I realize that Marsden is pretty far behind, but it's really hard to bring myself to care about a vote between a career soldier and a local warlord. Johnson liberated Chicago from the Nazis and held onto power ever since then? Yeah, really screams democrat...
I dunno, remember George Washington?
I really think old guard is a mistake with very good reasons suggested. But I guess people dont give a shit.
So help me God the next time I read a passive aggressive remark by about how people who vote the way you don't want "don't care,"
I will change my vote to whatever that person is criticizing.
Then give a rebuttal regarding why putting military over literally everything else and getting us attacked sooner than later is superior to every other choice we can make, and Oorah fuck yeah America, let's kick ass is not a good reasoning.
It's not insulting to say people are making a mistake.
WELP!
Changing my vote as soon as I'm done writing these replies.
You're right. And I apologize. I must however state that poptart already warned us about trying to game the system. So it stands to reason that were were going to have to sacrifice somewhere.
We should probably take vaccinations. Poptart implied on discord last night that were gonna need very good medical stuff.
...Okay, because you did apologize, which people who do this don't always do, I've changed my mind. I'll leave it as is.
But going forward I'm declaring this as a policy: I will consistently vote against anyone I see as being passive-aggressive or condemning opposing voters as stupid, uncaring, or otherwise inferior and lowly.
...because Old Guard gives you the military and option flexibility to be able to take all those nice economic perks, plus a hopefully huge amount of legitimacy for snapping Victoria's military over your back like a dry twig? Like, you know that Canon Omake: Jousting At Windmills? That was a single Abrams tank. The Old Guard start gives us an entire battalion of those. If we wanted to, we could probably launch a decisive engagement immediately, and instantly destroy the majority of Victoria's firepower.
To be fair, the Victorians DID somehow materially speed up the collapse. They must have been able to deal with Old World weapons and training
somehow, sort of, marginally.
My headcanon version of Rumsford or whatever his name is, is that he's a conceited hyper-bigoted jerk with all manner of delusions, but the one thing he
does have is a weird knack for figuring out ways to throw an opponent off balance. Like, that's his only relevant skill.
I expect the Victorians not to just charge in like mindless under-equipped mooks, but to actually be relatively effective at sneaking up on people, hitting them where they didn't expect it, and then keeping them down by a brutal,
brutal beating.
They've got to be good at
something to have done what they did and survived this long, even given that the Russians were helping them heavily and that all their opponents were weakened.
Begging the question, much? Speaking for myself, I was already planning to take professionals study logistics, as it's a great combination military / Econ buff, which makes the old guard soldier a free point extra; sure, it comes with Victorian attention, but I also planned on taking that anyway for the points, and if anything old world equipment will make us safer from that than my own plan of foreign equipment.
Should they pass, my vote would be:
Libraries
Universities
Independant Merchants
Brown Water Navy
Old World Training
Population Boom
Disastrous Start
Hostile Neighborhood
Disunited Currency
I'd be willing to compromise on the greatest sin for an additional benefit, like Good Security + Rail Network or Vaccinations *maybe* just removing disunited currency.
I think
Hostile Neighborhood combines very poorly with
Old Guard. Because
Old Guard means we're going to be locked into relying a bit more heavily on military force, and
Hostile Neighborhood means our neighbors will react to our use of military force by forming a coalition against us.
Basically, they will decide we're a bunch of conquistadores cut from the same cloth as the Victorians, and react accordingly. Very bad for our future prospects. We'd be positioning ourselves
specifically to push the button that triggers the worst possible reaction from that malus. I'd much rather take, say,
Import/Export Professionals, because while the crime wave and security problems it implies are an issue, there an issue that doesn't specifically blow up to new heights of badness with the
Old Guard start choice.
There's nothing to sustain. Old Guard just lets us repel their first attacks, and we can do whatever we want in the meantime. A strong military is also kinda hard to build up, given Poptart mentioned that turns are half-years, followed by noting that raising our unis to Level 2 in quality would take multiple turns of focus, with 2 -> 3, 3->4 each being more difficult than the last. And there's the risk in a build-up strategy--you get noticed by Victoria in a series of bad dice rolls without being ready for them.
I wouldn't assume
Old Guard confers immunity to the Victorians' actions.
They're
@PoptartProdigy quest antagonists; they're not going to be
complete idiots. They may send assassins. They may send saboteurs to cripple our logistics or our navy. They may send a large army to force us to mobilize all our forces and dig in to oppose them, while sending a flanking force to hit us another way. They might do something really horrible like deliberately spread a plague- they've done it before.
Just having a single battalion or regiment armed with Very Nice Guns isn't going to be enough to protect us from the concerted efforts of a nation-state to lay us low.
So the "have a strong military, confront the Victorians right away" strategy is
not even slightly without risk. This is doubly true if we take maluses that create weaknesses on the home front. For instance,
Population Boom means that any disruption of our trade routes will probably result in a famine.
Disunified Economy means we're going to struggle to organize and mobilize our industry to sustain a war effort- and we WILL have to mobilize, because we can't rely on a single battalion, however well armed and trained, to win the war for us.
Then why have it be less points?
Possibly because it's high risk high reward? If we defeat Victorian intervention, we gain prestige and may even capture useful assets (though the Victorians will keep coming back, and complaining about us to the Russians). The problem is that if we fail, we take damage or outright lose the quest.
So there's a balance of danger and opportunity, but it's biased towards "danger," so it's a malus and not a bonus. Plus it locks us into a strategy of having to prepare for a war we know is coming, another reason for it to be a malus.
I said what I meant: fight them and completely destroy their entire invading force.
Like, Jousting At Windmills is a canonical omake. In it, a single Abrams tank destroys 33-38(!) T-34s. That is how badly we outclass them militarily, using Old World Hardware. We might even outclass them more, because our gunnery is actually Old World standard.
What if they don't come at us in a screaming horde of poorly handled tanks? That T-34 rush scenario was just about the worst outcome
possible for the Victorians. And unless they are complete gibbering morons (unlikely for the main antagonist of a Poptart quest), they will probably have learned a lesson or two from that experience. Not even Rumsford deluded himself into thinking T-34s or other obsolete tanks could win armored clashes against enemy tanks; he just figured he'd always be able to find a way to raid where the enemy didn't have his tanks- which is arguably even stupider, but is the kind of doctrine that can adapt to lessons like "welp, so much for THAT armored regiment."
Plus, "a battalion of modern equipment" does not translate into "a battalion of heavy tanks and unlimited ammo." Plus, those forces can only be deployed in one place at one time.
So like, I get what you're saying about a tactical and strategic level, but there is no strategic level if a single engagement destroys their whole invasion force.
I don't expect us to immediately crush them and salt the earth afterwards; the Victorians will go begging to the Russians for tank handouts, and will probably get some to replenish their losses. But losing with this kind of advantage is, uh, doubtful.
Or, they will disperse their forces, not rely entirely on an armored spearhead when they may know or suspect we have modern antitank weapons, infiltrate ahead of time and employ commando/guerilla tactics against us
as is their normal practice, and otherwise present us with a problem we can't smash with a big hammer.
I don't think we should assume that Victorian intervention will take place in the most conveniently nail-like manner possible to be solved by our great big hammer.
Full stop: How many tanks do you think Victoria even has? Like, legitimately, how many tanks are you estimating them to launch at us?
A T-34 is a tank they can
manufacture even with their deliberately handicapped industrial base, unless the Russians have purposefully crippled them even further than we believe. Given a year or two to mobilize, with the
de facto ability to use forced labor on war industries, they could have many hundreds, even thousands, of tanks to replace the ones we destroy.
And it's not all about tanks.
Men are a factor- infantry, and that's an area where our margin of superiority is weaker or even nonexistent.
There is NO way this entire war is going to reduce to a series of giant clashes of armored forces that slam into each other head on and fight battles of annihilation until only one side is left standing.
And this is besides my point, which is that Old Guard is certainly not a start with nothing going for it; it does have something going for it, namely huge military strength plus CP to spend on economics and intelligence.
That's a fair point, but we seem to have people in very grave danger of badly underestimating the enemy, and that worries me.
Plus, with old guad, we can later take that amazing military unit, and split it up into instructors to teach people.
We've been told that this isn't a very practical strategy. No,
Old World Troops does not give us
Old World Training for free.
)
