I hope yu jing gets more characters. I'd love to see a guan yu or lubu type in the invincible army. Also I don't understand the vitriol. I hope they don't change the ISS and especially hope they dont change the kuang shi. The ISS are not your friendly Barny and Andy Griffith types. They are state sponsored police who act as judge, jury, and executioner with little to no oversight. They're not warm and cuddly and I'm sure the last thing on their minds are community relations. It's strange to me that people are so surprised with how the iss are in the fluff. This shouldn't have blind sided anyone. Real world organizations that were similar were bad organizations that did bad things. The yu jing reaction and treatment of the Japanese makes complete total sense. Hell in the states we rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in internment camps. Imagine what we would have done if Japanese spies were constantly assassinating officers at home or blowing up buildings? People say the fluff is making then physically sick especially the new yuandun division but I argue that its probably the most realistic and human answer. I personally don't agree with those methods being used in real life but I also understand that humans are tribal creatures and when the tribe is under attack people are ready to fight back. When the tribe is under attack from people who've infiltrated it then things get even worse. Real life history has shown that this sort of stuff has happened and it makes 100% complete sense in the infinity verse as well. How nice do you think the hexahedron would be to rebels? How do you think Tunguska and the black hand would handle potential mutineers? The future of Yu Jing is still bright and interesting. I think there's room for alot of interesting stories. YJ took a couple of licks and has to reassert itself as a superpower. Pano and YJ at some point will have to decide whether or not they can work together on paradiso against the combined army. Many people will probably be calling into question the emperor and parties strength for allowing this uprising to happen and how it was handled. The yanjing have to step up their game and make sure nothing like this happens again. So there are still plenty of stories left to tell. Yu Jing is in no way a boyscout but even with the uprising they aren't moustache twirling villains and the sky isn' falling.
Well, for what it's worth, I don't think the IS should *stop* making Kuang Shi out of criminals... just that it'd add an interesting dimension to the setting if they could make them out of sepsitor victims too.
People are annoyed because it doesn't reflect how China or Chinese culture handles these events at a political level. Take the Tiananmen square protest. The Chinese government suppressed and continues to suppress all and any footage and information about that event to the utmost best of their ability. This results in limited understanding or complete ignorance of the event amongst Chinese culture. Now compare that to PsychoCrane broadcasting his attrocities to the world. It doesn't fit at all. That's why people are annoyed. It also doesn't fit a culture that currently rose to power from a successful insurgency. The last thing you do to counter insurgents is declare to the populace "LOL GONNA KILL U ALL". That just forces every single non insurgent to become an insurgent. They have no choice now because you're going to kill them. Would you suggest the strategy to defeating ISIS is to kill every single muslim and person of Arabic descent in the middle east? Of course not. That's insane. You'd drive anybody in the region who isn't part of ISIS to join them out of pure necessity. That's why Gutier's writing is taking a beating in terms of criticism. It's out of touch and creates a huge amount of disbelief in terms of how he portrays the event happening. It's not to say an uprising could not or should not have happened, but how he's made it happen makes no sense at all and requires characters/factions to firmly grasp an idiot ball and behave in a stupid evil fashion. Personally I never really considered him a particularly good writer so these events don't surprise me alot, fluff degeneration was bound to happen but other individuals held his works in higher regard in the first place.
No, they absolutely need to stop making them out of political prisoners because it's polluting the meta-discussion that players have regarding the faction, just like suicide-bomber Muttas did or would. It is actively ruining the online campaigns. They could still keep the Kuang Shi, but reform them to, for entirely practical reasons, polish up the Yu Jing image both in-game and out of game, to have the Judiciary limit them to recycled captured Sepsitor targets and legitimate gallows fodder. For other reasons, due to Wu Ming having broken free and killed their surveillance officers to join Ikari, I think CB needs to take a good hard look at Wu Ming in ISS because it makes little sense to have them remain in status quo. While the entire program would make sense for Yu Jing to scrap, CB has now left a loose thread hanging here - in what way has ISS learned the lessons from this and how will they prevent Wu Ming from escaping in the future? Will these changes be felt in game (Zhanying is now mandatory or even the amount of Wu Ming in a single link is reduced) or will it be merely cosmetic? And last, but certainly not least, is that this cuddly comradier spirit of everyone vs Yu Jing needs to be broken up. Few of the NA2 have much reasons for liking each other and none of the main factions should be missing reasons to backstab each other, so it'd be nice if CB took the time to write it into the story some of that instead of directing players to once again gang up on Yu Jing.
I will start by stating that I'm going to write "Section9's truer-to-the-fluff-version of the Uprising" as soon as I get a chance to read the damn book (probably end of next week). But I have some standing ideas I will get to after I finish replying to specific comments. No, you need to not make the same mistakes as the past. That's why you need to remember it, and the harm that was caused at that point. I'd just change the Kuang Shi into YJ's general Death Row, not just political prisoners. Kuang Shi are not secret, YJ troops cheer when they hear one detonate. There are some people that simply refuse to play in a manner that doesn't harm others, they happily shoot up a movie theater to get their 15nanoseconds of fame. You cannot reform someone today, all you can do is kill them. Either by leaving them unsupervised in General Population, or by lethal injection. Yu Jing has found a way to use those individuals for the protection of the very society that they wanted to destroy, it's called the Kuang Shi. Obviously, this will still be rather controversial, much like the Death Penalty is today. But it's not going to be reserved for political prisoners, or even mentioned that sometimes political prisoners end up in the KS program. Yes, I really hope CB includes those. Because those actions made the immediate situation on the ground worse, by giving the Kempeitai a ready-made argument for convincing any non-combatant Japanese that the only way they'd have a chance of surviving the Uprising was to join those actively fighting. Chairman Mao literally wrote the book on how to win a popular uprising. All you have to do to win against the Uprising is NOT do what he says, it's not that hard (though sometimes the things you need to do go against your desires as a person, which is hard). If you really want the top-down version, there's an online copy of the current US Army field manual, but it's a better cure for insomnia than the US Tax Code... But I will say that even the Chinese use the US Army counter-insurgency field manual. It's that good. It's also written specifically to counter a Maoist popular uprising, since that's the only uprising that's been successful long-term (China and Vietnam). I'd say stupid. Incompetence of such epic proportions that if I were the Emperor, I'd have psychoCrane's head mounted on a pike for the next ten generations, with his Cube broken. Not even becoming a Kuang Shi could resolve this stain on his honor. The Gray Man was a single point of failure, if at any time he became suspicious, it was game over for the Uprising. And somehow, he never was suspected by an intelligence agency so effective that it forced PanO to create the Hexahedron? Smells like bullshit to me. Exactly. The Imperial Service can lose the Uprising, that's not the problem. I mean, advancing the narrative pretty much requires that the Uprising succeed. They should lose the Uprising because the Imperial Service got out-played by the kuge. Not because the Imperial Service was stupid and drove all the Japanese civilians into being combatants! FFS, the Imperial Service was even less competent than the US Army in Iraq, and that's saying something! I agree with your prediction, but I sure as hell don't like what you're predicting. Yes, Humanity is facing an existential threat in the form of the CA. You do NOT do things that weaken the second-strongest power in the sphere when you are facing annihilation. That is what psychoCrane did. He made YJ's position in the Sphere weaker. He made the Uprising worse, he got more troops killed unnecessarily. Troops that were needed on Paradiso, and if the Paradiso Blockades fall, on every other planet in the Sphere. He united the Sphere against Yu Jing, something that basically doesn't happen, it's almost always Haqq, Nomads, and/or Ariadna playing YJ against PanO temporarily (and all the sides know it, so it's never personal). Ariadna exists as a sovereign nation thanks to Yu Jing, instead of being part of PanO. How pissed off would you have to make someone like that to move against you politicially? psychoCrane and Friends(tm) managed that. ==== OK, now on to what Section9 would do to fix this mess of fluff, since Uprising has been printed and is a done deal: I'd have the sitting Emperor, whichever family he's from, "accidentally fall down the stairs while drunk and accidentally die," thus forcing a new Imperial Election. This new Emperor would also have a mandate to make sure that the Imperial Service knew what the fuck it was doing to not just nip insurrections before they got started, but also to defeat one that managed to get started. I would haul every Imperial Agent up in front of a tribunal, courts-martial the entire lot of them for their actions during the Uprising. Now, some of them might be innocent of wrongdoing. They go back to work. Ones who took over after the Kempeitai bombed their precinct house and barracks, probably get a promotion. I'm sure some fucked up a little bit, not too badly, and they get a pay decrease and maybe even a rank decrease for a while. The ones like psychoCrane, if they didn't fuck up too badly, they get to be a Wu Ming until they work it off. If they fucked up badly, they get to be a Kuang Shi. psychoCrane and the head of the Shield Division get to have their heads mounted on pikes as a warning to the next 10 generations that you do not kill the Emperor's citizens unless they are actively shooting at you. Yes, part of this is to repair YJ's public image in other countries. It needs to be done, to get back to a more unified front against the Combined Army. I'd also have a similar program run through the military. I don't care if they're Vietnamese, Uighur, Mongolian, Korean, or merely Cantonese, they are all equally important as soldiers. Anyone deliberately sacrificing soldiers gets to be a Wu Ming, regardless of your current rank. (This is honestly something that should have been started back when the Kempeitai first started to be a thing, would have dramatically reduced the traction they got in the ranks of the JSA). The US military had to deal with this when it de-segregated. It's painful to do, but makes a much stronger army in the process.
@Section9 the problem with replying let en masse :p I did write in a later post that Kuang Shi ought to be gallows fodder instead of specifically political prisoners. You know, instead of putting uppity punks who dissent and want an anarchist state into the program or local politicians who overstepped their station, you put serial rapists, mass murderers, tatenokai and kuge into the program - the terrorists, the insurrection leaders, and whatever sepsitored humans that Sforza managed to glue* Psychoticstorm also mentioned that they did set up reviews and that at least 2 of some 40-odd Agents were found guilty and punished. That would also hint of the scale of ISS vs JSA if Yu Jing subjugated Kuraimori using less than 50 Agents (not counting non-Agents like Bao or CG) * Also, more glue guns and stun pistols for ISS. Why isn't this a thing already?
1. How many of the student protesters were killing members of the party? How many of them were killing officers in the military? They government killed unarmed protesters. Information was waaay easier to control in 1989 than today in 2018 and I assume it will be even harder to control when there is the ability to be connected to the mayanet at all times and a giant ai running things. I think your comparison is not good at all. 2. Psycho crane was one person. Humans make stupid decisions all the time and this one decided to broadcast atrocities. I'd assume in some twisted way he was thinking that this will deter people from joining the uprising. Is that really such an unrealistic think would happen? I'd imagine if there was terrorist cells killing people on a regular basis certain people would 100% feel like the answer is to dial it up to 11 and commit atrocities to scare the group back into submission. I 100% disagree that Gutiers writing is out of touch and I'd honestly argue that people who are so upset that it makes them sick or that this is somehow completely surprising to them are the ones who are actually out of touch.
Sorry section 9, I like alot of things that you post but I'm glad that Gutier is handling the fluff and not you. I like his version alot more.
Also humanity in infinity is not on the brink of annihilation. They may not fully understand exactly what they'e fighting but they're still a bit off from annihilation. Also humanity is not fully allied against the combined army. If they were there wouldn't be any of this shadowy black ops it would just be 100% focused on the combined army. Humanity isn't there yet and each faction is still looking out for their own interests first. Once the CA takes a few planets and maybe pushes humanity back to earth or something similar then that's when they'll put aside the petty stuff and stop sabotaging each other and worry about humanity first.
Forget about the whole japanese fiasco. Tell us about other stuff. Whatever stuff. Svalarheima would be good, even if its not coming up until 2021. Also, write a compelling faction description.
*checks* Ooops, I did get that idea from you. My profound apologies for the lack of attribution! This. Moderators (and the other police units like Securitate and Loup Garous), too. All the police units should have less-lethal options (not non-lethal, because a stungun will kill someone with a heart condition, and a gluegun can suffocate someone). Stun Pistols should be as ubiquitous as a police officer's badge. Glueguns may be restricted to riot officers, or may be a general issue thing for some police officers, I'm not sure. They do require some special training to use, but it's pretty quick when you can actually use the glue. And Infinity's tech level allows the option of VR sims that are indistinguishable from the actual event (possibly at speeds well in excess of standard human perception, like in Altered Carbon). The real problem is that glueguns are big and heavy. It's a pain in the ass carrying a 25lb weapon for a 6hr watch, let alone all day. And I wasn't even walking around for that 6 hours, I was standing still with the weapon rested! @atomicfryingpan , You're right that people make terrible decisions in the heat of anger. The COIN Manual I linked to earlier specifically warns about that. The psychoCrane's decision is believable. You should hear some of the stuff that the RoK (and US) soldiers did in Vietnam. But the psychoCrane's decision is exactly the kind of thing that you cannot, MUST NOT do if you want to win the insurgency. Why did I read the COIN manual? Because I was going to get sent to Iraq for 179 days as an Individual Augmentation for a US Army unit (as for why a Sailor was getting specifically requested by rank and career field by the Army, well, submarine yeomen have to be capable of figuring things out on their own, and doing it correctly the first time. It's why we are very popular as Admiral's staff.). Or I would have been been an IA, if I hadn't been ruled Limited Duty and in the process of getting medically discharged. Anything specific? I can't get better as a writer if someone doesn't tell me what they don't like.
Mr. Crane's decision strikes me as something similar to the picture of the Vietnamese Colonel personally shooting a Vietcong fighter in the head. An utter PR disaster.
Regarding glue guns, we have: Louo-Garou (LI), police Sforza (LI), bounty hunter Tank Hunters (MI), military Chasseur (SK), military? KTS (LI), mercenary Lunokhud (REM) KISS (REM), alien Aswaung (SK), alien Dactyls (LI), haven't a clue what role these have Gao-Rael (MI), alien and I'm going to ignore true mercs found in NA2 or mercs list. It seems the list of Adhesive Launchers is mostly thematically Engineers or for rules practical reasons. Adhesive Launcher on Zhanying isn't unreasonable and so far I haven't found a HI with synthetic muscles carrying one. It seems weight isn't a concern. But mostly just blanket replacing ISS pistols with stun pistols (except for Hsien and Wu Ming who are simply put there to murder stuff)
Sforza has the extra of carrying an electric pulse as CC weapon, and no other CC weapon! XD Moderators also carry only Electric Pulse. Intruders carry a glue gun on a profile, costing 0.5SWC. The bandits have a profile with ADL too...
Dammit! I accidentally clicked Akrylate-Kanone instead of Adhesive Launcher when checking Nomads. My bad. So, Karlota, Wild cats, Prowlers and Jaguars to be added as well, none of which have the power muscles that Yu Jing makes (though what ungodly DNA mix they have is a different matter), but they are not police or bounty hunters? Good point on Electric Pulse, though, that would be interesting to see on enforcers in more places as well.
Exactly my point! I'm going to add comments in bold+italics Added the Nomad gluegunners, and everyone else with an Akrylat-Kanone My comments are about the probable use of the weapon by each unit. I disagree, the Stun Pistol should be in addition to their regular pistol. It's not like modern police that have a Tazer (effectively a stun pistol) gave up their pistol.
For CBL usage, sure. For normal list building I'm less certain the idea is worth the extra point that'd cost, there's enough VAT on Yu Jing profiles as is.
You'd think someone'd have developed the MULTI-Pistol, with normal and Stun ammo, for units whose duties are meant to be policing, but thats a setting musing since the thing would still cost an extra point. I don't even know how you could price Stun to be free for addition to police profiles, best you can probably do is Stun batons in place of knives or something of that sort... I am looking forward to this, since knowing your posts it will be a comprehensive review and revision! We may not agree on every issue and change, but it will lead to some excellent discussion. But of course I'm a little biased, since I know if there are counterarguments and debates to be had over it, you'll reply, where CB maintains their silence. This is actually ALREADY true! Kuang Shi are noted as political prisoners AND recurring criminal offenders, granted a "postponed, but useful to the system, death sentence." In my opinion, the latter are going to outnumber the former by leaps and bounds just based on how institutional priorities and cultures work... the Celestial Guard make the Kuang Shi, they're Imperial Service which was born in the fires of a battle against organized criminals, while political crimes would be judged by the Party, an entity entirely separate which seeks to impose control over the Emperor the CGs serve. Which are they going to consider more deserving of this punishment, of the investment of time and resources? Its the murderous Triad asshole, and that isn't even getting into trying to figure out how Yu Jing even defines a death-sentence-worthy political crime (treason is, after all, a political crime and convicted/executed traitors are political prisoners, even if a lot of countries try to pretend it isn't). Absolutely spot-on! And my objections to Uprising don't even call for any sort of retcon here, this is a perfectly plausible thing to have unfold, the stresses of war and civil strife, heated emotion, disconnect between how someone fighting a war perceives their actions and how outside observers see the same thing. Previous quotes from this agent in published material show him to be a definite hothead, the sort who could easily tumble into this kind of mistake. But, speaking to the future course of Yu Jing, a state in Yu Jing's position HAS to react to that failure harshly: it violated the principles of counterinsurgency the ISS is trained to carry out, it gave ammunition to the StateEmpire's enemies, it tarred the image of the state in the eyes of the Sphere. psychoCrane may have thought he was doing his duty, caught in the heat of the moment. Whether he likes it or not, he doesn't get to slip into obscurity making pizza pies in Virginia, his duty now requires he be publicly vilified and punished for his actions by the State in order to preserve and further its own interests.
You speak like a sage, Shiwen, it would be strongly preferable if CB could communicate what, precisely, constitutes a Kuang Shi worthy crime rather than glossing over with politically motivated. The community needs it, for one so people would stop trying to use it against YJ and for another so that YJ players would stop using it frivolously as has happened in the past. It is actively standing in the way of sane discussion in international events.
The problem with "defining Kuang Shi" is that first, you have to justify why use a perfectly good body for a suicide run, instead of "recycling" the body with a casualty (let's say, place a cube of a valued Terracotta soldier, so he can go back in action faster). Which means giving further definition to Cubes, Silk, and the process of resurrection. Something that, at this moment, has a fair bunch of hoops and loops to go through, can grow more in the future and... get in the way of future plannings (like the "why is Tony Macayana dead, how the hell is that PanO had no airgapped backup of her", that was asked not because she was wanted back on the table, but because it was quite ludicrous if the CA could perma-death anyone, while spesitorizing others... zero reasons to carry the cube in Paradiso at all).
