Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest

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AeonIlluminate said:
Pretty sure he meant that as a per station thing, not for all of them, i'll go look for the quote
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Might be, the grammar was kind of ambiguous about it. Neablis , did you mean 250 BP per station, or 250 BP for all of them?

Regardless, I think it's a solveable problem even if it's 250 BP per - in part because of this:
Neablis said:
-[] Basic Automated Manufactories (175 RP) If you tool a factory and install a machine spirit optimized to make just one thing, then it can just keep doing it without your oversight. (Unlocks automated ground/orbital/deep space manufactories, which will continue to produce a single kind of product without requiring actions. Will require CP, and cannot make starships or installations. Unlocks further research to increase productivity, flexibility, remove the CP requirement, as well as allow the automated manufactories to produce ships, installations and eventually megastructures).
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Which we could then we leave behind a few techpriests to operate the station, stick some guns and such on it, and have its production sent out via stealth shuttles.

I mean, assuming we even need that for them to make stuff that progressively makes everything needed to fix the place. The scope of the problem is something we'd figure out after doing recon, at any rate, but I'm confident we can get the ball rolling enough to leave in a turn or so.

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AeonIlluminate said:
Ye, looks like its 250 per station, at least how I read it.
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Oh, he edited it for better clarity, neat.

Still, the main thrust of what I'm saying stands: We have the ability to set the solution in motion and leave regardless of the total BP requirements for fixing the stations themselves. How to do so most efficiently will be made more clear after this turn.
 
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Alectai said:
They'll either be all dead or ubiquitiously Chaos by then instead of only a small percentage having fallen, they're barely hanging on as it is and the latter's starting to get a foothold. Figuring out if there's a faction we can work with and giving them what they need to endure until better help comes along isn't a waste of time.
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That's not the impression I got. It seemed to me that they were reasonably stable, and any changes would take several decades, at least.

Prime 2.0 said:
Didn't neablis say that 250 BP could stabilize the stations? Without a diplomatic agreement in place or any tech transfer?

I think we can quite easily triage this. We don't have to fix everything, just pull it out of its current death spiral so that we or denva can come back later to finish the job.
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350 BP *per station*, over like, a couple hundred stations. A very different prospect.
 
Neablis said:
I saw that and just sat there in disbelief for a moment, yeah.
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This sort of thing seems so weird to me. If you didn't want this sort of result to be possible... Than why do you have rules that allow for it to happen? You can have rules that mitigate the randomness and remove certain problems associated with randomness. After all, many players don't like being punished by the dice even when they do the right thing.
 
Gavinfoxx said:
This sort of thing seems so weird to me. If you didn't want this sort of result to be possible... Than why do you have rules that allow for it to happen? You can have rules that mitigate the randomness and remove certain problems associated with randomness. After all, many players don't like being punished by the dice even when they do the right thing.
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But that is part of the fun, it's like riding to war on a battle moose with variable antler system. :)
 
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Gavinfoxx said:
This sort of thing seems so weird to me. If you didn't want this sort of result to be possible... Than why do you have rules that allow for it to happen? You can have rules that mitigate the randomness and remove certain problems associated with randomness. After all, many players don't like being punished by the dice even when they do the right thing.
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Ehhh, I think you've missed the point there. The dice itself provoked disbelief, not what he wrote in response to it.

Neablis is a benevolent QM who writes results in our favor, in comparison to many others. I've pointed it out before, but we suffered no corruption, lost no assets, and the repairs require no actions or resources.

The only thing we've really suffered here is a setback on having scrapcode immunity, except once we get it it'll be even better this time. We did the right things, and for our trouble when we rolled the worst possible result we tanked it almost effortlessly.

That's pretty cool, imo.
 
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A second draft of my plan.

I still think stopping the ship from continuing to raid inhabited stations should be pretty simple to do and represent a decent reduction to ongoing deaths in the system. So that gets to be the first thing we move on. It's also liable to give us more information, even if just via accessing any logs or records the ship has.

The system's discount towards deep space industry is very nice, means we'll get a first factory finished early next turn, and has me even more minded to earmark this system for heavy development.

The research priorities have been changed. I think mechanized agriculture is a must-have to help these people, and a vital step towards true space-communism anyway, so it gets picked. Similarly, remote organic-machine control is going to be important to enable anyone we leave here to do work on the stations without needing to actually be on the stations, which seems important. Machine spirit chaos resistance seems very good, particularly given that machine spirit controlled psychic shields is also very good, and I agree that we've slept on psychic encryption, so those all get prioritized.

Next turn would see us finishing the first Machine Spirit Deep Space Manufactory, and I would like to see it include researching Improved, Large-Scale, and Void Organic-Machine control, which would leave us with everything we need to build a small shipyard in the system. Honestly, if we could quickly research an Even-Smaller Shipyard with a single ship construction slot, I'd be fine with that. I just want the absolute minimum to allow our industry here to build shuttles and the like, to help with fixing the place up. Leaving a small group of Cogitare here with a pool of void BP, at least one ship construction slot, blueprints for food production, and the ability to run it all in such a way that they can begin helping the people here from a position of strength and safety seems ideal.

Remaining research would probably go into Personal-sized Psychic shielding or one of the options unlocked by Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields, because I would consider the ability to make our chaos resistant machine spirit controlled encrypted psychic shields also be self-repairing to be an immediate urgent priority (Making them personal-scale at that point would possibly finally put me at a place where I'm fairly happy with our psychic shielding).

As far as non-research and construction actions next turn, I would be not-unhappy with beginning to annihilate the obvious chaos stations, or isolating them and beginning full diplomacy with everyone else in the system, or if Victan finds us an obvious good guy to support here, but it'll depend on what comes up.

[] Plan: Humanitarian Triage v2
-[] [Free] Fix damage to psychic shields. Vita Core (75/135->135/135 @ 300 BP), Bongo Oubliette (303/540->443/540 @ 700 BP) [1000/1000BP repair bay expended, 485BP of damage left]
-[] Orders: Stop the transport from continuing to dock with inhabited stations, either by hacking, hijacking, or disabling and towing into a new orbit. Be as gentle about this as possible, with a secondary goal of keeping the ship intact for later study.
-[] Construction: Begin construction of a Machine Spirit Deep Space Manufactory.
-[] Research x2 (400 RP + 70 Anexa RP + 42 Tech-Priest RP)
--[] Mechanized agriculture (150 RP)
--[] Remote Organic-Machine control (50 RP)
--[] Machine Spirit Chaos resistance (100 RP)
---[] Anexa assist
--[] Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields (50 RP)
--[] Psychic Encryption (150 RP)
--[] Basic Active Stealth (22->34/75 RP)
-[] Anexa active Action: Research
-[] Victan active action: Study the reactions to us kicking over the anthill, find out which stations are in the worst shape based on information from the ship, try to determine if anyone could be trusted to act towards helping the entire system given the absolute minimum technological help to do so or if we need to appoint some of our tech-priests or go get some Denvans.
-[] Cia Active Psyker improvement
 
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Alectai said:
They'll either be all dead or ubiquitiously Chaos by then instead of only a small percentage having fallen, they're barely hanging on as it is and the latter's starting to get a foothold. Figuring out if there's a faction we can work with and giving them what they need to endure until better help comes along isn't a waste of time.
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I don't think we have any evidence that we entered the system at a particularly dynamic time. The percentage chaos could be the same as it was just after the Imperial authorities pulled out - or even lower, if Chaos stations are less sustainable.
Prime 2.0 said:
Which we could then we leave behind a few techpriests to operate the station, stick some guns and such on it, and have its production sent out via stealth shuttles.
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I brought that up earlier, but also that our techpriests might be pretty sad to be left babysitting autofactories out here for decades.

(Also I'm wondering what the CP requirement will be, because autofactories are kind of weird - their upside seems to be only that Vita doesn't have to spend actions activating them - but factories operated by independent humans also don't need Vita to activate them, so it seems to have a very narrow utility?)

Though if we let them collect and train some acolytes off the stations maybe? Though that might be as much annoyance as benefit.
 
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Aineko said:
I brought that up earlier, but also that our techpriests might be pretty sad to be left babysitting autofactories out here for decades.

(Also I'm wondering what the CP requirement will be, because autofactories are kind of weird - their upside seems to be only that Vita doesn't have to spend actions activating them - but factories operated by independent humans also don't need Vita to activate them, so it seems to have a very narrow utility?)

Though if we let them collect and train some acolytes off the stations maybe? Though that might be as much annoyance as benefit.
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Point, though HSI provides much entertainment either way, I'm sure. We're also well equipped to provide compensation on our return, for that matter.

That said if we can only provide limited help right now, so be it, but I'm with alectai on wanting to know what the situations on the ground are before making any big decisions.
 
Just a thought but if we want to invade any of the stations or the ship then we should probably consider these three techs.

-[] Boarding Capabilities (100 RP) Apparently it's common for ships in this day and age to board each other and for the crew to fight hand-to-hand. Instead of, you know, chucking enormous missiles at each other. Insane. Well, it might be a nice capability to have in case you want to capture ships intact. (Unlocks boarding torpedoes, drop pods, and boarding craft for hangers, may combine with stealth research to unlock stealth borders)

-[] Combat Bot Melee Combat (150 RP) Your bots aren't armed for melee combat, and don't really have the articulation for it. If you could fix that, maybe they wouldn't be so vulnerable to close-range combat. (Gives your combat bots melee weapons and basic proficiency with them. Will unlock technology for improved melee proficiency, as well as synergize well and potentially unlock technology for improved melee weaponry.)

-[] Machine Spirit Ground Tactics (150 RP) Your bots can fight, but they aren't great at coordination. If you figure out how to network them together, you can help fix that. (Improved combat performance of machine-spirit imbued infantry & vehicle forces. May unlock technology for improved strategic coordination. If you want to point your army at a planet and say "Conquer it, spare the civilians" this is a good tech to have.)

Also if we do decide to lend mechanical aid to anyone in this system then it my be a good idea to consider this tech.

-[] Large-scale Void Manufacturing (100 RP) Unlike ground factories, which have to deal with gravity and atmosphere, there's little stopping you from just... scaling up the principles of void manufacturing. Besides the annoying spaghetti of logistics, but that's a solvable problem. (Allows you to design large void manufactories that are more efficient, improves the manufactories on your ships to be 1/5 instead of 1/10 production. Potential for other void-based platform technologies).
 
I'm thinking that the 250BP trade goods per station cost is because we don't have a specialised design for food trade goods plus all our food manufacturing is probably designed for small groups so we probably need mechanised agriculture so we can get mass production of food at a Cheaper cost.
 
Aineko said:
I don't think we have any evidence that we entered the system at a particularly dynamic time. The percentage chaos could be the same as it was just after the Imperial authorities pulled out - or even lower, if Chaos stations are less sustainable.
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That fact that we showed up at all is enough to get things churning, because these people aren't blind, and if anything at all can see sensors, or looked out a window, that can get people Plotting.

I'm very much in favor with at least checking if this place can be salvaged, or if we need to write it off. One action with our research focused on being able to go loud if necessary feels like a fair move to make.
 
F0lkL0re said:
Just a thought but if we want to invade any of the stations or the ship then we should probably consider these three techs.

-[] Boarding Capabilities (100 RP)
-[] Combat Bot Melee Combat (150 RP)
-[] Machine Spirit Ground Tactics (150 RP)
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I agree all of those would be extremely useful but I think we probably have such overwhelming local superiority in terms of force that we don't actually need them right away, and I'd like to start helping as quickly as possible. None of the locals seem to have anything we'd consider to be actual defences, so while a standard assault shuttle flying up and docking through normal hatches to deliver a squad of combat bots who proceed to march straight towards the bridge while firing only when they have to and even then mainly trying to wound and discourage (If they don't just shove beligerents out of the way) would just be a good way to lose a shuttle and some combat bots under most circumstances... I don't think the locals have anything that would actually stop them.

I could be wrong, if the ship turns out to have some kind of automated defences the locals just haven't been using on each other, or they have some rogue psykers capable of standing off our bots or something, but even so that would be good information to have and we'd only be out a squad of bots and a shuttle and we could still fall-back to the last-resort plan of "shoot out their engines and have shuttles tow them into an isolated orbit" and all of that's assuming we can't just remotely take control of it or jam it to the point it goes into standby mode or something. And I'd want to try teleporting a force of bots straight onto the bridge before sending a shuttle anyway.
 
Alectai said:
That fact that we showed up at all is enough to get things churning, because these people aren't blind, and if anything at all can see sensors, or looked out a window, that can get people Plotting.

I'm very much in favor with at least checking if this place can be salvaged, or if we need to write it off. One action with our research focused on being able to go loud if necessary feels like a fair move to make.
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What in the galaxy are you worried about? These people have no technological capacity. So they almost certainly have no useful sensors (between having no ability to maintain them and no reason to retain the ability to operate them). (And no, the mk. 1 eyeball isn't a useful sensor for detecting the Spark at any distance beyond us boarding them.) They have no ability to travel more than a spacewalk from their habs except by riding an automated transport that they have absolutely no ability to control.

The people here are about as hapless as anybody could ever hope to be.
 
Aineko said:
What in the galaxy are you worried about? These people have no technological capacity. So they almost certainly have no useful sensors (between having no ability to maintain them and no reason to retain the ability to operate them). (And no, the mk. 1 eyeball isn't a useful sensor for detecting the Spark at any distance beyond us boarding them.) They have no ability to travel more than a spacewalk from their habs except by riding an automated transport that they have absolutely no ability to control.
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The ship-faction doesn't seem to have any control over the ship's route/actions and no one here seems to have the ability to build anything new or stop their current gradual decline, that doesn't mean they don't have anything. It's entirely possible they have automated defenses that are just all stuck considering all "imperial" assets in the system as friendly or something, and I'd be actually surprised if most of the surviving stations don't have sufficient sensors to see the ship coming when it gets around to them. We haven't heard anything about communication between stations but given that the surviving stations are at least somewhat functional I'd expect there to be something.

None of this gives them a snwball's chance in hell against us, but I think they probably do have more capabilities than you'd expect from an equivalent civilization on a feral world for example.
 
10ebbor10 said:
The main thing seems to be that the cost benefit ratio has plumetted. We didn't even get anything from this latest attack.

Still, it'd mean we're losing this;
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I think we just need to stop prepping and just go for Daemonology already. Accept that we can't be immune to everything and that there are inherent risks to what we're doing instead focusing our attention on preparation.

"Perfect is the enemy of Good" and all that.
 
We don't have eyes on what they have in reserve, only what's been employed in their routine skirmishes for resources - namely, the fights where you have to be very careful with how much you expend or winning all of them will ruin yourself.

The possibility they have conventional force that can stand up to our current bots is really really low though. The most plausible X factor remains whatever hax those cults can call up if they're desperate enough, and that's something we deal with in our bots by getting MS chaos resistance.

(psy shielding is expensive and personal psy shields probably aren't any different. We're probably best off getting shielded bots by just replacing old ones that die after getting small scale integrated design, lol)

Personal psy shields by contrast are more of a thing for Cia and our humans, I'd say. Yeah, we can't turn them on inside of our ship until we get triple nested shielding, but surely they can flip on when the outer shield fails-

Actually, hold the phone.

What stops us from having layers of reserve psychic shielding that stay inactive most of the time, and only flip on when an outer, active layer is breached? With triple shielding especially.

Like, say we had a bank of 5 nested shields: three active shields and two inactive reserve:
|||||:smile:

Then the fire nation attacks, and the outer shield is breached so one of the reserve shields activates:
:mob:|||||:smile:

And so on:
:mob:|||||:smile:

:mob:|||||:smile:

:mob:|||||:smile:

|||||:mob::sad:


As far as the attacker is concerned, we would have had 5 layers of nested shielding, even though technically only 3 were active at any given time. Is there something we can research to do this, @Neablis?
 
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Something to think about. So we research personnel Psi-shield among a few other things and send her onto the infested stations to get some practice fighting before we move from the system. Sounds like a plan yeah?
 
The more I look at this situation the more I'm questioning if we shouldn't just leave it for now and come back after we build a fleet and also get Denva set up with warp travel so they help my gut instinct is telling me that would be way more effective and faster than trying to triage this situation with just the spark's manufacturing and crew.
 
BigBadBob7070 said:
I think we just need to stop prepping and just go for Daemonology already. Accept that we can't be immune to everything and that there are inherent risks to what we're doing instead focusing our attention on preparation.

"Perfect is the enemy of Good" and all that.
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Why accept something that isn't true? We just rolled a nat 1 while doing direct experimentation on bongo and Vita is now brushing it off almost like it never happened.

But, and this is important, it wasn't as much direct experimentation as Demonology will be. My stance is more or less the same as before - it'd be best if we had scrapcode denial before then. With prices as they are now though, I expect that'd be after we do Immaterium Understanding after we get back to Denva, while psychic encryption and a refit to machine spirit controlled psy shields covers our safety margin for the delay.

We want those anyways for opsec, giving Cia more oomph for her personal shields, and giving our bots a greater ability to operate in corrupted areas.

As Neablis confirmed, the shield pierce was something that happened specifically because our sabotaged redesign put some shield controllers on the interior of the vault where Bongo could corrupt them. Not only is that not something that's going to happen again, with MSCPS those controllers would be chaos-resistant machine spirits even if bongo did manage to reach them a second time by some insane shenanigan.

The prep worked. Stick to the plan, and we'll be just fine.
Speedemon22 said:
Something to think about. So we research personnel Psi-shield among a few other things and send her onto the infested stations to get some practice fighting before we move from the system. Sounds like a plan yeah?
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A deployment of Cia next turn along those lines seems plausible, yeah.
michaell8000 said:
The more I look at this situation the more I'm questioning if we shouldn't just leave it for now and come back after we build a fleet and also get Denva set up with warp travel so they help my gut instinct is telling me that would be way more effective and faster than trying to triage this situation with just the spark's manufacturing and crew.
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I think Alectai has the right idea on this one - we ought to stay at least for this turn so the repair bay can finish fixing the baby jail, so we may as well do recon while we're here. If there's some low hanging fruit we can cover before we leave, maybe do that, but I do kinda expect to be out of here by the end of next turn.
 
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So with Neablis's comments on what discounts we get from the stations I no longer think it is necessary to take over some abandoned structures to study them.

I'm still keen to develop our sensors and study the stations in depth before we start kicking in doors, especially for the chaos cults. Like I mentioned before this seems like a perfect opportunity to study many different forms of worship and the warp impact it has. Since we are going to prepare for boarding next turn I've moved things around to get ready for that with Personal Psychic Shields and Cognito filters. This will also make studying the system much safer for everyone onboard the ship. Next turn we can send in the door-kickers if we want to.

[] Plan: Something Hinky is afoot, let's study it
-[] Research 3x (600 + 70 + 42)
--[] Faith is my shield? (75 RP)
--[] Empathy at Range (200 RP)
--[] Help Cia's Training (50 RP)
--[] Personal-sized Psychic shielding (100 RP)
--[] Cognito Filters (250 RP)
--[] Basic Active Stealth (22 -> 59 RP)
--[] Overflow to BAS then Machine Spirit Hallucinations
-[] Explore - Do a loop or two of the asteroid belt exploring the stations from a distance. Explicitly use this to work on our empathy sensors and study multiple different faiths in action.
--[] Victan assists with signal analysis and categorizing different groups to help with the above and find a sane faction for us to work with.

Thoughts?

Edit: if anyone is curious it would take 22 construction actions starting with our 350 BP to build 1,500 deep space stations, which would give us 187,500 BP/turn.
 
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Prime 2.0 said:
The prep worked. Stick to the plan, and we'll be just fine
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But that means waiting even more, giving more time for Bongo to prepare again and get luck on his rolls. Let's stop this shit now and either destructively deconstruct him or research Daemonolgy to bind him. I really don't think we should wait anymore on this.

Prime 2.0 said:
I've pointed it out before, but we suffered no corruption, lost no assets, and the repairs require no actions or resources
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But we did lose an asset, our Psy-Shielding got weakened to be less effective against Scrapcode attacks and a couple projects got more expensive.
 
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If nothing else turns up, it might be worth doing a raid on the ship. We haven't seen the inside of a proper Imperium voidcraft yet, there might be some takeaways. We don't have to take the ship or root people out, just take a tour through the interesting parts and examine things.

It'd stir things up a bit with the locals, but we could do it and they really wouldn't be able to do much.

It might even be a warp-capable vessel with an Imperium Gellar Field generator, if we're really lucky.
 
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BigBadBob7070 said:
But we did lose an asset, our Psy-Shielding got weakened to be less effective against Scrapcode attacks and a couple projects got more expensive.
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No we didn't, our Psy-Shielding got reverted back to the version we had before the tech, that is, still the 75% resistant type. And a couple projects getting a bit more expensive would've happened with any nat 1 tech. All that's happened is that immunity is a bit further away, though I would prefer binding bongo sooner.
 
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