Talk:Agents Of Empire/Turns/1/House Advantage

Getting the aquaculture plant back online seems like a sensible task for Elaine, given that she's a) good at socialising with the ornery barbarians and b) is amphibious and thus well-suited for poking around a marine facility. Unless someone suggests a better way of dealing with this problem, she's going to travel to J13 and try to figure out what's going on. (Of course, if it's a science/engineering issue, she may not be much use. Hrm.)

• Shipping and fighting: none.
• Exploration: I'm inclined to have the novice explorer explore out towards the nearby radiation forest and do some prospecting, since radioactives are likely to form the heart of our economy.
  • Edit: as a Rank 1 unit, he is basically a kidnapped geocacher with a gammy knee and a morbid terror of bears. He cannot enter anything except plains and hills, so we should probably have him toodle up the coast to I13 or something. (The head of the fjord is probably worth checking out.) Both our PCs can function as Rank 2 explorers, though that still won't get them into anything more than light forest and shallow ocean.
• Production/processing: none.
• Research: we need to choose what our facility is specialised in. Hrm. Not sure yet.
• Building: finishing the research facility seems like a no-brainer (play to our strengths, use the resources we have.) The trick is that doing so would mean we'd have to sell unprocessed goods for a while (a rank-1 processor costs 10mc, which is exactly what our treasury is.) Thoughts?
  • Also playing to our strengths: we might want to start building an explorer unit, since we get the Trained version cheap. 3mc to finish the research facility, 2mc to build a Trained explorer, leaving 5mc to place a basic production facility once we locate thorium?
  • Edit edit: we now get the research facility for free. So, hm. Seems as if we should still focus on getting to that thorium. Build a trained explorer and save the rest? Or a food processing plant straight away? Or trained explorer + basic military, still leaving enough to set up a thorium mine?
• Landing/Trade: nothing yet
• Politics: tbd

-- Maga 12:35, 2 June 2011 (PDT)

Okay, it seems as if our major weakness right now -- since our first objective is making a bunch of cash to pay off the Empire -- is that with indifferent engineering and a difficult-to-explore main resource, we'll probably be fairly slow getting our economy off the ground. (The other threat is that right now, if the locals decide to stage an uprising we have no standing troops or fighty PCs to deal with it.)

• production plan one: spend 10Mc on a food-processing facility. Starting next turn, we produce 4Mc every 3 turns -- with a lag for processing on top of the one for trade. Assuming the production facility gets fixed, we'd have 3 food by turn 4, sell it for 4 Mc on turn 5; process another 3 on turn 7, sell for 8 total on turn 8; process 3 on turn 10, sell for 12 total on turn 11. The Emperor wants 30 Mc by turn 12. This is not a very good plan.

• production plan two: explore, find more resources, build production facilities for 5Mc apiece. Might take a little longer to bring online, but will bring in faster profits once we do; we don't need to worry about bulk until we're producing at least 5 goods a turn. (This is reliant on finding new resources soon. We might need more explorers.) Best-case scenario: we find 2 resources in the first 3 turns and have three basic production plants running by turn 5. That would give us about 30Mc by the end of turn 12. (If we find more resources before the start of turn 7 we should build more producers, but not thereafter.)
  • Conclusion: the 30 Mc tax is just about reasonable. Possibilities:
    • It's a starting-point for negotiation, not a hard demand. Get the diplomats on the task.
    • The Empire wants us to fail so that it can throw us out. Build military. (Not a good strategy for us, I think.)
    • Slingshot production with industry-oriented research.
    • Acquire more goods or money somehow. (Trade deals, exploration bonanza, taxing the locals.)

• production plan three: upgrade the food production plant to level 2 (7Mc cost), allowing it to produce 2 raw materials a turn. A fallback for plan 2.

So I'm thinking that we build a level-2 explorer (2Mc, because we're explorey), focus research on industry, have Jathries check out whether the deadline can be extended or the tax lowered, and keep money back to focus on building rank-1 producers. -- Maga 09:30, 3 June 2011 (PDT)