Eh, I haven't been impressed by any of Bongo's moves so far. I'm not afraid of giving him an extra turn - especially cause we just got a major step up on him. And the sooner we get LSMS, the sooner we can give it to the Denvans, and start putting MS in everything - including hospitals, prisons, water treatment plants, and the like. Also the sooner we can unlock follow on technology and get discounts to MS more generally.
Also, we'd have to cancel more than just LSMS to fit Bongo in this turn.
I guess I am also not feeling the need to get ASM finished
immediately like you are.
Nova weapons aren't really warpy, though I suppose precognitive aiming could be applicable.
BFGA models nova cannons as taking a chunk of delay time before their effect, while BFG tabletop rules model it as immediate but scattering. They're not described as slow in lore that I'm aware of.
Vortex cannons probably aren't what we'd get at first. Most 40k vortex weapons are warheads, not emitters, as best I can tell. The Eldar do have D-cannons, which seem to be vortex guns, and the Imperium did have an 'Annihilator Cannon' back in the Heresy era, though I don't know if even then they had more than one.
I see! Just to make sure, do you mean Battlefleet Gothic: Armada the videogames, or Battlefleet Gothic: Armada the tabletop supplement?
And yeah, I guess Nova Cannons are probably the best to get before the Vortex Weapons... though personally I think I would be happy with getting one or both of the pre-reqs for now—they're already good weapons techs.
To expand on this: Bongo tried really hard to backstab us when we retook Denva - and the main thing he accomplished was getting us new stuff to research. I'm not impressed by this, nor am I scared. We'll research Demonology this turn if we get a lot of discounts, or the turn after if we don't, just for the knowledge, but I'm not scared of Bongo.
Consider: last time we tried to poke Bongo, it almost escaped completely. And that was a psy-shield research, not actual factual demonology. I'm not very afraid of what Bongo will do short-term in a vacuum. I am afraid of what it could do while we poke at the process of handling demons.
While it's possible something needs to be done about Denva Primus, I feel like if it's going to be done sooner than several turns from now and probably just before we leave the system, then it's going to need to be done by the Stellar Ascendancy and not by us. We just have too many other priorities.
I'll be honest though, I'd be surprised if there actually is anything much that needs to be done there. The cultists don't seem to have had the control of the system they probably felt was necessary to start trying to establish mining operations given they would have faced exactly the same constant harassment the Imperium had to deal with and I don't think there would have been anything else to draw them to the place. Maybe I'm wrong and the inhabitants are dealing with their own chaos issues now, but if so they should be contained to the planet and we'll notice when we pick up Empathy at Range and Primus starts setting off our cult-detectors, or the SA will notice when they try to reestablish contact and resume their own mining with all their new shields/sensors.
The Imperium had to deal with harassment, yes... but they still got enough stuff that it was worth it to them. And, unlike the Imperium, these Chaos folks have means to convert enemies...
and, if we're very unlucky, to summon a couple of demons while we wait a couple of decades to go check.
Denva has a demonstration of how dangerous the galaxy is by the SM showing up
Has another demonstration of how dangerous the galaxy is by corsairs showing up
Vita builds they some ships
They refuse to build any more ships, get conquered by Chaos
Vita saves them again
...'Military build up is secondary for us now'
If this was a RTS I'd suspect the Denvan AI was broken at this point.
Couple of things: they didn't refuse to build more ships, they were just developing a combined arms doctrine for space combat first. We left them like two designs. Weapons development cycles are long before you take into account that we left them with no interface to use our tech for design efficiently and also took a couple dozen of their most brilliant minds.
And now, yes, it's a secondary priority... compared to rebuilding their cities, helping the citizens who have thus far been basically kept in apartheid... and even with that, they're still more on the ball than us—we haven't even researched the techs we want to build new ships with.
Thing is we did show up to save them and are now handing them solutions to their problems again. Once the invasion happened the solution was 'hang on and wait for Vita' and then it worked. The have one person who is able to think of the bigger picture and it's W who doesn't want to overstep her counterintelligence remit so she's inherently reactive. As for everyone else... well imagine if you are a civilian down there what at you going to vote for the politician that tells you that you have to build ships because the Savior of the System TM might leave you in a lurch or the one who tells you that you have plenty of time to rebuild the standard of life and deal with the Chaos Cults since Vita will of course stick around?
We have also told them we'd stick around, and the QM has told us they will handle all of these things. They're just also not that fast about it because they don't have our tech development capability (for example, for Taste of Chaos or the cult cabinet). Additionally, developing ships also takes training people in their use for other people... which takes a bunch of time, too (I would imagine whatever spacemen they managed to train the first time were likely among their casualties).
...That's fucking annoying. Ugh, why do people have to be so stupid. -_-
On the topic of weaponry though, if nova cannons are what people want, I think theres an argument to be made for 'The Biggest Boom' and 'Antigravity' together. That combo is more focused on ship combat, and gets us one of the two nova cannons techs, and a tech to help make better delivery systems and hopefully dscount gravity weapons in general.
Though I'd still want to focus most effort elsewhere, I don't think we need firepower improvements.
I am hoping we get one of them for now (maybe gravity weapons?) and see where that take us.
I mean yes, we are the ones
inside the Spark. If a force the Spark can't deal with shows up we can just warp out of here. The planet of Denva Secundus, famously hard to de-orbit and take into the warp.
Our risks and theirs are not symmetrical.
On the other hand, if the Spark fails we die. They get to do resistance on the ground.
