I think the bigger issue is our RZ abatement level, which I am focusing all non free dice on (so 5 tib and 3 mil), that those projects also provide the biggest income boost (and open another glacier mining) just makes it all the better since that means we can activate more dice next turn and Q1 I expect us to be at able to use all of our dice. For orbital, I only have 1 dice on shuttles, the 2nd dice used is for security review. Since I spent all resources with normal dice I had a lot of free dice to use with the 3 bureau to run security reviews (though I did put a free dice on power generation because we will need to do that Q4 so chip away at it this turn).
@Crazycryodude I think the bigger issue is our RZ abatement levels, YZ levels are at the point where bad rolls is what is messing with us while RZ is still at the point that normal rolls see the RZ expand and well the RZ is the most dangerous bit to have expanding. In addition the RZ projects provide more income which means more dice active next turn and with glacier mining next turn that is an expensive project
I personally think that while red zone abatement is important, it's not
the only thing or something that should be prioritized over all other concerns. We've got enough mitigation up already that only the worst rolls are going to eat
much Yellow Zone per turn, and we're not going to be ignoring that going forward. We need to take the civilian economy seriously, because shoveling all available dice into tiberium mitigation and harvesting and heavy industrial infrastructure is how we got into the present political crisis.
Yellow Zone abatement is only not an emergency in the most theoretical statistical of senses, in practical terms we've lost 20% of the planet's Blue Zone area since Turn 1 of the game and it just keeps getting worse. Sure, we had a run of bad rolls recently, but even if Tib starting rolling a 1 every single turn between now and whenever it starts to mutate and overcome our abatement we still wouldn't even push the borders back out to where we started the game much less build up a buffer.
As of Q1 2050, the Blue Zones covered 17.35% of the planet. Now it's 14.02%. That's a difference of 3.33%. In the absurdly unlikely event that tiberium rolled a 1 every turn, we'd be turning 0.61% of planetary surface area Blue each quarter, and we'd be back to January 2050 levels in
six turns.
Given that tiberium hasn't mutated yet, then unless you have specific QM information saying it's near-guaranteed to do so in the next two years, uh... I think you may be exaggerating.
Now, in all fairness, if we continued rolling the
statistically expected results over the long haul, we wouldn't be recovering 0.61% of the planet, we'd be recovering 0.11% of the planet every turn. It would take us 30 turns to get back to January 2050 levels, that is to say, we'd be there some time around the end of 2061. Even ten more points of yellow->blue mitigation would push that target date forward to something more like, uh, 2058 or so, so it
is worth it to press on...
But at the same time, I repeat,
we cannot just drop the civilian economy. We can keep building up layers of tiberium mitigation until the Visceroids come home and it won't satisfy the general public.
It's time to take that seriously, which means committing free dice either to Consumer Goods projects, or to infrastructure and heavy industry projects specifically meant to be in aid of that.
I will be frank the Yellow Zones have more space than the Blue Zones and we need the Blue Zones to continue our industrial progress. Without further commitment to space or orbital cities we can't be sure of the viability of human existence yet. The Yellow Zones turning to Red can wait a bit we already are trying to deploy MARVs right now but keeping the Blue Zones or increasing is increasingly an important part of our job and parliament won't like it that more of the center of global civilization is losing more ground.
We need the Blue Zones because it's only in Blue Zones that we can support large, healthy populations, industrial infrastructure that doesn't need to be hermetically sealed against tiberium dust, and so on. If we start to lose Blue Zones, we're gonna start to lose the factories that make a lot of our stuff, or those factories are going to be running at greatly reduced efficiency.
The thing is that if not for a string of shitty rolls, we'd
already be rolling back and pushing the Blue Zones out into the Yellow. The overwhelming majority of ground we lost in Blue Zones since the war was lost in the first year or two of the first Four Year Plan, because that was when we had significantly less than 50 mitigation on Yellow Zone expansion- the Yellow Zones were growing like the Red Zones are now, and the Red Zones were even worse. Now we just need the YZ roll to stop being a goddamn 90 every turn and they'll be starting to at least slowly roll back.
Wait a minute why are the plans thinking the Indian Ocean is important where most of our government and Blue Zone territories are in the North Atlantic. I believe defending Europe and the North Atlantic is more important because that is where some of our more importants parts are.
Where we build the hydrofoils is not the same as 'the only places we defend with the hydrofoils." But it's also important to note that with the Panama Canal being in a Red Zone (which almost certainly means the canal is inoperable), control of the Indian Ocean is all the more important if we want to be able to maintain shipping lanes and communications between the Pacific Blue Zones (in particular #6 and #12, Japan/Korea and New Zealand/Sydney-Brisbane) and the rest of GDI's territories. Nod gets a lot more dangerous and we get a lot weaker as Nod succeeds in disrupting the llines of connection between our far-flung territories.
I am curious, which areas are no longer blue zones like they were at the start of the quest?
Probably a lot of strips of land along the edges of what were the blue zones at quest start. I doubt we've straight-up lost any blue zones entirely except maybe Greenland or something that never had anything worth remarking on.