Without dredging up a lot of this, I feel like leaving the Ninja was a response to the massive outcry over losing the Ninja in particular, though I could be wrong about that. There's also the issue of the Ninja being in Red Veil.
yeah, we had a lot of conversation about what to call the no-longer-Japanese sneaky bastards, because losing the actual capabilities was unthinkable. Weren't you the one who found the Chinese word 'Cike' ("chee-kay")?
My rough guess is they lost about 3000 or so troops from an already quite small force since as noted, Ekranoplans are big. Ariadna's overall population isn't that high, think it may be less than 10 million? Either way, the Tartary/Rodina section of Ariadna is about half their total population IIRC, leaving the other half be split amongst the others, and even the threat of Antipodes doesn't mean a massive army would be available all the time. These would also all have mainly been the regular soldiers, so to replace those numbers with reservists could easily have a wider effect on the general economy. Call up reservists, less people to work factories, banks, farms, etc. Even if De Hell group was only 1000 strong it'd still be a significant blow - and that's before we account for materiel losses. Those three Ekranoplans and all the other gear lost would have cost a pretty penny.
Ah. You may want to read some of those threads, then. (Shortest answer: the ones that got locked for flames)
TBH, if they're going to screw up customer protection laws on some 10+ SKU (which I'll have you note they are avoiding with MRRF and ASA), they might as well do it on one more and produce the starter with a different model in it so that the overall product is made at a higher quality. I also find it weird that the Haramaki got to be self-sacrificing heroes instead of being, if not loyal then at least sufficient a liability to get killed before they offed the local ISS. @Section9 you keep getting me confused with Kanluwen, 'cause I know you attributed it to me dragging that knowledge up into light at the time, no I got it from someone else on the forums during discussions on Wuxia that I can unfortunately not remember.
Fairly certain it was JSA High Command that tended to put them in places where they could be sacrificed, whether they liked it or not. The hierarchical nature of JSA was only reinforced during/post Uprising and you can't have peasant borne samurai running around upsetting the Kuge's garden. The nail that sticks up, is the one that gets nailed hammered down.
An easy way to reinforce control over the lower classes is to tell them their suffering comes from another place. Other ethnicities, other religions, the other party, the other ideology, the government, the corporations, people who like different flavours of ice cream. Or cartoons with cute mascots, both worked for the Kuge...
As someone who has always had an interesting in SAA since i started but never actually playing them I can say i was a tad sad to hear they were going OOP. I considered grabbing everything but truth be told I am not sure i trust them to come back and if they do everything will be redone likely so i'd want the new hotness anyways. As far as MRRF, i kind of feel like they are definitely done done, but who knows. I love sectorials but i am worried now going forward for any sectorial and it has absolutely changed how i go about expanding my collection.
