You do not have to — and I'd rather you not — write in specificities like, "Tell him to check for traps."
Sigh, sorry, I was starting to know better. I was thinking mainly of the
specific 'infectious disease' idea. The Victorians have used refugees or prisoners deliberately infected with diseases as a weapon more than once, after all, and if those ships have hostages aboard it might honestly
not occur to a decent human being of a naval commander to observe some measure of quarantine to keep a plague from spreading to the rest of his forces.
I'd expect Romano to exercise reasonable caution about bomb-ships and so on, but shit like "oh yeah we injected the hostages with six horrible infectious diseases lolol own the libs" is a bit outside-context. Then again, Rumford
advertised in his memoirs that he's done this, so maybe people are more ready for it than would normally be the case in the present day.
I'll put up revised versions of the plans.
Please don't siege, but please also don't expend OWE when there are alternatives. We can raise more soldiers, but OWE is literally irreplaceable at this point. Its description also explicitly mentions reverse engineering prospects. Even if we won't soon be in shape to build more, the NCR will pay through the nose for the chance to examine it. Wouldn't you like to trade two OWE in exchange for our best ally building four more and gifting us one per year indefinitely?
Um.
@Lailoken ?
May I suggest that you not immediately leap to extreme and unrealistically favorable payoffs when trying to convince people to follow your plans?
Because you
have to know that's an unrealistically favorable offer given firstly that the NCR does in fact have production tooling for significant Old World Equipment of its own, and secondly that it's just plain stupidly favorable in general to the point where including it in the story would be outright bad QMing
It's like if we were talking about what restaurant to eat at, and you said "come on, go to the place I want to go, wouldn't you like to find a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk?" Yes, in theory, if we go to the place you want, we might find a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. But you cannot
possibly promise us that we will, and you can't know that we will, and you can't even know if the odds of such a thing happening are better under your plan than under another plan.
So it comes across as super disingenuous when you do this, like you're just desperately trying to make up big payoffs involving improbably good luck on our part, in hopes that gullible people who don't understand the game very well will fall for it and vote for your plans.
Speaking as someone who's seen it before, it predisposes me to vote
against your plans, because the way I figure it, if you had good compelling reasons to advocate the plan without making up unlikely super-sexy benefits for it, you'd be using those other reasons instead.
I don't think we can be confident of that...
We've been explicitly told that. The NCR has the production lines for modern weaponry of the types that go into Old World Equipment; they may not have
everything but they have a lot. They most certainly have modern guided missiles and we've been explicitly told they have a set of F-35 production line tooling. Even the limited suite of export versions they sell Victoria would be overwhelming to us, if not for being extensively sabotaged because the NCR hates Victoria and wants it to fail.
and the proposed benefits of the 4/5 use don't even measure up to the previous three.
Unless I miss my count, we've used
two charges, not three, so far. If we did use a charge it would likely be the last for this campaign, and we won't be having another major war for some time past this point barring some
really unlikely contingencies.
We can raise more cannon fodder.
Just for the record, you using the words 'cannon fodder' to describe our army when it's been fighting a Victorian force that outnumbered it something like 3:1 or 4:1 at the start of the campaign is another one of those things that predisposes me to vote
against your plan.
It's not just "being bluntly honest." It suggests an attitude towards military affairs and the management of the nation that is itself flawed and dangerous.
After all, people aren't idiots.
If the Vics take civilian residents of Lakeside communities on military transports going into combat, it doesn't take a genius to realize precisely what they were aiming to do. Saddam's human shields during Desert Storm didn't do him any favors.
The Victorians are very successful at propaganda war considering all that they've done, probably because they exploit a few basic principles. Chief among them, people are afraid
NOT to believe Victorians, and have been for most of the adult lives of most people now living in the area.
It's one thing to disbelieve the obviously self-serving propaganda of a brutal tyrant when you're sitting safely beyond the reach of his armies and spies, in a free society where there is no real cost to ignoring or denouncing what he says. It's another thing to disbelieve him when you're in a small, vulnerable community that he could burn to the ground at any time, especially when he can and has made an example of communities that resisted or opposed him.
Victoria has,
in relative terms, a lot more power to lie and be believed than Saddam Hussein had. Or to exaggerate the truth.
This is further exacerbated by
Hostile Neighborhood, which artificially weakens our efforts to counter that propaganda among our immediate neighbors. Bad rumors have spread about us and our intentions, and remember that the Victorians don't have to make us look like the good guys- they just have to make
us look almost as bad as they are.
I don't think that it's likely that they are sending away thousands of tons of explosives on a suicide mission where it's unlikely for the carriers to get anywhere close to anything important before being sunk... but I also think it's worth taking precautions in case they did. Can we please stop arguing when both sides have reached dead-horse levels of restatement of position?
Happily. I just get tired of being told not to worry about plausible threats on the grounds that the Victorians can't possibly have done X... which is
exactly the kind of reasoning that will brutally kick us in the shorts if we keep it up.
Anyone informed enough to require fuel will be informed enough to know that the Victorians control the islands right now, and a bunch of island civilians wouldn't use the giant victorian cargo ship. There is no believable way that, with an entire division of Victorian troops on the islands, the islanders seized two giant cargo ships and 4 smaller ones. It's literally laughable. Given their occupation of the islands, anyone who has any knowledge of the area will assume they massacred the islanders. Anyone far enough away to not know these simple facts won't be basing their assessment on any actual fact and would be just as effectively lied to.
Put this way. If we capture the ships, we are in a good position to
counter lies. We can lead reporters around the ships and say "see, there were no refugees on these ships" take them to interview the refugees who will tell them that the Victorians kidnapped them at gunpoint to use as human shields.
If we sink the ships, it's "he said, she said, bothsides, no one here is without sin," and the muddle goes on, with almost everyone either still afraid
not to believe Victoria, or still getting over decades of being systematically abused and gaslighted by the Victorians until they were thus afraid.
[ ] Plan Block Punch, Choke Them Out
-[ ] Defend with all committable forces.
-[ ] Siege.
-[ ] Order Admiral Romano to try to capture the Victorian freighters.
--[ ] He has permission to sink the freighters if capture would present unacceptable risks to his command.
-[ ] Scouting Missions.
This plan takes a siege approach. Since we'll be taking the long view, but want to resolve the siege relatively quickly, I don't think bombardment is the best use of our ships in this situation. A bit more bombardment isn't likely to shave a month or more off the siege by itself. So instead, "Block Punch, Choke Them Out" uses the Navy primarily for scouting, in hopes of finding a way to cut the Victorians off from the bulk of their remaining supplies with an amphibious landing.
[ ] Plan Block Punch, Apply Pressure
-[ ] Defend with all committable forces.
-[ ] Limited assault.
-[ ] Order Admiral Romano to try to capture the Victorian freighters.
--[ ] He has permission to sink the freighters if capture would present unacceptable risks to his command.
-[ ] Full bombardment.
Whereas with this plan, I think we can safely go for full bombardment because we'll be starting an assault soon- it is less likely that the enemy will be able to resupply their remnant army before we start cranking up the pressure.
[ ] Plan Block Punch, Apply Pressure, Then Stab
-[ ] Defend with all committable forces.
-[ ] Limited assault.
--[ ] Once the enemy is judged to be appropriately softened up and overextended, use Old World Equipment to launch a decisive, crushing assault.
-[ ] Order Admiral Romano to try to capture the Victorian freighters.
--[ ] He has permission to sink the freighters if capture would present unacceptable risks to his command.
-[ ] Full bombardment.
