No way, we're toats buddies with them. They would however break out the WMDs and war crimes if the Federation were too preoccupied to so much as glance in their direction.
I'm... pretty sure they're already going to do that anyway. Most of the war is happening in places the Federation doesn't know and has never visited, and we're not the boss of them, nor is there any interstellar accord on what constitutes a 'war crime' that would be enforceable by
anyone even if they could agree to let us be responsible for enforcing it.
If we combined every starship in the federation that is capable of fighting. Could we take the Cardassians?
...Probably? We're a little hazy on how many ships they actually have, especially since we don't know to what extent their allies factor into the balance and what the Klingons and Romulans would do if they saw us locked in a desperate struggle with Cardassia.
Constellation-A/Constellation-P Now-2370 [310m 700k t]
C3 S4 H2 L3 P3 D4
Cost [70br, 50sr, 3 years], Crew [O-2, E-4, T-2]
Centaur-A 2308-Now [315m 800k t]
C3 S3 H2 L3 P3 D3
Cost[80br, 70sr, 2 years], Crew [O-1, E-2, T-2
Can someone explain why the Betazeds would be better off with Centaur-As over Constellation-As? The Consties are equal or better in every category and are cheaper.
Are they suffering from a crippling shortage of enlisted personnel that I don't know about?
Well, they don't have
twice as many enlisted as techs and officers. They'd run out of redshirts to crew
Constellations faster than they'd run out of goldshirts or blueshirts.
I figure that it's like, The American President being the Commander in Chief. That individual is the executive connection point with the military, and there probably is a certain degree of the Praetor had better not be totally objectionable to the Navy and the Navy not having officers objectionable to the Praetor. Praetors change with the backing of the Navy I bet, but it's not like the Navy is the special demesne of the Praetor.
While that is definitely NOT how it works in the US, it is almost certainly how things work in the Romulan Empire.
One thing to remember about Rome, after which Romulus is in some ways modeled (obviously), is that it very much was an oligarchical pseudo-democracy, where most of the protections extended to the general public were the product of a series of extremely abrupt general strikes. There were a LOT of offices in the Roman Republic with staggering potential for abuse of power. The main reason this power was not, on the whole, abused
all the time every time forever was that the bulk of the governing senatorial class came from the same background, all knew each other, and were extremely disciplined and rigorous about
not giving power to anyone they deemed likely to abuse it beyond the bounds of what was normative for Roman society.
Incidentally, you can look at this as a prisoner's dilemma scenario. Prior to about 100 BC the Romans were in a 'cooperate-cooperate' equilibrium where everyone played it more or less straight. After that time things fell apart because people started 'defecting' and doing things like recruiting armed mobs to intimidate their political opponents.
Well, at least some part of this ties back to fifteen in game years of history being behind most of the decisions. There are probably a number of areas that could be simplified, but some of it can't be avoided.
I agree. If your game hasn't achieved a fair degree of emergent complexity after sixty turns of regular gameplay plus
dozens of turns of emergency events, with the active participation of up to 60-70 questgoers on certain votes... Something has gone much, much more wrong than what's wrong with a 'council' system that essentially reduces to representative democracy.
I am not sure if the fact that the quest has grown so complex that only a handful of people understand its core-mechanics is a good thing or something to be proud of. I am currently re-reading the quest and in my eyes it is quite depressing to see how its decision making and voting process grows ever more exclusive with every revision adding even more complexity to it, with nowadays it being pretty near impossible to actually make an indepedent decision in any part of the quest without spending several hours researching the material. A quest that relies so heavily on write-ins/plans like this has always a tendency to move towards a "council" like style (since the number of players that have the time to actually to do the work requried is relatively low) but at beginning you had at least some opportunities to parcipate which have nearly all disappeared which is quite sad im my opinion.
We actually get a fair amount of competition in my opinion,
except in three areas.
One is ship deployment and construction, which as a rule Briefvoice always wins.
One is research, which Nix always wins.
One is ship design and optimization via spreadsheet, which SWB always wins, but doesn't come up very often.
In just about everything else, there is
either competition,
or extremely broad-based consensus about what our priorities are that requires no 'council.'
If I were thinking about how to essentially redo this quest at some future date (which I am), my priorities would be simplifying the mechanics of the latter two fields, and
seriously considering figuring out a way to 'automate' routine ship redeployments.
