I would appreciate it very much if someone could check my math on this. So, I would like to make a Perfectly Balanced city of the tracklayers. It seems like all three factions have good ideas to accomplish their common goals, and I like the text about “one faction to tear down the stars, one to raise up the brutes, and one to keep everyone alive while the other work is done.” However, I’m not sure I mathematically can get to that even with the “adjust local politics” options.
Right now, I’ve built the station at Moulin. I haven’t laid any track on the path to the Hurlers. If I understand right, that gives me 6 points to distribute through the Next Stretch of Track. I also haven’t built a Watchtower to get the 1 emancipationist point there, and if there are other one-off ways to get points I don’t remember them.
I have Emancipationist Tracklayers 10, Liberationist 8, Prehistoricist 7. If I use 5 of my 6 track laying options to get them all to 10, that still leaves one left over; either the Liberationists or Prehistoricists will be one short. If I use the “adjust the local ideology” options in the City itself once it’s built, I can adjust in increments of 3, but I’m still not sure that works. If Prehistoricist stays at 7, Emancipationist and Liberationist can be at 12, but that would still leave Prehistoricist one point behind. And so on. Is there a way to make this math work, or an option I’m missing?
I have some ideas, but I have no way of testing them at the moment. I’m going to trust you on the Stretch of Track count.
I think it’s possible to Subvert everyone with ham sandwiches several times to reset everything to zero. You’re going to need a fair amount of tinned ham, I suppose.
I was hoping inviting January to the board would help, but I think you already need Liberationist below 2 for that to change the balance. I guess that might save you a couple Subvert attempts if this idea works and you do all your subverting plus the board change before you lay down the track. Add in the watchtower, and that’s maybe another 625 scrip of ham you don’t have to buy.
You might have one more option dependent on Furnace’s current status, so that plus the watchtower means you don’t have to do any subversion or board changes at all.
I already healed up Furnace so I can’t feed her anymore. But I don’t think the Subvert option is actually available until the City is built anyways.
Here’s my Next Stretch of Track screenshot, by the way.
Then as far as I know, that’s your only option to get perfect balance if you can’t come up with one more +1 adjustment in addition to building the watchtower.
(Alternatively not building the watchtower and finding a -1 adjustment would work, but I’d guess that’s even more impossible.)
Here’s my math about how many items you’ll need (and again, I cannot verify these numbers right now, fair warning):
If you support the Emancipationists five times while laying track and never build the watchtower, you could Subvert nine times and then support the others twice each, for 45 x tinned ham, 10 x crackling devices, and 2 x distillations of retribution. If you support the Emancipationists only three times before building the city (which could include one for building the watchtower if you want) and make sure none of the others rise higher than 10, then that’s 50 x tinned ham, 5 x crackling devices, and 1 x distillation of retribution. And finally, if you’re happy with them all being zero, keep everything as close to equal as you can and then you’ll need 55 x tinned ham.
I think there’s also some rare failures and rare successes around adjusting Tracklayer leadership after the city is built that might spare you some of the Devices and Distillations and wow do I not know how that works.
Oh, wonder if you could support Emancipationists four times, the Prehistoricists twice, build the city, Subvert eight times, engage in board member shenanigans, and then support the Prehistoricists and Liberationists once each. You’d need seven Revolutionary Favours and three Hillmovers for the board member changes, so that doesn’t rise high to my personal list of favourite ways to do this. Please don’t ask me to actually figure out how expensive this all would be.
Yeah, I do not want to try and gamble on rare successes for leadership changes. I admit I was hoping there’d be another +1 to this or that faction option, like the Watchtower, that I’d overlooked. It’s a bit frustrating to be one point away to anyone, but that meaning the only way to fix it would be to completely drop every rating to 0 and then rebuild.
Ok, wait. So it looks like you can lose 1 point of Liberationist on ‘peel philanthropy from propaganda’ on the alt failure. Does anyone know what the odds are of getting that over the other? I guess I could just try it several times, but I think the math works out then (as long as emancipationist and prehistoricist are liberationist+3x)
And I couldn’t build the Watchtower without messing up the balance, but I don’t think building it is necessary for anything.
