now is when the Council is finally prepared to sigh relief and declare the rachni extinct, not when the rachni ran out of fighting power and ceased to be a force in galactic affairs).

I can't see it happening until the war is almost won. Is whatever you're considering worth not starting on having an independent Virmire for 200+ years before engaging in discussions?
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I don't think that's a realistic or useful standard to apply. I think that we are in an excellent position to ask for recognition as a regional power with a Citadel embassy and territorial control over Sentry Omega, which we've held entirely secure from the rachni for decades and actively begun colonizing.

Maybe even some rights in Attican Beta and/or the Kepler Verge, clusters we've navally cleared of the rachni or soon will have dealt with.

Our capture of Attican Beta in particular will probably turn out to have been very important to the war effort, because it cut the supply route for one of only two mass relay "tramlines" the rachni could use to press against Citadel space without going around through the Terminus systems. I don't know how well the rachni over in Hades Gamma have been doing against the batarians, but I don't imagine they're having any fun. :p

I think that the immediate reaction right after we meet the Council, and can say "so yeah, we're the ones who cut the pressure on the batarians and made a mess in the rachni rear areas starting about X years ago, the war's still on and we're willing to help, but we are NOT willing to go back to being a colony directly administered by the Citadel after capturing three clusters from the rachni and building up a navy the size of the Vol Union's" is a pretty good time for us to negotiate a change of our status.
 
Wiadi said:
Yeah, this is a serious false dichotomy. I'm down for declaring independence as soon as next turn, probably. We don't have to engage in complex negotiations with the Council necessarily, but we will be receiving new info from using the comm buoys, so there's very little reason beyond PR to act now instead of in six months or so.

So, question for you: what do we lose by a small delay to gather information? 'cause all I'm seeing is a hit to our approval ratings, which are currently a cool 99% and so can tolerate some damage.
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False dichotomy? I don't see it. All I did was ask questions and speculate. Anyway, to answer your question, we don't lose much more really unless our opposition spins our veto in a very bad way for our PR image. Highly unlikely, but possible. Still, this wasn't the kind of answer I was looking for.

Simon_Jester said:
It goes something like this.

Mira points out to a Council envoy, probably some asari matriarch, that three quarters of the Virmire legislature and (presumably) a corresponding fraction of the citizenry favor independence even in the middle of the war, with all the associated risks and drawbacks. Mira herself probably has sympathies along these lines even if she doesn't think it's the best strategy.

Realistically, if Virmire does not get a beneficial offer from the Council that represents the tremendous sacrifices the planet made, and acknowledging Virmire as a regional power on par with, say, the Vol Union... Well, there is no realistic chance of Virmire consenting to remain within Council space. All Mira has to do is stop plying her veto stamp.


Now, the Council can fume and posture and threaten to do terrible things, but we already knew they could do those things, and have supermajority support for independence anyway. Either we get a much better deal out of the Council, or we walk. Most Virmireans would prefer to walk.

This is a classic way for people to lever their way to a better bargaining position or higher status. "We have things you want, we're grossly unsatisfied with the status quo, give us more recognition or we walk."

And there is no fundamental reason this has to wait until the war is over. I think we should do it as soon as we regain contact with the Citadel, because that is the time at which the Council is most likely to be desperate- before the krogan make their entry on the galactic stage, or before they have been able to make a decisive contribution.
____________

*(note that 200 years from now is when the Council is finally prepared to sigh relief and declare the rachni extinct, not when the rachni ran out of fighting power and ceased to be a force in galactic affairs).

I don't think that's a realistic or useful standard to apply. I think that we are in an excellent position to ask for recognition as a regional power with a Citadel embassy and territorial control over Sentry Omega, which we've held entirely secure from the rachni for decades and actively begun colonizing.

Maybe even some rights in Attican Beta and/or the Kepler Verge, clusters we've navally cleared of the rachni or soon will have dealt with.

Our capture of Attican Beta in particular will probably turn out to have been very important to the war effort, because it cut the supply route for one of only two mass relay "tramlines" the rachni could use to press against Citadel space without going around through the Terminus systems. I don't know how well the rachni over in Hades Gamma have been doing against the batarians, but I don't imagine they're having any fun. :p

I think that the immediate reaction right after we meet the Council, and can say "so yeah, we're the ones who cut the pressure on the batarians and made a mess in the rachni rear areas starting about X years ago, the war's still on and we're willing to help, but we are NOT willing to go back to being a colony directly administered by the Citadel after capturing three clusters from the rachni and building up a navy the size of the Vol Union's" is a pretty good time for us to negotiate a change of our status.
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This is the kind of answer I was looking for, and I like it. That said, we are far behind enemy lines. How long will it take until we can have proper contact with the Council? Five years? Ten? Fifteen or twenty, or even fifty years? How many years in a row do we veto this? Then again, this is all just me speculating.

I guess I can go along with vetoing it this year. Get the maps updated, send out our SOS, and decide on the independence vote next year. I just didn't see the worth of tanking the popularity hit just to wait on updated maps first. I also don't want to get into the habit of choosing options that tank popularity just because we're really popular. I guess we could also tackle the question of how long it'd take to get in reliable and/or constant contact with the Citadel when we have updated maps.

E: Then PoptartProdigy answered, and the choice became a no-brainer. It also reminded me what I had thought initially; this vote is just making Virmire's choice official.

[X][TIMING] Pass. Virmire First.

[x][BUOYS] General Distress Call
[x][BUOYS] Update the Maps
[x][BUOYS] Reconnaissance Pulse
 
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Veto is creeping up, this vote has attracted a lot of voters.
Inserted tally
Adhoc vote count started by Miner249er on Jan 13, 2018 at 11:14 AM, finished with 8083 posts and 96 votes.
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Adhoc vote count started by Miner249er on Jan 13, 2018 at 1:26 PM, finished with 338 posts and 99 votes.
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Adhoc vote count started by Miner249er on Jan 13, 2018 at 1:27 PM, finished with 337 posts and 98 votes.
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Tolack said:
This is the kind of answer I was looking for, and I like it. That said, we are far behind enemy lines. How long will it take until we can have proper contact with the Council? Five years? Ten? Fifteen or twenty, or even fifty years? How many years in a row do we veto this? Then again, this is all just me speculating.
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No see, what we do is, we dedicate an action to the politics and figuring it out. What's the popular support, what are the rough breakdowns by faction of the pro-independence movement, versus how many people would like to see us rejoin the Citadel under improved terms? I doubt anyone except a handful of matriarchs wants us to go back to being a direct Council-administered colony with only as much local autonomy as the Council thinks we should have, but there's considerable room to think about our role here and how it shapes the future.

There are major advantages and disadvantages to being independent from Citadel space, and we're only beginning to explore them here. This is a decision to make after considering the pros and cons for a while, not a "come at me bro" decision we should make pre-emptively.

[X][TIMING] Veto, you belligerent idiots.

[x][BUOYS] General Distress Call
[x][BUOYS] Update the Maps
[x][BUOYS] Reconnaissance Pulse

(I accidentallied my BUOYS votes, wanted to put them back in)

I guess I can go along with vetoing it this year. Get the maps updated, send out our SOS, and decide on the independence vote next year. I just didn't see the worth of tanking the popularity hit just to wait on updated maps first. I also don't want to get into the habit of choosing options that tank popularity just because we're really popular. I guess we could also tackle the question of how long it'd take to get in reliable and/or constant contact with the Citadel when we have updated maps.
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Yeah, it would help to know that. Especially combined with the recon pulse giving us (as I understand it) a rough idea of how much force the rachni have in Hades Gamma, which is our easiest route back to Citadel space.


Could be a tough nut to crack, though; if the batarians haven't already broken through it from the other side after several years of it being cut off from the rest of rachni space, there's probably a reason.
 
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[X][TIMING] Veto, you belligerent idiots.

[x][BUOYS] General Distress Call
[x][BUOYS] Update the Maps
[x][BUOYS] Reconnaissance Pulse
 
[X][TIMING] Veto, you belligerent idiots.

[x][BUOYS] General Distress Call
[x][BUOYS] Update the Maps
[x][BUOYS] Reconnaissance Pulse

// Iirc, the GM said at the start of the quest something along the lines of 'get in contact or bad end', and getting in contact with a nice 'we piss on you' message really doesn't sound like that was the intention of that statement ...
 
So if we say veto we will still want to become a council member as a full member not a colony under council shoe? We just move it to later date?
 
Magic_Pal said:
So if we say veto we will still want to become a council member as a full member not a colony under council shoe? We just move it to later date?
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"We" are not a hive mind. Different people want different things.

But I cannot recall a single person who wants to be a helpless subject of the Council and Citadel, as opposed to being a participating member in their system of government. "Veto" is not a vote to become a colony whose government is run by whatever dictates the Council decides to send us, whose leaders are appointed by the Council, and so on.

At the same time, I am not going to lie to you. We aren't going be able to negotiate for a seat on the Council, if that is what you want.

As of this time there are two such seats; it's not so much a "council" as "a very carefully selected asari matriarch and an equally carefully selected salarian dalatrass or get together, have tea, and decide the fate of the galaxy." We are not important enough to be number three.

For everyone who isn't an asari or a salarian, or eventually a turian, there are no seats on the Council. There are embassies to the Council. There are entire species that were part of the Council system for thousands of years and never got a Council seat, such as the volus- who nevertheless eventually acquire so much financial power in Citadel space that they could break the back of its economy if they wanted to.

So us becoming a "full member" is grossly optimistic and unlikely; we are far more likely to be able to negotiate no more than an embassy. On the other hand, those 'embassy only' species often did pretty well for thousands of years under the Council system, and being represented to the Council by an embassy is still a major step forward in the Mass Effect setting.
 
Tolack said:
Hmm... @PoptartProdigy what is the expected reaction by the Assembly and the populace if we Veto this? Both Mira's expectation and our advisors?
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Negative. Independence is a strong issue; in particular, support for continued colony status among the salarian population (which has no living people who remember living under Citadel rule) is effectively zero. The batarians were already largely sourced from Hegemony malcontents unlikely to love the Citadel, and a couple of generations have been born inside the blockade. The volus are a little more moderate, but tend to be pissed about being abandoned. The asari are your single most pro-Citadel population; there are a few matriarchs, they have a lot of cultural weight, and few of them advocate for a break.

But the vast majority of your population is in favor of independence, and even the most pro-Council of Matriarchs (Kirai) doesn't believe that Virmire should simply return to the way it was once you re-establish contact. Vetoing this bill will not be popular.
 
The thing I really don't like about the veto vote is the wording. Mira shows some really autocratic tendencies. She looks down on the opinions of everyone else, and was reluctant to reimplement democracy fully. She's no Cincinnatus. If she vetoes this bill then the assembly would be well-justified in making her life difficult by passing bills to restrain her veto power so she'd have to be seen publicly vetoing those bills.
 
Simon_Jester said:
"We" are not a hive mind. Different people want different things.

But I cannot recall a single person who wants to be a helpless subject of the Council and Citadel, as opposed to being a participating member in their system of government. "Veto" is not a vote to become a colony whose government is run by whatever dictates the Council decides to send us, whose leaders are appointed by the Council, and so on.

At the same time, I am not going to lie to you. We aren't going be able to negotiate for a seat on the Council, if that is what you want.

As of this time there are two such seats; it's not so much a "council" as "a very carefully selected asari matriarch and an equally carefully selected salarian dalatrass or get together, have tea, and decide the fate of the galaxy." We are not important enough to be number three.

For everyone who isn't an asari or a salarian, or eventually a turian, there are no seats on the Council. There are embassies to the Council. There are entire species that were part of the Council system for thousands of years and never got a Council seat, such as the volus- who nevertheless eventually acquire so much financial power in Citadel space that they could break the back of its economy if they wanted to.

So us becoming a "full member" is grossly optimistic and unlikely; we are far more likely to be able to negotiate no more than an embassy. On the other hand, those 'embassy only' species often did pretty well for thousands of years under the Council system, and being represented to the Council by an embassy is still a major step forward in the Mass Effect setting.
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PoptartProdigy said:
But the vast majority of your population is in favor of independence, and even the most pro-Council of Matriarchs (Kirai) doesn't believe that Virmire should simply return to the way it was once you re-establish contact. Vetoing this bill will not be popular.
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Well with what Pop said i stay by my choice.
 
I really dont think the Citadel will be as antagonistic towards Virmire as some seem to think, they have written off the colony as overrun because they didn't even try to defend it, finding out it's in friendly hands which are supporting them in the war is a solid plus for them regardless of whether or not Virmire recognizes the Citadels authority which considering that we are a friendly polity that intends to provide military support to them anyway is a very minor issue compared to the greater war.
 
Can someone remind me how long Virmire had been under siege before we took over in 480?
 
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