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Old 08-22-2017, 07:49 AM   #1
WaterAndWindSpirit
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Default [Mass Combat] All or Nothing blitz

Hello everyone.

So, basically, I wanted to know how to handle the following situation.

Two rival conspiracies are at it, one hiding behind a large corporation and a mess of shell companies to hide financial trickery, with magitech TL9 toys (that must not fall into enemy hands or they could be reverse engineered and they would lose their edge) and elite troops at their disposal as well as a hidden HQ, and the other one hiding behind a supposedly altruistic movement with massive public and government support that resists any controversy.

The first side's power is relatively fixed over time, while the second grows every day.

The 1st conspiracy decides to make a bold play by making an all out all or nothing blitz, seizing Africa by taking advantage of it being politically unstable, and setting up factories to get real tank and artillery. After all, waiting would only lead to public support to grow for the other side, and they're already outnumbered several thousands to one. To prepare for this blitz, they spend every noncritical asset to acquire raw materials, including operatives selling everything they do not absolutely want to keep for after the war and taking on as much loans as they can get away with, since either way they won't be paying those back since they will be dead or in hiding or they would have won and then the banks would be acquired. Nukes against densely populated areas are not an acceptable option due to magical backlash. At best one kiloton nukes might be used to destroy salvaged ultratech that can't be liberated.

So basically, due to having no real economy anymore but loads of preparations, the 1st conspiracy gets a massive initial budget to throw on troops, but little way to recover it beyond salvage and raids, but the second gets a smaller budget that replenishes much more, meaning the 1st side win condition is to overwhelm the 2nd with an all or nothing blitz, while the second's side win condition is to outlast the blitz and exhaust the 1st side's resources.

The question is three sided.

How to make the legal and economic machinations to acquire resources prior to the all or nothing blitz believable, and how to balance the odds so that the battle for PCs on the 1st side will feel like a very uphill battle despite their massive personal abilities (we're talking characters who would have grown from around 75 points to 600+ over the course of preparations) and cool toys because the enemy. Won't. Stop. Coming. And they might run out of supplies before the war is even close to over. And how to give the PCs opportunities to shine and turn the tides?

Thanks.
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Old 08-22-2017, 10:51 AM   #2
ericthered
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Default Re: [Mass Combat] All or Nothing blitz

Legal and economic machinations. hmm.

For best results, those take time, even after you commit to "no holds barred". The real trick will be selling out all of the old corporate infrastructure or converting it to military footing.

Seizing Africa is about coups and rebellions. Each coup will need a power-hungry local you can back. Rebellions will need causes, but such things aren't terribly hard to come by. You'll need also need a way to control all of your newfound "allies". Until you're on military footing, you'll want them to look homegrown.

converting corporate power to military power may be tricky. Some of it can be used to set up and fund factories in the region you plan to take over, but in the end, you'll want to sell off most of it, and hope that enough soviet arms are floating around to supply all of your wants.

You use the word "Blitz". The amount of time you have to do this is important. Ideally you'd move over the course of 10 years, slowly diverting profits into war machines you control. If you've got to do this in a month, you'll be much less effective, and it amounts to holding a public offering on all of your stock, selling what you have, and directly meeting with enough leaders to hold your ground against the enemy once all of them have pulled their coups.
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Old 08-22-2017, 11:27 AM   #3
WaterAndWindSpirit
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Default Re: [Mass Combat] All or Nothing blitz

Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
Seizing Africa is about coups and rebellions. Each coup will need a power-hungry local you can back. Rebellions will need causes, but such things aren't terribly hard to come by. You'll need also need a way to control all of your newfound "allies". Until you're on military footing, you'll want them to look homegrown.

converting corporate power to military power may be tricky. Some of it can be used to set up and fund factories in the region you plan to take over, but in the end, you'll want to sell off most of it, and hope that enough soviet arms are floating around to supply all of your wants.

You use the word "Blitz". The amount of time you have to do this is important. Ideally you'd move over the course of 10 years, slowly diverting profits into war machines you control. If you've got to do this in a month, you'll be much less effective, and it amounts to holding a public offering on all of your stock, selling what you have, and directly meeting with enough leaders to hold your ground against the enemy once all of them have pulled their coups.
Allies won't be hard to come by, at least in Africa. Lots of, shall we say "dimensionally displaced" people are there, many already already willing to join the conspiracy if only they had known about it, and good incentives like food, water, medicine, and so on for the populace. Training would take a while, but loyalty won't be an issue. Uniting them will take time though, time conveniently provided by an uprising elsewhere and enough counter intelligence for raids to still look like nothing more than warlord violence has occurred. Mainly using cloning tech so that a fake body would be left as proof that one guy was killed and another took over and so on and so forth.

The corps/conspiracy has already plenty of combat ready personnel, at least compared to a typical corps. outnumbered a thousand to one at least, but they're there. They're mostly insurgents, but they have a few shock troops with ultratech magitech gear that can be deployed anywhere in the world.

Weapons won't be a problem, at least infantry portable ones, in fact they've been manufacturing and stockpiling them for about 3 years, give or take a few months. Mainly high end modern equipment, though again, no tanks, artillery heavier than mortars, or aircraft. Technicals with mounted weapons and armor kits are sometimes used, but very rare. They also have (thanks to sabotaging their enemies') the only (remaining) MILSAT network in the world. Africa will be the aircraft, tanks and artillery manufactory because they have a secret HQ that serves as a haven and would be impossible to breach short of inside help or nuking it, and pilots trusted enough to know it's location are in painfully short supply.

Basically, outside of being outnumbered a thousand to one and not having either the support of the (non African) population or any government,they have a pretty good gig.
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Old 08-24-2017, 01:10 AM   #4
Michele
 
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Default Re: [Mass Combat] All or Nothing blitz

Before being a Mass Combat situation, this is going to be a Social Engineering situation. Small numbers with advanced know-how means you want to recruit large numbers, and the most reliable way to do that isn't buying them, it's convincing, or converting, or memeing them.

Africa in general is of little use to conspiracy 1.
If they insist on that continent, they have to focus on the most highly developed countries in it, probably starting with South Africa. There are two reasons for this, both linked with the intended production of an advanced and bulky armory.

1. Nowadays you can't hide a sizable factory, not from satellites. Not even underground. Taking control of Northern Mali or of Equatorial Guinea and building the factory in the desert or in the jungle means telling the enemy where to strike. OTOH if you take control of South Africa, that country has plenty of already existing factories. You can then transform a chemical plant in order to produce TL9 polymers, or upgrade an existing factory that already produces TL8 armored vehicles. It will be much harder for the opposition to notice such operations.

2. Resources. You need oil (for fuels and chemistry), steel (advanced steel includes iron and a long list of costly metals), rubber (presumably synthetic rubber, which still means oil and chemical plants), other metals like copper, lead, nickel, zinc etc., phosphates (for the explosives). For top-end stuff you'll need uranium, carbon, rare earths, special elements, advanced plastics (again much of that means chemical plants and advanced refining plants of one sort or another, but uranium is down in a mine firstly), and I'll be forgetting something. Oh, and a surplus of power (not the political one, the electric one). So if you take Cape Verde, that would be easy, but you'll then need to import nearly everything. South Africa OTOH also comes with gold and diamonds, which are nice to have if you have to buy something you lack.
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Old 08-24-2017, 09:58 AM   #5
WaterAndWindSpirit
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Default Re: [Mass Combat] All or Nothing blitz

Quote:
Originally Posted by Michele View Post
Before being a Mass Combat situation, this is going to be a Social Engineering situation. Small numbers with advanced know-how means you want to recruit large numbers, and the most reliable way to do that isn't buying them, it's convincing, or converting, or memeing them.

Africa in general is of little use to conspiracy 1.
If they insist on that continent, they have to focus on the most highly developed countries in it, probably starting with South Africa. There are two reasons for this, both linked with the intended production of an advanced and bulky armory.

1. Nowadays you can't hide a sizable factory, not from satellites. Not even underground. Taking control of Northern Mali or of Equatorial Guinea and building the factory in the desert or in the jungle means telling the enemy where to strike. OTOH if you take control of South Africa, that country has plenty of already existing factories. You can then transform a chemical plant in order to produce TL9 polymers, or upgrade an existing factory that already produces TL8 armored vehicles. It will be much harder for the opposition to notice such operations.

2. Resources. You need oil (for fuels and chemistry), steel (advanced steel includes iron and a long list of costly metals), rubber (presumably synthetic rubber, which still means oil and chemical plants), other metals like copper, lead, nickel, zinc etc., phosphates (for the explosives). For top-end stuff you'll need uranium, carbon, rare earths, special elements, advanced plastics (again much of that means chemical plants and advanced refining plants of one sort or another, but uranium is down in a mine firstly), and I'll be forgetting something. Oh, and a surplus of power (not the political one, the electric one). So if you take Cape Verde, that would be easy, but you'll then need to import nearly everything. South Africa OTOH also comes with gold and diamonds, which are nice to have if you have to buy something you lack.
Satellites are kaput from TL 9 computer viruses on TL 8 computers.

They have a large stockpile of resources, but deploying them requires factories, and military tanks and fighter jets and AT guns etc... can't be deployed from enemy territory. At most you'll get away with technicals retrofitted with armor and weapons in most western countries, if you can hide them well enough.

Deploying from Antarctica comes with it's own set of problems, not least of which the secret HQ being located there and pilots that can be trusted with it's location are in short supply. At best you're looking at 200 pilots that can keep their mouths shut. Most of the fighting force are not loyal enough that you couldn't get moles in their ranks, and a single mole revealing the location of the HQ means game over through teleporting a few nuclear gifts to the area. Thus, they need land with inhabitants that the enemy would be reluctant to nuke at least right out of the bat at least long enough to get the nuclear arsenal kaput just like the satellite network. Africa, with all it's political unstability, happens to fit that bill.
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Old 08-25-2017, 01:45 AM   #6
jason taylor
 
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Default Re: [Mass Combat] All or Nothing blitz

Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
Legal and economic machinations. hmm.

For best results, those take time, even after you commit to "no holds barred". The real trick will be selling out all of the old corporate infrastructure or converting it to military footing.

Seizing Africa is about coups and rebellions. Each coup will need a power-hungry local you can back. Rebellions will need causes, but such things aren't terribly hard to come by. You'll need also need a way to control all of your newfound "allies". Until you're on military footing, you'll want them to look homegrown.

converting corporate power to military power may be tricky. Some of it can be used to set up and fund factories in the region you plan to take over, but in the end, you'll want to sell off most of it, and hope that enough soviet arms are floating around to supply all of your wants.

You use the word "Blitz". The amount of time you have to do this is important. Ideally you'd move over the course of 10 years, slowly diverting profits into war machines you control. If you've got to do this in a month, you'll be much less effective, and it amounts to holding a public offering on all of your stock, selling what you have, and directly meeting with enough leaders to hold your ground against the enemy once all of them have pulled their coups.
You also need to be able to use the power once you got it. Most dictators are so paranoid about keeping their power that they let their military go to pot. It is fine enough for home defense because they can usually mount an insurgency on their own soil with sufficient propaganda. But they seldom have enough effectiveness to go conquering.
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