Kusari discussion club

[Karst]

Wonder if this will become a one million page affair like that thread about Rheinland's stagnation.....

Honestly, I don't see Kusari as being in such a bad shape at this time - it was certainly worse a little while back.
The AFA is back and fairly active, the Isejin are back and fairly active as well.
Then there are the rebels, which are also fairly active.....

For me, Kusari has always been the most roleplay-oriented house. The vast majority of interesting roleplay encounters I've had in house space were in Kusari, and that's not just because I spend quite a lot of time there.
I'm not entirely sure why, but Kusari seems to have a particularly large amount of interesting and unique characters.

Now, geography.
(I'm going to talk a lot about unlawful activity now, because let's face it - interesting gameplay and roleplay generally doesn't occur much between lawfuls and traders)
Kyushu is a pirate hotspot, probably only behind parts of Liberty and neighboring Tau-23, largely because of the amount of ore coming through.
But also because it is well accessible from several sides - Ainu can be used by Outcasts, Dragons, and of course GC, while Samura unlawfuls have Kagoshima.

The other systems are more problematic.

I think part of the reason for that is the lack of unlawful bases, and the relatively low number of jump holes.

Shikoku - There's an FA base near the hole on the Kyushu side, and a Hacker base near the hole on the Galileo side.
That means it's mainly easily accessible only for FA, which haven't been active until very recently.
We'll see if we see more of them.
The problem is, it's not an attractive place to go for the Dragon/GC unlawful side because of it's remoteness.

GC have good relations with Hackers and could probably base out of Leiden. However, that would mean being incredibly far away from all the other places they might be active. Returning to Ainu means cruising.....uh, probably more than 200k.
And their other base? Who knows why that battleship is in Okinawa. I'll get to that.

And Dragons? Well, I don't know about their relations with Hackers, if there actually are any. It definitely doesn't seem likely that they'd base out of Leiden.
Even if they did.....they are lightyears away from any of their other bases.

The infocard for Fuchu mentions Blood Dragons staging raids against the place, and I've got to wonder.....from where? The nearest Dragon bases are literally on the other end of Kusari.
And perhaps more importantly, simply reaching Shikoku as a Dragon or GC involves either passing very close to a FA base, or going through a jump gate with a police border station right next to it. Neither of those options are realistic in roleplay.

Suggestion: Add another jump hole to Tokyo or Honshu, and/or a Blood Dragon base.

New Tokyo. Once again, this system suffers from poor accessibility for the Kishiro-aligned unlawfuls. GC based out of Ainu either have to head to Chugoku, Honshu and to the hole, or take the jump hole from Kyushu, which has hostile bases on both sides. (unless they take the jump gate - might actually be more realistic)
Blood Dragons coming from Kyoto have it a bit shorter, obviously.

Of course, that puts them far on one side of the system - generally the side with less traffic. And getting to the other side involves immense amounts of cruising, if one wishes to avoid attention.

Suggestion: Add another jump hole from any neighboring system. It only has holes to Kyushu (realistically, limited to Samura-aligned unlawfuls) and Honshu.
Or, possibly, add a Kishiro-aligned unlawful base.

Honshu - likely the only system that's easier to access for the Kishiro-aligned unlawfuls, which makes sense as it is the system most influenced by Kishiro.

Still - a combination of a total lack of unlawful bases, a small amount of not-exactly-super-convenient access jump holes, and the layout of the lanes makes it unpopular for unlawfuls.
Unless one is sure which direction someone's going, the only realistic spot to pirate is right by the Tokyo gate - and obviously, pirating right next to the gate to a capitol system is very risky.
Generally though, Honshu is pretty okay.

Okinawa - I don't have much to say about this place.
It makes sense inrp that GC and Dragons have bases here, but they're not terribly useful gameplay-wise. The GC base would be useful to pirate the Honshu lane from, but a lot of the traffic on that line is GMG - which they don't (shouldn't) be pirating.

The Dragon base is very remote and only really useful to access Nagano and hope Samura ships show up.

Hokkaido, Rishiri, Nagano - these systems are more or less okay.
Samura unlawfuls can stage from Nagano, and Kishiro unlawfuls from Ainu or Chugoku.
Still, they don't really have enough traffic to see much action.
Of course, this will change massively anyway when Rishiri gets a jump gate to Gallia (it was Rishiri that gets it, right?).

There, geography covered.

Now, the factions themselves. I agree totally that the change to a so-called democracy has caused some problems.

So earlier, the system was a conservative monarchy, with Samura being the dominant corporation.
At the same time, the Hogosha were generally viewed as criminals, tolerated only by Samura and elements of the authorities.

Now, we have a democracy (at least in name), with Kishiro being the dominant corporation, yet suddenly the Samura-aligned Hogosha have become a legitimate corporation?
That just makes no sense whatsoever - and it leaves the Hogosha confused and with no real role.

Suggestion: Hogosha become fully outlawed, something that would only make sense in a Kishiro-dominated government.
They get rephacked hostile to Kishiro, KSP, and KNF (though not Samura, obviously).
In return, they get the right to commit piracy.

FA are, I'd say, pretty much fine the way they are now - conservative unlawfuls that focus on foreigners and Synth Foods in particular (though the complete lack of Synth Foods ships is a little sad).

Now, what to do with the GC and Blood Dragons?
The thing is, they've both achieved a great deal of their main goals - the fall from power of Samura and the Shogun, the end of the patriarchal monarchy (GC) and the illegitimate monarchy (BD).
Of course, neither has really fully achieved their goals.
In case of the GC, either a matriarchy (for the more radical members), or at least an end to the still highly patriarchal, sexist structure of Kusari society.
For the Dragons, the reinstatement of their own emperor and themselves as the emperor's guard (if I understand BD lore correctly).

I'm not entirely sure what to do with these factions, as I don't really see a huge problem with the way they are now - except the aforementioned lack of bases.
However, what I see as an option is the GC becoming semi-lawful.
Focusing on smuggling cardamine and pirating outside of house space (which would include Samura-owned Nagano), as well as in Kyushu, and Samura ships within Kusari (both of which would conveniently be ignored by the government, though not the KNF).
The Blood Dragons, on the other hand, are unlikely to give up arms until the government reflects their ancient ideals exactly.
This could lead to a falling out with the GC - it was always kind of an alliance out of necessity in the first place, the conservative samurai and the young, radical, drug-abusing feminists have no reason to cooperate anyway, except against hated Samura.
With Samura now having lost most of its power, I'd see it as realistic for that uneasy alliance to come to an end.

I'll just drop my thoughts in here rather randomly:

> Reduce the level of xenophobia.

In a game that is meant to be played together and which is only really good when players actually talk to each other, extreme xenophobia and "gaijin!"-standard-rp is not attractive at all.

Totally agree. It's fine that FA and to a lesser extent Hogosha are xenophobic, but really, this constant gaijin spam is not going to draw more people from other houses to Kusari.
Kusari is supposed to be a fresh, new, optimistic democracy. Sure there are conservative elements, but the "old guard" has lost its power.
Xenophobia should be "uncool" in most of modern Kusari society.

My KSP is always nice to foreigners :3

> Concentrate on a few factions and awaken them to life instead of spreading activity so thin it stays invisible

How many unlawful factions are there in Kusari? How about we concentrate on making one work, or perhaps two instead of... lots? But that's not only a Kusari problem: generally, too many competitors for a roleplay segment (like "unlawful baddie" or "lawful moneymaker" exist everywhere.

Possibly......but not necessarily. Kusari has four unlawful factions (yes, I'm counting Hogosha), like Rheinland.
But look at Bretonia: They only have two (Gaians and Mollys) and both are totally inactive. So fewer unlawful factions don't necessarily mean they'll work better.

> A House needs a war where massive capfleets can batte

Assuming that in the next version cap fights will not crash the server any more, I would love to see Kusari joining Gallia fully and attacking Liberty's northern front. Or... I don't really care who they fights, but they deserve a real warzone where players can pit their big toys.

I don't know about that.....admittedly, I'm biased because I have no caps.
But aside from that, theoretically, they already have this option: There's an Outcast base just one jump away, in fact the Outcast home system is only three (rather short) jumps away. And we do, in fact, see Outcast caps in Kyushu fairly often.

Aside from that, the BD have an entire capital shipline - so the potential's there, Kusari already has enemies with capfleets, these massive battles just don't occur for various reasons.

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