Okay, so, it looks like I could just swap out the diplomacy action for spending boons without an action, and spend the freed up action helping root out the remaining cultists? But I don't think we can get enough RP for all the research I want here... I guess Psychic Encryption can wait for another turn? It's almost certain to get cheaper, between MS CPS and ASM... Ugh, this is such a mess. Do we have any idea what the death toll in all this was? And how it compares to the <10M in Vorthryn and Caldereth we spent so many actions on? Denva had, like, 7000M+, so even a comparatively light death toll of a 100M or so would dwarf Vorthryn and Caldereth. -_-
I mean, yeah, those interventions were always going to have a hard time standing up in that calculus, though they were done pretty fast given the scale of our time increments.
In the real causality it doesn't seem clear we really had much option to have spared Denva this, though. They could have had a proper defense against this, but the dice said they didn't so they didn't. If we'd skipped Calderon and come back 10 years sooner, we can't expect we'd have arrived back in time to break the invasion early.
If we'd spent an extra turn building Denva, like, cruisers? That might have done it. But we seemed to be pretty well in a hurry to go see some stars there, so I don't exactly see that having been a serious option.
On the logic that Bongo would corrupt Vita instantly once he was out would be my guess. Even if not corrupting a genuine DAOT AI would likely have his patrons look much more favorably on him for resurrection.
That logic seems wrong, though, and Bongo should know it was wrong. Though Bongo lying to the warlord seems chaotically plausible. Vita's core has its own shielding layer, which Bongo knows about and has been thwarted by before. And Bongo didn't have the juice to have overcome that.
Bongo out of his box might have been able to cause some chaos to the rest of the Spark and to the defending bots, but Vita's core wasn't going to fall to psychic attack.
-[] Plan: Cauterized Feast
--[] [Repair Bay] Repair 125 BP of Structure Damage, 875 BP (175 HP) of Outer Hull Psychic Shielding. (1,000 BP Used)
--[] Orders: Secure Klyssar's Nest
--[] Explore: Salvage the Echo of Apotheosis
--[] Construction 600 + 2000 + 15000 BP 17100
---[] Repair 130 Orbital Manufactories to Machine Spirit Orbital Manufactories (13000 BP)
---[] 10,000 Specters (1000 BP)
---[] 10,000 Heavy Machine-spirit humanized Infantry Bots with Machine Spirit Jammers (1900 BP)
---[] Basic Psychic Experimentation Lab (200 BP) (Spark)
---[] High-Energy Physics Research Lab (500 BP) (Void)
---[] Warp Research Lab (500 BP) (Void)
---[] Medium Machine-spirit tanks (375 BP)
---[] Additional 25 BP of psychic shielding repairs
--[] Research 200 + 80
---[] Large-scale Void Manufacturing (100 RP)
---[] A Curio Cabinet of Cultists (20 +80/100 RP) (Anexa)
---[] Drugs? Drugs. (75 RP)
---[] Intelligence Coding (5 RP -> 170/400 RP)
--[] Boons (5 Boons - 5 Boons)
---[] [Give] Help Conquer Klyssar's Nest
---[] [Give] Transfer OMC/Machine Spirit Tech
---[] [Give] Transfer Corruption Defenses
---[] [Boon] Permanent Manufacturing capacity x2
---[] [Boon] Psykers
---[] [Boon] Permanent Social intervention (Xenophile Lobby)
---[] [Boon] Specialized Crew (Cogitare)
--[][Aetherion] Keep.
--[] Anexa active Action: Research
--[] Victan passive action: Counterespionage & Alliance-building
--[] Passive Psyker improvement
Get all this buttoned up, and prepare for a research turn. The labs will be refit into an appropriate vessel later, but can hang out in the void for the time being. Next turn's construction will repair the shipyard and get to work on the fleet. This turn's meager research will help contain the cultists.
One element I wish to stand on is that we get Denva on the right path when it comes to dealing with aliens. I certainly don't want to see the nightmare kobolds suffer yet another round of genocides for that neglect. We need to check on them as well, but that'll be next turn.
Denva's domestic research capacity is honestly not worth the cost of investment. We're a million times better at it than they'll ever be. In the longer term, what we should do is create an offspring AI to work with them instead. Besides that, Anexa needs a staff today, not tomorrow. Let's hope you all don't give these away too...
More psykers are plainly a gimmie. They can do actual literal magic. We're doing everyone involved a favor by taking on the small numbers of strong ones.
That logic seems wrong, though, and Bongo should know it was wrong. Though Bongo lying to the warlord seems chaotically plausible. Vita's core has its own shielding layer, which Bongo knows about and has been thwarted by before. And Bongo didn't have the juice to have overcome that.
Bongo out of his box might have been able to cause some chaos to the rest of the Spark and to the defending bots, but Vita's core wasn't going to fall to psychic attack.
The psyker shields protect against nothing physical, however. They break Bongo out, he gets to work on the Spark, and they go around trying to breach Vita's core. In the meantime, anything Bongo takes over can be used to support. Once the core shielding has been physically broken, he doesn't need to expend much warp power getting at Vita.
I think the Stellar Ascendancy will be able to put LS-OMC to immediate use (they've still got tens of thousands of VBP per turn of their own from the crucibles but trying to (re)build their own shipyards or refineries without it is going to be an enormous pain, particularly given the state of the system right now) and I'd like to have it so that the Cogitare can start training on it and teaching initiates how to use it, but yes. Actually having the Cogitare run things probably won't happen until the first turn where we can't spare a build action, which may not actually be until we leave, although if they can run it at least as well as we could on a single-action (Which our current level of OMC tech should allow) then it may make sense to start using them sooner.
I'm unsure we want LS-OMC before we've reasonably rooted out the chaos presence on Denva. Contrary to what some have said, Bongo talking to the warband doesn't mean the warband knows everything Bongo does, nor that the warband communicated everything they learned nor everything they know elsewhere.
In fact, we're reasonably sure the warband has done the opposite of spread this stuff around, so far. Spite moves might change that, which means until Denva is in a better place, we shouldn't be putting OMC tech into civilian hands that aren't actually using it for production purposes IMO.
Operational Security is not a binary. There are degrees leakage, speed, and spread.
Okay, so, it looks like I could just swap out the diplomacy action for spending boons without an action, and spend the freed up action helping root out the remaining cultists? But I don't think we can get enough RP for all the research I want here... I guess Psychic Encryption can wait for another turn? It's almost certain to get cheaper, between MS CPS and ASM... Ugh, this is such a mess. Do we have any idea what the death toll in all this was? And how it compares to the <10M in Vorthryn and Caldereth we spent so many actions on? Denva had, like, 7000M+, so even a comparatively light death toll of a 100M or so would dwarf Vorthryn and Caldereth. -_-
Psy Encryption directly helps us against Klyssar, even if we don't print bots that have personal psy shields, which we might.
There's probably a sorcerer aboard (it was the cushiest place for the warband aside from the heavy cruiser) who will try to divine Vita's developments/prep for the attack, Bongo will try to reach out in turn to give more fine grained information, and even regular chaos warriors allegedly have a divination-based sixth sense in combat that could give individual ambushes and engagements away.
The more stealthy we can make the prep, timing, and execution of the Klyssar mission, the less capable the sorcerer or the general warband will be of fighting back, or initiating spite moves and panic rituals using the tens to hundreds of millions of slaves on board.
Or of mobilizing their slave soldiers against our bots in general, really.
That stealth begins with Psy Encryption. For this, and all the other reasons people have said, it is not optional.
. I also believe we should try and salvage the chaos ship. I'm willing to bet if we roll well, we could get some non-chaos stuff like the blueprints of the ship or some survivors as highly unlikely that is.
We have more than enough dangerous stuff to research that we haven't so much as tocuhed, and 99% of it is going to be chaos shit we could reclaim. The Smell of Chaos is more than enough.
There's nothing unique here we can't get elsewhere or don't already have, it's not worth an action.
We have more than enough dangerous stuff to research that we haven't so much as tocuhed, and 99% of it is going to be chaos shit we could reclaim. The Smell of Chaos is more than enough.
There's nothing unique here we can't get elsewhere or don't already have, it's not worth an action.
That very same research says that more samples makes it better, and we have not in fact captured any examples of chaos engineering yet to study, Bongo aside.
Even chaos marine armor is like, mostly holdovers and shit from the heresy. I hear chaos ship engines are some of the best, so any remains of those we want to get even aside from how it improves things like curios cabinet and taste of chaos.
That logic seems wrong, though, and Bongo should know it was wrong. Though Bongo lying to the warlord seems chaotically plausible. Vita's core has its own shielding layer, which Bongo knows about and has been thwarted by before. And Bongo didn't have the juice to have overcome that.
Bongo out of his box might have been able to cause some chaos to the rest of the Spark and to the defending bots, but Vita's core wasn't going to fall to psychic attack.
Bongo would know it was wrong, but why the hell would Bongo tell the Chaos Champion that? He just wanted out of the box. Daemons lie even to their allies, especially to their allies.
I'm probably misremembering but I could swear that Neablis said something about us potentially being able to avoid crit fails on research if we put in enough extra RP.
The psyker shields protect against nothing physical, however. They break Bongo out, he gets to work on the Spark, and they go around trying to breach Vita's core. In the meantime, anything Bongo takes over can be used to support. Once the core shielding has been physically broken, he doesn't need to expend much warp power getting at Vita.
Bongo would know it was wrong, but why the hell would Bongo tell the Chaos Champion that? He just wanted out of the box. Daemons lie even to their allies, especially to their allies.
Yeah, as I said, I could believe that - though then there's the question of what Bongo gets out of it exactly. Just a chance to flip us off by messing with the Spark? Further make the boarders let it out of the binding to the generator so it can go back to the warp?
I'm probably misremembering but I could swear that Neablis said something about us potentially being able to avoid crit fails on research if we put in enough extra RP.
The Warband's warship will contain all of their relics and archeotech. We have huge gaps in our techbase because we lack samples to base operations off of, functioning entirely through the reality simulator to model from first principles.
We have never gotten our hands on a Human-made ship. And that's not nothing - the superconductors and antigrav stuff is all new to Vita, as are the thousands of years of adaptation to the more hostile warp. We need to have a look at these things and derive what insights from them we can.
I wouldn't mind critting on this and finding disturbing Chaotic artifacts, but that's not even the main appeal.
Well, sure, but at that point they're gambling on their one lightning strike team being able to storm both the Bongo Box and Vita's core.
That seems like a worse plan than just storming Vita's core and trying to psy attack or physically disable her without Bongo.
Yeah, as I said, I could believe that - though then there's the question of what Bongo gets out of it exactly. Just a chance to flip us off by messing with the Spark? Further make the boarders let it out of the binding to the generator so it can go back to the warp?
It was a desperation move, so gambling comes with the territory. Astartes aren't afraid to die, or at least they don't want to believe they are. They'll pull anything in a squeeze.
I'm sure Bongo would take getting free as a consolation prize, but the main thing is to possess Vita.
Yeah, as I said, I could believe that - though then there's the question of what Bongo gets out of it exactly. Just a chance to flip us off by messing with the Spark? Further make the boarders let it out of the binding to the generator so it can go back to the warp?
[] Plan cleanup, prep for demonology & warp comms
-[] Action: Help sort out Klyssars nest and cleanup cultists and their messes more generally.
-[] Spend Boon: banked manufacturing capacity.
--[] Construction 600 + 2000 + 15000 BP 17100
---[] Repair 130 Orbital Manufactories to Machine Spirit Orbital Manufactories (13000 BP)
---[] Build other stuff...?
-[] Research x2 (400 Base RP + 80 Anexa RP + 60 Cogitare RP = 540 RP:
--[] Faith is my shield? (75 RP)
--[] Machine Spirit Chaos resistance (75 RP)
--[] Alternative Shielding Meanings (150 RP)
--[] A Curio Cabinet of Cultists (100 RP)
--[] Drugs? Drugs. (75 RP)
--[] Superconductive Shenanigans (50 RP)
--[] Abacus Manufacturing (+15 RP)
Need to sort out my build queue, more detail for the cleanup action, and what boons I'd get, but at least the research makes sense here I think.
I mean, yeah, those interventions were always going to have a hard time standing up in that calculus, though they were done pretty fast given the scale of our time increments.
In the real causality it doesn't seem clear we really had much option to have spared Denva this, though. They could have had a proper defense against this, but the dice said they didn't so they didn't. If we'd skipped Calderon and come back 10 years sooner, we can't expect we'd have arrived back in time to break the invasion early.
If we'd spent an extra turn building Denva, like, cruisers? That might have done it. But we seemed to be pretty well in a hurry to go see some stars there, so I don't exactly see that having been a serious option.
Mmm. I'm not a huge fan of that kind of narrativism, I much prefer simulationist approaches for my games, at least for the underlying bones, but okay, whatever, moving on. -_-
Psy Encryption directly helps us against Klyssar, even if we don't print bots that have personal psy shields, which we might.
There's probably a sorcerer aboard (it was the cushiest place for the warband aside from the heavy cruiser) who will try to divine Vita's developments/prep for the attack, Bongo will try to reach out in turn to give more fine grained information, and even regular chaos warriors allegedly have a divination-based sixth sense in combat that could give individual ambushes and engagements away.
The more stealthy we can make the prep, timing, and execution of the Klyssar mission, the less capable the sorcerer or the general warband will be of fighting back, or initiating spite moves and panic rituals using the tens to hundreds of millions of slaves on board.
Or of mobilizing their slave soldiers against our bots in general, really.
That stealth begins with Psy Encryption. For this, and all the other reasons people have said, it is not optional.
Nobody else is including it in their plans, so you've got a lot more of a case to make. So, you'll need to put a fair bit more effort into explaining why all these matter, and we can't just solve them all by going 'Shoot harder', and Psychic Encryption is the best way to address the problem.
I'm at work right now so I can't go into two in depth about my thoughts, but overall last turn when incredibly well. I am very happy that I made my dice roll when I did, saving those refineries is a massive boost to our industrial capability and means we don't have to get distracted building a whole new refinery complex.
I like a lot of the plans I've seen, it seems that overall we all seem to agree on general concepts and are just fussing over the details now. My specific thoughts are a little farther afield.
Looking over the course of the next few turns, this turn is obviously going to have to be devoted to putting out as many chaos fires as we can, rebuilding infrastructure and overall reducing casualties as much as possible. Securing clysar's nest will definitely be needed, but after that pretty much the system is ours.
I definitely agree we should hold off giving back the shipyard and the infrastructure were currently in possession of, at least for say two more turns. This turn we're using it to get tremendous BP input on rebuilding everything to scratch, I do agree we should rebuild everything to machine Spirit standard even though it's more expensive, but the benefits will kick in very quickly after that.
Next turn we should devote one research slot to designing a battleship class. We need to be bigger, we have too many things we want to do and not enough raw internal space to get it done. Either we can take our existing Grand Cruiser and expanded into a battleship, or more likely will have to build a dedicated frame from scratch. I don't know if we have researched Grand Cruiser design schematic Tech yet, so we may have to do that for real before we can progress to building battleships, but we definitely need to do that.
I'm definitely a big advocate for superconductive shenanigans, I would also mention that Advanced Materials would be perfect for all the construction we're going to be doing. Since we have to build so much from scratch or upgrade so much, even though it is still a little hefty by way of research points, Advanced Materials would be perfect in upgrading pretty much everything we're touching, including rebuilding our own ship. I got the impression that there's something in advance materials that will probably help prevent Space Marines from cutting through our ship and our robots like a plasma knife through butter.
Anyway, those are my thoughts for now, I have to go back to work right now so I can't keep talking. If I can I'll put down more of my thoughts later.
Nobody else is including it in their plans, so you've got a lot more of a case to make. So, you'll need to put a fair bit more effort into explaining why all these matter, and we can't just solve them all by going 'Shoot harder', and Psychic Encryption is the best way to address the problem.
It helps because it keeps Bongo from tattling on us. Like he did during the current fight.
It helps, because it makes scrying on us harder or impossible by any Chaos Sorcerer's left on the station.
The last group of their sorcerers took 100 points of our psy shields with only shuttles...
I'd rather have a way to surprise them instead of them getting to spy on our every move.
Mmm. I'm not a huge fan of that kind of narrativism, I much prefer simulationist approaches for my games, at least for the underlying bones, but okay, whatever, moving on. -_-
I mean, I feel that entirely, but we know that what happened here wasn't generated turn-by-turn while we were away, it was devised when we arrived driven by the combination of the material starting point and the dice rolled. Our meta analysis of things wants to follow the real meta, no?
Nobody else is including it in their plans, so you've got a lot more of a case to make. So, you'll need to put a fair bit more effort into explaining why all these matter, and we can't just solve them all by going 'Shoot harder', and Psychic Encryption is the best way to address the problem.
Nobody else is including it in their plans, so you've got a lot more of a case to make. So, you'll need to put a fair bit more effort into explaining why all these matter, and we can't just solve them all by going 'Shoot harder', and Psychic Encryption is the best way to address the problem.
I don't see this as not simulationist. The simulation just resolved instantly when we returned instead of being painstakingly maintained in the background.
@Cookiesndip I have given it some thought I will admit you are correct. I decided to swap out the salvage action and added in Improved Void Abacus and Faith is my shield. The first is to increase the quality of our Abaci before we make them and help Denva establish a religion that is anti-chaos which shouldn't be too hard considering everything that just happened.
[ ] Plan kicking Chaos out V2
-[ ][Aetherion] Keep.
-[Free] Repair Psychic Shielding on the outer layer(7/240 HP -> 207/240 HP, 1,000BP)
-[ ][Boon] Transfer your new OMC/machine spirit technology to them. (+1 Boon)
-[ ][Boon] Transfer corruption defenses, including all Psychic shielding, Cognition Filter & warp sensors. This will also mandate you to transfer basic cultist detection if you get it. (+1 Boon)
-[ ][Boon] Specialized Crew (Cogitare) (-1 Boon)
-[ ][Boon] One-time Social Intervention ((Re)Establish the Cogitare as an NGO under the joint authority of Magos-Explorator Vita and Magos-Errant Anexa) (-1 Boon)
-[ ][Boon] Permanent Social intervention (Establish a recruiting industry to bring in those interested in joining the Cogitare) (-2 Boons)
-[ ] ResearchX2 (200X2+80=480RP)
--[ ] A Curio Cabinet of Cultists (100 RP)
---[ ] Anexa Assists
--[ ] Abacus Manufacturing (50+50=100/100 RP)
--[ ] Machine Spirit Chaos resistance (75 RP)
--[ ] Improved Void Abacus (125 RP)
--[ ] Faith is my shield? (75 RP)
--[ ] Intelligence Coding (170+55=225/400 RP)
-[ ] Construction+Denva boon (600+15,000=15,600BP)
--[ ] Machine Spirit Orbital ManufactoryX130 (13,000BP)
--[ ] Replenish combat bots (185BP)
--[ ] Heavy Machine-spirit Infantry BotsX3 (450 BP, 40CP)
--[ ] Specter (100 BP, 20 CP)
--[ ] Heavy Machine-spirit humanized Infantry Bots with Machine Spirit JammersX3 (570 BP, 60 CP)
--[ ] Medium Humanized Machine-spirit Infantry BotsX2 (200 BP, 40 CP)
--[ ] Void Warp Research Lab with Shielding (500+500=1,000VBP, 100CP)
--[ ] Remaining spent on relief efforts (45BP)
-[ ] Command: Retaking the Nest
--[ ] With Aetheron secured and the cultists on Denva scattered, it is time to retake Kyssler's nest. Once preliminary scouting is done, have your heavy infantry go in as the first and second wave while the third will be half infantry and half Specters along with Cia and her personal guard. The Specters will sneak by and start sabotaging their defense efforts while Cia will break any stubborn holdouts.
-[ ] Anexa active Action: Research A Curio Cabinet of Cultists
-[ ] Victan passive action: Counterespionage & Alliance-building
-[ ] Cia assist in the retaking of Kyssler's nest
100ish RP for civilian tripwires. 100-150-200-250 for crit-good-regular-poor success for Faith.
The same as 100 tech-priests. 1 RP each (0) per turn, with people beyond 50 providing 0.2 and people beyond 100 providing 0. Caps at 60 total RP, if you want more do the tech for it.
3a. They're already working on it their own way, which is not your way. If you want to command where they go then do a diplomacy action to boost/set up/run their research for a little while. It'll provide extra RP depending on rolls, though not a lot the first time becasue you're just setting things up. 3b. That's not how it works - they run the factories constantly, but their people are less efficient and need to sleep. You redeeming a boon for construction is basically you asking them to lend you their factories (mostly on the crucibles) for a while. If you want to try to boost Denvan productivity in this way take a diplomacy action around it, but you'll need to integrate yourself into their production management system. Coordination of manufacturing schedules with the people involved is tricky.
Spend an action now for the full reward or spend none for none of it. I'm not going to let you slice actions into thin slices very often.
Yup. I'm making this more clear. I'm going to add a new option to Cia's actions:
-[] Assist with a military action: Cia will be part of a military operation. There won't be an effect on rolls, but having a epsilon-level pyromancer with a force sword gives you new options when dealing with enemies.
-[] Orders
--[] Support the reclamation of Klyssar's nest with all available forces.
---[] Victan Active Action: Assist in coordinating with the locals.
---[] Cia Active Action: Assist in the fighting.
--[] Scavenge the Echo of Apotheosis
While it makes a lot of sense mechanically, is it really reasonable in universe to make use of the one time manufacturing boon right now? They're just coming out of a siege and commandeering a significant fraction of their industrial output for our own purposes rather than their, presumably, planned relief, repair, and reconquest efforts might be less than ideal. Though in concert with a suitable command action for coordination it might work very well.
I had this thought - my idea is that most of the manufacturing you get is going to be from the Crucible ships. They're not really limited in terms of manufacturing for rebuilding their cities - the ground-based Aevon manufacturing can handle that. This is part of why the One time boon is limited to 1/turn. That number might go up in the future as they fix their planet.
@Neablis, curious on what we can do to invest more in Denva's research capabilities.
I assume these two techs are the primary:
You've set it up so that humans can help you with research and development, but the gains are limited because there's only so much they can help you with before you get diminishing returns on team size. Figure out better ways to utilize your research teams and let bigger teams contribute to projects. (Increases size of research team before RP/turn limit is reached. May assign more technical staff to further reduce design costs.)
Your OMC implants are fairly intense, and only growing more so as you improve their capabilities. If you figured out how to dial down the requirements for the software, then it would be possible for less-sophisticated and invasive implants to also work with the system. They wouldn't operate at the same capabilities of control, but it would allow people with civilian-grade implants to control a CP or two worth. (Dramatically lowers the barrier to entry into OMC-style work, allowing a much larger fraction of the population to work with organic-machine control, and likely accelerating training as lower-scale implants are required to successfully work with OMC-technology. May unlock future technology to allow implant-less people to operate OMC effectively through normal cogitators).
Are there another techs that would be helpful for them?
Would it be useful to spend a diplomatic action organizing their research efforts, or are they past that?
Is there anything we could build, like advanced tech labs, that would help them?
I'm not looking for hard numbers, or even specific answers, just a general guide of where to invest effort to help them in this front.
Collaborative Computational would be a big deal for them. It's basically inventing github but for science. Communication is king in research. And the lower implant spec would turn their training pipeline into a training river, because you don't need to invest in an expensive implant/tricky surgery for every single person. People can be playing gamified R&D sims in their dinky consumer-grade implants.
Other techs for research capabilities - Companion Cogitators, it's a flat increase to neural implant effectiveness. Improved, Streamlined, Gameified, Interchangable & Large-scale Organic-Machine control would help their industry a good deal and would spill into R&D. Other stuff would generally be useful, but the two you mention and Cogitators would change the research game for Denva.
It would be quite useful to spend a diplomatic action to organize their research efforts. They're trying to figure out what research institutions look like, since they haven't had one before. Don't worry about trying to build them stuff, they've got manufacturing capacity.
Would we be allowed to pick something along the lines of:
[ ] Research Assistance - One-time For a total of 3(?) turns, usable as needed, Denva will contribute as many highly-skilled OMC Research assistants to your efforts as you can meaningfully use.
Not calling you out in particular, but you already have one banked boon of this kind, and it's limited to 1/turn usage. You can get another one if you want this again next turn.
Hm, another thing. @Neablis , will we get the ability to make the Dark Eldar splinter rifles for our bots directly from the Dark Eldar weapon study research?
Hard-no to doing this without psy encryption and a external holding cell. Neablis laid out the risk, I will not have demons emerging inside of our ship. @Neablis , is Bongo's old vault (the 400 HP one) still there?
Finally, if we do get superconductors it's bonus would logically apply to the boon as well (@Neablis, confirming this?). So if we claim the boon next turn we will get more yield. <- Cherry on top, not main point.
Could I persuade any of you to spend a boon on getting official NGO recognition for the Cogitare with us in charge and at least one more to set up ongoing recruitment campaigns for them? I don't think I can understate the degree to which that could pay off in even the medium term.
Huh. Yeah, that would keep them alive as a subculture. They have the benefit of being both OMC operators and researchers in ways most others wouldn't be. Right now they're kind of dying breed of crotchety professors/trainers for OMC operators. Every Denvan involved in STEM has stories about Cogitare people being weird, but not many people have been joining them in extensive augmentation and priest-like devotion to knowledge.
Do we have a good idea of why the Chaos boss went out trying to free Bongo? I mean, it's a decent target for a lightning strike, but by the time that was committed their ship was toast and their chances of surviving even if they hadn't been cut off at the gate seem extremely low. Did they think Bongo would be able to win the day for them if only the door was open? Did they have some longer-term score in mind despite the shorter-term imminence of being shot a lot?
You don't know what the plan was. But there was a plan. It likely involved breaking bongo out, then fighting to your AI core and slapping you with Bongo directly. Your good void combat roll, defensive boarding preparations, and good roll on boarding defense neutered their "distraction attack" that was designed to pull your troops away from critical areas. Then Cia and the good roll on boarding defense prevented them from even getting to Bongo in the first place.
Do we have any idea what the death toll in all this was? And how it compares to the <10M in Vorthryn and Caldereth we spent so many actions on? Denva had, like, 7000M+, so even a comparatively light death toll of a 100M or so would dwarf Vorthryn and Caldereth
A few million in the recent fighting, mostly from Chaos being vengeful on their way out. Millions before that from Chaos being Chaos. Probably 10 million on Denva Secundus all-told.
Two author comments:
1. Psychic encryption is an interesting tech. It's almost entirely defensive, and most of the time you won't know when it's done it's job. Are the Eldar scrying on you and making decisions based on that scrying? Maybe. You won't know about it until it's too late. Same with Chaos. This isn't me telling you to get it. The name of the game is opportunity costs. But it's the kind of tech where if you wait until you know you need it, it's too late.
2. I'm considering splitting future turns in half because of how long and crazy these plans and the updates are getting. These 5k updates have been much easier to manage than the 10k ones. Under this scheme you'd get two actions per update. This would also let things be more modular in that you could "Do a research action, travel to Calderath." Then you could see if there's anything in Calderath worth spending an action on and not have to guess. Thoughts?
Huh. Yeah, that would keep them alive as a subculture. They have the benefit of being both OMC operators and researchers in ways most others wouldn't be. Right now they're kind of dying breed of crotchety professors/trainers for OMC operators. Every Denvan involved in STEM has stories about Cogitare people being weird, but not many people have been joining them in extensive augmentation and priest-like devotion to knowledge.
Yeah, the revelation that the local Cogitare have been in decline since we left both broke my heart and jumped out as a potentially extremely beneficial thing for everyone involved to spend our boons on.
They can run our industrial projects when we can't spare the attention to do it better, contribute to ongoing R&D in the system, staff their own recruiting university and possibly send teachers to anywhere that needs them, provide backup crew to our fleet and run ships sent to different systems than the ones we intend to go to (We could send supply and reinforcement expeditions to Vothryn and Calderath without needing to go ourselves), and provide constant reinforcements to our Cogitare crew so that we aren't suffering from the attrition of establishing new outposts to run uplift operations everywhere we go!
2. I'm considering splitting future turns in half because of how long and crazy these plans and the updates are getting. These 5k updates have been much easier to manage than the 10k ones. Under this scheme you'd get two actions per update. This would also let things be more modular in that you could "Do a research action, travel to Calderath." Then you could see if there's anything in Calderath worth spending an action on and not have to guess. Thoughts?
Her gaze grows calculated as she thinks for a second, then jerks her head in a sharp shake. "Help here would save lives, but we're going to win. Having those manufactories might be the difference between Denva surviving the next century or not. The Crucibles need the fuel from the refineries..." she trails off and waves a hand as if to dismiss all the other reasons this is a good idea. "It's the right choice. You don't need the fighters or bombers?" The Denvan fighters that ascended to aid you in the battle against the Echo of Apotheosis are already beginning to return to the planet.
On a side note, you can figuratively hear W swear internally during this conversation. It's the right choice. It's not the kind choice to everyone fighting the cultists, but it's the strategically right choice.
