Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest

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Prime 2.0 said:
So, diplo. Kind of funny, that, one of the interesting facets of this world is that it's really, really easy to build and do work in isolation from anyone else. Strictly speaking, we could air drop the masks, and leave a detachment behind to oversee terraforming efforts and industrial buildout without ever really interacting with the locals at all!

But say we did, as nightlord plans to. What would our goals be?

Well for start, we could definitely smooth out the aid, and have a much better opportunity to get an uplift/cogitare recruitment pipeline going, proactively take credit for the terraforming to earn more cooperation on whatever. Find out what the political makeup of the feral world is, how much knowledge they've retained. But then I consider the world's original purpose - it's an agriworld.

And it could be our agriworld. The Ascendency's, that is. Industrial buildout comes in, food goes back... back to where, you might ask? Well, aside from the obvious of Denva itself, just about anywhere. We just got done doing food aid at the last system we were in, and going "hey, can I get some delivery" anywhere in zantris that needs it as a free action could simplify some future issues. Or denva doing that as part of their own programs, for that matter.
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Personally, I was thinking about Victan's thoughts on designing a government. We have inklings in Faith is my Shield that we might be able to design a better religion than the Imperium's. What better place to start than somewhere all records of the Imperium have either been lost or heavily distorted, and where we don't see any obvious manifestations of Chaos?

Setting up a better agriworld with our terraforming tech is also open as a possibility—the upgraded, large-scale agriculture research is right there.
 
[] Plan: Mercantilism V3
-[][FREE] Refit the 7x manufactories to 7x Machine-spirit Manufactories (630 BP), Outer Hull 232/240 HP -> 240/240 HP (40 BP), Bongo Oubliette 535/540 HP -> 540/540 HP (25 BP), 305 BP left.
-[] Diplomacy: Introduce yourself to the natives and offer to help them with the stank problem in exchange for basing rights in the system and on the planet. Ask them where the best place to begin setting up a planetary headquarters for the Cogitare would be, given that they'll both be recruiting and running manufactories producing masks among other things. They'll likely be running a hospital as well.
--[] Victan assist
-[] Construction (600 VBP, 500 LC):
--[] Build 1 Spaceport (100 BP)
--[] Build 1 Anti-personnel Bunker, Psychic Shielding (40 BP)
--[] Build 1 Machine Spirit Manufactory on the ground. (120 BP)
--[] Build 1 Small automated medical facility (50 BP)
--[] Build 1 Basic Stealth Assault Shuttle (25 BP)
--[] Build 1,200,000 masks to give to the locals. (120 BP)
--[] Build 2,000 Light Humanized Machine-spirit infantry bots (120 BP)
--[] Build 5 personal void shields to offer as an incentive for Cogitare to stay here and recruit / run the manufactories when we leave next turn. (25 BP)
-[] Research 2x (400 + 75 + 20 = 495 RP)
--[] Abacus Manufacturing (100 RP)
--[] Reliable Gellar Fields (300 RP)
---[] Anexa assist
--[] Psychic Shielding Reliability (95 / 100 RP)
-[] Cia: Active Psyker improvement
-[][Cia] Focus
-[][Quorath] Bots (703 Light Machine-spirit humanized infantry bots, 840 Medium Machine-spirit humanized Infantry Bots, 491 Heavy Machine-spirit humanized Infantry Bots with Machine Spirit Jammers, and 143 Heavy Machine-spirit Infantry Bots)

Mostly the same as my last draft with the research shifted a bit and the construction expanded.

To go through it point by point...

Firstly, we open by introducing ourselves to the locals and trying to make friends while nailing down a deal to trade a bunch of masks for basing rights in the system and permission to establish a branch of the Cogitare on their planet. They can help us pick out a good place to begin building the facilities for that. Then we actually do the construction.

Said construction includes a little of everything I thought they'd need. Including a spaceport, both because the locals have turned theirs into some kind of arena and because it would probably be more convenient to just have the new one at the same site that we're building everything else. A bunker to live in and/or retreat to in emergency. Medical facilities to both help with winning over the locals and expanding their own ranks. A manufactory to begin bootstrapping with. And a stealth assault shuttle to go in the spaceport, because who knows when they might need one or why.

Other construction includes enough masks to equip the whole city with some leeway and a bunch of bots to start replenishing the ranks after losses we've taken over the past few turns.

On the research front, I've decided I want to get the abacus manufacturing done slightly more than I want the psychic shielding reliability, given that the latter is mainly "tripwire" reliability. I want the abacus manufacturing and reliable gellar fields both done this turn so that they'll definitely be ready to hand over to Denva when we head back there at the end of the next one. I like the idea of having an extra turn of potential buffer if we roll poorly and need to make a last minute push to fix something like the issue we ran into with the spicy food, or the unreliable tripwires.

Next turn would ideally be 1 Orders, 2 Research, and 1 Travel actions to explore and loot the governor's beach house, either correct any last minute issues with the research from this turn or grab some more juicy techs (I'd be ready to either start pushing for warp communication or going hard on more OMC and Companion Cogitators) and finish up the reliable psychic shielding (It'd only be 5 RP left).

EDIT - Almost forgot, the people arguing for just having Cia focus on pyromancy in hopes of true-killing demons won me over and I decided to just give Quorath all the odd bots out that we had. The uneven numbers were low-key annoying and I'd like him not to need to worry about wasting time fabbing up new infantry.
 
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Random question for future reference, next time we do bot designs instead of just upgrades, would anyone mind if we made some non-humanoid bots like hawk scouts and spider tanks and things? Variety of tools might help a future commander be more economical than just, hurling hordes of infantry at things in true imperial guard style?
Like, a light breaching tank designed for ship boarding would have probably saved us… a lot of bot casualties.
 
Alright, I've been a bit busy today, but let me take a quick poke. I'm going to handwave the fiddly bits for now, and mostly focus on broad strokes adjustments.

Specifically though...

[ ] Plan: Begone Stank!
-[ ] Diplomacy: Stankberg is doing pretty okay, but you're fairly sure that they'd prefer not to be one shipment away from everyone dying horribly from a truly profound odor. Fortunately, we have lots of tools and options to give them a nudge, and it probably won't even take forever either! Make contact with the settlement, see what they know, and if there's any trading opportunities to be had here--all so we can have an excuse to drop them whatever support they might need of course. This was apparently a mass food production planet, and things were apparently working just fine until the stuff was left unharvested for a few seasons, there must be something you can learn or gain that survived, right? (Approach Stankberg as representatives of a trade ship, probe for information, gather opportunities to open something up, and use our access to solid medical facilities and the ability to print out filter masks optimized against the Stank to get our foot in the door, and maybe see if they're interested in seeing if we can cooperate to mitigate it going forward.)
-[ ] Exploration: Meanwhile... A fancy government palace hidden in a volcano! Putting aside the realities that this is flagrantly a supervillain's lair, there's likely loot to be had! Samples! A chance to cut down on the horrifying backlog of things you need to catch up on! Better still, we do have some stealth shuttles still, and given their fear of automation, a low altitude insertion of an expeditionary force should be entirely doable. A force of light bots to scout, medium bots for all purpose use, and a handful of heavies for bodyguard work of any people involved in this should be enough to handle anything that hasn't already broken containment. Finders Keepers Rules are in effect after all, and knowing the sorts of people that seem to exist in the Imperium, the Good Shit is likely to be here. (Use our stealth shuttles with an escort force to investigate the Caldera Palace, doing our best to stay low altitude to avoid any defenses while we subvert anything we can. Cia and an escort force of Bots will be our vanguard, while the rest of the gang conducts mission control at a distance)
-[ ] Construction (1,000 Repair Bay, 530 600 Manufactory)
--[ ] Repair All Psychic Shields (-60 Repair Points)
--[ ] Refit all Manufactories to Machine Spirit Manufactories (-630 Repair Points)
--[ ] Wherever we put the Chaos Artifacts, give it the strongest shield we can afford with our remaining Refit Budget
--[ ] Recover our Bot Losses from the previous engagements and our garrisoning (10.5 BP + 35 BP Light Humanized MS, 16 + 100 Medium Humanized MS, 163.4 Heavy Humanized MS/j): Total of 325 BP.
--[ ] Remaining BP for immediate trade and bribe budget, like making masks or setting up a field hospital or something.
-[ ] Research (200 + 95 Anexa RP)
--[ ] How to Build a Biosphere (30 + 70 Anexa RP)
--[ ] Combat Neural Implants (25 Anexa RP)
--[ ] Does In-Vitro Have Something to do with Wine? (100 RP)
--[ ] Variety of the Spice of Life (50 RP)
--[ ] Basic Active Stealth (61/75)
-[][ANEXA] Research: (Combat Neural Implants gets the modifier)
-[][VICTAN] Assist with Diplomacy
-[][CIA] Active Improvement
--[ ] Focus
-[][Quorath] No
 
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Haganeko said:
Personally, I was thinking about Victan's thoughts on designing a government. We have inklings in Faith is my Shield that we might be able to design a better religion than the Imperium's. What better place to start than somewhere all records of the Imperium have either been lost or heavily distorted, and where we don't see any obvious manifestations of Chaos?

Setting up a better agriworld with our terraforming tech is also open as a possibility—the upgraded, large-scale agriculture research is right there.
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Hm, that certainly is a thought, re:faith.

Honestly, faith research is kinda funny because you'd expect this to be a place where the reality sims just... don't matter as much, because it's about people. Dipping our toes in on our own seems fine enough, but the idea you could get very far afterwards without a society to study seems... odd.

Any time I've talked about doing an anthropological study, I've basically been running on speculation that we would have to or would strongly benefit from it, and with all the isolated communities, we actually have the ability to run a number of faith experiments in parallel here, if we think we can approach that in an ethical manner.
Alectai said:
--[ ] Machine Spirit Shipboard Manufactories (75 Anexa RP)
--[ ] Improve Armor Articulation (30 + 20 Anexa RP)
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Considering the circumstances, I would strongly consider swapping this out for Terraforming (100RP, applies to the current problem) and anexa on Combat Implants (25RP, for the foundational tech discount spree).

Can't complain about Wine, considering our timeline.
 
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Further adjustments made to add in Character Acts, I'm not sure what resources our dudes back in the last system might need though, did the discussion go over that?
 
Alectai said:
Further adjustments made to add in Character Acts, I'm not sure what resources our dudes back in the last system might need though, did the discussion go over that?
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Very little, I think, which is a bit of a problem. We don't have a lot of obvious meaningful assets to transfer.

There was an early suggestion to turn the 30 BP originally dedicated towards the new factory into extra personal shields and one plan gives them an extra thousand bots. Those seem like basically the two relevant things we have to offer, barring a thus far unraised clever idea.

We might be able to get away with trying to give them a shuttle out of our bays (which we would need to replace), but they don't really have a place to park it or an obvious use for it.
 
We could start harvesting the stuff ourselves, if we can put some BP towards some simple auto-harvesters.

At least clear enough of the seaweed away from each mat that the deoxygenated patches heal and we can start considering introducing predators to eat the stuff back.
 
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Amerigo Vespucci said:
I was thinking the "manned manufactory" option under export goods. With 200 BP, it's possible to build two, I believe. That's 100 ground-based BP/turn, enough for 120,000 masks every five years, I think?
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I think that's kind of falling below our level of abstraction, the entire point of diplomacy is "Find out what they want", and then we have a pile of budget and the rest of the Construction action to actually build it.
 
Per the word of the QM "You can make a box of 10,000 nearly indestructible masks for 1 bp."

So 100 BP would be enough to give everyone in the city a new mask every five years.

I think that revelation of the extremely good BP to Mask ratio is why a lot of plans now just include "Make enough masks for the locals to basically solve their problem" instead of spending the time and research to start investigating how to outright fix the planet.
 
Alectai said:
I think that's kind of falling below our level of abstraction, the entire point of diplomacy is "Find out what they want", and then we have a pile of budget and the rest of the Construction action to actually build it.
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Pretty much.

RE:Masks in particular, they either manufacture their own or have an inexhaustible supply some other way:
Neablis said:
Furthermore, from this distance, you can actually see that the people of the inhabited town are wearing some kind of mask over their face. Every one of them is wearing a close-fitting greenish-pink mask as they go about every task. Without the benefits of almost any advanced technology - there's not a single combustion engine or other advanced piece of technology in attendance.
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Introducing our own masks, or a dedicated mask factory, might collapse what industry they do have for not much gain. If we want to introduce industry we ought to do so with a more flexible package.
 
KyleDaScourge said:
I feel confident that our "nearly indestructible" DAoT masks are significantly better than whatever they're... probably hand-crafting locally. They're also incredibly cheap to make, and if we do manage to collapse their local industry it just means they're dependent on Cogitare production until they manage to uplift themselves. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
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I'll point out that we started this quest tangling with a Mechanicus branch that had set themselves up as the arbitrator of all high technology on Denva. I'm not keen on reintroducing such a dynamic twice, especially here where technological industry is not absolutely essential to survival.

If we're going to give them manufactories, we should at least make them general purpose so they can tool up their own mask factories--and ensure that any Cogitare we leave behind focus on educating the locals instead of setting up another powerbase.
 
DecaffeinatedOwl said:
I'll point out that we started this quest tangling with a Mechanicus branch that had set themselves up as the arbitrator of all high technology on Denva. I'm not keen on reintroducing such a dynamic twice, especially here where technological industry is not absolutely essential to survival.

If we're going to give them manufactories, we should at least make them general purpose so they can tool up their own mask factories--and ensure that any Cogitare we leave behind focus on educating the locals instead of setting up another powerbase.
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Which is why I'm advocating for setting up to do exactly all of that, yes.

IMO every branch of the Cogitare that we establish should be splitting their focus between recruiting and building up the Cogitare themselves and uplifting the locals wherever they happen to be. Eventually, they might become the glue tying the various outposts of humanity in the area together. Too bad for Ascalon they "murdered our mother" and drove us away before we established one there.
 
While @Angle has been more pessimistic, I think there's a decent chance that directly behind basic automation will be a tech to let us make basic automated factories that don't require CP and thus can be left unattended.

It might not be a cheap tech though.

And better masks are doubtless desirable don't really solve the local problems - you can't mask 100% of the time, and when you don't you take lasting harm. And they've already got some kind of masks.
 
Aineko said:
While @Angle has been more pessimistic, I think there's a decent chance that directly behind basic automation will be a tech to let us make basic automated factories that don't require CP and thus can be left unattended.
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I mean, I think it's likely that such a tech will be revealed - but it's almost certainly going to require 'Independent Manufactories (400 RP)' as a prereq. Like, why would Neablis let us skip that? It makes no sense. It might get discounted heavily, maybe, but skipped entirely? No way. We've never seen anything like that, I don't see why it would happen now.
 
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I mean, it would be better to outright solve their problem but it wouldn't be a small task by any means and this situation just isn't setting off my "urgent humanitarian disaster" bells the way the situation in the last system was.

If we'd showed up a century or two ago when the stuff first started rotting and I imagine the majority of the population were choking to death, that would be one thing, but the situation seems more or less stable now. We can invest a little to offer them a substantial improvement in the form of better masks and the prospect of eventually fixing things themselves via having swathes of their kids go through Cogitare classes and starting to up-tech the planet.

All of that can be set in progress and still let us get back to Denva quickly to settle in for some serious research and industrialization before the sector goes to hell.
 
Angle said:
I mean, I think it's likely that such a tech will be revealed - but it's almost certainly going to require 'Independent Manufactories (400 RP)' as a prereq. Like, why would Neablis let us skip that? It makes no sense. It might get discounted heavily, maybe, but skipped entirely? No way. We've never seen anything like that, I don't see why it would happen now.
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Independent Manufactories applies to an entirely different category of manufactories. I believe we're never going to get a tech that lets the installation "Machine Spirit Manufactory" cost zero CP.

Also, really - why would the Independent Manufactories CP discount be an absolutely inescapable prereq but not not the Ground Manufacturing Efficiency Improvements CP discount?
 
I really think that trying to put manufactories here or to pursue either automated factories or try to throw manned factories here is not a good idea. We are running out of tech-priests, so that is not a truly viable option currently for me. And as has been pointed out, even the manned factories require a tech-priest initate level of technical literacy.

And total manufacturing automation seems far enough down the line that relying us getting it in a reasonable timeframe is unlikely.

So really, just having Victan do his thing with backing of an actual diplomacy action and a very big budget to do as he pleases should do wonders. No need to micromanage. Who knows, even if we can't use the wonders of DAoT tech, we could still kickstart some local industrial developments. Not everything has to be straight out from our blueprint-list.

Using Alectai's plan as the base for my own plan. Some changes: dropped In-vitro and Variety, to make room for Psychic Suppression and throwing Anexa at it in hopes for a crit and a new speciality for her in Psytech. Shifted Cia to passive until we have a guarantee that we have something that can mitigate the worst of the Perils that can still get through our psychic shielding.

Because playing with psychic fire while teaching yourself from the scratch how to use it? Very dangerous and if we take the Focus milestone -upgrade for Cia it will get even more risky. So lets not take that risk of Cia turning to ashes due to uncontrolled psychic powers turning against her, at least before we can shield her from at least the worst of the consequences, yes? Also, the tech could be potentially useful for a possible follow-up tech leading to larger scale psychic suppression.

Also made some changes to Exploration write-in from Alectai. Included hacking the place first and specifying including the heavy bots we use for the mission to be those with Machine Spirit jammers.

[ ] Plan:
-[ ][FREE] Refit the 7x manufactories to 7x Machine-spirit Manufactories (630 BP), Outer Hull 232/240 HP -> 240/240 HP (40 BP), Bongo Oubliette 535/540 HP -> 540/540 HP (25 BP), 305 BP left, reinforce the Chaos Artifact cold-storage with as much as possible with the remaining budget.
-[ ] Diplomacy: Stankberg is doing pretty okay, but you're fairly sure that they'd prefer not to be one shipment away from everyone dying horribly from a truly profound odor. Fortunately, we have lots of tools and options to give them a nudge, and it probably won't even take forever either! Make contact with the settlement, see what they know, and if there's any trading opportunities to be had here--all so we can have an excuse to drop them whatever support they might need of course. This was apparently a mass food production planet, and things were apparently working just fine until the stuff was left unharvested for a few seasons, there must be something you can learn or gain that survived, right? (Approach Stankberg as representatives of a trade ship, probe for information, gather opportunities to open something up, and use our access to solid medical facilities and the ability to print out filter masks optimized against the Stank to get our foot in the door, and maybe see if they're interested in seeing if we can cooperate to mitigate it going forward.)
-[ ] Exploration: Meanwhile... A fancy government palace hidden in a volcano! Putting aside the realities that this is flagrantly a supervillain's lair, there's likely loot to be had! Samples! A chance to cut down on the horrifying backlog of things you need to catch up on! Better still, we do have some stealth shuttles still, and given their fear of automation, a low altitude insertion of an expeditionary force should be entirely doable. After first hacking the place, of course. A force of light bots to scout, medium bots for all purpose use, and a handful of heavies for bodyguard work of any people involved in this should be enough to handle anything that hasn't already broken containment. Finders Keepers Rules are in effect after all, and knowing the sorts of people that seem to exist in the Imperium, the Good Shit is likely to be here. (Hack the Caldera Palace if you can. Use our stealth shuttles with an escort force to investigate the Caldera Palace, doing our best to stay low altitude to avoid any defenses while we subvert anything we can. Cia and an escort force of Bots (heavy bots preferably those with jammers) will be our vanguard, while the rest of the gang conducts mission control at a distance)
-[ ] Construction (600 BP, 500 LC)
--[ ] Recover our Bot Losses from the previous engagements and our garrisoning (10.5 BP + 35 BP Light Humanized MS, 16 + 100 Medium Humanized MS, 163.4 Heavy Humanized MS/j): Total of 325 BP budget for Victan for relief/diplomacy.
--[ ] 275 BP Victan budget for relief effort, uplifting, etc. as he deems necessary.
-[ ] Research (200 + 95 Anexa RP)
--[ ] Basic Psychic Suppression Devices (150 RP) (Anexa)
--[ ] Combat Neural Implants (25 RP)
--[ ] How to Build a Biosphere (100 RP)
--[ ] Basic Active Stealth (41/75 RP -> 61/75 RP)
-[ ][ANEXA] Research: (Basic Psychic Suppression Devices)
-[ ][VICTAN] Assist with Diplomacy
-[ ][CIA] Passive Improvement
--[ ] Focus
-[ ][Quorath] No
 
I don't feel that how to build a biosphere will be all that relevant right, we arent plaing to stay forever.
The RP could be used in other more universal research from more machine spirit stuff to take out most of demonology.
 
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