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TFT out of order snippet

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Re: TFT out of order snippet
Post by KBaggy   » Sat Jun 30, 2018 8:45 am

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noblehunter wrote:Now I want a reverse civilization game where you try and destroy civilizations at different levels of development. Hunter gatherers would be pretty resilient but take out a few power plants or major power lines and a post-industrial society is toast.


Their are at least some city builders that have the ability to trigger disasters at will, or randomly. Cities: Skyline has with one of the expansions.
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Re: TFT out of order snippet
Post by noblehunter   » Sat Jun 30, 2018 12:27 pm

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KBaggy wrote:Their are at least some city builders that have the ability to trigger disasters at will, or randomly. Cities: Skyline has with one of the expansions.


I was thinking more like Plague, Inc. except with more explosions and better modeling of societal breakdown.

Dropping rocks on your city is fun and all but Skylines is a bit too failure adverse to really capture the fragility of civilization.
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Re: TFT out of order snippet
Post by Joat42   » Sat Jun 30, 2018 1:15 pm

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noblehunter wrote:
Joat42 wrote:Here is a quite good write up of power grid wargaming scenarios. It's an interesting read.


Math. :shock:

I confess to being the sort of David Weber fan who converts all the numbers into qualifiers. I just need to know there are a lot of missiles going faster and only a few are stopped by defenses or miss.

It's basically saying that more spares of high voltage transformers for the power grid is needed if you want to protect the grid against coordinated attacks. The current reserves is only scaled for age related (end of life) and one-off (ex lightning strikes) breakdowns.

Or to put it in Honorverse missiles analogy, the missile load-out on the warships is only geared towards anti-piracy operations and not a stand up fight.

---
Jack of all trades and destructive tinkerer.


Anyone who have simple solutions for complex problems is a fool.
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Re: TFT out of order snippet
Post by Dilandu   » Sat Jun 30, 2018 4:09 pm

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The thing is, civilization is highly resistant. And capable of quickly repairing the inflicted damage. The more advanced civilization is, the more it could repair damage, or, if forced, "downgrade" to maintain the capabilities albeit on lesser, less-efficient technical level.
------------------------------

Oh well, if shortening the front is what the Germans crave,
Let's shorten it to very end - the length of Fuhrer's grave.

(Red Army lyrics from 1945)
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Re: TFT out of order snippet
Post by noblehunter   » Sat Jun 30, 2018 4:48 pm

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Dilandu wrote:The thing is, civilization is highly resistant. And capable of quickly repairing the inflicted damage. The more advanced civilization is, the more it could repair damage, or, if forced, "downgrade" to maintain the capabilities albeit on lesser, less-efficient technical level.


That's what would make the game interesting. Though downgrading could easily involve drastic reduction in population, ref. Glacierheart.

I think you're over-estimating the resiliency of high tech society. Sure, we can deal nicely with "random" failures but a few kiloton strikes in the right spots could have nasty follow-on effects.
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Re: TFT out of order snippet
Post by Randomiser   » Sun Jul 01, 2018 7:29 pm

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Dilandu wrote:
Randomiser wrote:
Unfortunately, the OBS is not the only weapon of mass destruction a returned Chihiro could employ, theoretically at least. Some kind of weaponised very nasty disease with a relatively short active life and a self destruct built in, spread everywhere but North Harchong, which had orders to cut itself off from the Apostates for a time could effectively wipe out the opposition without doing permanent damage to the planetary ecostructure.


Too rosky. The opposing side (I mean, Merlin & Co) could easily retaliate in kind, hitting the North Harchong too, and threatening to essentially depopulate the planet. Biological warfare may be useful, yes, but not in the situation when both combatting sides are basically invulnerable, and the only one suffering is their proxies.

However, the threat of biological warfare may actually be a deterrence factor for both sides, preventing them from too direct actions against each other. Basically a "Dead hand" strategy.


I think a smart Archangel would realise it wasn't risky at all, in that sense. Merlin, Cahleb and Sharly, to say nothing of our favourite Archbishop, are never going to authorise the murder by biological weapons of millions of innocent Harchongese. (Innocent in the sense that any Bio-war was not their idea nor within their technical capabilities.) Especially not if those millions were almost all that was left of the human race at that point. The Returned Archangel would be able to work that out from their record and publicly known characters.
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Re: TFT out of order snippet
Post by Fireflair   » Sun Jul 01, 2018 11:01 pm

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If the inner circle really wanted to get frisky they could always set up an electrical device in the heart of some church strong hold and activate it.

They could watch the results from a respectable distance.

Of course this sort of destruction and loss of life associated with it would be counter to everything they stand for. Not to mention it might wake some sort of sleeping giant. But it would be an easy way to let the OBS swat your enemies for you....
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Re: TFT out of order snippet
Post by Dilandu   » Mon Jul 02, 2018 12:14 am

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Randomiser wrote:I think a smart Archangel would realise it wasn't risky at all, in that sense. Merlin, Cahleb and Sharly, to say nothing of our favourite Archbishop, are never going to authorise the murder by biological weapons of millions of innocent Harchongese. (Innocent in the sense that any Bio-war was not their idea nor within their technical capabilities.) Especially not if those millions were almost all that was left of the human race at that point. The Returned Archangel would be able to work that out from their record and publicly known characters.


Considering that no one of Archangels knew Merlin (even if some of them knew Nimue), how could they evaluate the risk?
------------------------------

Oh well, if shortening the front is what the Germans crave,
Let's shorten it to very end - the length of Fuhrer's grave.

(Red Army lyrics from 1945)
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Re: TFT out of order snippet
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Tue Jul 03, 2018 12:21 am

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Dilandu wrote:
phillies wrote:
What is the gender of the observer? Who is it?


Probably Nimue/Merlin PICA. Frankly, with the exception of the very first book, RFC generally put the whole question of gender changes & subsequent psychological problems aside. Nimue seems to act in Merlin's body pretty naturally, without any problems that would plague such... involuntary transgender person. On the other hands, we may assume that PICA may have some deep-rooted psychological dampeners, exactly to avoid such possible problems for user...


Or the use of PICAs has made some degree of gender fluidity the norm so people aren't bothered by being in a body that doesn't match their internal "gender". (Personally, I don't think it really exists in the first place--rather, what we see is an attempt to force a spectrum onto a binary scale.)
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Re: TFT out of order snippet
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Tue Jul 03, 2018 12:27 am

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Randomiser wrote:Unfortunately, the OBS is not the only weapon of mass destruction a returned Chihiro could employ, theoretically at least. Some kind of weaponised very nasty disease with a relatively short active life and a self destruct built in, spread everywhere but North Harchong, which had orders to cut itself off from the Apostates for a time could effectively wipe out the opposition without doing permanent damage to the planetary ecostructure.


That would be pure insanity. Nobody would flee to the area the plague wasn't hitting???
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