It would appear that Belligerence has passed. At this point in the game, nobody is really an enemy of anyone else, so it seems like fighting isn't going to accomplish much. However, extortion could be a good way of earning more minerals than SCVs can provide. One marine, attacking SCVs, can destroy 16.7 minerals' worth of them per week, so if we threaten n people with n marines, demanding 12 minerals per week, it will always be more cost-effective for them to give in to our demands than to ignore them.
The profitability of extortion scales super-linearly with the number of marines we have, though: if we have, say, six marines and six victims, and most of them give in to our demands, we could probably get away with demanding 25 minerals per victim per week, since if, say, only two of them refuse our demands, each of the two will end up losing 50 minerals' worth of SCVs (which is to say, one SCV). So I could build a marine and start extorting all by myself, but if I had some partners, each of us could make a better profit than we could alone. Who wants to join in? By the way, I plan to assume Mongor as soon as I've fulfilled my other Agoran official duties. —Machiavelli
