Use Sean Connery's voice to say that mister.
...How did you possibly NOT hear that in Connery's voice!?
You already failed to do that when we ended up striking the middle line between legitimacy and a new state.
We either could have gone all in on just "lol 1787 mkII" or dropped the pretense of reviving a dead state and go for something new but we ended up doing neither. So we'd end up sloshing useless around the middle while the Russians come to gut us.
Well, it's not like we were
OFFERED this particular choice to vote on 'BOSS' and get an old secretary of state at the time.
I don't think Poptart is offering us this choice with the express intent of screwing us over, or saying "you could have had this choice and made it work, but now you're screwed because of choices you made before I offered you this choice." I could be wrong, but my gut says otherwise.
Note that Poptart
has tailored the vote choices to our situation. Daley is only available because we picked Chicago, for instance.
I honestly really love the Sara option, becuase I'd like our new start to be... a new start. And I love the idea of just some local that looked at the Nazis and went "No. No fucking more" then after that was done looked around again, looked at the state of her area and the Victorians and Russians over the horizon and went "No. No fucking more." and just fucking puts her back into turning everything around.
[hug]
So how are they going to intervene?
CRUISE MISSILE - wait hold on are launching cruise missiles over chinese or german airspace? abort! abort! abort!
- Launch from the NCR? Do you not understand the concept of "don't give orders that won't be followed?"
Exactly what stops the Russians from having a cruise missile regiment squatting in Victorian territory? Or air-launched cruise missiles fired from bombers?
INVASION - wait how what with what bombers (can't be strategic) or troop deployments or logistics this far away from resupply
They couldn't invade, but they can stage commando raids, relying on the Victorians to get them an "in" with minor powers close enough to our territory to act as staging bases.
PATSY INVASION - more plausible, but still difficult, because unless they already have surplus military the Russians can't just snap their fingers and roll over Chicago
Courtesy of the Victorians they have clear lines of supply most of the way to our territory. They could arm a local opponent with modern weapons.
ASSASSINATION - The most likely course of action; Russia's Okhrana are among their best units, it fits their previous MO, and most of all it's quick and doesn't depend on some other idiot who could fuck it up.
The assassination attempts may also involve special forces raids.
oh shit NUKE - welp. gg. fuck I forgot this was still in the wild. pray that Russia decides just to take the nuke and not use it.
The Russians don't need to obtain the nuke, they
are nuke. Well, they have nukes. They have their own. If they felt like nuking Chicago, they could; they have their own missiles to do it with. The main thing stopping them is international reputation, I suspect.
So now that we're attempting to solve for the issue of "how do we not get assassinated" and "survive a patsy invasion" plus "let's be economic powerhouse and revivalist", the path forward I think becomes pretty clear. pray for clouds and very little instant sunshine
REQUIRED PERK: Good Security. It sure as hell isn't going to be sufficient, but we need to start with a leg up or we're just not going to be able to keep up.
-1 CP.
Now we have to make a decision. I elect to drop the Brown Water Navy, and develop that with actions, ditto too for the Rail Companies. This cuts my requirements down to Independent Merchants, Libraries, and Universities.
Complication:
With no appreciable naval assets, we are even
less capable than normal of stopping the Russians from running guns to our local opponents.
+1 CP.
Incompetent Military: It's the easiest of the 2 CP drawbacks to work around, which is not saying much; it'll still take shittons of dedicated actions when we're desperately pressed otherwise, but it can be overcome and what we get in return is university experts.
Incompetent military means that any
actual living Russians who show up to mess with us will probably go through our troops like a bandsaw through butter. "Incompetent Military" doesn't just mean our frontline troops are weak; it means security is poor on our military facilities, in that the guards are likely to be poorly trained and undisciplined. A good intelligence network that can keep secrets doesn't translate into being able to keep a platoon of Spetznaz out of a building.
Likewise it implies problems for any patsy invasions that may arise.
I think you're minmaxing too hard.
...we're in Chicago. Why exactly do we need a navy?
Because we're sitting on some of the biggest river networks on the planet, which will almost certainly be the backbone of our future logistical and trade networks. And because we're also sitting on the largest network of freshwater lakes on the planet, lakes the size of small seas, which are
directly between us and the Victorians. Like, the Victorians literally
have territory on the Lakes; they can attack us via the Great Lakes. The territory we and they wish to struggle over for control is, in large part, along the shores of the Lakes.
Thus, our ability to put a fleet into battle on the rivers and lakes of North America is very likely to decide our fate.
With respect, but I think that at this point force projection is a boondoggle. We need to have standing troops to defend ourselves against attacks of opportunity, and an intelligence service for counter-intelligence, but I don't think we should look into offensive capabilities just yet. First, we really should build up our own infrastructure/industry/economy. I suppose I could see an argument in that vein for protecting the trade lanes, but well, we'll have to cut corners
somewhere, and I'd prioritize economy over defence for now, and within defence I'd prioritize army and counter-intelligence over the navy. So the navy pretty looks like the corner to cut for me.
Basically, my strategy would be to bunker in and invest. Turtling and booming, that is
If we can't establish control over a reasonable set of resources, we can't even
turtle properly. That means we need metal ores- not found around Chicago, but rather up around Lake Superior and parts of Michigan. We need food- grown in large stretches of cropland throughout the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. If we don't control the lake and river lanes that lead into our core territory, we can't turtle because we can't sustain our economy in the face of opposition.
"Turtling" works in strategy games because in a strategy game, all the resources you need to keep your economy running are (typically)
inside a small area tightly clustered around your base, so you can build defenses around the resources as well as the base itself. That only works in real life if you're able to build "turtle" defenses across an area hundreds of miles wide. Think less like "build a fortress" and more like "build the Great Wall of China."
No popular front option for a socDem-socialist-communist coalition? Despite socDems being leery of revolutionary ideology, they OTL show themselves pretty willing to enter coalitions with communists if they're the dominant partners and the communists agree to work within the electoral system, which they are here. The French popular front was a great example of that. In fact, the stopper to such coalitions was usually from the left, not the right. In fact, market liberal parties frequently didn't see the difference between anything left of center so coalition with capitalists seem less likely. Especially with no soviet union to fill the communists with delusions about social fascists. Or anyone killing Rosa recently.
The main reason not to have a popular front is that not going all the way over towards communism is actually important to the Social Democrats as a party. The reason they
don't self-identify as socialists is precisely because they are not fully committed to socialism, only to the idea that capitalism is not the boss of them.
As for leaders, Sara gives up the option of a clean slate with no drawback, but I think it's a mistake. We probably need a drawback to build up somewhere else. Should we assume no leader has political baggage in terms of parties? If so I'd probably go for the old guard and trying to go all in towards building for conflict with Victoria. People are more likely to rally to us if we're leading the fight.
Sara also gives us the option to
choose our drawbacks. For example, if we want to pay for Universities and Widespread Vaccination with Disunified Economy and, uh...
something?, we can.
Yeah but this is likely to leave us with an article of confederation level of dysfunctionality. And maybe set us up for a civil war down the line like the old US. I'd rather have half the territory but know the people who are in are really with us than have to make so many compromises we're basically impotent.
That... doesn't really make sense to me.
The problem is, the people we need to recruit aren't all neatly pigeonholed by territory. It's not like we can go to the communist part of the country and ally only with communists, while ignoring everyone else. Communists would be a minority scattered all over the nation. So would any other faction.
Relying on "this one political faction loves us" as the cornerstone of our small-l legitimacy means that we'll have fans everywhere we go... but also
enemies wherever we go.
Furthermore, the only way to
avoid political compromises on ideological and political propositions is to enforce the same ideology on everyone. And if we wanted to do that, we should have voted for it in the CRUSH options. As it stands, our political structure is already permanently committed to upholding
whatever the voters want. Which means that as we expand, our political system will necessarily reflect what the 'real' in-character voters want.
Since the majority of Americans in this setting are (for example) not communists, this means that we're necessarily not going to be able to maintain a strong and well-respected state purely by being very very communist. Or firmly committed to any other ideology.
By contrast, people
can unite behind the idea of restoring something broadly similar to the old United States government: a federal, national system that enforced democratic norms and,
in principle, did not enforce any specific ideology, instead providing room for people to argue and disagree and vote on things.
I'm still unclear as to how "Bringing back the old country" doesn't also only appeal to a subset of people. Like, you haven't done a great job differentiating, because I'm still confused,
Almost everyone in the former United States agrees that bringing back the United States
mode of government would be far preferable to the present situation (no organization above the level of city-states, and all of it tyrannized and brutally sabotaged by the Victorians and the Russians).
The disagreement arises when people start to ask what the restored government should do- but almost everyone wants to have it back. The desire to have the US government, or something clearly recognizable as a similar successor state, restored is
much stronger than any individual faction's ideology. There are very few people in post-Collapse America who specifically want a theocratic successor state, or a communist successor state, or a market anarcho-liberal successor 'state.' There are many many many who want "a state kind of like the old United States," with a certain amount of vagueness
accepted as to the exact details.
It's like, if my car is destroyed, I very much want a new car. My favorite color may be green, and I may want a green car specifically, but I want A car more than I want a GREEN car. I would much rather deal with someone prepared to offer me a new car, and compromise on its color, than deal with someone who's strongly pro-greenness, but doesn't actually plan to offer me a car.
You haven't even given me permission to use Goldblum. Name's a coincidence, I'm afraid. :lol
...I thought I did give you permission. Maybe it was implicit.
Okay, Poptart, it's been about a year and a half since the last time we had this conversation, so here goes again. More explicitly.
Any creative content in any way made by me, that is posted in any quest thread of yours, you have standing permission to adapt for use in that quest. This applies in the future, too.
Yes, you have permission to use [rank indeterminate] Sara Goldblum. Just like you had permission to use that wacky version of the Raditz story. If there is any doubt in the matter, the default answer is
yes, you can go right ahead, I really don't mind, if ever do put up something I feel like hoarding for myself, I'll say so.
I have sufficient trust in your respect for characterization that I'm more worried about the hassle of having to explicitly spell this out, than I am in you doing something I'd abhor with the characterization.
