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[RAM]

Unit 1: Upgrade a navigation drone to programming drone by giving him ability to link with computers and general talent in coding

That will help in developing computers and decoding the recon data... In future we may use it as a mate for the tech queen making

Navigation is a very useful trait, and it is worth considering that if we generalise ourselves then it limits our capacity to focus ourselves. Also, there is no reason to believe that this would be sufficient to construct devices capable of appreciably impacting our mental faculties, nor deciphering alien texts. perhaps it would be better to focus on more general faculties such as the capacity for abstract thought and ability to focus...

Unit 2: Upgrade LVL2 soldier by giving him some tech drone traits and turning him into a mix of a dedicated weapon designer and capable soldier

He should start working on designing large scale weapons.
Ideally guns capable to knock through armor of the hive ship we recently scouted and studied. We need something to counter enemy tanks, should a need arise

This seems premature, we possess the capacity to defeat them on the small scale, and are not capable of a large scale engagement. We cannot risk the prospect of a formal engagement and pollen can be used to construct traps capable of defeating any threat that we engage informally. A mind queen would be far better suited to such tasks and adapting ourselves to defeat our circumstances should take priority. The jelly would be better spent on a queen or enhancing the worker drones to be more efficient.

Unit 3: Copy electric eating trait of the scouts to the queen. Small, but quite useful thing to have on all our children. Additionally, we ma improve metabolism of the queen in  general, using all the experience we got from designing the digestive chamber

It would seem that if we are to expend jelly on such a thing it would be better spent to allow ourselves to receive and generate electricity in a controlled fashion. We could incorporate this ability into the control mechanisms of our technology and possess swift, precise, variable controls that would be difficult to commandeer and would also provide a potentially useful weapon.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

Navigation is a very useful trait,

Navigation + coding is better. Good quality computers will boost both our research and production and gives us an option to use robots later.

This seems premature, we possess the capacity to defeat them on the small scale, and are not capable of a large scale engagement.

I want to have a force that can defeat a division worth of enemy as soon as possible, allowing us to get noticed and having enough time to adapt to that and regroup before humans will send a huge force

Also, I want smart soldiers, as i want this Soldier to be fertilized next turn and  mate with commander or queen. That may give us slightly less fight capable soldiers than standard S-caste, but I'd like them to fill the role of combat engineers that can be quite useful between combats better weapons\fortifying our bases

A mind queen would be far better suited to such tasks

I am not sure that we need a mind queen, a lot of tech drones can research quite effectively, too. Wasting loyal queen spot on R&D  looks like a waste. We can get several high level drones, clone a lot of generic tech drones and build R&D computers to get the same effect
We have no need for a mind queen to create R&D caste, there are more cost effective ways to do that

I really prefer a queen optimized for farming, or war queen, or deep queen or electro queen, or vacuum adapted queen... Such queens will influent their children in funnier ways allowing us to create very useful subhives

[Ross Vernal]

pollen can be used to construct traps capable of defeating any threat that we engage informally

I will count this as a vote for "Refine any leftover pollen into fuel + byproducts".

It would seem that if we are to expend jelly on such a thing it would be better spent to allow ourselves to receive and generate electricity in a controlled fashion. We could incorporate this ability into the control mechanisms of our technology and possess swift, precise, variable controls that would be difficult to commandeer and would also provide a potentially useful weapon.

This is a doable thing.

I want to have a force that can defeat a division worth of enemy as soon as possible, allowing us to get noticed and having enough time to adapt to that and regroup before humans will send a huge force

Humans do not need to send a huge force. They can just use a Macross Missile Massacre or Orbital Drop strategy.

I am not sure that we need a mind queen, a lot of tech drones can research quite effectively, too. Wasting loyal queen spot on R&D  looks like a waste. We can get several high level drones, clone a lot of generic tech drones and build R&D computers to get the same effect We have no need for a mind queen to create R&D caste, there are more cost effective ways to do that

Mmmnnngh.... I'd like to point out that by Day 13 of the last thread, the Mind Queen had:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

AI Virus
An Entertaining Strategy Game (Beta)
Pressurized Acid Blaster
Pumped Pulse Blasters
Laser Cutters
Heavy Energy Machine Gun
Heavy Energy Tribarrel
Battery
Mechanical Scout Drone (Light Variant, Killer Variant)
Environmental Protection Suit (Armored, Powered, and Anti-Kinetic Variants)
Magnetohydrodynamic Propulsion System
Light Ferrofluid Railgun Cannon
Medium Pulse Cannon
Stealth Scout Fighter
Food Synthesizer
Fusion Reactor
Various Computers
Sensory Array
Heavy Artillery
Cluster Munitions (Anti-personnel, Chemical, Incendiary)
Magnetic Shield

We are currently at

Heavy Energy Machine Gun
Food Synthesizer
Fusion Reactor
Environmental Protection Suit
Battery
Sensory Array

The problem comes from having B-caste produce T-caste offspring. Granted, You should have the Clonekai kinks figured out in a few generations, but until then... eh.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

HM.... Alternative suggestion on royal jelly usage

Only spend one unit of jelly to turn a navigation drone in a computer specialist and save two units of jelly for later use Weapons can wait until we are discovered, and  queen upgrades can wait till the second mating

I want to see our possible offspring before deciding what to do with Royal Jelly...

My current long term plan for royal jelly is like that:

a) Look for possible queen candidates among  our new eggs, create one by spending majority of jelly on it
b) Fertilize one of our tech drones (either navigation or navigation+coding)
c) Mate with tech drone
d) Stockpile royal jelly to start making a tech queen as our third queen as soon as the second queen matures

How does it sound?

[RAM]

 Given our nature, it would seem preferable to dedicate some drones to navigation and some to intellectual devices. If the navigators become dependant upon such devices then they will be impaired by their absence. Requiring the presence of complex devices with every entity that requires independent navigational prowess would increase the maintenance and supply requirements and make the intellectual agents more identifiable. Maintaining a high degree of separation between the castes allows us to react to situations by adjusting our composition, without requiring any modification to individual drones.
 Given our current shortage of resources, some hybridisation may be required to account for all of our needs, so such a proposal is not currently inadvisable. However, the long-term ideal seems likely to be the maintaining of highly specific archetypes, perhaps females with specific roles and males with specific talents. A soldier queen and a navigation drone could produce a clutch of guide soldiers. A worker commander and a mechanical drone could produce a clutch of maintenance drones. With a sufficient population to maintain many clutches at once, and a large population of archetypes, this would be relatively easy to maintain...

[Ross Vernal]

There are 8 T-caste drones, for the record, and double-jellying one into an L2 Programming Drone is viable as well. All Kai aside from Nurses, Queens, and Commanders are neuter-female until Royal Jelly is used to sex them.

In theory, You could pop any bloodline by fertilizing a T-drone or an S-soldier, letting the resulting eggs hit the right level, lay them, and do the Royal Jelly thing to transform them into Queens.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

RAM
Well, in my proposal only one navigation drone will be changed into a coding drone, if his navigation abilities will be too damaged we may fertilize the second navigation drone or even generic tech drone to get traits desired for a mind queen.
We just don't need two navigation drones neither tactically (their abilities aren't really useful right now) nor strategically (we need only one drone to breed it ) 


The more I think about saving two units to start creating the second (farming) queen during the next turn the more I like it...:

a) She will aid us in plant related research and when we'll add the mind queen will have a nice separation:  Body queen - Kai related research. Farming queen - flower related research.  Mind queen - robots and vehicles related research.  Nice specialization here. Add a war queen for weaponry research and we'll have all important aspects covered

b) We need generic queens to pop a lot of babies and subhive creates, and the second queen can devote all her jelly to making queens allowing fast population growth without producing potential rebels that are to strong to handle. While it's not guaranteed, I hope she will be able to produce more jelly than Body queen allowing her to excel in this role.
Body queen will be able to use her jelly to fine-tune herself, mates and make specialized, caste starting queens to develop the main hive

[10ebbor10]

I really want a mind Queen as we really can't afford that one going rogue. We should use our only safe spot to solve  our greatest weakness, not to work on a non problem.

I'd really ike the to be under our persona vontrol.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

Storywise reason : I think we can afford that because tech queen going rogue is FUN. Mind vs body civil war will be very entertaining thing to roleplay should that happen

Also, If I understand it correctly we need a good bad luck to get third queen rebellious

I disagree about non problem. Ability to expand our population and create sub-hives as soon as possible is a very desirable course of action, and if we'll get a dozen or two, even low tech ones, we will be very hard to destroy by any conventional means, while even very developed high tech single hive is vulnerable

Also, if we'll have a mother of many minor queens, It's very good if that mother queen is 100% loyal to us. Producing minor queens ourself is a waste of body queen's royal jelly that can be used on many more useful projects... and minor queen from tech queen will be tech queens themself, and thus too reliable on technology for the quick expansion

I want queens that are able to go alone with few flowers and nothing else and be able to create a working hive miles away.

Anyway, I suggest to save two units of the jelly  and look at possible queenization eggs I am hoping that Ross will give us a a rough outline what kind of queen we can get from each kind of egg... If no good candidates, than we'll wait for a tech queen opportunity and prepare ideal mate for fathering the queen, after all we can take a generic tech drone and use four units of jelly on it

[10ebbor10]

Storywise reason : I think we can afford that because tech queen going rogue is FUN. Mind vs body civil war will be very entertaining thing to roleplay should that happen

It's not a civil war. It's just that the tech queen becomes an NPC, and doesn't listen to us.

I disagree about non problem. Ability to expand our population and create sub-hives as soon as possible is a very desirable course of action, and if we'll get a dozen or two, even low tech ones, we will be very hard to destroy by any conventional means, while even very developed high tech single hive is vulnerable

Point is, an NPC farmer Queen can perfectly take care of and reproduce by itself. I however, would very much like to have some say in researching.

Also, if we'll have a mother of many minor queens, It's very good if that mother queen is 100% loyal to us. Producing minor queens ourself is a waste of body queen's royal jelly that can be used on many more useful projects... and minor queen from tech queen will be tech queens themself, and thus too reliable on technology for the quick expansion

Why would that be a benefit? It's not like the minor Queens are going to be loyal to their mother either. Or that we'll need to be in charge of them. The entire point of multiple redundant hives is that they take care of themselves, which is exactly what a non controlled Queen will do.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

Point is, an NPC farmer Queen can perfectly take care of and reproduce by itself. I however, would very much like to have some say in researching.

If I understand the game system correctly, all queens have some degree of autonomy, loyal or not. But we play hive as whole, not as a body queen. So whatever we choose we will direct the research

Why would that be a benefit? It's not like the minor Queens are going to be loyal to their mother either.

As I see it - if mother  of minor queens rebels, most of her daughters follow her... That means majority of Kai population. If the mother of minor queens is loyal, even if rebellion starts more queens will be loyal

I think that difference between 2nd and 3rd queen is too minor to delay creating a queen that can greatly boost our population growth, farming and botany research while we wait for T-eggs to make a tech queen.

[kopout]

I don't remember when we got the jelly. If we have at least one unit on hand before mating then I suggest we upgrade the lvl 1 pollinator before mating. Give him 1) the ability to digest plant toxins  2) waste products that make very good fertilizer for the flowers and 3) a better instinctive understanding of the flowers.

I think we should use a generic tech drone to make our programmer.

keep one unit of jelly in reserve.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

We'll have  three unit of jelly because we are talking about 8 days period here and we have no jelly to upgrade the pollinator

I don't think that upgrading generic tech drone with one unit of jelly is a good idea, at the very least we need two: one to make it smarter than your average drone and another to make it computer specialist, while Navigation drone was made smarter already and we need only one unit of jelly to have smarter and coder in one package

Also, programing and navigation in one package will allow far better programming of robots and, especially, autopilots so there are obvious synergy between navigator and computer specialist

[Noxes]

+1 to Ukrainian Ranger's general course for proposed action.

[Travisplo]

PTW