Chaos also has navigators or they can just use bound daemons to lead them through the warp. It is less reliable than a navigator, but it is much faster so it evens out.
Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest
- Thread starter Neablis
- Start date
- Mature Sci-Fi
Chaos also has navigators or they can just use bound daemons to lead them through the warp. It is less reliable than a navigator, but it is much faster so it evens out.
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And they are going to pay those contracts to daemons just to explore what should be empty space? I doubt it.
Also, Chaos navigators probably just survive for 10 years at max.
They already mutate without Chaos, with Chaos they probably just slowly explode in Chaos spawns.
They are going to do that to raid, a thing Warbands do normally, it's the one thing they are good at, Path of Glory and all that. Even just people in general are useful to Chaos worshipers since they make good sacrifices. All it would take is for one of these common warbands to get lucky and then sell the spoils somewhere more central that is capable of organizing an invasion fleet.
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In 40 years? With the risk of being killed for knowing this place exist by the same ones you are trying to sell your things?
Chaos is much worse on those things than the Imperium.
Your average Chaos captain isn't making rational decisions about the odds of getting killed for selling the information to the wrong person, plus they are going to need supplies and if you are going to sell archeo tech better to sell the coordinates too before the big boss shows up to tear them out of your head with psychic powers or maybe you don't do it and he does do the tearing. Point is Chaos crews would be bad at keeping this secret and once it came out whichever Chaos polity got the information would likely try to capitalize.
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The odds you keep referring to do not actually say what you think they say.
I mean, you're right that this isn't 1/100 odds. It's actually one in four hundred odds.
0.05 * 0.05 = 0.25%.
The Imperium has existed in its post-emperor state for 12,000 years, and we've been gone for about 50. It wouldn't finish ablating away at this rate for another 8,000 years - and in practice we observe a much higher rate of lost worlds, because they're also capturing ones afterwards, a factor which does not apply to Denva.
Between that and the aggravating narrative factors like:
- the pissed off dark elder pirate queen one system over who knows that we were trading in the area, if the corsair didn't mention meeting us at Denva outright
- Denva's military just having started development meaning so there's no inertia to salvage the developmental failure
- Absolutely zero strategic depth so any attacks are on the Denvin homeworld in the first place...
- No, seriously. Imperial world safety is mostly achieved through the imperium just being so goddamn big and every world having its own PDF that to get to anywhere you have to go through a metric shitton of things first.
- Our in-system defense force might be better, but Denva's overall defensive posture is far, far worse because there is absolutely bupkus limiting the ability for a scout to come in, see something worth taking, and bringing an invasion fleet in. Contrast to the imperium which can find out about the scout and reposition its sector fleets to intercept an attempt to do the same - we have no such protection.
- Vita's strategic mobility is dogshit. For example, an imperial navigator can travel 10 systems in one action, and there are only 30 systems in between Denva and Zentara - meaning that the whole trip here if they don't stop anywhere can happen in one turn and they'd still have one action of travel to spare.
- A round trip from Denva for space marines to bring back a fleet, if they chose to do so, could have arrived at the same time the eldar corsair raiders did! It would only take 2 turns, even given 2.5 years for muster time!
- Valtrix, the DElf pirate base Xylaris operates, is even closer at 21 systems from Denva. Eldar mobility is likewise superior, it's not unlikely that she could do a full round trip in just one turn.
- For contrast, we've been gone for seven turns.
Our saving grace in that respect is that he is not running this quest as a simulationist. Rather, he has promised to try to make it fun, to fail forward, and to generally interpret results and votes in a beneficial way.
That bias is the main reason for hope here. Not the odds, which genuinely do say Denva should be toast.
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Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Yeah, losing the place we invested a shitton of narrative time and attention on because we left it for a few turns after giving them lots of tools to build up and protect themselves would dis-incentivise us from ever giving a shit about anything ever again, so I don't think Neablis is going to go that far. If the shit's going to hit the fan, I think we're going to have a chance to be the Saving Throw.
"Lost due to bad RNG because lol Warhammer" is a terrible fate for something we spent over a hundred thousand words on building up, when we've only actually been gone for a relatively short time. It may be simulationist. "You can do everything right and then die because a negative space wedgie manifested and ate the system, that's Warhammer Baby", but from a narrative perspective, nothing would kill the investment in the story faster than to go "The entire core premise is useless because if you ever aren't watching someone with a club, they can just get got from RNG and no amount of preparation or advantages can save them."
"Lost due to bad RNG because lol Warhammer" is a terrible fate for something we spent over a hundred thousand words on building up, when we've only actually been gone for a relatively short time. It may be simulationist. "You can do everything right and then die because a negative space wedgie manifested and ate the system, that's Warhammer Baby", but from a narrative perspective, nothing would kill the investment in the story faster than to go "The entire core premise is useless because if you ever aren't watching someone with a club, they can just get got from RNG and no amount of preparation or advantages can save them."
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Not if it gets pre baked with a 2 in military organization for the Imperium.
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... Why? They are perfectly able to keep secrets even when insane. The insanity doesn't manifest in not being able to keep secrets.
The crew would fear too much the punishment the officials would make them endure.
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When I said crew I didn't mean the wretches down in the engineering pit or the built in gladiator arena, I meant the other officers .
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The space marines had a good stewardship as a trait, actually. So that 2 isn't actually what they have.
A little hyperbolic, but yeah.
Ultimately, my point is that we knew the risk of this happening, and we chose to take that risk anyways when we could have, for instance, doubled back from Ascalon when we saw that the road trip was taking a long time, and then we wouldn't be in this situation where chance would have had this much say in the outcome.
I made a plan to that effect, too - The idea was to start exploring Denva's other neighbors in a breath-first approach. Lost by a landslide - we knew and chose this risk.
That's not sour grapes on my part to be clear. I wasn't exactly beating the drum about the risk during the plans since then - I was even mulling over "stay on caldereth" plans for this turn, I'm no Cassandra.
But I'm not going to say we didn't fuck up, because we absolutely did.
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I was talking about the average imperium world, like you were.
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Then you miss the point because that 2 on military organization doesn't actually apply to the overall security posture, which is not limited to just the world itself.
The main defense they have is logistical. Scouting out a target and then sending a fleet to take it is much harder when the fleet protecting the whole sector can be informed of you casing a world and then move the fleet in to intercept or pincer yours, and when every system in between also has a defense force to slow you down.
Also, they have warp communications in the form of astropaths to coordinate that response.
Dynamics like that are the reason the Imperium still exists despite its incompetence. It uses its bigness in every way it can and that counts for a lot more than the defense force of a single planet, even one as good as ours.
Anybody who may have decided to attack Denva by contrast have been given enough time to call for reinforcements multiple times, and have few to no speed bumps in between to delay the arrival of those forces.
The only reinforcements Denva has is us. The contrast is quite bleak.
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They may kill the ones who want to share the information preemptively.
It actually could apply even to overall logistics. The human wave drown in number can also come from the Imperial guard, and the administratum can be really slow and really wrong in its decisions.
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The Imperial Navy is a separate institution from the administratium Is a separate institution from the space marines.
And one of the candidates for an attack on Denva are the good-at-stewardship space marines, which is why I brought that trait up.
Like it or not, the imperium is the Galactic Hegemon. The big boy on the block that everyone else measures themselves against.
There is a baseline of macro scale military competence that is required for that to remain true, And organizing a response to an invading fleet is one such you must be this tall to ride line.
If they couldn't do that, their highly centralized power structures would be knocked over with ease, and the Imperium would have ceased to hold most of the galaxy as their territory long before the galaxy was split in half.
Sure but I don't think it's very likely. At the end of the day any shipborn warband has to balance the risk for being killed for knowing too much with the risk of death and worse that comes with no longer being able to function.
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The military deployment orders of Imperial guard and fleet are managed by the Administratum.
The definition can be generic for the Imperial fleet, like with a sub-sector defense order, or with a "fight that force", but the sub-sectors fleet usually aren't that big and may still be overstretched.
Otherwise the segmentum fleet could destroy every imperial world with impunity. Or at least that's the idea.
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To put it bluntly, if a couple of bad rolls (none of wich is even a crit fail, by the way) is enough to destroy all the massive amount of actions we have invested in uplifting Denva, then there is no rational reason to help anyone ever again, all the resources we don't invest in our own research or construction may as well be thrown into a black hole.
Dices should have consequences, bit if said consequences are "all your time and effort is worth shit and one of the main plots was killed off-screen" then that's just very poor storytelling.
Not saying that I think Neablis is going to do that, he has proven several times already to have a deep and profound understanding of how quests fail and how to avoid said traps, this was more like personal rambling.
Dices should have consequences, bit if said consequences are "all your time and effort is worth shit and one of the main plots was killed off-screen" then that's just very poor storytelling.
Not saying that I think Neablis is going to do that, he has proven several times already to have a deep and profound understanding of how quests fail and how to avoid said traps, this was more like personal rambling.
I for example would be happy if Denva is no more, we could return to "Boldly go" as was advertised and not this "lets build empire from different perspective".
We were to be explorers remember?
If it was up to me we would already be half way to Prospero and not looking back to this random planet.
We were to be explorers remember?
If it was up to me we would already be half way to Prospero and not looking back to this random planet.
Looking at those roles for military and production my expectation is that Denva has lost any and all space assets but was able to mostly defend the planet using their pre-Vita millitary + planet to void lances. Meaning all that production buildup was on the planet, probably with a bad enviromental impact because they decided to crash build it.
...And then what?
We need resources to do things, unless you'd prefer the quest to be a series of "Vita went to X place, looked around for a bit, repeat"... Which, well, that would certainly be a choice.
I don't think Anexa cares that much about the place, to be honest, and I think Victan is pragmatic enough he would recover. Not sure about Cia.
But anyway, I wasn't advocating that we abandon Denva. Just that we not treat it as if it had to be the centre of all our attention and operations.
True! Neablis generally goes for bad dice moving things forward. Just having Denva be completely destroyed seems like something that wouldn't happen.
Interesting. I think the opposite lesson should be taken—that we never put so many eggs in any basket again. Stay mobile, don't get too invested or tethered to any one place, make sure we have what we need to rebuild on our mobile fleet, invest in many places.
I guess when bad things happen everyone has a tendency to go "well, if we'd done it my way..."
In the end, one can deal with risks in two ways—prevention, to reduce chance, or mitigation, to reduce harm. And one can only prevent or mitigate so much. Let's see what we can salvage from whatever the crisis is, this time. There's some very thorough people in this thread, and we have diversity of thought. We'll come up with something.
Grow along the way, help planet of the week, discover neat shit and generally have an adventure.
Edit: To boldly go where no AI has gone before.
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Build in many places, not get too tied up in any of them above the rest.
Though I must confess to also kind of wanting Denva to be gone, that's a destructive impulse borne out of the sadness of the dice not going our way. It's not a rational or productive desire.
Wise or not, we have heavy investments in that place and it being destroyed is worse for us. Do I want to advocate we diversify our stocks after this? Yes. But I also don't want us to lose the majority of our resources.
So they can die horribly a couple of turns later instead of right now? Nah, if we are going there we may as well lean into "I don't care about your problems unless you have something I can trade with"