- If Denva got eaten or exterminated by Necrons or something it would seriously sour the tone of the quest from both an IC and OOC perspective, but we will probably get over it eventually
- If they have major Chaos corruption or genestealers we are spending the next however many turns we need to fix that fixing it even if we have to eat Wayrfarer penalties
Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest
- Thread starter Neablis
- Start date
- Mature Sci-Fi
If people wonted to build civilisation then at character creation there was more then one option for that, yet explorer won and now the thread is train to use this explorer to do thing it was not designed to do.
Edit: In fact Vita is specifically designed against it, she dose not even have STC but unique database that make civilisation building intentionally difficult.
Edit: In fact Vita is specifically designed against it, she dose not even have STC but unique database that make civilisation building intentionally difficult.
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Aliya
Someone I might become
- Location
- Kazakhstan
- Pronouns
- They/She/It
I look at those odds and say - if the setting was actually this dangerous, it wouldn't exist. Mind, I actually think Imperium straight up cannot function as written, but this is part of the handwave necessary to accept 40k as a setting.
It's 3 AM here, and I don't want to argue, but I did also say myself that there are diegetic reasons for why this shouldn't destroy Denva. But there is a practical reason too - they rolled great on industry, and good logistics and sheer industrial mass can compensate for a lot. It is entirely possible to write Denva eating shit in a fight and managing to squick by because they had trillion civilian robits to throw in a grinder.
Angle
Release Candidate Enby
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs/Comrade
They also probably got some technologies to enhance that further - superconductors, LSVM, GMEI, to start with. And they may have made a deal with the Vellkar and started building out on Denva Primus, too, so that would further accelerate things.
- Location
- colombia
It probably is enough for the medium to long term
But in the short to mid term we got to rebuild their shit from whatever kicked their teeths in
As others pointed whuoe denva has civilized planet defenses
The threaths around them could take fortress worlds,and they have no buffers or areas to call reinforcements,they are against the wall
Personally i been advocating about the same general goal sonce day 1
>give denva the tools to expand on their own so we dont have to babysit them
This imply:
>warp travel
>warp protections (so they can improve their warp travel without us)
>military improvements
This rolls vindicate my stance
We should bite the bullet and stay and build them up to the point they can do their own expansion and exploration
Happy about production rolls tho
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.
Meh it doesnt feel like that so far
More like fast food equivalent of exploration
Enter,put out a fire,leave without actually doing much
>Space uber! janitor
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At least the research went well and was focused on empowering organic agents.
Unless they've been totally wiped out, in which case I'd say head to Vothryn immediately, or they're dealing with a significant corruption issue, in which case I'd say add some missile research onto the queue of things to finish along with OMC and Warp Coms so that we can leave something behind to remote-sterilize the system if Chaos wins, I don't think my actual plan has changed much.
Give them OMC tech and a warp communicator and largely leave them to it.
I think it's important that we setup and nurture a friendly faction for both practical and ethical reasons, and organic agents empowered via OMC and Companion Cogitators seem the current easiest way to start rapidly multiplying the resources at our disposal, but I'm not planning to spend long here either way.
Unless they've been totally wiped out, in which case I'd say head to Vothryn immediately, or they're dealing with a significant corruption issue, in which case I'd say add some missile research onto the queue of things to finish along with OMC and Warp Coms so that we can leave something behind to remote-sterilize the system if Chaos wins, I don't think my actual plan has changed much.
Give them OMC tech and a warp communicator and largely leave them to it.
I think it's important that we setup and nurture a friendly faction for both practical and ethical reasons, and organic agents empowered via OMC and Companion Cogitators seem the current easiest way to start rapidly multiplying the resources at our disposal, but I'm not planning to spend long here either way.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
... Warp Travel would not have stopped this, this was full out "They got complacent again despite a scare when we left, and then they did a poor military job defending themselves, so if whoever popped in was hostile, they'd be able to do quite a lot of damage--but unless whoever jumped them loaded for Exterminatus from the start, I don't see them getting completely rolled over that fast".
And the tech we gave them was still better than what most of the Imperium has easy access to, again, this is not a problem that would have been solved with bigger guns, this was a complacency problem here.
And the tech we gave them was still better than what most of the Imperium has easy access to, again, this is not a problem that would have been solved with bigger guns, this was a complacency problem here.
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What would you want to be doing that we're not doing?
Because while I won't deny there's been a strong tendency to rush, I don't see a lot of missed opportunities I'd describe as exploration.
Not necessarily? But if freak events can happen, having a single planet be the nexus of all our operations is putting too many eggs in one basket.
It's less about helping vs gratification and more about whether to build a centralised civilization or be an emt. Star Trek vs. Foundation, if you will. Or maybe vs. Dune.
- Location
- colombia
less fire putting and more actually doing stuff because is fun and not because is a timebomb we gotta de-activate
do stuff because we want not because we have to
>arrive to system "A"
>le rungus tungus is gonna kill everyone
>spend all the time fixing the rungus tungus
>leave
we didnt really explore shit,some extra wiggle room would be neat
ocasional "nothing bad here,just a few neat trinkets" systems to wash our mouth from "shithole on fire" systems
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So is the complaint that we spent too much time per system doing other things, not too little doing exploration?
I'm pretty sure we were free to completely skip interacting with the people in the last two systems if we chose, even arguably encouraged to do so in Vorthryn, but too much player pressure against doing so.
So far motivation is "we should do this and this so Denva can colonize/build/expand" or "we will do this and Denva will swoop in and finish the work" instead of exploring on our own.
- Location
- colombia
the complaint is that gameplay pressures railroad us towards a very specific path and tasks,and by the time said tasks are done we are too overburned and just fuck off
is not exploration,is homework
take for example denva,we stood here and we did uplift denva but also explored the rest of the system and found bongo
it wasnt railroaded or forced onto us
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It's not gameplay, it's posters. I am confident the quest would be totally compatible with us having ignored the humans in all three systems.
Though admittedly if we did we'd have probably gotten zero samples until the beach house. Though we didn't get much from Vorthryn anyway, and Ascalon's samples were a surprising prize-for-failure situation.
Angle
Release Candidate Enby
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs/Comrade
I mean, we're exploring - but the trouble is that every time we get to a new system, it's some variation on 'this is 40k, things are bad', and then people feel obligated to stick around for a bit trying to fix the bad things. So, only real solutions there are 'stop trying to fix the bad things', 'scale capabilities up enough that fixing things doesn't require us to stop exploring', (Which would be best done via warp comms & alliance with Denva), or 'Hope we start finding systems that don't have anyone we care about in them so there's nothing to fix'. The third one will probably happen eventually if we just wait for the gribblies to kill everyone, but it's not my preferred solution. First is beyond individual control and seems unlikely, so I wouldn't endorse it.
Obviously the second one is the one I want, but I've been arguing this point for several turns now and nobody has wanted to pay much attention, so it seems likely we'll continue with the current status quo for some time yet. -_-
Obviously the second one is the one I want, but I've been arguing this point for several turns now and nobody has wanted to pay much attention, so it seems likely we'll continue with the current status quo for some time yet. -_-
- Location
- colombia
yes i was expecting exactly that,some random events that dont take all our effort across multiple turns to solve
>neat mineral deposit,scan and get a research discount
>a trade fleet here,go meet new people,get some some intel,make some friends
>ruins here,scan
>interesting people here,go diplo
having some low stakes events sprinkled around so it give us low hanging fruits to de-stress from
denva had the monasteries and bongo on top of its nation states,so not all our actions had to be "fix denva geopolitics",it gave a very different vibe to:
"SHITHOLE #4 SPEND 8 TURNS HERE AND DO ''FIX SHITHOLE'' ACTION EVERY TURN WITHOUT ANYTHING ELSE,THEN JUMP TO SHITHOLE #5 AND REPEAT"
if every place we visit is a shithole on fire were the only avaible actions are fixing said shithole through a action sink or jump to another system that will offer those 2 exact options anyways? (also in stankberg case,it was a literal shithole given the rotting algae)
i say that is equally or more boring
we need some more minor side-quests that cant blow up in our face in places we visit
at least we got some necron stuff this time,im thankful for that
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I disagree "we will do this and Denva will swoop in and finish the work" is what stopped us from getting bogged down even further. There was no plan to just leave Vorthryn, not that no one voted for one, no, nobody even put together a plan that said "i dont care, let the stations die, this system isnt really interesting".
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We don't know that. We don't know any of the details, really.
Unless one of the factions who know about Denva already came in with a huge alpha-strike, I actually kinda expect that they fought the first incursion off, at which point "complacency" stops being a factor and that 90 in industry growth wakes up and starts printing ships.
This would almost certainly be good enough to stop a second wave - it's one thing to see a bunch of factories, but one thing even the three factions who know about Denva missed is that these factories shit out materiel like nothing else in the galaxy. The space marines were duped into thinking 50 plasma rifles were "hard", the corsairs didn't get a good look, and Xylaris at best only knew anything about Denva second hand from the corsairs. Any of those three doing a salty runback after a repelled first invasion would be in for a nasty surprise.
And had we stuck to our original schedule, that's where things would have ended. Vita would be back with the ability to 4x all manufacturing in the system and the updated tech for those factories to produce, outdoing any even remotely realistic comers. Even with their much higher strategic mobility and lack of roadbumps stopping them, 20 years is too little time to fit in a third wave that responds to Denvan manufacturing.
But we were gone for 40 years, not 20. And that is enough time for a determined attacker to take Denva's measure and respond accordingly.
Hence, my insistence that we erred and that Neablis's questing philosophy is why we're not going to come back to find the Stellar Ascendancy nipped in the bud.
What I think is about to happen is that, as Alectai initially said, we're going to show up in time to be Big Damn Heroes, helping to stop that third wave. Big, awesome fight. And then afterwards we get some kind of adventure hook to clean up after any fallout like tech capture, e.g. "you learned that attackers were from the forge world northwest of Zantris and their loot from Denva was likely taken there - now muster forces and invade them right back".
Ehhh, I think you misunderstood me here.
It's not that any given world has a 1 in 400 chance of being 40k'd every half century. I mean, for the imperium in particular it could and the imperium would still exist, I entered this conversation with proof of that, but that's still not what I'm saying.
I'm saying that at this point in time Denva was realistically at heightened risk and that we chose not to mitigate, and that a 1/400 disaster across half a century would realistically be enough for that risk to do a 40k to Denva.
I'll leave it at that since you want to disengage - hopefully you're already asleep by now anyways.
I agree that Neablis isn't going to raw dog us over this. He's said what he's about - things will be bad, but the first two thirds of this quest aren't suddenly about to be moot.
At the same time though, I fundamentally disagree that this was just the dice screwing us. That's not how dice work in this quest - they choose from outcomes that are possible, rather than retroactively deciding what was possible. If Denva's survival WAS on the line, it would be because of our choices, plain and square.
So let's talk about what we could have done differently - and, what we originally planned to do.
We could have checked in on them sooner, like we originally planned to, and a 1/400 event would not realistically knock them down - I point out that we were gone long enough for multiple round trip reinforcements to arrive in favor of an invading force.
Our original road trip plan was to only be gone 15-20 years. That was a good plan! The risk of a sustained attack was a lot more negligable along that timeframe, Denva would only have to repulse or hold off against a few waves, and with their manufacturing crit, easily would have. See my reply to Alectai below for details on how I'd think that would go.
We just... Chose not to stick to that plan, and didn't do anything else to mitigate that risk, even after a new red flag in the form of Xylaris's grudge appeared.
Some readers may recall a similar thing happened to result in Bongo's first escape, the one where he took over those grand cruisers. Vibes won over sticking to the plan, and I was one of the people who got snookered by said vibes back then too, just like I personally didn't take the risk to denva seriously enough this time. The dice did not fuck us over with Bongo, they just failed to bail us out.
But at the end of the day, I believe Denva's mil/defense rolls should realistically be viewed less as the dice fucking us up out of nowhere, and more as the dice failing an easy saving throw to cover our mistakes.
That's how we have to view it, if we want to preserve any sense of agency at all.
I can't speak for everyone, but the rationale I heard most often and loudly - not just here, but on Discord where I workshop most of my stuff - was less about timelines and more about "We only just escaped, please don't go back to Denva already".
Which, honestly? Perfectly understandable, and it's part of why I didn't push to abandon our road trip in favor of a breadth first exploration of denva's neighbors harder.
For what it's worth, I'm very cognizant of the "well if we'd done it my way" pitfall and I'm trying to avoid it.
It's why I'm trying to keep pointing out that even if I had a preference at times to return to Denva earlier, and even if I pointed at our original timeline, I did not actually pound the table about this outcome being possible, I did not push, and I even advocated for longer stays out on the frontier.
I am not Cassandra.
As far as eggs in one basket go though - DragonParadox's talks about chaos demonstrate the problem with that, in that one of our baskets getting raided threatens any basket we have anywhere else by making the entire setting wildly more dangerous, depending on who got the eggs.
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Beach planet Caldereth was honestly low stakes except for the beach house treasure. Post-apocalyptic, sure, but fairly cozy. (And the entire sector is post-apocalyptic, after all.) The locals would have been okay without us and happy with one construction action of help, which is really not far from what they got. While spending lots of turns there was technically an option, it wouldn't have really been a matter of solving the planet's problems. I'm not sure expecting places nicer than Caldereth is likely to be fulfilled.
Ascalon had no actual 'solve this' for us, unless you think we were obligated to conquer the dogmatic remnant, which we didn't do. If it was on fire beyond being an Imperial world, we never found out about it.
Vorthryn is the only one a little like your description. Of course, the first chapter said in as many words that maybe we shouldn't intervene, and we pretty much ran off without really resolving anything as it was.
Admittedly, it seems quite possible that Denva (the return) will fit your description.
You realize I'm talking about the fact that we were free to just keep exploring instead of the (actually brief) stops we've been making, not that we were free to run back to Denva which is the opposite of continuing to explore?
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
No, actually. I thought you were talking about keeping to our original road trip schedule by not spending as much time on each individual system. Sorry for the mixup!
Did someone try to precommit to a short time limit for the expedition? I think I outright missed that.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Oh, absolutely! If you go back to the last few turns on Denva, you'll see me bringing up a research plan I refer to as a "survive a seige starter pack" that included heavy in-atmo void shields, among other things. Long before that, you'll see Alectai musing about how Zantris is organized into three "loops" that connect back up with denva, which we could explore one by one stopping at denva in between each to make sure they're okay.
The Ascalon-Vorthryn-Caldereth loop was chosen as the first of the three to explore because it was the shortest one. The stated reasoning about it in detail was that we'd be keeping our absence to 10-20 years. There was talk of how we could even explore multiple systems in one turn, which is how that 10 years absence would be possible.
Understand, under the original plan we'd have left with them having no navy except those caltrops - they had no void OMC to operate the tiny monitors, and the only reason the Candle was designed and built was because the Corsairs showed up, and we were given the opportunity to spend more time in-system to help build up extra defenses.
Our plan for Denva to not die was, ultimately, to outfit them well enough that they could survive a brief siege until we got back. And the talk back then absolutely included multiple people talking about how to stop Denva from dying.
That's the plan I keep referring to, why the original roadtrip schedule was kind of important, and why I characterize what we did instead as a mistake. We had a plan that would have no-diffed the rolls we're looking at now, and we just chose not to stick to it.
It happens. We've made mistakes before, we're going to make more in the future, that's just part of questing. I'm not pointing fingers at anyone.
I'm just trying to insist we learn from it instead of cursing bad luck, lol.
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- Location
- Here and there
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Gang can we at least save the panic and doom until we actually can see what happened?
I think it is not very honest to say you are trying to avoid a pitfall while using the event (when we don't know what happened yet) plus unconfirmable speculation (what would have happened had we come back earlier) to effectively confirm what you wanted anyway (to commit more heavily to Denva and use it to act on the sector).