Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest

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Nightlord256 said:
Knee jerk is to spend two turns here, so we can explore the SECTOR GOVENORS villa and help the locals. The information we could find at that villa could be literally campaign changing, so I put a very high priority on that.
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A sector govenors villa will have some nice research samples. Because we obviously need more tech tree :V

Alectai said:
Yeah, Hard-committing to Pyromancy to get a Beta-grade Pyromancer Champion is very, very good at having a big club to hit fuckers with, especially since we can compensate for the lack of flexibility with gear.
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Building tall for our combat champion makes sense since we have replacables elite mooks to soak combat losses without empowering chaos rituals in the combat zone.
 
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Xon said:
A sector govenors villa will have some nice research samples. Because we obviously need more tech tree :V
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That would be a nice side bonus for me.

The main benefit would be intelligence on the sector itself. What planets are where? Where did all of the imperial forces go? What are current threat assessments? Are there any secret projects cooking somewhere? etc, etc

Intelligence makes the world go round.

Different topic: @Neablis if Cia gets another specialty will we unlock the relevant Basic [Specialty] understanding (150 RP) right now? or will that need to wait until she hits level 15?
 
Neablis said:
If you built them up a bit, made them to be a little bit smarter they might even
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Unfinished sentence.
Neablis said:
A lot of it is just feeding designs to a machine spirit manufactory, watching how it "optimizes" the production process and then trying to decide if it's a good adaptation or not so you can reinforce good ones and discourage bad ones. Anexa and her tech-priests are incredibly helpful in the process, going over and flagging tons of designs each until you've built up a good set of examples to train the machine spirits with.

After that process it's mostly a matter of iterating the training and tuning the machine spirit layout until they're actually optimizing the process, instead of just doing crazy things that increase risk while delivering a tiny speedup. The tech-priests love it for some reason, and keep muttering about the "Omnissiah's blessing made manifest" whenever they see a particularly unintuitive yet effective optimization.

Still, there's potential here. You like to think of the machine spirits as having an animal level intelligence, but these things are more like idiot-savants. They have no conception of self but if you hand them a manufacturing problem they'll solve it. If you built them up a bit, made them to be a little bit smarter they might even
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I swear I've read a section that's very similar to this earlier in the quest. Did we have a similar machine spirit research in a previous turn?
Researched Mechanized Agriculture, 9+20=29. Poor success.
You can now grow large amounts of food in an industrailized setting effectively. But it's very spicy. Like Thai-grandma spicy. And also colored like flame, because a DaoT biohacker thought it was fun and you didn't read the readme.
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This is a hilarious failure. Like. On one hand, this is legitimately not good for people. But on the other hand, we might end up accidentally creating a spice-obsessed culture and that's silly.
Then you spot some kind of unnatural movement and see a single boat cutting through the water, using a sail as production.
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Propulsion.

-[][Cia] Pragmatism

I'm going to have to argue for this. Having all our combat rolls be raw rolls with no bonuses is incredibly risky, especially when Cia herself is heading into danger. But you know what a +10 bonus does for us? 10% of the time, on rolls of 6-15, it'll turn a failure into a poor success. 10% of the time, on rolls of 26-35, it'll turn a poor success into a normal success. 10% of the time, on rolls of 56-65, it'll turn a normal success into a good success. 10% of the time, on rolls of 81-90 it turns a good success into a critical success. In total, 40% of the time it'll improve every combat Cia herself is involved in. And on top of that, the improved chance of crits means more chances for Cia to level up. And it'll only go up higher as Cia levels up.

It's possible that we might eventually find a military leader to recruit. However, *gestures at the last three systems* recruitable characters seem thin on the ground so far. In the meantime, while Cia is a powerful combatant, she's risking her life every time we send her out there, and our combat bots have, ah, minimal strategic and tactical ability. And while the other options improve Cia as a psyker, this option substantialy improves Cia in the role she's already performing.

We have a lot of research that can improve Cia's psychic abilities. But we don't have anything that'll give her dice bonuses when she needs them, except this option.
 
Strongly in favor of Focus for Cia. We got her for True Fire/True Killing, and this is what raises her to the level where she can get that. It's also still highly applicable to the narrative of combat - it's not like we're choosing between "do better military actions" and "not" here, improved pyromancy will still dramatically change what all parts of the roll table mean for the better.

For being swordy, we can improve our bots. For command/strategy, we want a dedicated commander rather than to spread Cia thin.

For Divination, I want to hold out for an Eldar. We've successfully established good relations, know where to go to build on that, and can leverage our already considerable psy shield research to make a trade to get such a prized bean that they'll jump at anyways.

But True Fire? Only ever going to be Cia. Taking Focus closes no doors, while walking through the one we recruited her to unlock. True Killing things is a qualitative difference, not a quantitative one - we can't just throw bigger numbers and amps and implants at the problem to get that result, as best we know it can only be achieved through Cia developing her skill with pyromancy.

Anyways, as far as research - I think it's time to get navigator techs. Understanding Mutations, Drugs, and Wine are our docket; navigator genetics is applicable to navigator health, but Neablis clarified that it's primarily about cloning so I don't think it's worth it to spring for that compared to making sure the navibean is out of the tank and ready to socialize while we're at Denva, and that means starting the prep now.

For the humanitarian issues here - absolute floor is just producing a shitton of breathing equipment as a one-and-done. One step up is a factory with a couple of techpriests (or just a normal factory lol) for producing it, and the step above that is doing the teraforming research and leaving that as their project to do with said factory. No dedicated diplo is reasonably needed, they're already begging for the equipment - just a choice between one construction action -> +techpriest detachment -> +100RP.

Neablis said:
The tech-priests love it for some reason, and keep muttering about the "Omnissiah's blessing made manifest" whenever they see a particularly unintuitive yet effective optimization.
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I love this bit of fluff.



Neablis said:
Quorath gives a bleat of acknowledgement. "%Understood%."
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Huh, didn't we switch to ++ for binaric?

Neablis said:
If you built them up a bit, made them to be a little bit smarter they might even

Research
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Cut off sentence.

Neablis said:
Auric Burden outpost completed:
1x Anti-personnel Bunker, Psychic Shielding
1x Small automated medical facility, 50 person capacity.
3.25x Machine Spirit Manufactory, 180 BP/turn. Ish.
1000 Heavy Machine-spirit Infantry Bot
1000 Light Machine-spirit Infantry Bot
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*Bots
Neablis said:
and an incredibly ornate set modelled off of waht I'd seen of their captain Annalictaus's outfit.
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*what
Neablis said:
Then the attacks started. The Ductsworn have ambushed groups of patrolling bots, using their knowledge of the maintinance tunnels and inner workings of the ship to surprise your bots from close range, or unleash hot steam into their ranks. Additional efforts have been made to make the enclave unlivable, diverting life support away and waste heat into it.

The Bridgeborn apparently have retained a stock of Imperial-era weaponry and tried using them for harrasment style attacks, using the longest sightlines possible to try and pick off defenders. They've also tried to use what control of the ship they have left to inconvenience you, sealing security hatches to seperate and split patrols for ambushes.
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We learned about the weapons last turn, so this should probably be "took their retained" rather than "apparently have retained".

Also, interesting to see the weaponized life support stuff I theorized before the military action happening now, rather than earlier. I guess the ductsworn really did stay out of things.
Neablis said:
and garnering recruits

Refugee Diplomacy Roll - 57. Success.
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Cut off.
Neablis said:
The way to fix that is by setting up your own food systems. You have galley systems that can turn organic matter into excellent food, but they aren't really scaleable, and if you want to feed the number of people who may one day call the Auric Burden home, you'll need to provide a better foodstuff.
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Composition of the statements in this sentence is a little confusing - could probably instead go:
The way to fix that is by setting up your own food systems. You have galley systems that can turn organic matter into excellent food, but they aren't really scaleable so if you want to feed the number of people who may one day call the Auric Burden home you'll need a new way to provide good food.
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Uses "so" and removes some commas to demarcate and keep together the conclusion of Vita's thought, rephrases the "provide a better foodstuff" to make it grammatically clear it's not referring to your galley systems when it says "better". You can infer those things logically already, sure, but removing the ambiguity in wording that demands that inference keeps the flow going better imo.
 
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Wish I'd thought of this earlier, but: @Neablis If we take Pragmatism for Cia here, and later recruit a more general commander character, would their bonuses stack? Cia leading from the front while a commander leads the larger battle? Or can we only get one crewmember's bonus for combat?
Prime 2.0 said:
Strongly in favor of Focus for Cia. We got her for True Fire/True Killing, and this is what raises her to the level where she can get that. It's also still highly applicable to the narrative of combat - it's not like we're choosing between "do better military actions" and "not" here, improved pyromancy will still dramatically change what all parts of the roll table mean for the better.
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We have lots of psytech research that we've only really scratched the surface of. I don't doubt that we can get research to enable Cia to use True Killing fire, and/or effectively boost her level. What we don't have is research to give us die roll bonuses to Cia actually doing her job. And unless we luck into a commander soon, she's going to be leading a lot of combat encounters with no die bonuses to back her up.
 
Derpmind said:
Wish I'd thought of this earlier, but: @Neablis If we take Pragmatism for Cia here, and later recruit a more general commander character, would their bonuses stack? Cia leading from the front while a commander leads the larger battle? Or can we only get one crewmember's bonus for combat?

We have lots of psytech research that we've only really scratched the surface of. I don't doubt that we can get research to enable Cia to use True Killing fire, and/or effectively boost her level. What we don't have is research to give us dice roll bonuses to Cia actually doing her job. And unless we luck into a commander soon, she's going to be leading a lot of combat encounters with no die bonuses to back her up.
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Commander is one of those things we can get trivially. Go to Denva and ask for an adventurous officer, there are entire armies of those.
 
Here is my first draft plan:

[] Plan: Beach Episode
-[] Research (295 RP)
--[] Finish Basic Active Stealth (34 RP)
--[] Basic Ground force stealth (50 RP)
--[] Design Specter – Light infiltration bot 88 BP per 1000 (20 RP) (Light (25BP, 10 RP), Humanized (15 BP base), Jammers (10 BP base),[50 BP base] Machine Spirit (+1/2 [25] BP), Stealth (+.25x [13] BP, +1x [10] RP)
---[] Include Active stealth if possible, budgeting up to 16 additional RP on the design
--[] Psychic Shielding Reliability (100 RP)
--[] Combat Neural Implants (25 RP)
--[] Improved Armor Articulation (50 RP)
-[] Orders: Operation Quiet Caldera
--[] Send in a detachment of Spector bots, fly low and land stealthily. First, the team will establish a safe perimeter at the caldera's rim, scanning for hidden weapon systems or failsafes. Onsite bots will carefully dismantle or neutralize any discovered defenses without triggering alarms, while Vita monitors sensor feeds, remotely hacking system overrides. Once the shuttlepad area is secure, the infantry bots will proceed to the lagoon, where they will subtly map and probe the submerged structure. Throughout the operation, prioritize minimal damage to preserve any artifacts or records; only engage destructive measures if failsafes cannot be bypassed quietly. Cia will be deployed nearby with a detachment of medium and heavy bots if the operation needs to go loud.
-[] Diplomacy: Introduce yourself to the natives and offer to help them with the fungal problem
-[] Construction:
--[] Build 2x detachments of the new Spector bot (176 BP, up to 250 BP if active stealth increases costs)
--[] Operation Quiet Caldera has resource priority and can pull in another 250 BP as needed
--[] Repair the spaceport of 'Stankberg' to make supply delivery easier
--[] Build lots of masks and medical supplies for the locales (all remaining BP)
-[] Free action: Have dinner on a nice beach with your Crew

This finishes stealth tech, applies it to ground forces, and researches a new stealth focused bot. We use these new bots to secure the Sector Governors villa to get his secrets, with Cia and heavier bots on standby if things go loud. While we are here we help the locales and distribute aid to them (@Neablis, quick assumption check does an aid mission require a diplomatic action to setup? or could it be done as part of a construction action?).

I'll look forward to feedback, but for now I have a date with Civ 7.
 
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Derpmind said:
We have lots of psytech research that we've only really scratched the surface of. I don't doubt that we can get research to enable Cia to use True Killing fire, and/or effectively boost her level. What we don't have is research to give us die roll bonuses to Cia actually doing her job. And unless we luck into a commander soon, she's going to be leading a lot of combat encounters with no die bonuses to back her up.
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I do. I doubt it a lot. True Fire is not a bigger fire, it is not a hotter fire, it is a more skilled fire. There is no substitute for actually being more skilled at pyromancy to get it.

Genetic enhancement will not substitute for that. Her powers would get stronger, but true fire isn't merely about being strong.

Amps will not substitute for that. Her attacks would get bigger, but true fire isn't about being big.

Psytech weapons might eventually substitute that on the small scale, but we have no clear route to doing so and it will never substitute for it on the scale of scouring a daemonworld, which I recall Neablis has said Cia can grow into doing even with our earlier choice of "be a champion" if we let her.

Dice can only produce results that are possible. And even with bonuses, a nat 1 is always possible. We should not compromise Cia's core abilities to compensate for a weakness we can already mitigate and already have significantly mitigated using research and good operational planning, and which we do, in fact, have prospects for resolving completely.
Derpmind said:
We can recruit techpriests trivially but we've only found one Anexa.
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For instance, if we hadn't rolled a nat 1 on our diplomacy on Ascalon, we'd have had a commander Crew option on offer right the fuck then. Neablis confirmed, we could have negotiated for the no shit a senior leader(Edit: corrected description of Crew prospect) of the sororitas there as capital C Crew.

That, from a single turn at a random imperial outpost.

Things may be dreary in 40k, but it comes with at least one silver lining: there are lots and lots and lots of people who are very good at dealing with the fact that in the far future of the 42nd millennium, there is only war.

But there will only ever be one Cia.
 
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DragonParadox said:
Yeah, but she's not very good, both in terms of being unstable and weak.
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Also have to remember thats its been at least 20/30 years since then and a decade or more till we go back, how long would she be alive (would she have been important enough to be given juvenat?), we would likely be looking at a whole new crop of recruits by this point.

on a note of what we could do; we dont have time manpower or resources to uplift the planet right now we would need to settle in for the long term first. Searching the Palace seems like a no brainer just for the info we might get on the sector let alone any extra goodies that may be stashed away. depending on what we find setting up a series of hidden underground manufactories could be a good idea, though depends on how the stank affects the machinery since i assume thats why they dont have combustion engines because they cant get it filtered will enough.
 
darer said:
Also have to remember thats its been at least 20/30 years since then and a decade or more till we go back, how long would she be alive (would she have been important enough to be given juvenat?), we would likely be looking at a whole new crop of recruits by this point.

on a note of what we could do; we dont have time manpower or resources to uplift the planet right now we would need to settle in for the long term first. Searching the Palace seems like a no brainer just for the info we might get on the sector let alone any extra goodies that may be stashed away. depending on what we find setting up a series of hidden underground manufactories could be a good idea, though depends on how the stank affects the machinery since i assume thats why they dont have combustion engines because they cant get it filtered will enough.
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She is one of the most powerful psykers on the planet, she would be very high up on the juve nat priority list. Fair point about being able to maybe find new ones.
 
Hm, I wonder if there's something we could give these people so that in the time we'll be gone, possibly generations, they could make some progress, or at least lay the foundation of a more permanent solution?

Also, I do note that we have one potential breadbasket and one potential industrial centre right next to each other.
 
Shogeton said:
Hm, I wonder if there's something we could give these people so that in the time we'll be gone, possibly generations, they could make some progress, or at least lay the foundation of a more permanent solution?

Also, I do note that we have one potential breadbasket and one potential industrial centre right next to each other.
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Not right now, but if we wanted a low tech solution to this the best one is probably biological, make a bacteria that eats the seaweed or better yet make a retrovirus that alters the seaweed into one that is not quite so hostile to human life but which out-competes the native strain. Does this sound like a mad scientist idea? Yes. Is it more of a mad scientist idea than making your own scrap code generator? Hell no. :V
 
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Consider the following:

Calderath is a potential agri-world held down by ecological issues (that we can fix) and Denva Prime is a primo manufacturing world. No?

Either way, where exactly do we want to make our permanent base? We don't need food, so I'd propone getting Denva into Calderath for their first planetary conquest, while taking much of Prime for ourselves, maybe selling the excess to Ascalon. We don't need food, after all. Come to think of it, we'd then mirror Mars and Terra, we Omnissiah now, W is the Emperor.
 
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DragonParadox said:
Not right now, but if we wanted a low tech solution to this the best one is probably biological, make a bacteria that eats the fungus or better yet make a retrovirus that alters the seaweed into one that is not quite so hostile to human life but which out-competes the native strain. Does this sound like a mad scientist idea? Yes. Is it more of a mad scientist idea than making your own scrap code generator? Hell no. :V
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That's fail deadly enough that we'd need a techpriest detachment to monitor it regardless, so the action and resource input is probably about the same - 1x research (terraforming & navibean prep), 1x construction for techpriest detachment support & immediate aid, 1x exploration (for the dungeon), and 1 discretionary.
Cookiesndip said:
Consider the following:

Calderath is a potential agri-world held down by ecological issues (that we can fix) and Denva Prime is a primo manufacturing world. No?

Either way, where exactly do we want to make our permanent base?
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If we decide to go perma-base, we can also expand the construction in the above to have our detachment put more focus on building it up in our absence - a micro-organism based stank solution would mostly need monitoring rather than continuous industrial input, so we'd get a fair bit of bang for our labor's buck. Teraforming also assists with this, since that would make the locals extremely amendable to Cogitare recruitment - and unlike in the last system, this folks have retained much more knowledge and would be quicker to train.

Then we just swing back around after denva with warp comms unlocked to seal the deal. I expect Primus is something that'll be worked out between us and Denva - we won't do construction actions every turn, and allowing them to use it when we're not just makes good sense, especially if they use it to build more factories.

We mitigate if not resolve the local issue, and hit the ground running with our industrial base the moment we're ready to operate it remotely. Win-win.
 
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Regarding Cia, I'll point out that a Combat Pre-Cog can be one of the more dangerous things in Warhammer (Fucking Eldar). Doubly so since we're building her for direct combat.
Telekinesis might be nice, but we could turn her into an absolute beast this way.
 
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Since we have genetic engineering capabilities, I wonder if we could perhaps design some kind of organism that would eat that surplus seaweed. Plus it would also provide another method, if done properly, of having the natives on the planet harvest these organisms for food that isn't seaweed.

I love the idea of the new planet, but cultivating a more balanced planetary aquaponics agriworld will take some careful ecosystem planning. I would want to do a more systematic survey of what native life exists on the planet and work around that or otherwise integrate our plans into it, I'd rather not wipe out what's going on in the oceans just for sure industrial profit.

I also wonder if there is anything useful in the jungles in terms of either food, resources, or even wildlife. This planet could also be an exporter of different kinds of goods from the jungles in that case.

I love the idea of hooking this world and Denva up, it would provide a great Target for Denva's future expansion to eventually cover the system. Massive agricultural surplus combined with Denva's massive industrial capabilities and future potential growth leads to a very good combination of elements.

Edit: it would also be relatively easy to defend this oceanic world. Not only could we install more conventional anti orbital bunkers and fortifications on the surface, we could also custom Design anti-orbital capable submarines that operate under the surface of the water. Any invading fleet would find it damn difficult to notice something specifically designed to hide from orbit a mile deep in the ocean, and given the scale of 40K engineering and spaceship design, any submarine we designed based on those principles would be very large and could have massive salvos of anti-spaceship missiles, or giant retractable lances.

That's an idea I have debated for years on how to defend oceanic worlds, so I wonder if potentially there might also be more stuff in the oceans by way of Dark Age ruins or infrastructure or something that maybe the imperials don't even go looking for, because they don't prioritize water stuff.

Edit 2: we could also design, if there's a lot of relatively shallow Continental shelves attached to those islands, underwater cities or arcologies that could serve to allow us to colonize the oceans as well. I'm not thinking deep ocean, but the continental shelf only goes down on Earth about 100-200 meters, which isn't a crazy difficult engineering standard for 40K and or the Dark Age of technology.
 
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avatar11792 said:
Since we have genetic engineering capabilities, I wonder if we could perhaps design some kind of organism that would eat that surplus seaweed. Plus it would also provide another method, if done properly, of having the natives on the planet harvest these organisms for food that isn't seaweed.
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You know, I'd bet good money on that there already exists extensive harvesting facilities on the planet that are just going unused and unrepaired. This kind of agriworld should have been largely automated.
 
I will mention that the populace seems to be amenable to new tech. Recruiting from them until they slowly get absorbed by the Mech (the sheer tech disparity and seeming technophilia makes it inevitable, but such an absorption is ultimately for the better instead of encouraging numerous disparate subfactions to grow under our noses) seems like a good way of developing a massive talent pool and bootstrapping on the Mech population necessary to properly settle Denva Prime.

Asheram said:
You know, I'd bet good money on that there already exists extensive harvesting facilities on the planet that are just going unused and unrepaired. This kind of agriworld should have been largely automated.
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In that case it's been a loooong time. It's probably mostly wreckage by now.

Great for research and salvaging/fixing, though.
 
How much BP would it cost to give everyone on the planet a Mask and a Spare?

What sort of facilities would be needed for them to satisfy their own mask needs for the foreseeable future?
 
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