This Week's Action Planning

Ok, I really, really need some help planning all the details of where we have villages and stuff. I managed to delay everyone's invasion force long enough to give us this week to plan the specifics so we can give them to them in their next week plans/results. So demonnick, I need you.

Alright, the Army was nice enough to grant me a four day weekend, so I'm back in the game (at least for a little while) now that I washed all the fuel outta my uniforms.

So poor paint skills aside, here's my contribution for where I would figure areas of population density and forts are gonna be. Forts of 200+ soldiers and actual entrenchments would be in red, highly populated areas in black. Green zone has two cities, placed around bodies of water for two reasons 1) more defensible against major attacks and 2)with less food/water/medicine from Minerva, they're going to need every advantage they can get to sustain high population levels. No forts out here yet, because it's the frontier insofar as Minerva is concerned. I threw the yellow zone ones in area that appeared to have more foliage and confluences of roads, because even with no maintenance for 100 years they still built roads on ground that was pretty flat or made it flat, and therefore is probably gonna be easier to travel for traders.I actually put fewer cities in the black and red zones because if you're that close to Minerva, you might as well just move to Minerva itself. 

So I'm gonna assume we roll with the current week's planning in this board, as well?

To get in the spirit of roleplaying:

I understand that the recent sightings of Turkmen scouts to the south have put some Oculus analysts into a bit of a tizzy; following the APAR attacks, this is completely understandable, but we have enough problems without creating new ones. I'd suggest some ISR assets be tasked to track these scouts, but given the political and military situation of both Minerva and the Turkmen, they are a fairly low priority at the moment.

The Russians... they're a different matter. Because our territorial boundaries are effectively rough demarcations of where we patrol and offer aide, it's possible they just overstepped accidentally... but I wouldn't bet on it. In light of these developments, and the APAR attacks, I would suggest we have our pentads begin to instruct locals in the basics of self-defense. ISR assets should definitely be tasked to shadow the NRF forces. If we have Oculus agents inside the NRF, they should start sending out feelers. If there seems to be a military buildup, but no other force is triggering it, we may have to consider the possibility of a preemptive strike.

More generally, due to the massive loss of skilled personnel in the APAR attacks, I would suggest recruiting roughly another thousand soldiers into Aegis. We should find the best here, ladies and gentlemen, and give them a reason to join. Our strength lies in highly-trained and motivated soldiers armed with the best weapons and armor Minervan technology can feasibly produced. Maneuverability, force multiplication, and intelligence are our greatest assets. To throw these advantages away by diluting them through poorly trained and equipped soldiery would only serve to dilute our strength and increase our vulnerabilities.

With regards;

LTC Ahmed Singh, Oculus Applied Intelligence Division, Commanding
                           
(Hope you guys don't mind me getting in the spirit of things! I find fleshing out who I am and why I'm fighting help me think from whatever perspective I'm trying to work from.)

Aight, here's my idea for ISR. On the Russkie front, we should focus on deploying airborne assets to scope out any major enemy force moving in to invade. It's impossible to move a large cohesive force through open terrain without being spotted, so it shouldn't be a problem for us to steal the element of surprise from any conventional force. And when I say steal, I mean steal; we may want to consider producing Marauders to patrol the north.

Insofar as the Turkmen scouts go, best option would probably be to talk to the locals there. They'll know if a scouting party of significant size has slipped past our defenses.
Meanwhile, have our diplomats meet with whoever is in charge there. Find out if they have a price, and how high that price is.

Sorry about the brevity of this one, but I accidentally deleted it twice, so I'm pretty much calling it quits before I manage to delete it again lol

K. Thoughts:

1) contacting the Turkmen, we basically want to buy them off because we can't be bothered right now, and synthesizing stuff is simple for us with our bio-reactors and solar energy... we didn't before because we are not just benevolent overlords etc...

2) the Russian faction... they are the only ones that we have seen in force thus far. I'd say we setup a few HAWKS just orbiting over all of their locations... make it clear that we have seen them... Set them up at high altitude with psuedo random patterns, but we want them to be seen... the message is that "we know you are there and exactly where you are you buggers... no suprises for you"... Perhaps a few high altitude sonic boom flyby's to again drive that point home. We also should drop a beacon (that will strobe and basically get them to pick up a radio so we can establish contact without putting our people at risk. I would also suggest that if they get into the Yellow area or if they attack any of our green area forts or towns... that we seed their path with some pamphlets and blow up a couple of hills right in their path (when they are a few miles away)... again making a very clear "turn the hell around right now" message.

To Sebastian: Minerva has a super strong background in bio and chem war... although they have disavowed and hate this past... some of the deep ROOT level crazies in Oculus might not be opposed to some more underhanded methods.

So yeah... I'll defer any real tactics to Sebastian since he actually knows what the hell he is talking about.

Thoughts on the Turkmen for next round:

So, first off, starting last week when we noticed them... we had the AI's go over the satellites coverage of their area and we have found not only their main bunker, but we've also located the entrances and the air intakes and exhausts, as well as their main water intake and/or auqafer. We begin prepping a covert operation to coincide with our eventual "face to face" chat with them. The operation has two parts:

1) prep new HIPA type air filters, that filter out all sorts of the garbage etc, that will be easy to drop in install into their air intakes. Same with prep water purification that we can drop in place into their auqifer or into the pipes that they are using to feed water into their bunker. prep a covert team that will take these and install them while we are having the main meeting.
2) during the main meeting we casually mention how dedicated we are to helping them, that we noticed via our sattelite feeds that the air and water sanitization they had at their main bunker was terrible and unhealthy so we went ahead and installed safer new tech for them, as well as the solar panels to keep the tech up and running.
3) we switch to live video feed of our guys turning on the tech, as well as a helicopter drone settling down in their main entrance opening up with just crates and crates of medicine...

Its really just a way of being like... "hey... yeah we coulda wasted your families you idiots... don't mess with the dudes with friking stealth helicopters morons".

Should set the tone nicely for the negotiations and make it clear that although they might be able to mess us our outlying villages, we could have just wrecked their house. And all for the cost of a bit of the warehouse meds and a week of some lab techs to make the filters etc.

With the Russians, I'll defer to Sebastians' thoughts... although the same strategy of a large Parachuted (and I mean like big several pallets full) of food and beverage into the middle of their camp should make it pretty clear that it could have likewise been a big ass bomb... if nothing else it would force them to completely scatter into smaller little groups that wouldn't be worth bombing... whereas right now we are leaving them the leisure of walking around in a way to large of a congregation... and... here's the thought, forcing them to scatter into tiny groups would go well with Sebastian's idea of training our people in guerilla defense.

Today is the submission date for each faction's turns. I was planning on waiting to see what the Turkmen plan to do before we act. I like the idea of just fixing up their things for them, showing them a force of power and then offering them the carrot. They are pretty fiercely independent so don't want to feel like we own them or anything, but they might be happy with doing scouting and etc for us, or at least not attacking us if we give them what they want.