Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest

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Aineko said:
I really don't think the warp tech path is all that stand-out valuable for Chaos to abuse. Useful? Maybe. Certainly some use specifically for traitors on Denva. But so's all the other tech they've got and all the other tech we can give them. A cultist with OMC implants could, surely, channel daemons straight into whatever machines they're operating. Universal factories are obviously useful for any kind of insurgents. Don't even want to think about what they can find in Drugs. Other than a handful of specifically anti-chaos techs practically any technology can be used to corrupt ends. It's all a security problem, but it's already all a security problem.

A mechanical way to phone daemons (which, yeah, is exactly what Yelling Into The Warp sounds like, isn't it) seems more redundant than anything considering any hardcore cultist already knows a more organic way to phone daemons.

(Warp Abacus they probably can't use against us here, but it's funny to imagine some Dark Mech handing it to people in Imperium space to start turmoil with the Navigator Houses.)

...Ubiquitous psy shielding is a pretty sweet offering though. I do like what that does to a world.
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So - remember when Bongo corrupted our shield from the inside because of that nat1, and the shield started projecting corruption tentacles?

That was Bongo's magnum opus, basically, and we killed everyone he could have told it to, assuming that was even one of the things he spoke about to the Echo. But Alternate shield meanings would essentially allow a cultist to configure a shield they have access to in order to do that with much, much more modest means.

As for a mechanical way to phone demons... it's not redundant. It's not redundant at all when the normal way to phone demons is mass human sacrifice. In the current environment where getting those sacrifices is hard and traceable, and where the rituals themselves can be directly detected by warp sensors, said mechanical alternative lets an operator make deals from relative stealth.


The way psy shield tech tends to just... auto apply to all shields with a software update works against us here. Remote OMC for comparison, that can be black boxed, and every terminal strictly traced and tracked. Drugs? We track and control those in real life.

It's less about what you can do with it - and more how hard it is to rule out that bad things are being done using it, how hard it is to keep it out of bad hands. Single purpose tech and drugs can be strictly controlled and tracked.

Psy shielding? Psy shielding we want absolutely everywhere. Once the software to make it a transmitter leaks, then it's leaked, and then anywhere with a psy shield is anywhere that could turn into a corruption bomb or a mechanical demon summoning.

The foundation of security is to understand what is possible, and use your tools to rule out things that are adverse to what you are protecting. New technologies make new things possible, and while you can use that for protection, sometimes they make it far easier for an attacker, and the warp comms techs are prime examples. Even the above nightmare scenarios are controllable, but we do not want to be working out the kinks to that when we have an active cultist problem.



It is honestly, genuinely better if alternate shield meanings requires a hardware difference - this becomes a million times easier if you can't just get the ability to turn your household chaos defense into a corruption projector or a demon phone off of The Pirate Bay.

But so far we've had exactly one psy shield upgrade that you couldn't apply via software, and that was high density shielding. So until we learn otherwise about alternate meanings - I'm fairly opposed to distributing that until the cultist problem is further reduced.
 
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Prime 2.0 said:
As for a mechanical way to phone demons... it's not redundant. It's not redundant at all when the normal way to phone demons is mass human sacrifice. In the current environment where getting those sacrifices is hard and traceable, and where the rituals themselves can be directly detected by warp sensors, said mechanical alternative lets an operator make deals from relative stealth.
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Human lives are much cheaper to the average Chaos polity than advanced technology and the people needed to maintain and repair it. Also I am pretty sure the shields projecting are the opposite of stealthy. The current one screams 'NO'. Any shield designed to invite daemons would scream. "DAEMONS WELCOME! COME FOR THE KHORNE-FLAKES!"
 
DragonParadox said:
Human lives are much cheaper to the average Chaos polity than advanced technology and the people needed to maintain and repair it. Also I am pretty sure the shields projecting are the opposite of stealthy. The current one screams 'NO'. Any shield designed to invite daemons would scream. "DAEMONS WELCOME! COME FOR THE KHORNE-FLAKES!"
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To the average Chaos polity, yes.

To chaos cultists that have gone to ground in Denva, fuck no. Missing persons are leads.

These shields are things we want to be absolutely everywhere. We want them to be ubiquitous. They will be way easier to come by than untraceable human sacrifices - by the time we're thinking about other polities, we'll have figured out ways to deal with this.

As for stealthiness of a summoning in progress... we don't actually know how stealthy warp comms will be? Psy encryption may work against us here as well. Point is just that you could make something that does summoning - or at least attracts attention - without pinging as chaos in and of itself.

Though, this suggests a partial solution: daemonology should yield information about how to recognize something that would function as a way to summon/draw attention even if it doesn't use chaotic means.


Nonetheless, the "any psy shield could be converted into a city threatening disaster with little meaningful warning" issue remains the big one, regardless of how well we can spot it once it the evil shield is turned on. The war-band's current means of doing anything like this has very traceable prep, will immediately ping on sensors as a chaos ritual, and needs cultists to be actually there for it. Alternate Meanings/shouting into the warp has none of these limitations.


But honestly, I'm not even bringing this up to say "don't do warp comms". Just don't share it with Denva until their cultist problem is better dealt with. It's not worth arguing over imo.
 
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I'm honestly not enthused to research the faith line of tech, like at all? I don't want this game becoming religious crusade 2; everything's even more fucked boogaloo?
 
Sesparra said:
I'm honestly not enthused to research the faith line of tech, like at all? I don't want this game becoming religious crusade 2; everything's even more fucked boogaloo?
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The reason I keep talking about the follow-up is because the tech itself says it can unlock research to make a less objectionable Faith that provides warp protection.

Based on the cogitare it shouldn't be too intrusive on the story itself - They're religious about Vita and are actively spreading it, but it doesn't seem to bother anyone too much afaik.
 
Prime 2.0 said:
The reason I keep talking about the follow-up is because the tech itself says it can unlock research to make a less objectionable Faith that provides warp protection.

Based on the cogitare it shouldn't be too intrusive on the story itself - They're religious about Vita and are actively spreading it, but it doesn't seem to bother anyone too much afaik.
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I mean, that's fair but like…. Faith has uhhhh let's call it Not Worked Out, for basically… anyone in 40k? Not even the "Masters of the Sea of Souls and forgers of pantheons" could do more than build things that couldn't even clean up their own backyards despite 60million years worth of time to do it in. Also religion is even more easily corrupted than general governments so… yeah.
 
Prime 2.0 said:
To the average Chaos polity, yes.

To chaos cultists that have gone to ground in Denva, fuck no. Missing persons are leads.

These shields are things we want to be absolutely everywhere. We want them to be ubiquitous. They will be easier to come by than human sacrifices - by the time we're thinking about other polities, we'll have figured out ways to deal with this.

As for stealthiness of a summoning in progress... we don't actually know how stealthy warp comms will be? Psy encryption may work against us here as well. Point is just that you could make something that does summoning - or at least attracts attention - without pinging as chaos in and of itself.

Though, this suggests a partial solution: daemonology should yield information about how to recognize something that would function as a way to summon/draw attention even if it doesn't use chaotic means.


Nonetheless, the "any psy shield could be converted into a city threatening disaster with little meaningful warning" issue remains the big one. The war-band's current means of doing anything like this has very traceable prep, and will immediately ping on sensors as a chaos ritual. Alternate Meanings/shouting into the warp has neither of these limitations.
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Huh... I see what you mean. One potential solution would be to Install kill switches. If anyone connects to a shield with any kind of connector that could change the meaning brick the whole thing and alert the authorities (though a built in audio alarm). After all there is no reason why the shield would have to be linked to anything external, shield damage could be displayed on a built in system with no connections to the outside world.
 
Sesparra said:
I mean, that's fair but like…. Faith has uhhhh let's call it Not Worked Out, for basically… anyone in 40k? Not even the "Masters of the Sea of Souls and forgers of pantheons" could do more than build things that couldn't even clean up their own backyards despite 60million years worth of time to do it in. Also religion is even more easily corrupted than general governments so… yeah.
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I'm hoping for advanced meditation, mainly. That, and better understanding of the warp in general, and maybe ways to disrupt faith based warp effects. I don't think anyone's going to go in for a religious crusade.
 
Faith does have some uses in directly combating the influence of the warp. When a daemon comes streaming out howling for blood being able to pull out a holy symbol and hold it at bay is useful, but the real solution if such can be found is material, make the galaxy a better place and the warp will start to still more with each year rather than grow more and more agitated.
 
Prime 2.0 said:
So - remember when Bongo corrupted our shield from the inside because of that nat1, and the shield started projecting corruption tentacles?

That was Bongo's magnum opus, basically, and we killed everyone he could have told it to, assuming that was even one of the things he spoke about to the Echo. But Alternate shield meanings would essentially allow a cultist to configure a shield they have access to in order to do that with much, much more modest means.

As for a mechanical way to phone demons... it's not redundant. It's not redundant at all when the normal way to phone demons is mass human sacrifice. In the current environment where getting those sacrifices is hard and traceable, and where the rituals themselves can be directly detected by warp sensors, said mechanical alternative lets an operator make deals from relative stealth.


The way psy shield tech tends to just... auto apply to all shields with a software update works against us here. Remote OMC for comparison, that can be black boxed, and every terminal strictly traced and tracked. Drugs? We track and control those in real life.

It's less about what you can do with it - and more how hard it is to rule out that bad things are being done using it, how hard it is to keep it out of bad hands. Single purpose tech and drugs can be strictly controlled and tracked.

Psy shielding? Psy shielding we want absolutely everywhere. Once the software to make it a transmitter leaks, then it's leaked, and then anywhere with a psy shield is anywhere that could turn into a corruption bomb or a mechanical demon summoning.

The foundation of security is to understand what is possible, and use your tools to rule out things that are adverse to what you are protecting. New technologies make new things possible, and while you can use that for protection, sometimes they make it far easier for an attacker, and the warp comms techs are prime examples. Even the above nightmare scenarios are controllable, but we do not want to be working out the kinks to that when we have an active cultist problem.



It is honestly, genuinely better if alternate shield meanings requires a hardware difference - this becomes a million times easier if you can't just get the ability to turn your household chaos defense into a corruption projector or a demon phone off of The Pirate Bay.

But so far we've had exactly one psy shield upgrade that you couldn't apply via software, and that was high density shielding. So until we learn otherwise about alternate meanings - I'm fairly opposed to distributing that until the cultist problem is further reduced.
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I certainly don't expect the interstellar com apparatus to be just a thing every psy shield does automatically.

Nor do I think alternate psy shield meanings will enable 'yeah, just plug this into a wall outlet and it drags daemons into the materium'.

So I figure the point where a cultist hijacking one of those systems is a Big Problem is the point where they hijack a Big System - which is where I was gesturing to all big systems being big problems if hijacked.

That thing you're attributing to Bongo didn't actually happen, though the relevant passage does suggest something along those lines might have happened if the vault shields weren't built with subunit self-destruct charges which scuttled each corrupted section before it could:
Neablis said:
You lament your cleverness in the microseconds while the attack plays out. You'd been so damned clever and pleased that you hadn't noticed you'd been played. Scrapcode takes over section after section of the psychic shielding and they flicker and go dark, curling around the edges as the fractal nature of the shielding is corrupted and turned darker.

Fortunately, the controllers are only on the edges of the protection of the shielding, not fully unprotected. And Bongo's vault is beefy, and layered with contingency measures. Your full attention is on monitoring every piece of the vault - and when Bongo starts corrupting pieces of your shielding you detonate the corresponding incendiary charges, incinerating those areas in moments.

Dozens of panels of shielding fail, but each one is protected individually and you build the vault such that an enormous number of panels needed to fail before the psychic protection was well and truly broken. The protection flickers once as Bongo psychically rattles his cage, and eager tendrils of scrapcode flash out through the conduits of the ship, eagerly seeking your core.
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Though of course this event suggests that mono-function psy shields can already be used to chaotic ends when corrupted. (Though they might need to be physically compromised before being spiritually compromised in order to avoid the incendiaries.)
 
Hmmm.... do astrotelepaths encrypt whatever they broadcast into the warp? Or do they rely on the emperor's soulbinding to make whatever they send out anathema to demons and anyone who might be listening?

We might end up using encryption to encrypt the information we broadcast through the warp with our shields. Everyone with suitable sensors might be able to get a read on the raw data, but using some DAOT level encryption should give us "pretty good privacy" where only the intended recipient can decrypt the message.
 
Copperscale said:
Hmmm.... do astrotelepaths encrypt whatever they broadcast into the warp? Or do they rely on the emperor's soulbinding to make whatever they send out anathema to demons and anyone who might be listening?

We might end up using encryption to encrypt the information we broadcast through the warp with our shields. Everyone with suitable sensors might be able to get a read on the raw data, but using some DAOT level encryption should give us "pretty good privacy" where only the intended recipient can decrypt the message.
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They basically send vibes into the warp and the person on the other side gets vague dreams or more often nightmares. It is a very bad system, only made vaguely functional by repetition. Adding one more layer of complexity to it by trying to encrypt the information would likely make it completely unusable
 
DragonParadox said:
They basically send vibes into the warp and the person on the other side gets vague dreams or more often nightmares. It is a very bad system, only made vaguely functional by repetition. Adding one more layer of complexity to it by trying to encrypt the information would likely make it completely unusable
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It's also the only FTL comms that we have.

And hopefully with Empathy at Range, we'll be able to remove psykers from the equation.
 
Dmol8 said:
Dude priorities. Wife comes before rolls or she shouldn't be your wife anymore.
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I was joking.

Also I just realized that the Cultist Cabinet Crit is probably going to discount our Psytech and Mutation/Corruption research.
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I can imagine that helping by quite a bit honestly.

***

My personal goals to achieve in the next turn would be:

- Abacus Manufacturing (100 RP)
- Advanced Materials (250rp)
- Improved Engine Designs (125rp)
- Streamlined ship design (100rp)
- Efficient Equipment Distribution (100rp)
- Extremely Efficient Weapon Distribution (200 RP)
- Boarding Capabilities (100 RP)
- Networked missiles (100 RP)
- Low-Emission equipment (150 RP)
- Active Spaceship Stealth (150 RP)
- Improved Passive Stealth (50 RP)
- Improved Active Stealth (150 RP)
- Heavy Void shields (150 RP)
- Psychic Shielding Reliability (100 RP)
- Large-scale Design-integrated psychic shielding (250 RP)
- Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields (50 RP)
- Teleportation is like skipping a stone (150 RP)
- Improved Void Abacus (125 RP)
- Gravity Weapons (200 RP)
- The Biggest Boom (150 RP)
- Superconductive Shenanigans (50 RP)
- Miniaturized antigrav (50 RP)
- Better Sensors are just Physics (150 RP)
- Machine Spirit Void Tactics (125 RP)
- Large-scale Machine spirits (75 RP)
- Machine Spirit Shipboard Manufactories (75 RP)
- Machine Spirit Ship Design Improvements (200 RP)
- Machine Spirit Chaos resistance (75 RP)
Total = 3550RP

As you may have noticed, everything I selected is for improving all our void warships. We need better ships, we need better designed ships, we need to be able to produce more ships, and they need to be better protected and better equipped with much more powerful weapons. They need to be faster, stronger, tougher, and ideally smarter.

With a handful of exceptions for more expensive research, my cap for selecting text was for $150 or lower. My thinking is these are the technologies that we can do more of in a single turn. The ones that are over 150 are technologies that I view is simply too important and essential to avoid skipping out on for hopes of a future discount later on, such as Advanced Materials, Extremely Efficient Weapon Distribution, Gravity Weapons, and Machine Spirit Ship Design Improvements.

Obviously 3550rp is too much to do in a single turn, or even 2. So, here's my Absolute Priorities Over The Next 2 Turns version.

- Abacus Manufacturing (100 RP)
- Advanced Materials (250rp)
- Improved Engine Designs (125rp)
- Streamlined ship design (100rp)
- Efficient Equipment Distribution (100rp)
- Extremely Efficient Weapon Distribution (200 RP)
- Boarding Capabilities (100 RP)
- Heavy Void shields (150 RP)
- Superconductive Shenanigans (50 RP)
- Miniaturized antigrav (50 RP)
- Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields (50 RP)
- Improved Passive Stealth (50 RP)
TOTAL = 1,325RP

Alright, this is my streamlined, Absolutely Essential for the next 2 turns list.

...Alright, its still too big. Still, its something. Let's do this again, break it up into turns.

Next Turn (assuming 600RP spent on research):
- Abacus Manufacturing (100 RP)
- Efficient Equipment Distribution (100rp)
- Superconductive Shenanigans (50 RP)
- Miniaturized antigrav (50 RP)
- Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields (50 RP)
- Improved Passive Stealth (50 RP)
- Extremely Efficient Weapon Distribution (200 RP)
TOTAL = 600RP

Turn After Next (Assuming 600 RP for research):
- Advanced Materials (250rp)
- Improved Engine Designs (125rp)
- Heavy Void shields (150 RP)
- Boarding Capabilities (100 RP)
TOTAL = 625RP (which we could do with Anexa's RP bonus)

The only tech not done in 2 turns in this way is Streamlined Ship Design, but honestly, it's the last priority after all these techs getting done. Now, once that's researched, we'll be able to make ships multiple tiers better than what we could before.

And this is just the streamlined list, obviously there's a lot more ship techs we could push for, I just feel these are the most important to get done before we build our own ships and leave the Denvan system again.

***

Now, last but certainly not least, I want to discuss the future of our Flagship, the main vessel which will host our AI's consciousness. I feel it pretty much has to be a Battleship. We've all acknowledged that the Grand Cruiser we've built as her first body is a kludge design, with too many competing visions of what is should be resulting in an unoptimized design.

Now, knowing SV and voting, I'm not going to say that building a Battleship body would be any better in optimization, but at least it'll be much bigger and thus we'll have more internal room for doing whatever we feel we need to do.

Grand Cruisers (400 RP) Making a ship design that's not spaghetti takes time and effort. It's still boring. But if you want to make queens of the void, its necessary. (unlocks grand cruisers, half of the prereq for battleships)

Grand Cruiser tech is…a lot of RP, but we know doing Streamlined Ship Design will help reduce the cost of ship designs by like half, and I think it'll affect this as well. Plus all the other ship techs we do will also help make the final more powerful, and probably reduce costs in other ways as well, so if we do Grand Cruiser AFTER my 2 Turn tech stuff and Streamlined Ship Design, at least it'll be worth it.

For some reason, I can't find what the other half for Battleships truly is, but I've run out of time to keep typing. But this is still a decent discussion of my ideas on warship building.

I know everybody else is obsessed with anti-Chaos tech improvements, and I certainly get why, but I'm a hardware kind of guy. I focus on bigger booms and tougher hulls over the more esoteric stuff, which I leave to y'all to talk about.
 
@avatar11792 We are probably not doing 2 full turns of 3 Research Actions each. We still need to check on the aliens, recruit more people and do a once over to make sure the entire system of Denva is clean.
 
Aineko said:
I want Understanding Mutations on the meta-level that I'm real curious about what the answers to the questions are, but I'm not sure it's actually a high Vita priority at the moment.
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It's useful for cultist detection (and potentially cure). In particular, it's a pre-requisite for the chaos intervention implants. I imagine it could also help with navibean, which I think is our next priority.
MSH said:
Industry techs, ship techs, weapon techs, anything immediately useful? At least bind Bongo so we can reuse that space? Perish the thought. We have to fight the Corruption Point.

Seriously, I've tried my best to make an appealing plan that includes at least one essential tech a couple of times now. It just ain't happening. The thread's urges are too strong. Even now it seems the plan is to wait however many generations it takes for Denva to research industrial tech for us.
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I mean... that was the plan partly because we expected them to have more stuff for us, because doubling up on their progress was not the best idea, and because we didn't have that much manufacturing of our own. Consider we could also get the "better omc research" techs and turbo-charge their efforts.

Oh, and we did get a weapon tech. Drugs? Drugs. It's not a void weapon tech, but it's a weapon tech.
Prime 2.0 said:
On warp comms - you may want to see my edit, at the end of the post.

Wayfarer is vibes, it's not going to slap us for a mere 3 turns. Reach 5 and then we might worry.

MSCR is interesting - we'll see how pressing it actually is when the turn drops, what with us dropping lots of machine spirit wargear into the grinder. But machine spirits are... well, kinda expensive? They're not something I expect to see in civilian gear, so while they absolutely harden infrastructure, they're of much less value than the general proliferation of shields and tripwires to actually eradicating chaotic influence in the Denva system.

Which is to say, I feel like we can afford to put it off for a turn where Anexa can personally focus on it.

To elaborate on design-integrated shielding - SSDIPS is nutsoid because it puts chaos sensors absolutely everywhere and hardens a massive swath of things, including general purpose housing - if our cog filters can network with those shields, civilians would even get the fast-acting version despite not having personal shields... for however long personal shields themselves don't become common, which SSDIPS may also change.

Any kind of MO that relies on warp powers becomes effectively impossible in any rebuilt area.

This is in addition to it "likely [improving] the quality of shielding available and [unlocking] research for further shielding improvements".

I want warp comms. I want it a lot.

I do not want it in the hands of chaos cultists. I feel that we're somewhat limited in what tech we can share with Denva before these jerks are dealt with, and this is one of those limits - even in isolation, alternate shield meanings in a cultist's hands can be turned into an industrial corruption generator, shouting into the warp becomes a demon gathering machine.

That's not to say we can't research them and keep them secret for now, we can have a terminal in our industrial park and post guards. But we lose out on a lot of the benefits if Denva can't be trusted with it before we leave.

I am nonetheless seriously considering comms-first as a possible path forward, depending on what circumstances we find ourselves in next turn.
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I think any such effort would be detected almost immediately with Empathy, even without the Range upgrade—that's not really needed to detect things in the proximity these cultists would be to regular Denvans.
Prime 2.0 said:
So - remember when Bongo corrupted our shield from the inside because of that nat1, and the shield started projecting corruption tentacles?

That was Bongo's magnum opus, basically, and we killed everyone he could have told it to, assuming that was even one of the things he spoke about to the Echo. But Alternate shield meanings would essentially allow a cultist to configure a shield they have access to in order to do that with much, much more modest means.

As for a mechanical way to phone demons... it's not redundant. It's not redundant at all when the normal way to phone demons is mass human sacrifice. In the current environment where getting those sacrifices is hard and traceable, and where the rituals themselves can be directly detected by warp sensors, said mechanical alternative lets an operator make deals from relative stealth.

The way psy shield tech tends to just... auto apply to all shields with a software update works against us here. Remote OMC for comparison, that can be black boxed, and every terminal strictly traced and tracked. Drugs? We track and control those in real life.

It's less about what you can do with it - and more how hard it is to rule out that bad things are being done using it, how hard it is to keep it out of bad hands. Single purpose tech and drugs can be strictly controlled and tracked.

Psy shielding? Psy shielding we want absolutely everywhere. Once the software to make it a transmitter leaks, then it's leaked, and then anywhere with a psy shield is anywhere that could turn into a corruption bomb or a mechanical demon summoning.

The foundation of security is to understand what is possible, and use your tools to rule out things that are adverse to what you are protecting. New technologies make new things possible, and while you can use that for protection, sometimes they make it far easier for an attacker, and the warp comms techs are prime examples. Even the above nightmare scenarios are controllable, but we do not want to be working out the kinks to that when we have an active cultist problem.

It is honestly, genuinely better if alternate shield meanings requires a hardware difference - this becomes a million times easier if you can't just get the ability to turn your household chaos defense into a corruption projector or a demon phone off of The Pirate Bay.

But so far we've had exactly one psy shield upgrade that you couldn't apply via software, and that was high density shielding. So until we learn otherwise about alternate meanings - I'm fairly opposed to distributing that until the cultist problem is further reduced.
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These are somewhat valid concerns; yet, as I stated before, that would be trivially detectable with Empathy... and that's before we get into Taste of Chaos and Empathy at Range.
LightLan said:
There is an easy fix for that:
Recruit a diviner psyker.
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Yes! I've been wanting one so badly!
avatar11792 said:
I was joking.

I can imagine that helping by quite a bit honestly.

***

My personal goals to achieve in the next turn would be:

- Abacus Manufacturing (100 RP)
- Advanced Materials (250rp)
- Improved Engine Designs (125rp)
- Streamlined ship design (100rp)
- Efficient Equipment Distribution (100rp)
- Extremely Efficient Weapon Distribution (200 RP)
- Boarding Capabilities (100 RP)
- Networked missiles (100 RP)
- Low-Emission equipment (150 RP)
- Active Spaceship Stealth (150 RP)
- Improved Passive Stealth (50 RP)
- Improved Active Stealth (150 RP)
- Heavy Void shields (150 RP)
- Psychic Shielding Reliability (100 RP)
- Large-scale Design-integrated psychic shielding (250 RP)
- Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields (50 RP)
- Teleportation is like skipping a stone (150 RP)
- Improved Void Abacus (125 RP)
- Gravity Weapons (200 RP)
- The Biggest Boom (150 RP)
- Superconductive Shenanigans (50 RP)
- Miniaturized antigrav (50 RP)
- Better Sensors are just Physics (150 RP)
- Machine Spirit Void Tactics (125 RP)
- Large-scale Machine spirits (75 RP)
- Machine Spirit Shipboard Manufactories (75 RP)
- Machine Spirit Ship Design Improvements (200 RP)
- Machine Spirit Chaos resistance (75 RP)
Total = 3550RP

As you may have noticed, everything I selected is for improving all our void warships. We need better ships, we need better designed ships, we need to be able to produce more ships, and they need to be better protected and better equipped with much more powerful weapons. They need to be faster, stronger, tougher, and ideally smarter.

With a handful of exceptions for more expensive research, my cap for selecting text was for $150 or lower. My thinking is these are the technologies that we can do more of in a single turn. The ones that are over 150 are technologies that I view is simply too important and essential to avoid skipping out on for hopes of a future discount later on, such as Advanced Materials, Extremely Efficient Weapon Distribution, Gravity Weapons, and Machine Spirit Ship Design Improvements.

Obviously 3550rp is too much to do in a single turn, or even 2. So, here's my Absolute Priorities Over The Next 2 Turns version.

- Abacus Manufacturing (100 RP)
- Advanced Materials (250rp)
- Improved Engine Designs (125rp)
- Streamlined ship design (100rp)
- Efficient Equipment Distribution (100rp)
- Extremely Efficient Weapon Distribution (200 RP)
- Boarding Capabilities (100 RP)
- Heavy Void shields (150 RP)
- Superconductive Shenanigans (50 RP)
- Miniaturized antigrav (50 RP)
- Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields (50 RP)
- Improved Passive Stealth (50 RP)
TOTAL = 1,325RP

Alright, this is my streamlined, Absolutely Essential for the next 2 turns list.

...Alright, its still too big. Still, its something. Let's do this again, break it up into turns.

Next Turn (assuming 600RP spent on research):
- Abacus Manufacturing (100 RP)
- Efficient Equipment Distribution (100rp)
- Superconductive Shenanigans (50 RP)
- Miniaturized antigrav (50 RP)
- Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields (50 RP)
- Improved Passive Stealth (50 RP)
- Extremely Efficient Weapon Distribution (200 RP)
TOTAL = 600RP

Turn After Next (Assuming 600 RP for research):
- Advanced Materials (250rp)
- Improved Engine Designs (125rp)
- Heavy Void shields (150 RP)
- Boarding Capabilities (100 RP)
TOTAL = 625RP (which we could do with Anexa's RP bonus)

The only tech not done in 2 turns in this way is Streamlined Ship Design, but honestly, it's the last priority after all these techs getting done. Now, once that's researched, we'll be able to make ships multiple tiers better than what we could before.

And this is just the streamlined list, obviously there's a lot more ship techs we could push for, I just feel these are the most important to get done before we build our own ships and leave the Denvan system again.

***

Now, last but certainly not least, I want to discuss the future of our Flagship, the main vessel which will host our AI's consciousness. I feel it pretty much has to be a Battleship. We've all acknowledged that the Grand Cruiser we've built as her first body is a kludge design, with too many competing visions of what is should be resulting in an unoptimized design.

Now, knowing SV and voting, I'm not going to say that building a Battleship body would be any better in optimization, but at least it'll be much bigger and thus we'll have more internal room for doing whatever we feel we need to do.

Grand Cruisers (400 RP) Making a ship design that's not spaghetti takes time and effort. It's still boring. But if you want to make queens of the void, its necessary. (unlocks grand cruisers, half of the prereq for battleships)

Grand Cruiser tech is…a lot of RP, but we know doing Streamlined Ship Design will help reduce the cost of ship designs by like half, and I think it'll affect this as well. Plus all the other ship techs we do will also help make the final more powerful, and probably reduce costs in other ways as well, so if we do Grand Cruiser AFTER my 2 Turn tech stuff and Streamlined Ship Design, at least it'll be worth it.

For some reason, I can't find what the other half for Battleships truly is, but I've run out of time to keep typing. But this is still a decent discussion of my ideas on warship building.

I know everybody else is obsessed with anti-Chaos tech improvements, and I certainly get why, but I'm a hardware kind of guy. I focus on bigger booms and tougher hulls over the more esoteric stuff, which I leave to y'all to talk about.
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I do think your techs seem interesting, though I would personally add to those Demonology, Immaterium Understanding, Necron Research, Faith, and the Navibean tree. Preferably before all the weapon techs. We have enough void weapon options as is.
 
Haganeko said:
I mean... that was the plan partly because we expected them to have more stuff for us, because doubling up on their progress was not the best idea, and because we didn't have that much manufacturing of our own. Consider we could also get the "better omc research" techs and turbo-charge their efforts.
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That was never going to happen. I warned repeatedly that it was never going to happen. It's plainly obvious that Denva doesn't have a research body to its name.

We need to finish the basic industrial techs yesterday, not in a hundred years of handing down OMC games. These are our essential techs. Research any of them before the next time we fall into a crisis or get distracted for realtime weeks with one of a million planets:

-[] Grand Cruisers (400 RP)
-[] Streamlined ship design (100 RP)

-[] Large-scale Void Manufacturing (100 RP)
-[] Abacus Manufacturing (100 RP)

-[] Examine the Dark Eldar Craft (150 RP)

-[] Void Shield Discounts (300 RP)

-[] Chaos Space Marine Armor Investigation (100 RP)
-[] Advanced Materials (250 RP)
-[] Heavy Armor Production Line (100 RP)
-[] Armor Device Integration (200 RP)

-[] Necron Initial Investigations (200 RP)

-[] Combat Bot Melee Combat (150 RP)
-[] Really good Robotics: (600 RP)

-[] Intelligence Coding (400 RP)

-[] Alternative Shielding Meanings (150 RP)
-[] Psychic Shield Tuning (200 RP)

-[] Empathy at Range (200 RP)
-[] Yelling into the Warp (175 RP)
-[] Vortex Weapons (250 RP)
-[] Reliable Gellar Fields (300 RP)
-[] Demonology (150 RP)
-[] Immaterium Understanding (225 RP)
-[] Improved Void Abacus (125 RP)

-[] Basic Psychic Suppression Devices (150 RP)
-[] Complex Psytech Implants (250 RP)
-[] Psychic Materials (300 RP)

-[] Dark Eldar Weaponry (150 RP)
-[] Gravity Weapons (200 RP)
-[] The Biggest Boom (150 RP)
-[] Superconductive Shenanigans (50 RP)
-[] Miniaturized antigrav (50 RP)
-[] High-energy Physics (300 RP)
-[] Better Sensors are just Physics (150 RP)

-[] Machine Spirit Combat Bot Flexibility (250 RP)
-[] Independent Manufactories (400 RP)
-[] Machine Spirit Shipboard Manufactories (75 RP)
-[] Basic Automated Manufactories (150 RP)
-[] Machine Spirit Ship Design Improvements (200 RP
-[] Machine Spirit Hallucinations (300 RP)

-[] Complex genetic enhancement (150 RP)
-[] Psyker genetics (300 RP)
-[] Understanding Mutations (150 RP)
-[] That's two levels of augmentation too many (150 RP)
-[] Adult genetic engineering (100 RP)
-[] Does in vitro have something to do with wine? (100 RP)
-[] The key to Expert surgery is Ego (150 RP)
-[] Perfect Knockout (75 RP)
-[] Superhuman Uppers (100 RP)
-[] Navigator Genetics (400 RP)
-[] Navigator Gestation (150 RP)
-[] Dubious Dark Eldar Dissections (75 RP)

-[] Combat Neural Implants (50 RP)
-[] Advanced organ replacements (100 RP)
-[] Companion Cogitators (350 RP)
-[] Mood Regulators (100 RP)
-[] Pain Controller (100 RP)
-[] Advanced Combat cybernetics (150 RP)
-[] Chaos Corruption Cognitive Intervention (400 RP)
-[] Collaberative Computational R&D (250 RP)

-[] Rapid hacking (400 RP)
 
avatar11792 said:
I was joking.


I can imagine that helping by quite a bit honestly.

***

My personal goals to achieve in the next turn would be:

- Abacus Manufacturing (100 RP)
- Advanced Materials (250rp)
- Improved Engine Designs (125rp)
- Streamlined ship design (100rp)
- Efficient Equipment Distribution (100rp)
- Extremely Efficient Weapon Distribution (200 RP)
- Boarding Capabilities (100 RP)
- Networked missiles (100 RP)
- Low-Emission equipment (150 RP)
- Active Spaceship Stealth (150 RP)
- Improved Passive Stealth (50 RP)
- Improved Active Stealth (150 RP)
- Heavy Void shields (150 RP)
- Psychic Shielding Reliability (100 RP)
- Large-scale Design-integrated psychic shielding (250 RP)
- Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields (50 RP)
- Teleportation is like skipping a stone (150 RP)
- Improved Void Abacus (125 RP)
- Gravity Weapons (200 RP)
- The Biggest Boom (150 RP)
- Superconductive Shenanigans (50 RP)
- Miniaturized antigrav (50 RP)
- Better Sensors are just Physics (150 RP)
- Machine Spirit Void Tactics (125 RP)
- Large-scale Machine spirits (75 RP)
- Machine Spirit Shipboard Manufactories (75 RP)
- Machine Spirit Ship Design Improvements (200 RP)
- Machine Spirit Chaos resistance (75 RP)
Total = 3550RP

As you may have noticed, everything I selected is for improving all our void warships. We need better ships, we need better designed ships, we need to be able to produce more ships, and they need to be better protected and better equipped with much more powerful weapons. They need to be faster, stronger, tougher, and ideally smarter.

With a handful of exceptions for more expensive research, my cap for selecting text was for $150 or lower. My thinking is these are the technologies that we can do more of in a single turn. The ones that are over 150 are technologies that I view is simply too important and essential to avoid skipping out on for hopes of a future discount later on, such as Advanced Materials, Extremely Efficient Weapon Distribution, Gravity Weapons, and Machine Spirit Ship Design Improvements.

Obviously 3550rp is too much to do in a single turn, or even 2. So, here's my Absolute Priorities Over The Next 2 Turns version.

- Abacus Manufacturing (100 RP)
- Advanced Materials (250rp)
- Improved Engine Designs (125rp)
- Streamlined ship design (100rp)
- Efficient Equipment Distribution (100rp)
- Extremely Efficient Weapon Distribution (200 RP)
- Boarding Capabilities (100 RP)
- Heavy Void shields (150 RP)
- Superconductive Shenanigans (50 RP)
- Miniaturized antigrav (50 RP)
- Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields (50 RP)
- Improved Passive Stealth (50 RP)
TOTAL = 1,325RP

Alright, this is my streamlined, Absolutely Essential for the next 2 turns list.

...Alright, its still too big. Still, its something. Let's do this again, break it up into turns.

Next Turn (assuming 600RP spent on research):
- Abacus Manufacturing (100 RP)
- Efficient Equipment Distribution (100rp)
- Superconductive Shenanigans (50 RP)
- Miniaturized antigrav (50 RP)
- Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields (50 RP)
- Improved Passive Stealth (50 RP)
- Extremely Efficient Weapon Distribution (200 RP)
TOTAL = 600RP

Turn After Next (Assuming 600 RP for research):
- Advanced Materials (250rp)
- Improved Engine Designs (125rp)
- Heavy Void shields (150 RP)
- Boarding Capabilities (100 RP)
TOTAL = 625RP (which we could do with Anexa's RP bonus)

The only tech not done in 2 turns in this way is Streamlined Ship Design, but honestly, it's the last priority after all these techs getting done. Now, once that's researched, we'll be able to make ships multiple tiers better than what we could before.

And this is just the streamlined list, obviously there's a lot more ship techs we could push for, I just feel these are the most important to get done before we build our own ships and leave the Denvan system again.

***

Now, last but certainly not least, I want to discuss the future of our Flagship, the main vessel which will host our AI's consciousness. I feel it pretty much has to be a Battleship. We've all acknowledged that the Grand Cruiser we've built as her first body is a kludge design, with too many competing visions of what is should be resulting in an unoptimized design.

Now, knowing SV and voting, I'm not going to say that building a Battleship body would be any better in optimization, but at least it'll be much bigger and thus we'll have more internal room for doing whatever we feel we need to do.

Grand Cruisers (400 RP) Making a ship design that's not spaghetti takes time and effort. It's still boring. But if you want to make queens of the void, its necessary. (unlocks grand cruisers, half of the prereq for battleships)

Grand Cruiser tech is…a lot of RP, but we know doing Streamlined Ship Design will help reduce the cost of ship designs by like half, and I think it'll affect this as well. Plus all the other ship techs we do will also help make the final more powerful, and probably reduce costs in other ways as well, so if we do Grand Cruiser AFTER my 2 Turn tech stuff and Streamlined Ship Design, at least it'll be worth it.

For some reason, I can't find what the other half for Battleships truly is, but I've run out of time to keep typing. But this is still a decent discussion of my ideas on warship building.

I know everybody else is obsessed with anti-Chaos tech improvements, and I certainly get why, but I'm a hardware kind of guy. I focus on bigger booms and tougher hulls over the more esoteric stuff, which I leave to y'all to talk about.
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Without warp comms, we can't really make good use of that, as we need to keep all our ships close. Hence why I want to rush warp comms - cause then we can do things like start sending out sensor ships to scout ahead of us, or behind us, and have them keep watch for hostile fleets and the like.

MSH said:
That was never going to happen. I warned repeatedly that it was never going to happen. It's plainly obvious that Denva doesn't have a research body to its name.
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It would have happened had they rolled better and/or not gotten bodied by chaos forces, Neablis said as much.
 
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Honestly, I think our biggest problem is that our priority list for research is something like several thousand RP, and we only get 200 per action plus another ~140 from Anexa and the Cogitare.

With that in mind, Research Plan: Kick-Starting The Singularity

Next turn...

-[] Collaberative Computational R&D (250 RP) (Anexa Focus)

Invent Science!GitHub to take immediate better advantage of our available Cogitare and kick-start the Stellar Ascendancy's science. Pair with a diplomatic action to help them figure out what research programs even look like. To quote Neablis "Collaborative Computational would be a big deal for them. It's basically inventing github but for science. Communication is king in research." and "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." Anexa gets the focus on this because we want the best possible result to maximize long-term research gains.

-[] Improved Organic-Machine control (75 RP)

Fully redesign our implants both to double the CP available to OMC Operators and more importantly, make sure the next wave of implants is starting from the best possible position.

The turn after that...

-[] Lower OMC Implant Specs (150 RP)

To quote Neablis "The lower implant spec would turn their training pipeline into a training river" and the continuing increased implant familiarity would put us in the best place for the last jump...

-[] Companion Cogitators (350 RP) (Anexa Focus)

Invent the fucking Cybran Nation with Anexa as our Dr. Brackman. Flat improvement to all our brain implants to boost research capacity, both the tech itself and the fact it was originally a 500 RP cost say it's going to be a big improvement, and on top of everything else, one of the follow-up techs mentioned at one point was personality backups. Soul-StonesCortical-Stacks baby!
 
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