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Victoria Falls: A Post-Collapse American Nation Quest [Down With Victoria!]

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bdun140 said:
People saying "I TOLD YOU SO" about taking both "The Bear Weakens" as well as "Old Grudges" at once, and subsequently asking if the shiny things were worth it
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"For what I know perfectly well will not be the last time, yes the shinies were worth it. Old Grudges gave us the points for Sister Cali, and without delicious Caligear we would have just lost a fight with an air force they weren't even supposed to have. I see no reason to think it's suddenly going to stop working when we finally get the Old Grudges fight, and once it helps us crush them the malus will have officially more than paid for itself."
 
rikalous said:
"For what I know perfectly well will not be the last time, yes the shinies were worth it. Old Grudges gave us the points for Sister Cali, and without delicious Caligear we would have just lost a fight with an air force they weren't even supposed to have. I see no reason to think it's suddenly going to stop working when we finally get the Old Grudges fight, and once it helps us crush them the malus will have officially more than paid for itself."
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Quick, what other shinies did they buy? We know they took "The Bear Weakens", which I imagine was worth a hefty chunk of change, and if the Resistance movement still exists / ever existed, it's possible they took "Original Sin (weak)*" as well. "Ideological Purity", to keep them from having to purge their Air Force every other year? "Land of Bounty", so that they would actually have positive population growth for the first time since The Collapse?

Context I'm imagining is that Strudel Savant got bored/unsatisfied with the system they were using some time after Azania, and opted for a 20 year time-skip while they un-fucked things, during which the players were invited to purchase Complications in exchange for Benefits. Maybe they realized "Hand of the Tsar" was more powerful than they intended, and then offered a large number of points for "The Bear Weakens" in hopes the players would get rid of it. That, or Russia was going to have to pull out anyway because the QM said so, and this then formed the initial budget for shinies.

One can only imagine the cackling when they chose "Sister Cali", then when rolling on the top-secret Grudge Faction table the QM got "Azania Resurgent".

*If the resistance were us, that would mean they took either the moderate or severe version.
 
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bdun140 said:
Quick, what other shinies did they buy? We know they took "The Bear Weakens", which I imagine was worth a hefty chunk of change, and if the Resistance movement still exists / ever existed, it's possible they took "Original Sin (weak)*" as well. "Ideological Purity", to keep them from having to purge their Air Force every other year? "Land of Bounty", so that they would actually have positive population growth for the first time since The Collapse?
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Let's see, some probable shinies taken by the Victorians.

"Railroad Companies," because they need a rail network in the worst way and it's the one form of transport infrastructure that they can run as a retroculture and actually work pretty well. Without this, their logistics and internal development DCs would be higher.

"Foreign Investors," basically to get ANY foreign investment (exploiting, e.g. Vermont ski slopes and Niagara Falls scenery combined with much much cheaper Victoria-era labor in the Northeast for tourism, enabling someone to dam the Bay of Fundy, etc), which is their equivalent of "Independent Merchants."

"Stalwarts," Victorian sympathizers in other polities and more diplomatic inroads with minor factions so that they can pull off shit like the Recruit Local Allies maneuvers they've been doing against us. Without this, their diplomatic DCs would be higher.

"The Apple, Cored," a debuff to the Free City of New York representing the degree to which their populace is intimidated by Victorian might and to which their city is disarmed.
 
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Well, we can be 100% sure they took Stalwarts, the rest I'm not so sure of.
EDIT: And obviously, something they DIDN'T take was "Brother Tex", or else the Mexican Federation would be having a much harder time of things right now. I can understand why though, the stuff it offered just wasn't sexy the way fighter jets are. And one complication they shied away from was "Drums in the Distance", hence the tragic lack of Juggle-Mongols.

Of course, fanfiction being what it is, we can each have our own head-canon on what they took, what they DIDN'T take, and who's salty that X got taken over Y or that Complication A was favored when Complication B would clearly have been less damaging, etc.
 
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bdun140 said:
Quick, what other shinies did they buy? We know they took "The Bear Weakens", which I imagine was worth a hefty chunk of change, and if the Resistance movement still exists / ever existed, it's possible they took "Original Sin (weak)*" as well. "Ideological Purity", to keep them from having to purge their Air Force every other year? "Land of Bounty", so that they would actually have positive population growth for the first time since The Collapse?
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They probably picked "veteran soldiers" like our old world soldiers a couple of times to keep the Christian marines as dangerous a force as it is currently, maybe picked "Land Air and no Sea" in order to keep buffing the other branches ("where are we going to need a navy? We all know that if you can't hold land with a boat")
 
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huh, I wonder if we could try and draw the vics in? farther into our AA envelope, and farther from resupply. Then again, we may not need to, their going to keep charging forward until something stops them I think.
 
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random_npc said:
hun, I wonder if we could try and draw the vics in? farther into our AA envelope, and farther from resupply. Then again, we may not need to, their going to keep charging forward until something stops them I think.
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Well, the thing is, we only have an AA envelope within, say, ten miles or so of our own troops. Maybe twenty though that's pretty marginal range for the kind of basic heavy surface to air missiles we might be using*. Also, they're already pretty much maximally far from resupply, because they're at the extreme western tip of Lake Erie, and their supply base in Buffalo is at the extreme eastern tip. About the only thing we can do to cut them off even further is if we get their main force to launch a land attack out of Toledo and cross the swamps to hit us from the north.

*(Our biggest AA weapons would probably be heavy SAMs, the kind that are the size of a telephone pole and take significant setup time, but if one actually blows up near your plane, your plane is seven kinds of fuckety. The problem is, they DO take setup time; they're like artillery, only more so because they often depend on multiple radar sets to lock on and target enemies, and things like that. So you have to deploy them far enough behind your lines that you can be confident of being able to pack up and pull out if the enemy is doing well...)
 
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Random Member said:
*raises eyebrow*
Not Steve Rogers?
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We're saving that for a super-prototype uber-massive future-tank, duh.

10ebbor10 said:
On the other hand, most of the Honor Harrington series focusses on a plutocratic Capitalistic Monarchy fighting against dumb socialists, so it doesn't really seem appropriate.
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Well, dumb/corrupt socialists are just as bad as dumb/corrupt anything else....

QTesseract said:
If it's a boat, there's no excuse for Elendil rather than Eärendil, or better yet Cirdan.

Also not a huge fan of Honor Harrington, the series is unabashedly both anti democratic and anti socialist.
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Might be anti-full-socialist/communist, but not anti-SocDem. :p;)
 
KnightDisciple said:
Well, dumb/corrupt socialists are just as bad as dumb/corrupt anything else....
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KnightDisciple said:
Might be anti-full-socialist/communist, but not anti-SocDem. :p;)
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Eh, the Hero nation of the story is Manticore; where progressive taxation is unconstitutional unless there's a war, people are not allowed to vote if they recieve any kind of governement aid, and most of the power lies with royalty and aristocracy.

On the other hand, you have the People's Republic, a socialist state so socialist that everyone stops working and goes on welfare, forcing them to keep conquering new economies that they can then ruin.

Now later books recontextualize a bunch of that stuff, but there's still a lot of it left.
 
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You know, if we're looking for someone to name a ship after to annoy the Vicks, how about Gráinne Mhaol?

I mean, we have a lot of Irish blood in Chicago, and one of our fleet bearing the name of an Irish pirate queen with a long and storied history of revolutionary activity against a hostile foreign power would be pretty appropriate.
 
If the goal is to use famous people's names that have something to do with Chicago, we could use Charlie Chaplin, who worked for a Chicago-based studio.

Imagine a suply ship called "the Tramp".
 
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10ebbor10 said:
Eh, the Hero nation of the story is Manticore; where progressive taxation is unconstitutional unless there's a war, people are not allowed to vote if they recieve any kind of governement aid, and most of the power lies with royalty and aristocracy.

On the other hand, you have the People's Republic, a socialist state so socialist that everyone stops working and goes on welfare, forcing them to keep conquering new economies that they can then ruin.

Now later books recontextualize a bunch of that stuff, but there's still a lot of it left.
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Reading between the lines, Manticore is basically Space Dubai.

They were an economic and technological backwater, more or less competently administered but clearly third-rate, occasionally splurging on an advanced weapon or two but usually not bothering because meh. Then they discovered a magical spatiotemporal whozit on the edge of their star system (the wormhole junction) that gives them massive fuckoff stupid amounts of free money from literally nowhere. They don't have to maintain infrastructure to keep it running. They don't have to DO anything, except just maintain the fortifications on that wormhole junction so nobody gets any fancy ideas about conquering the system in order to control it. It is the ultimate example of a resource curse state.

It actually speaks well of the Manticoran aristocracy that they haven't fucked the place up catastrophically, that they've managed to reinvest the ridiculous massive fuckoff firehose of money pouring out of the wormhole junction into building up a modern state, and that the society that's resulted is more or less capable of convincingly impersonating a liberal democracy. Most real life countries starting in that situation would screw things up repeatedly and misuse the money until eventually some real power (like the League or Haven) moved in and took over.

IonicTiger said:
You know, if we're looking for someone to name a ship after to annoy the Vicks, how about Gráinne Mhaol?

I mean, we have a lot of Irish blood in Chicago, and one of our fleet bearing the name of an Irish pirate queen with a long and storied history of revolutionary activity against a hostile foreign power would be pretty appropriate.
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I'm kind of hoping to keep a relatively tight focus for the next ship class on "American/Chicagolander heroes." This means not digging deep into mythology or fiction or other countries' history, or picking people who aren't remembered in an especially heroic light.

Remember, these ship names are meant to reflect the spirit and hopes and resolve of a nation that is fighting for its life. Stuff 90% of the population has never heard of doesn't really fit the bill.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Reading between the lines, Manticore is basically Space Dubai.

They were an economic and technological backwater, more or less competently administered but clearly third-rate, occasionally splurging on an advanced weapon or two but usually not bothering because meh. Then they discovered a magical spatiotemporal whozit on the edge of their star system (the wormhole junction) that gives them massive fuckoff stupid amounts of free money from literally nowhere. They don't have to maintain infrastructure to keep it running. They don't have to DO anything, except just maintain the fortifications on that wormhole junction so nobody gets any fancy ideas about conquering the system in order to control it. It is the ultimate example of a resource curse state.

It actually speaks well of the Manticoran aristocracy that they haven't fucked the place up catastrophically, that they've managed to reinvest the ridiculous massive fuckoff firehose of money pouring out of the wormhole junction into building up a modern state, and that the society that's resulted is more or less capable of convincingly impersonating a liberal democracy. Most real life countries starting in that situation would screw things up repeatedly and misuse the money until eventually some real power (like the League or Haven) moved in and took over.

I'm kind of hoping to keep a relatively tight focus for the next ship class on "American/Chicagolander heroes." This means not digging deep into mythology or fiction or other countries' history, or picking people who aren't remembered in an especially heroic light.

Remember, these ship names are meant to reflect the spirit and hopes and resolve of a nation that is fighting for its life. Stuff 90% of the population has never heard of doesn't really fit the bill.
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Manticore is Space UK. Like, there's basically no disguise of that? Sort of like Haven is Space France and Grayson is Space Utah.
 
KnightDisciple said:
Manticore is Space UK. Like, there's basically no disguise of that? Sort of like Haven is Space France and Grayson is Space Utah.
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I don't quite see the link between the UK and Manticore. I mean, both have a monarchy, but that's it.

Haven does indeed have the bit where Weber just copy pasted the French revolution, but outside of that it's not really French.
 
Honestly Haven seems to legit speak French and it's only setting translation conventions that stop us from noticing, or such is my impression.

KnightDisciple said:
Manticore is Space UK. Like, there's basically no disguise of that? Sort of like Haven is Space France and Grayson is Space Utah.
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Except, it's not. Manticore is very little like the United Kingdom beyond a very superficial level. The UK never had a magical space gribbly radiating money into their economy. The UK never combined a welfare state with a "you can't vote unless you pay net taxes to the government" requirement. The UK never had a dueling culture and a modern media infrastructure simultaneously.

If you want a series that actually resembles Space Napoleonic Wars, go read David Drake's Lieutenant Leary series. The resemblances are far, far stronger.
 
Yeah, if you had to force a European monarchy comparison, I'd go with the Netherlands. Tiny country with a wealthy trade network.
 
Yep, even the Andermani Empire are ethnic Chinese inspired by Old Fritz (Fredrick the Great). Haven is an example of what you get if a democracy screws up, Manticore is what happens if victorian nobles have a social conscience and Grayson is a Utah Mormon's wet dream.

And then there is Manpower Inc., which must be fiction's worst temp agency ever.

But the most important message is: Celery is so addictive, even cats will grow extra limbs to climb celery trees! :lol
 
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Should we deploy the Big Red One division to attack the cut off forces or should we keep it in reserve because there could be reinforcements or it is not worth it to risk the tanks to win faster? The enemy air force is still a threat to our currently irreplaceable tanks.
 
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BoredStudent1414 said:
Should we deploy the Big Red One division to attack the cut off forces or should we keep it in reserve because the could be reinforcements or it is not worth it to risk the tanks to win faster? The enemy air force is still a threat to our currently irreplaceable tanks.
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Our entire strategy revolves around the fact that we have supplies and they dont. Why would we risk anything to make it faster?
 
I'd agree with waiting. We don't want to wait so long we never use them, necessarily, but it doesn't feel like quite the right time for that sucker punch.
 
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