[X] Briefly indulge in the idea of overthrowing the monarchy of the Shawnee Kingdom and installing Mary as the new princess. Before sighing, reminding yourself to be sensible, and...
[X] Remove Hostile Neighborhood. You have been the focus of low-grade hostility and resentment for too long. And...well, all right, you've not actually been very proactive about doing anything about that. But you are
tired of it, and you will never get a chance to be surer than now that you'll have the ultimate opportunity to finally change people's perceptions of you. You can't make a second first impression, but you can kill that bastard first impression while you have the chance.
-I thought Bemidji and Manitoulin were negotiating about blobbing up. Then I looked at the map. Now I'm just puzzled.
The fact that theyre doing it openly suggests they aren't worried about other people objecting to whatever they're talking about.
Maybe it's just establishing trade links.
Manitoulin and Bemidji are both relatively likely to be polities with a lot of Native American/First Nations influence. Not as in "ethnostate" levels, but as in "quite possibly dominant political and organizational force." Since that is basically the only thing I'm aware of that they have in common I would
think that Native American solidarity would be it, assuming there's a policy reason at all.
I'm cool with that.
Of course, it's equally possible that the governor-in-name-only and the chief are just very good friends for some personal reason.
-The monarchists are going to be an obvious problem. And are a powderkeg looking to blow; a lilywhite hereditary monarchy established by force of arms and ruling over a bunch of brown people is an untenable situation. I don't think Sara is itching to get her hands on them because they have been good for the area.
I will note that I'm pretty sure that the Shawnee Kingdom's territory has the usual racial mix for the region (mostly whites and blacks and some Latinos). The actual
Shawnee, the Native American ethnic group, got forcibly deported over 200 years ago in this setting; all that's left in the area is their names on some of the terrain features.
This doesn't automatically invalidate anything you just said, but I want to make sure we're clear on it.
Remove Hostile Neighborhood is the soft power option.
It removes the diplomatic malus to engaging with other states, makes it easier to absorb them, provides a passive boost to things like intelligence gathering, and provides a passive buff against Vic diplomacy.
And critically, it lays the groundwork for a big expansion push in six months to a year once we reveal the Declaration of Independence.
The main drawback is that it costs us TIME in our industrialization schedule and economic buildup.
And time is not something we have in abundance.
I don't think that trying to immediately extract demands from these little polities is going to give us that much direct short-term benefit. They're not very rich or powerful and we already trade extensively with them. Forcing them to give us what little they have on less favorable terms may even make things worse for us in some ways, because it means they can't afford to buy goods we export.
Furthermore, I suspect that a softer line is going to see warlords looking for how far they can push things. With the Vics gone, we WILL see attempts at conquest. Either Volk or Armstrong are going to attempting to anschluss Dubuque, for example. Then there's the Shawnee Kingdom and it's delusions of grandeur.
From a coldblooded PoV, that shit will drive people into our arms.
But it will also damage infrastructure and kill skilled people.
There will be costs.
Yes, but unless we forcibly integrate all the local polities likely to start such wars (in which case they'll fight us and THOSE wars will have costs too), some of that is likely to be inevitable in my opinion.
Plus, if we do start fighting someone like Volk or the Shawnee Kingdom after declaring ourselves to be the muscular Number One
without addressing Hostile Neighborhood, all those other polities will be soured against us and suspicious that we're basically just "Victoria, with better PR and more cannons."
The Blue Mountain Farmers is probably too big.
I'd leave that up to
@PoptartProdigy . Remember that their "territory" consisted of, essentially, "as much land as a Victorian army division felt like claiming as a private fiefdom and/or resort area." They're not so much a political faction as they are a
region. A region where the Victorians of Andrew Division deliberately
weeded massacred all leadership and organization above the 'village council' level, expected all the surviving villages to take orders from General Smith's mansion, and started handing off kidnapped children to the villagers to raise.
Their territorial extent is, again, defined by how much land the
Victorians could carve out and wanted to... and that's quite a lot of land. Especially since the Andrew Division deliberately wanted to go for a low population density, to enforce rural lifestyles, and to be able to exploit their monopoly on motorized transport in the area. They wanted the little peasant villages to be far apart, and they wanted the villagers (including the kidnapped children) to "stay put" and wait passively for the Andrew Division troops to come back so they could cosplay being country squires.
The brown spot for Atlanta is definitely way too big.
And given our experience with Hiroshima/Nagasaki, radiation wouldn't linger that long unless it was a dirty bomb; US soldiers moved into Hiroshima weeks after the bombing, and they started rebuilding the city a couple years later. Two weeks is the rule of thumb
Ch. 1: The Dangers from Nuclear Weapons: Myths and Facts An all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States would be the worst catastrophe in history, For example, air bursting a 20-kiloton weapon at the optimum height to destroy
www.oism.org
But you probably knew that anyway.
You're talking about a nuclear airburst. This was a groundburst. It would have left a highly radioactive crater that would have taken much longer to dissipate, and a much thicker, heavier fallout plume than Hiroshima or Nagasaki, because solid matter caught up in the nuclear fireball would be getting thrown into the air as radioactive dust.
Yes, this is boringly predictable 'nice vote' but I have a couple of reasons, and not of the 'let's be good guys' variety.. First, Victoria's treaty are gone and people can reject their aid workers, but they don't have to. Their armies incompetence aside, Victoria is good at turning people against each other, and I want their shenanigans to be as hard as possible over the next few years, a hostile neighborhood, especially one that is hardened by our actions, is very fertile ground. While the iron is hot for expansion, it will be hot again when the trade is cut off. Sure getting them earlier gives us more AP, but it gives us more obligations to spend it one, the poverty of American successor states means that most simply won't be that much contribution now, waiting a few years, focusing our ap on building up a bureaucracy and infrastructure that can handle more states, and letting them grow wealthier on trade means we will have a powerful coalition for the next war.
We can also work on integrating the most 'actually important' states via diplomacy in the short term. A lot of the polities that are showing up here are ones that can basically join us or not without it making a huge difference; the extra economic muscle they represent is significant but they don't represent THAT much economic muscle individually.
But a few are specifically valuable for their strategic location or resources they control or something. And those we can try to diplomance faster.
Now, to be fair, because I want to make dangers in any plan clear. If Victoria drops the trade, but is smart enough to not immediately attack, that makes the coalition much harder, b/c if we create it, and then do nothing but shake fists at Victoria, it's gonna fragment. So we'd have to invade them to bring them to the table, a much more difficult prospect. That said, VIctoria's ideology and Blackwell's fear of us means that a more aggressive approach seems likely.
This is one reason for us to position ourselves with Hamilton and Toronto and build up a landward approach to them through Blue Mountain Farmers territory (and the land to their southeast along the centerline of the Ontario Peninsula). Because with
that as our forward base we have a pretty good position to start from in war fought to "reopen the St. Lawrence Seaway, by force if necessary." If we're staging out of Detroit and Toledo it's harder, because we have to cross the full length of Lake Erie, and the Vicks will have an air and naval force worth mentioning the next time we try it.
Nicely done!
