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Either dead or heading back to Detroit with us when we leave if they haven't gone already. Any that say behind will have to hope that they don't get found by the Inquisitors when they start investigating the populace for infiltrators. or that they are part of the groups get made examples of to the rest of the population.
You know, I am not a big fan of one D100 roll, it feels it all hangs on one throw of the dice, mayhaps use two or three D100 and average it? I mean it makes crits on both directions more difficult and rare, plus asking a whole forum to do one roll of the dice? *grimaces* not a big fan. regardless of this event, honest each time I see Poptart call for a dice roll and three or four people doing simultaneous rolls? it ends up being a tad annoying, tbh
[X] This was not a decisive blow, merely a painful setback. It wasn't even a defeat! You achieved your operational objectives and pushed out the forces responsible for this. Operations will continue. Continue the war, now racing internal dissent as well as Loyalist pressure.
-[X] If you can make it unaccceptable for Blackwell to keep waiting you out, he'll be forced to attack you, guaranteeing you a crushing, heavily symbolic victory. Put about on public broadcast announcements of a Plebiscite of Independence for Buffalo. They hate Blackwell more than they hate you, and he knows it. Blackwell absolutely cannot ignore the threat this leaves, and has to to launch an attack immediately - which will end in a dismal failure.
Bluff Called
One could write a poem about the Battle For Buffalo. The announcement of the plebiscite. The sudden, searing panic in Loyalist Command. The sudden attack. You could make a movie about the soldiers on the ground, fighting in unseasonably warm weather to repel tides upon tides of Loyalist militia.
But that's all unnecessary, because frankly, the military operations were never the operative part of this. The long and short of it is: the Commonwealth puts about that they're going to give Buffalo a vote on their political status. Blackwell realizes that he cannot afford that, and musters up to attack, come hell or high water. The militia comes.
And they die.
Shattering upon six divisions of proper troops with artillery and air support, the militia die. Barely directed by an officer corps more used to directing house searches and political arrests than military actions, they die. By the thousands, they die. For a week of all the assaults the Inquisitors can force them into, they die.
And they break.
* * *
-Buffalo, New York, United States of America-
-Northern Confederation of Victoria-
-Monday, December 29th, 2075, 12:17 PM-
-Private James Roycewicz, Liberators Division, Commonwealth Army-
James peers out across the no-man's land, seeing a party of militiamen approaching at a slow pace. They carry a gigantic white banner, and they're moving slow and steady, in the open. He has his gun trained on them, but he doesn't fire, for now. He watches as the 1st Brigade's Colonel steps out to meet them, followed by a part of other soldiers. About 50 yards from the lines, the two parties meet and start talking. The Colonel gets agitated. A moment later, he sends two of his escort sprinting back towards the Commonwealth's lines. James watches in confusion as a ripple of whispers spreads towards him. Said hears first and whispers to Reyes.
"What's happening?" asks James. "What are they saying?"
Reyes leans back, eyes wide. "They..." She looks out at the Loyalists, shaking her head. "They're surrendering."
* * *
Five hours after the first surrenders, General Blackwell issues a formal request for a ceasefire, and hours after that, Augusta requests that peace talks resume. Victoria has pitched everything they can at you in an effort to push you out and force Buffalo to refuse the plebiscite. Loyalist officers have been ranting over the air waves for weeks about how anybody who fills a ballot is going to die, and how Victoria will not stand for its own people to undermine its legitimacy like this. They have thrown all that can be spared into an attempt to drive you into the Lake and scour Buffalo of any flicker of disloyalty.
Plebiscite [Remain or Leave]: 4+25=29.
And the worst part of it is, they needn't have bothered.
The vote occurs in the midst of the fighting, when the sounds of battle were audible constantly, and isn't tallied until after the fighting is done, and so there are many reasons why the people of Buffalo vote, pretty solidly, to remain a part of Victoria. Part of that is the terror that the Loyalists will win, and what they will do after they win. Part of it is the threats. Part of it is simply inertia.
The regular demonstrations, however, with citizens waving signs begging the Loyalists for mercy, that they didn't set this up, that they won't vote for this, are fairly indicative of which of those reasons is foremost among them.
But there are two weeks in between when the ballots are submitted and when they are counted. Two weeks of Victoria going from howling about how they will cleanse Buffalo in blood to grumbling to the nation at large that the traitors of Buffalo, those bastard city-dwellers, sold Victoria to the Marxists. Two weeks of people within Buffalo whispering back and forth, "I voted to stay, didn't you? We all did, right? Why are they still talking about this? Why are they saying we wouldn't ask to stay? Why do they want to kill us?"
Two weeks during which the media presence within Buffalo is under strict controls, with news reports on a mandatory delay until the results are released. A good part of that is the fact that the city is home to significant military operations, and you very much cannot have media reports accidentally disclosing things about troop movements. But incidentally, it means that the Loyalists have no means to take the mood in Buffalo, hear about exit polls, and realize that death threats may not be the optimal response to this situation.
And then the Loyalists realize that they've been threatening a population that voted to remain with them with a 71% majority with death for disloyalty, 24/7, for the better part of a month.
The sudden pivot in the Victorian broadcasts' angle is...not precisely taken to heart. And the resulting demonstrations for that, you are more than happy to allow to be broadcasted. Immediately.
* * *
Victoria comes to the peace table shattered. Their armies broken, twice. Their vaunted moral victory utterly repudiated. By their own actions, an entire city rioting in outrage that their nation considered their loyalty worthless. The Crusaders, allowed to roam free throughout the entirety of December.
And then, finally, the snows come.
Victoria vanishes under a white sheet as its militiamen are released in barely enough time to get home. Half of the harvest rotted in the fields. Hundreds of thousands of able-bodied young men have perished. There is severe rationing of what little is left. They are a nation so badly hurt it's staggering, and still they need to fight a civil war to its conclusion. At this point, they need peace. They need peace almost as badly as they need food.
And by now, there is no amount of bluff that can conceal that. Premier Swift returns to the Free City of New York with the look of a man facing a firing squad. To open negotiations, you propose, again, the treaty that caused them to walk away last time.
He signs it immediately, and then immediately departs back to Victoria. A week later, the word spreads that he has committed suicide. You don't know what that's code for. You don't want to question it.
You drag your heels on departing Buffalo for as long as you can. You announce across the entire city that Victoria has signed a treaty granting the people leave to walk away. You find every person who voted to leave and have your people beg them to come with you. You scoop up as many who voted to stay and feel betrayed. In the midst of a winter all the more furious for its delays, you organize as grand an exodus as you can.
Uniquely for your usual troubles counting people, the necessity of integrating these people into your military logistics network means that you actually get a very accurate head count of how many people remain in Buffalo. After the ravages of the past year, Buffalo has 68,493 residents. 32,595 will be remaining, when you leave. You tried to convince them, but they remain certain that their votes will be their shield, and that Victoria will forgive. They must forgive.
But regardless, you leave, and over half of what remains in the city comes with you.
It was a dirty and exhausting campaign, and Blackwell made it painful.
But you won.
* * *
NEW CHICAGO TRIBUNE
VICTORIAN CAPITULATION: PEACE TREATY SIGNED IN FCNY!
Earlier today, Premier Swift of the Northern Confederation of Victoria signed a peace deal with President Johnson, formally bringing hostilities to an end.
The treaty was the same as that which cause the Victorians to walk away back in November; in the aftermath of the Welland Campaign -- called, "Operation Foil," by Commonwealth military planners -- they have agreed to the treaty in full.
This treaty is nothing less than a Victorian surrender in full; among other terms, Victoria assumes full fault for the war, opens the St. Lawrence Seaway to general travel, and grants their population leave to seek refugee status in foreign nations. Furthermore, the treaty contains a demand that Victorian Prisoners of War be repatriated in exchange for war brides seized by Victorian troops while abroad.
Congress has unsealed recordings of President Johnson presenting the treaty to them for approval, and...Continued on Page 2.
The war has concluded. You have succeeded in your original goal: forcing Blackwell to accept the incredibly harsh peace treaty that he walked away from during the first round of negotiations.
[X] Total Industry mk4 DC 90
-[X] War Reparations Clause, Acquisitive: +5
-[X] Artifact Reclamation Clause +5
-[X] War Guilt Clause +5 DC
-[X] Militia Clause -5
-[X] Prisoners of War Clause, Delayed -10
-[X] War Brides Clause, Exchange +15
-[X] Free Migration Clause +30
-[X] Johnson Doctrine Clause +10
-[X] Foreign Aid Clause +15
-[X] Annulment Clause +25
-[X] Hostile Neutrality Clause -15
-[X] Seaway Clause, General: +50
-[X] Free Trade Clause +20
-[X] Lakes Access Clause: -20
Once again, you can reference all of the involved clauses here.
FCNY has approached you regarding one of the clauses, namely the Artifact Reclamation Clause. They are offering to purchase the items from you now. They reference their ability to maintain the items, the fact that this would free you from any need to undertake the costs of restoration and maintenance, and offer you a good price.
[ ] Agreed. Sell the artifacts from the treaty directly to FCNY, along with the attendant Legitimacy boost. Gain +2 free AP for this upcoming turn.
[ ] Politely decline. You'd rather hold onto the artifacts, either for the symbolic value or for later resale. Gain +5 Legitimacy.
NO MORATORIUM. APPROVAL VOTE IF YOU WANT TO I GUESS.
All right, folks, we are done with the war!
So, throwing open the curtain for a moment: Blackwell was always bluffing, even harder than you were. He didn't counterattack against the Canal because he knew he couldn't retake it if you gained the beaches. He didn't initially counterattack against Buffalo because he knew it would be a slaughter. However, he was fighting internal pressures from several prominent factions who found Marxists occupying Victorian soil utterly unacceptable. Blackwell was setting up to fight a Fabian-style campaign in the hopes that you'd buy he was politically capable of doing so. Thus, he used Buffalo as a demonstration of resolve; "We can and will bleed you for this, and absolutely are not on the verge of mutiny if I don't force you to a decisive battle." The hope was to drag you to the peace table to avoid that difficult campaign.
Had you remained in the Canal, he probably would have just left you there until he had enough forces to bury you alive. The isthmus was evacuated of civilians, and the land isn't that important to Victoria under present conditions. It's once you started pushing out that he had to start reacting to you. And once you announced the plebiscite, the factions demanding a counterattack outright threatened mutiny if something wasn't done. Blackwell knew how it was going to end at that point, but if he just called you up and accepted peace, he wouldn't have survived the month. So he launched an assault messy enough to make the impossibility of victory clear, and then called for peace.
Unfortunately, that meant that the war ended with you having unambiguously succeeded in all of your campaign goals, and meant that there was no room for him to negotiate.
And the rest, you saw.
We're heading onto the Midwest Conference next, folks! I'll handle it probably tomorrow! Have fun!
Much as I appreciate a good biblical reference, the circumstances are rather different when a major plank of our party's platform is the effective provision of social services like healthcare and housing. It's got a lot of upsides, but I think this is gonna be an area where it provides some difficulty: namely, keeping up that standard of care, housing etc. as we rapidly expand our population. It's something even my own country struggles to do with a complicated system of equalization and the resources of an entire nation to fall back on. We're already taking in millions and we don't even have the well-preserved pre-Collapse infrastructure of the NCR or NYC. So politically, just giving them a manger to bed down on won't cut the mustard, and economically, we might not have the resources to give them more while we're also incorporating two entirely new polities into our social safety net and dealing with pretty hefty refugee flows already. I wasn't exactly saying "fuck off, we're full", because we're already taking in millions of people. There's no shame or immorality in having the good sense to look around and ask ourselves if we might simply be approaching the upper limits of our capacity to absorb new people right now. To say nothing of the fact that if we botch this, it might make our sales pitch to the rest of the neighborhood ring pretty hollow. How can they trust us to produce the goods when we're still struggling to hash these issues out within the territory we already control?
Make no mistake here, giving the people of Buffalo- I think when they've engaged in counterinsurgency and been murdered by Victorians, the label of Victorian doesn't fit very well
Again, I should have perhaps clarified my terms earlier. I refer to them as Victorians because until a few months ago they were Victorians, and that carries some difficulties. Not the "fifth column" sort of difficulties, that I definitely should have clarified, but I meant more in the sense of their social mores, the environment they were raised in and their preexisting skills. For the first two, this will probably significantly affect their adaptability and ability to integrate into the Commonwealth. They're going from Retroculture North Korea to a modernized and fairly left-leaning democracy. As if the political landscape won't be riotous enough compared to back home, they'll be walking through a whole different social minefield, abruptly exposed to norms, habits and behaviors that they'll have either never seen before or been repeatedly told are borderline satanic/Marxist, along with an economy that is as different as night and day from theirs, full of technology that a 50s person might assume was fucking witchcraft. Which leads me to my next point, their skills. Leaving aside for a moment the impression I seem to have created of being a heartless bastard, it's a pretty important factor in more senses than just "how do we get some use out of them." On their part, their entire block of skills will be based around agrarian subsistence farming or light or heavy industry using a model of manufacturing that is utterly obsolete and where even the cutting-edge tech is almost 100 years behind the curve. They will have zero marketable skills. All their work experience in the shipyards and manufacturing plants? Gone, or if not gone, substantially reduced, because how Victorians do industrial work and how we do industrial work are poles apart in a number of ways. I don't even want to think how many administrative personnel will be instant redundancies once they become aware that the TI-84 exists. Again, I'm not bringing this up as a cold-hearted "what use will they be" argument, I'm using to point out that they'll be able to work on just about nothing besides baseline unskilled labor, which they'll have to compete for with millions of other refugees, and whether we regard them as being distinct from Vicks or not, I wouldn't be surprised if some prejudice didn't emerge in the hiring process. Or alternatively, we retrain them en masse, which will be another extraordinary logistical effort.
Well, as I said, if the quest doesn't make a point of de-Victorification and liberation then I have to question how well it's fulfilling its root purpose in and out of universe.
It's for the above reasons that I'm not sure we'll be able to "de-Victorify" much of anything for the next few turns. If we had a chance of holding Buffalo and introducing these things into the city where they're in a familiar environment surrounded by people they know, then yes, we could absolutely integrate them fairly swiftly, and mitigate the issues somewhat because they're staying in a familiar community that can support them. But we're upending their lives and bringing them to a place that is utterly alien where their life experiences are either going to be challenged on all sides or prove utterly obsolescent. If I was a Buffalonian in those circumstances, whether I was in favor of joining the Commonwealth or not, I think a situation like that would leave me feeling scared, helpless and angry.
I'm also in this to de-Victorify people. As I hope some previous work of mine has shown, I feel pretty sympathetic to the average Victorian who is a victim of their system. But our "purpose" in-universe isn't just to collapse the Vicks, it's to provide a good alternative for our people and theirs. I'm not sure about our ability to provide that alternative for the population of Buffalo right now given the difficulties above, and I think that the limitations integrating them will impose on our freedom of action will also hinder our ability to provide that alternative for our own citizens and the millions of other refugees over the crucial next few turns.
honestly this is so much more interesting than us successfully sucking everything of value out of victoria and leaving it a husk to be destroyed a few years down the line. like, maybe i'm alone in this, but after detroit I was honestly worried we were just going to snowball and have a classic SV "nothing is a challenge ever again" lategame. instead, things are happening.
it's not like we've been obliterated by victoria's hidden orbital weapons system or anything. we had a setback. because of dice, because of planning that didn't account for dice, because the enemy gets a vote. and now things are happening.
edit: ninja'd by an update and we actually won. man y'all got heated for nothing.
edit 2: to clarify, I'm not taking a side on whether pushing was the right decision or not, I just think the discussion on that (and especially the "fucking dice" or "i told you sos" were a bit...bleh)
The fact that Buffalo mostly voted to stay probably means that folks in Congress aren't pleased, but we got our wargoal.
That said, we got our wargoal by progressively doubling down. And the thing with that is that you can't pull it off forever. So for next time, I hope that we approach the prospect of escalation more clear-sightedly.
[X] Agreed. Sell the artifacts from the treaty directly to FCNY, along with the attendant Legitimacy boost. Gain +2 free AP for this upcoming turn.
I don't really feel like being the reborn United States, I'd rather be our own thing.
[X] Agreed. Sell the artifacts from the treaty directly to FCNY, along with the attendant Legitimacy boost. Gain +2 free AP for this upcoming turn.
Now, for those of you who were screaming that this was a disaster:
Please, trust that some of us actually have brains in our heads? We have achieved all goals, and are going home with massive improvements on several fronts. Just as dangerous as victory disease is defeatism.
Quick point of order but the main factor is actually cost benefit analysis. The dice can always screw us but what matters is considering both outcomes and if a higher risk is worth the possible reward.
You know, I am not a big fan of one D100 roll, it feels it all hangs on one throw of the dice, mayhaps use two or three D100 and average it? I mean it makes crits on both directions more difficult and rare, plus asking a whole forum to do one roll of the dice? *grimaces* not a big fan. regardless of this event, honest each time I see Poptart call for a dice roll and three or four people doing simultaneous rolls? it ends up being a tad annoying, tbh
As far as I'm concerned, it's a good enough way to roll these important events. If there's enough of an advantage of ours on our side, we win the vote anyways, so its 100% not just a roll of the dice.
[X] Politely decline. You'd rather hold onto the artifacts, either for the symbolic value or for later resale. Gain +5 Legitimacy
