(and because I know it'll be asked, strategists will be easier to recruit than seers, and weaker seers will have a bigger malus to divination rolls).
You know, I think something has been overlooked here - Neablis appears to be implying that if we get Strategist Gwen, we can still pick up a dedicated seer later. That generalized nat 1 protection everybody wants can be had by less expensive means.
Sounds like a good place for that hypothetical Eldar Crew member to me. Good thing we've made an excellent protection against chaos we can produce in bulk, eh?
To be more serious about this though what you seem to be boiling things down to is that our shiny new seer will have a greater impact on reducing our chances of actual quest failure by reducing chances for crit failure for military rolls (And other poor results on those rolls). She will also have a greater impact due to the limited effect her rolls would statistically have if she were just a plain old seer, and that we will almost certainly be having more and more military rolls as the quest goes on. That we have, in fact, had at almost 2:1 separate instances of military rolls in the past ten turns alone.
Now, I agree when put like that the decision seems pretty obvious. Like. We're going up against John Warhammer and we need to smash some hams. Having a Seer geared towards doing this is honestly going to be incredibly useful for not dying. In fact, it might become almost necessary as things escalate. Then again, it might be overkill to go down this route if we get someone with proper bonuses. Otherwise we're going to have to continue to be supremely cautious and drown out enemies in our overwhelming tech advantage and numbers. Which I'm starting to wonder if we need more of. And overkill is the best kind of kill...
... If I do decide to vote, which I may not due to my rather sparse posting and tracking of the conversation. Then, I'll probably lean towards military over Seer. Even though I like the idea of the Seer better and it feels kind of a waste to put them on military duty just because we haven't head hunted a good general yet or taken one as an option in favor of diplomacy and spy stuff. Which I also really rather enjoyed the vibes of. The spy games that is. It has been cool seeing the diplomancer diplomance.
Never got around to this last night, but it's less "actual quest failure" and more "worst consequences" in a more nuanced sense. Warfare is where we're tested on how we did for the rest of the game - having a strategist means we're better at taking tests.
You keep doing this sleight of hand where you compare Strategist Gwen only with Seer Gwen as if Seer Gwen was somehow precluded from working with a Strategist. The unique ability that Strategist Gwen provides is not the flat bonus to military actions, it's the reroll of military dice with a bonus. The comparison for Level 9 Gwen is "Reroll to any single die at -1" vs "Reroll to military dice at +9". (Plus imo picking level 9 is playing favourites towards Strategist Gwen because it's just before the level up where the Seer gets to spread to cover more rolls)
Also note that Strategist Gwen does not in fact have a 99% chance to improve military rolls, it's only a 80% chance, because 19% of all rolls are already crits at that point.
The established mechanics are that seer gwen's reroll does not benefit from anyone else's modifiers. It is also established that Strategist!Gwen will have a unique divination-based flavor to how she improves military results. This is not up for debate, a seer and strategist working together are not as good at strategy as a seer who is a strategist.
And, of course, strat!gwen + pure seer Eldar(?) is something we can eventually get too. How well will
they work together, I wonder? Anyone else and I'd say diminishing returns, but seers, especially eldar seers,
work together. There could be a synergy there that we can't get any other way.
I mostly compare level 9 gwens because the math is easier. I have made and shown some calculations about level 10 gwen anyways. I do not have infinite time and energy, the fact I did not spend it on the calculation you are interested in is not a reason to make an accusation of bad faith.
It's
incredibly rude, actually.
Also note that Strategist Gwen does not in fact have a 99% chance to improve military rolls, it's only a 80% chance, because 19% of all rolls are already crits at that point.
Not all crits are the same. Not even slightly.
Roll results are more than just the bracket they land in. Neablis often labels rolls as borderline, says outright ways in which placing high or low in a bracket affected us... and even separate from the
roll, says how assigning Crew qualitatively affects the results, a qualitative difference that explicitly exists for strategist gwen.
And of course, there's the Very Critical Success, something which only happens on nat 100s that
additionally have bonuses applied to it:
Command: Blow up any Chaos-tainted stations you find and detect. Rolled Nat
100.
+1 Victan level
Denva Diplomacy roll - Natural 100 + 21 = 121. Very Critical Success.
Denva Secundus isn't quite unified in actual politics, but it's unified in spirit and aspiration. They want to reach for the stars now.
It's harder to level once you get past level 10. But a nat 100 is still worth 2 levels for Victan. He's level 13 now.
3rd: Scrapcode Resistant Shielding , 100+20=120 Very Critical Success!
Sorry what? The Nat 1 that you describe as "providing a sick adventure" featured Cia having her hand severed. She got better thanks to Anexa, but are we concerned about her injuries or not here?
Are you forgetting the nat 2 we rolled for system visitors? Or are you just suggesting that the dark eldar, who
rode in towards us and ascalon without firing engines to change course for stealth, would have just not raided The Spark if we had rolled better on diplomacy?
You know who
would have helped there? Strategist Gwen, who explicitly can apply her ability reactively straight from level 1, and whose bonus would go to the actual boarding defense instead of the words we say to the battle nuns while we're being raided.
Double-check your work before saying somebody else is wrong about theirs, thanks.
Point: as has been stated, we have specifically underinvested in military power. Our fights going in dangerous directions can be seen as an effect of that. Remember the nat 1 on scrapcode immunity? That was a nat 1 in research.
What about what happened with the battle nuns? That cost us dearly. And fighting the deldar that attacked us off better wouldn't have helped nearly as much as foreseeing dangers to the diplomatic mission.
What about them? Like, I explicitly brought up both. I didn't say non-military rolls were categorically low stakes, I said they were usually lower stakes than military.
Related? You're comparing a nat 1 on diplomacy to a good success on repelling boarders backed up by a critical success by Cia.
Defending yourself from the Drukhari boarding action - 68. Good Success.
You still take casualties, but most of them happen among the combat bots, and you're able to capture several bodies, weapons and a single boarding craft.
Cia Active Psykana Study - rolled 92, 52
+2 Cia levels.
If these rolls were reversed - no crit from cia, nat 1 on repelling boarders? The a/n text would be a lot more bleak.
That's setting aside that I honestly liked the ascalon diplomacy fail update. We got an adventure hook! Yeah, getting some battle nun staff would have been preferable, but on the scale of critical outcomes... this is on the mild side. We delayed an opportunity. The DEldar were attacking either way.
And... like, I don't think there's any question that the diplomacy nat 1 was significantly aggravated by the visitor nat 2 roll. Ascalon is the exception that proves the rule.
You say the possibility of combat fails make us slower because we prepare more.
Consider:
1. Seer Gwen will also protect military rolls from worst outcomes.
2. Research poor successes literally slow us down, making us have to spend another turn (and more RP) fixing a tech, or pay surcharges out of worry.
3. Research crit fails most often just straight-up prune the tech tree. Remember MS jam hacking? Crit failing that basically kicked us out of the hacking tree. And if we crit fail something like, say, Nova Cannons? How much damage will that cause? We cannot say it's unlikely—we do half a dozen researches per turn; something is bound to break.
Lastly: remember the discussion earlier. Strategist Gwen will have her reroll stuck in a place where her bonus applies. We can't send her to a second diplomacy action (might happen this turn, and could cost us delays or a boon), to shore up dangerous research outside Anexa's wheelhouse (Necrons, for example), to help us explore... all dangers we must contend with.
1. Only ones to which she is assigned until high level - not 10, "high level". Strategist Gwen could have blocked a nat 1 repelling those DEldar by then.
2. Or we just... shrug and move on, because the tech wasn't pressing. By your own admission, we already have the ability to hedge against poor successes there - multiple ways! Anexa makes poor success a 4% chance! Military rolls have a 14% chance to fail, 1% chance to critfail, and
then a 20% chance to poor success. And when we do roll poor successes, the followup usually puts us further ahead than just a normal success on the original tech, while also being an effective reroll for crit rewards.
Research rolls are already super hedged. Military rolls are not.
3. Wrong.
Additionally, truly catastrophic events are quite rare. Rolling a 1 on a research roll probably means a fire broke out and destroyed some samples, but it won't burn down the lab unless you roll below a 20 on a follow-up roll. Now, if you were studying a bunch of hibernating necrons then the outcomes might be a little worse.
MS Jam Hacking was explicitly an exception, neablis went out of his way to say it was because it was a low sidegrade and that he'd never do that with a core or foundational technology.
Any other roll than a 1 would have gotten you a success on the research roll. But because it was a 1, you failed. That means that this kind of technology is impossible, and the option is lost. If this was a core part of research tree you'd still have the option to continue with a higher cost, but because it's a sidegrade it's just gone. Too bad.
He has kept his word, too: on no other occasion - and we've had more occasions where it could than we should - has a nat 1 on research removed a technology from the game. The words "
Technology Removed" appear only once on the completed research page.
So yes, we can say it's unlikely. Nat 1s in the first place are a 1/100 occurrence, and we usually have... call it 6 project rolls a turn? Let's be nice and say 2 out of those 6
are critical, rolls that would really really hurt to nat 1. Saying that a nat 1 is likely to happen sometime in the next
~16 turns isn't saying much... but saying that a nat 1 is likely to happen to a critical project roll in the next
15/(1/3) = 45 turns is...
We haven't even
had 45 turns in this quest! We've had more nat 1s than you would expect, and more of them have landed on critical rolls than you would expect too, yet none of them have landed on
military rolls, where frequently a named character might die or be captured depending on follow-ups.
And I would be lying if I said I didn't think that history wasn't producing a bias for the thread in general: We have never seen what a military failure actually looks like. Not even once, much less what a military
crit failure looks like. We are so used to every roll having bonkers bonuses that people regularly say "fail" to mean "poor success"!
But time and time again, military rolls give us a black eye even when we roll high. We've gotten by so far because we somehow managed to keep rolling high - and if you want somebody who is good not just at avoiding military roll failures, but at rolling high, you want strategist gwen.
And you know what, I'll say it. I still want that eldar seer
too. They'll be harder to get, but it will be so much sweeter when we do - and a stable strategist-diviner for that seer to collab with I don't expect we'll get an opportunity for ever again, so.
