Which do you suggest for the intrigue action? Im thorn on that
ok, generally people are interested in excavating the rock tunnel, infiltrating the federation and catching slugma, the pros and cons of which(that i know) are as follows.
I don't want to say "vote for this" but can see a bunch more advantages to the first two, which one's best probably depends on whether you want to take a risk to advance and unlock new stuff, or play it safer and prevent some future issues?
rock tunnel gives us a route into the pipeworks and out of the zone, unlocking a whole bunch of future actions, like smuggling and whatnot. this has been something we're trying to do for a while and once it's sorted out we'd be able to expand in a bunch of ways and so is probably pretty important to advance the quest.
downside is it's a presumably pretty high mystery DC, so hard to say it'll succeed (though we do have high intrigue+copycat to boost rolls by more than 50, so if it's ~100 we'll have a 50% shot at it), and that we have other actions we can do so don't *need* more (though if they're better that's a good thing)
infiltrating the PKF is a matter of turning a potential enemy on the board into an asset, or at least not an obstacle. since a success angles them away from us we'd have less to worry about in rival reports, and less problems to resolve/defend against (while other factions would suffer more from them). also there's a chance at being able to further subvert them and gain a sub-faction/remove them as an issue or something in the future, which would be wild.
it's also a DC 75 action (85 with the -10 to rolls) which might seem bad but it's pretty achievable with the bonuses we'd have to an intrigue roll, so a good pick for the turn we'd have this malus?
downside's that it might be best to wait for copycat to do personals beforehand to possibly improve the effectiveness of it, and that it means not taking other actions (especially possibly delaying rock tunnel and everything behind it)
Slugma gives us pokemon from Johto(having more pokemon's handy and Johto ones may be special somehow) and stops others from getting it while being an intrigue action (other catching pokemon actions are martial, so this one lets us get pokemon without taking that up)
but the downside's that the PKF are already after it(so we don't need to do anything to stop it from going to Silph, and if we fight over it they could get set against us which could cause problems long-term), taking this would mean we miss out on other strategically important intrigue actions, and it's also a mystery DC (may be doable but you can't say for sure)(note for the record I'm a bit biased against taking this one, i just don't see it as worthwhile)
there's some other actions but those are either locked(leave the zone through the sea, get drugs from the pipeworks), are probably too high a DC to be viable when we have a malus to rolls (inserting moles into Silph, investigating Neo-Johto, power pills, searching for mu-2), or are too expensive (pokesmuggling, which since we only get more pokemon through national actions would require us to keep catching more or run out of ones for personal use)
I mean, it achieves "getting it done now so we don't need to spend a Stewardship action on it next turn". I assume we can do them in any order, and we don't need to do them on the same turn, although, yeah, maybe we should.
yeah that's the advantage, especially since it's hard to trust a quest chat to be able to coordinate/stick to a plan as things get more complicated
from what i can tell, we can do one now, both now, or neither now, and will get the reward once both are done, meaning doing just 1 this turn won't pay off?
my logic is that in the event we're taking diplo recruit heroes this turn and diplo doctors next turn and also have sanitisation to do and one other action (any, really), if in a plan where recruiting doctors gets put off we also put sanitisation off we'd get the benefit from the alternate stewardship action a turn ahead of when we get it otherwise? which could make a difference depending on what it is
of course, this assumes we don't get new urgent stewardship actions the turn after this one.
personally I'd prefer to sort out the stewardship *and* diplo setup actions now since we don't have strong competition for stewardship, there's always the chance of next turn more limited time opportunities/high importance actions popping up (perhaps one for building up fortifications in the pipeworks if that intrigue gets chosen/succeeds, maybe? i could see that being pretty rewarding since the area's so dangerous)
/what's your reasoning for slugs?