Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Plan Capitally Urgent, Funds for Steel Talons, Get Your First Shots, Cleanup on Aisle LEO
Just so that people have the percentages of completion on hand, here is the leading plan, with percentages.
[] Plan Capitally Urgent, Funds for Steel Talons, Get Your First Shots, Cleanup on Aisle LEO
-[] Tidal Power Plants (Phase 2), 4 dice (40 Resources) 0%
-[] Yellow Zone Arcologies (Phase 1), 1 die (15 Resources) 97%
-[] Fusion Peaker Plants, 1 die (20 Resources) 66%
-[] Heavy Rolling Stock Plants, 2 dice (20 Resources) 96%
-[] Kure Machine Works, 2 dice (30 Resources) 0%
-[] Chemical Precursor Plants, 2 dice (30 Resources) 34%
-[] Johannesburg Myomer Macrospinner (Phase 1), 2 dice (40 Resources) 100% phase 1, 12% Phase 2
-[] State Operated Breweries, 1 die (10 Resources) 91%
-[] Perennial Aquaponics Bays, 2 dice (20 Resources) 97%
-[] Tiberium Prospecting Expeditions (Repeating Phase), 3 dice (15 Resources) 91%
-[] Chicago Planned City (Phase 3), 1 die (20 Resources) 0%
-[] Hewlett-Gardener Method Development, 1 die (30 Resources) 100%
-[] GDSS Enterprise (Phase 3), 1 die (20 Resources) (fusion) 0%
-[] Orbital Cleanup (Phase 3) 1 die (10 Resources) (fusion) 42%
-[] Asteroid Belt Survey Probes, 1 die (15 Resources) 41%
-[] Vaccine Development Programs, 1 die (25 Resources) 0%
-[] Fashion Development Houses, 1 dice (10 Resources) 0%
-[] Game Development Studios, 2 dice (10 Resources) 0%
-[] Reclamator Hub Red Zone 7 North, 1 die (20 Resources) 75%
-[] Reclamator Fleet YZ-5a, 1 die (20 Resources) 9%
-[] Zone Suit Factories (Oslo), 1 die (15 Resources) 71%
-[] Ablat Plating Deployment (Phase 2), 3 dice (30 Resources) 83%
-[] Governor Class Cruiser Shipyards (Yokohama), 3 dice (60 Resources) 59%
-[] Rapid Fire Laser Weapons Development, 1 die (15 Resources) 91%
-[] Security Reviews (Military), 2 dice 99%
[] Plan Capitally Urgent, Funds for Steel Talons, Get Your First Shots, Cleanup on Aisle LEO
-[] Tidal Power Plants (Phase 2), 4 dice (40 Resources) 0%
-[] Yellow Zone Arcologies (Phase 1), 1 die (15 Resources) 97%
-[] Fusion Peaker Plants, 1 die (20 Resources) 66%
-[] Heavy Rolling Stock Plants, 2 dice (20 Resources) 96%
-[] Kure Machine Works, 2 dice (30 Resources) 0%
-[] Chemical Precursor Plants, 2 dice (30 Resources) 34%
-[] Johannesburg Myomer Macrospinner (Phase 1), 2 dice (40 Resources) 100% phase 1, 12% Phase 2
-[] State Operated Breweries, 1 die (10 Resources) 91%
-[] Perennial Aquaponics Bays, 2 dice (20 Resources) 97%
-[] Tiberium Prospecting Expeditions (Repeating Phase), 3 dice (15 Resources) 91%
-[] Chicago Planned City (Phase 3), 1 die (20 Resources) 0%
-[] Hewlett-Gardener Method Development, 1 die (30 Resources) 100%
-[] GDSS Enterprise (Phase 3), 1 die (20 Resources) (fusion) 0%
-[] Orbital Cleanup (Phase 3) 1 die (10 Resources) (fusion) 42%
-[] Asteroid Belt Survey Probes, 1 die (15 Resources) 41%
-[] Vaccine Development Programs, 1 die (25 Resources) 0%
-[] Fashion Development Houses, 1 dice (10 Resources) 0%
-[] Game Development Studios, 2 dice (10 Resources) 0%
-[] Reclamator Hub Red Zone 7 North, 1 die (20 Resources) 75%
-[] Reclamator Fleet YZ-5a, 1 die (20 Resources) 9%
-[] Zone Suit Factories (Oslo), 1 die (15 Resources) 71%
-[] Ablat Plating Deployment (Phase 2), 3 dice (30 Resources) 83%
-[] Governor Class Cruiser Shipyards (Yokohama), 3 dice (60 Resources) 59%
-[] Rapid Fire Laser Weapons Development, 1 die (15 Resources) 91%
-[] Security Reviews (Military), 2 dice 99%
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staplesdex2
CLASSFIED
[X] Plan Capitally Urgent, Funds for Steel Talons, Get Your First Shots, Cleanup on Aisle LEO
[X] Plan Cap Goods, PS and Military
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'm not so sure that we should crash-fund expensive projects on speculation that there will be follow-on projects from the silo technology.
There is a definite option for refining tiberium back into inert materials better, it's called the Hewlett-Gardner method, and my plan works on it. The other plan to build long-term tiberium silos seems a bit more of a speculative move as far as "things to do with tiberium" go. Since both actions are expensive and one is considerably more immediately useful to us than the other, I don't recommend trying to do both at once when we're resource-limited.
In all fairness, the adjustments pretty much all hit space- it's a plan that sacrifices "beeline to Enterprise Phase 3" to accomplish a number of other things by freeing up funding and to a lesser extent lift capacity.
Well thank you. I should note that I'm actually a fan of building space stations, it's just that I'd like to slip in enough orbital cleanup that we get through Phase 3 or 4 by the end of this year. The direct benefits of being able to safely launch low orbit satellites are attractive, and the indirect benefits may be nice too, and importantly it's self-funding, even profitable when done with fusion dice, which is wonderful when we're trying to do a bunch of other expensive stuff.
Almost nothing else we do pays for itself anywhere near as quickly as orbital cleanup. Even tiberium mining takes several turns to pay off, though it's the gift that keeps on giving and in the long run there's no comparison.
To be very clear, I am supportive of setting a goal of completing Enterprise Phase 3 by the end of this year, maybe even by Q3 if the dice are merciful- though I'd prefer to do Shala to buy up political support we can then cash out for labor unions and co-ops.
We can do the Big Commie Reforms (unions and co-ops) effectively for free (aside from the political support cost) and do well on them, as long as we do one at a time. Either can be done well by having three dice and average results, and we have three Bureaucracy dice. If we're feeling really antsy we can spend a single Free die. Weirdly this is arguably to our advantage in a way because it means we have fewer dice competing for the Resource pool- those options don't cost Resources.
The trick is, we have so much else going on, and so relatively few Bureaucracy tasks, that it would be kind of wasteful to pour 3-4 MORE Free dice into the Bureaucracy just to get a second Big Commie Reform done in the same turn as the first one. Better to spread the reforms out over two turns, spending much less in the way of Free Dice, and having the Free Dice to spare working on the military or on critical megaprojects like North Boston.
The thing is, the only reason we want Chemical Precursors is for the +2 Capital Goods. We need at least +1 Capital Goods to be confident of covering the shipyard we're building this turn. Now, we'd of course like more, as much as we can get, but we just need +1 to be 'okay.'
Now... I can't speak for anyone but me and @Crazycryodude on this off the top of my head, but both our plans include two Heavy Industry dice on Heavy Rolling Stock, which means an overwhelmingly good chance of getting +2 Capital Goods from that. Having already arguably overinvested in that project to ensure success, there is very little benefit in also overinvesting on Chemical Precursors. If two dice is enough for a good chance to complete the project, that's acceptable, and it's better to get rollover progress towards the Johannesburg plant than to waste progress on Chemical Precursors.
Yeah, the problem is mostly just resource budgeting. Chicago is a significant mitigation project (2 Yellow, 2 Red), and has nontrivial other benefits, it just costs 320 Progress and sucks a lot of the oxygen out of the room if done aggressively. There's some other stuff in there, but we're not quite to the point where we feel confident rolling out a ton of expensive projects in the Yellow and Red zones that overextend the military, which limits our options for RpT increase and mitigation. It's not something we're ignoring, but it's tricky to get the ball rolling again.
Fusion dice have dropped the cost of building big stations to 20 R/die, which is actually not that bad, and we've seen from the Philadelphia that the bonuses of Phase 3 and later station completion can be quite significant- and can affect groundside operations. The Philadelphia is now giving us an extra Free die and a small bonus to literally every d100 we roll, which is pretty fuckin' sweet and will pay off a lot in the long run.
We are reaching a point where it is inadvisable to not activate all three of our Orbital dice, because:
1) Probes are cheap and in the long run will lead to major new +RpT options.
2) Orbital cleanup literally pays for itself on a short time delay, with a tidy profit most of the time if you use fusion dice. It also unlocks...
3) Communication satellites at 10 R/die if we keep cleaning up orbit, which are quite possibly THE most cost-effective way we have of getting +Logistics.
4) As noted, the big stations only cost 20 R/die, which is fully competitive with a lot of the other major projects we do anyway, and they have substantial benefits.
The argument that we "can't afford" space operations is something of a holdover from the First Four Year Plan, before we had the fusion yards up and running and before a good deal of other stuff was in place.
A boxer doesn't win a match by blocking wherever his opponent punched last.
We're currently fighting to establish real footholds in South America for the first time since before Tib War II, as far as I can tell, and this is a good time to do everything in our power to disrupt Nod sealanes to that continent and protect our own. The Atlantic is a smaller, more easily controlled ocean and easier to turn into a GDI lake, especially the North Atlantic.
With that said, the second and third yards should definitely go to Durban and one of the sites in the Pacific. And we should do the last Rapier yard, the one in (I think) Korea, if and when we ever have that much Energy to spare.
Not gonna lie, I'm flattered; I'd kind of resigned myself to having no impact.
I honestly was basically okay with @Crazycryodude 's plan except the zero dice on Talons funding, but I was thinking, "hey, didn't we just spend like 3-4 turns doing almost nothing in space but obsessively building the giant stations? Isn't there a bunch of other stuff we can do in space too that might be important?"
And it turns out that making that switch gave us more options. Not that Enterprise Phase 3 isn't important- quite the opposite!- but dropping that 'finish ASAP at all costs' mindset gives us more wiggle room.
- Location
- The Underdark
Also, one thing. When it comes to reforms, and bigger direction of the quest type stuff, I tend to react to what the thread wants in combination with the ideology of the character. So the thread has typically said "more communism" so I am giving them the reforms for more communism. If the thread had taken a different direction, I would have made reforms that privatized chunks of your sectors and let you refocus.
To follow up on this: SCED has finished the first phase of Lunar resource scouting (probes). That means that we're likely waiting on Enterprise phase 3 to be able to start Lunar resource extraction, after this turn.
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So what you're saying is that we should have talked more about neko gene-engineering in the thread.
- Location
- USA
[X] Plan Capitally Urgent
- Location
- Earth
[X] Plan Capitally Urgent, Funds for Steel Talons, Get Your First Shots, Cleanup on Aisle LEO
QM just noted in Discord we'll be in capital goods hell next turn. Plan makers and voters might want to keep this in mind for this plan and the next plan.
QM just noted in Discord we'll be in capital goods hell next turn. Plan makers and voters might want to keep this in mind for this plan and the next plan.
From discord said:
- Pronouns
- He/It/Argh!
*raised eyebrow*
Yet we are going for the 'we ran out of resources for Tiberium dice usage' option...
Sure 20R appears cheap, but those projects also require much more progress. And at the time I posted, the leading plan were going 3 dice on big station projects, not the cheaper things.
Three out of four of your points for Orbital were not about the station projects, and the station projects were the only thing I objected to...
- Location
- Place
[X] Plan Capitally Urgent, Funds for Steel Talons, Get Your First Shots, Cleanup on Aisle LEO
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I WOULD JUST LIKE TO REMIND EVERYONE...
that the military is nearly 30% of the Resource budget in my plan, and is using literally all the Free dice. This is probably not a sustainable level of effort unless we want to be behind in areas like Tiberium and Orbital next plan, same as we're behind in Military this plan.
The key point of the strategy here is to deliberately cheap out on Orbital and Tiberium for a few turns, doing things that are important but don't eat triple-digit R budgets, while putting out the biggest Military fires until the screaming stops. Hopefully we can dial back a bit to slightly more manageable Military budgets after that, throwing some of our Free dice to Heavy Industry (North Boston is very medium in resource cost), Light Industry (so so many appealing options there), and Orbital (to get Enterprise Phase 3 and orbital resource extraction unlocked).
Remember that this plan (and Cryo's baseline plan) throw seven dice at the military's "Very High" priority projects, hopefully enough that they calm down a bit. We'll still be building Governor shipyards after this, to be clear, and we'll still be working on MARVs and so on... but we're going to have to cool our jets just a bit overall. There are just only so many Resources and dice to go around, and almost everything that isn't the Military has been feeling the strain on one level or another for the past year or so, even if that's mostly just filling in for delayed expenses.
Hopefully a die on Oslo and three on ablatives will at least get everyone to calm down a bit. We're probably gonna need at least four more dice to finish Enterprise Phase 3, but we can in principle slam that out next quarter if we really want to and have a good chance of clearing the project, more if we really wanna push it and are willing to tighten our belts in other areas (e.g. not start another MARV hub and concentrate on finishing the Chicago fleet, things like that).
But thanks for the information; I'll be more actively behind a push to at least try and get Enterprise Phase 3 finished next turn.
The reality check is that there will always be more things we can do with Capital Goods (or Logistics, or anything else) than we have surplus available. We can realistically complete North Boston Phase 4 and the war factory upgrades within the scope of the current Four Year Plan. Realistically, we cannot do that and complete a hypothetical "mass power armor production" megaproject in the same Plan, so "put all of GDI's ground troops in either a tank, a mech, or power armor" is going to have to be a project for the Third Four Year Plan, by which time we can rummage up another 16 Capital Goods or whatever. Somehow.
The key is to just keep fighting and not angst over the number of possible projects that exist.
And the military buildup is being done PRECISELY because we want to be able to get back to normal tiberium mitigation operations that are a lot more economical than MARV spam and net us actual serious RpT from tiberium harvesting. We've slammed up against caps on how much mitigation we can safely do, that have closed off a lot of our attractive options, so we need to work on other areas for a while to get back to business as it was.
Look at it like this. Our ratio of Resources to Dice this turn, not counting Bureaucracy dice that normally don't use them, is 540/40 or 13.5 R/turn. That means that any project costing 10 R/turn or less is 'cheap,' 15 R/turn projects are 'a little above average,' and 20 R/turn projects are 'kinda pricey.'
By contrast, 30 R/turn is 'are you sure this is necessary' territory, where just funding one die of the project means you need to find multiple other dice to tune down to 5 R/turn or drop them entirely just to be able to afford it at all.
During the first plan, stations were 30 R/turn and excruciatingly expensive. Now they are merely 'kinda pricey' because we can just spam fusion dice to build them. And since they do very much provide concrete rewards that are objectively valuable, that's a nice starting point.
Ultimately, unless we score a miracle and yoink the Tacitus back from Nod or Kane does us an unexpected favor, we are committed to evacuating Earth eventually. That's our Plan B and Plan A is pretty much a pipe dream right now. We need to get the basic infrastructure set up for our space construction operations to be more or less self-supporting, and that does involve investing seed money up front. But if we don't do it know, we're likely to be kind of boned doing it later, and we're losing out on the various benefits of space infrastructure up front (like the very real bonuses we're getting from having the Philadelphia back up and running at pre-Tib War III levels more or less).
that the military is nearly 30% of the Resource budget in my plan, and is using literally all the Free dice. This is probably not a sustainable level of effort unless we want to be behind in areas like Tiberium and Orbital next plan, same as we're behind in Military this plan.
The key point of the strategy here is to deliberately cheap out on Orbital and Tiberium for a few turns, doing things that are important but don't eat triple-digit R budgets, while putting out the biggest Military fires until the screaming stops. Hopefully we can dial back a bit to slightly more manageable Military budgets after that, throwing some of our Free dice to Heavy Industry (North Boston is very medium in resource cost), Light Industry (so so many appealing options there), and Orbital (to get Enterprise Phase 3 and orbital resource extraction unlocked).
Remember that this plan (and Cryo's baseline plan) throw seven dice at the military's "Very High" priority projects, hopefully enough that they calm down a bit. We'll still be building Governor shipyards after this, to be clear, and we'll still be working on MARVs and so on... but we're going to have to cool our jets just a bit overall. There are just only so many Resources and dice to go around, and almost everything that isn't the Military has been feeling the strain on one level or another for the past year or so, even if that's mostly just filling in for delayed expenses.
That's fair, that's fair. I'm going to be quite supportive of plans that go heavy on Enterprise Phase 3 overall after this turn, but we're in a Military dice crunch trying to spend (in my plan) something like seven Military/Free dice on urgent priorities, one quasi-mandatory die on Steel Talons research, and still scrape loose a couple of dice for MARVs. Add that to the desire to do the sweet sweet "boost your tiberium refining cap" research, which is kind of pricey, and you trip over the whole "cannot be strong everywhere" problem.
Hopefully a die on Oslo and three on ablatives will at least get everyone to calm down a bit. We're probably gonna need at least four more dice to finish Enterprise Phase 3, but we can in principle slam that out next quarter if we really want to and have a good chance of clearing the project, more if we really wanna push it and are willing to tighten our belts in other areas (e.g. not start another MARV hub and concentrate on finishing the Chicago fleet, things like that).
But thanks for the information; I'll be more actively behind a push to at least try and get Enterprise Phase 3 finished next turn.
[shrug]
The reality check is that there will always be more things we can do with Capital Goods (or Logistics, or anything else) than we have surplus available. We can realistically complete North Boston Phase 4 and the war factory upgrades within the scope of the current Four Year Plan. Realistically, we cannot do that and complete a hypothetical "mass power armor production" megaproject in the same Plan, so "put all of GDI's ground troops in either a tank, a mech, or power armor" is going to have to be a project for the Third Four Year Plan, by which time we can rummage up another 16 Capital Goods or whatever. Somehow.
The key is to just keep fighting and not angst over the number of possible projects that exist.
Yes. But the real Resource hog in this plan cycle, as it has been for the past few turns, the military, at I believe 160 Resources. By contrast, orbital eating up 75 (Cryo's plan) or 45 (my plan) is small potatoes.
And the military buildup is being done PRECISELY because we want to be able to get back to normal tiberium mitigation operations that are a lot more economical than MARV spam and net us actual serious RpT from tiberium harvesting. We've slammed up against caps on how much mitigation we can safely do, that have closed off a lot of our attractive options, so we need to work on other areas for a while to get back to business as it was.
My point here is, the station projects aren't white elephants and we genuinely can/should make the effort to actually do them, especially when we're starting to get close to the point of being able to get RpT out of them. Which is when we start seeing a true virtuous cycle in Orbital where expanding capability funds further expansion of capability, sort of like the glacier mines did during the first several years of the quest until we smacked into military limitations.
Look at it like this. Our ratio of Resources to Dice this turn, not counting Bureaucracy dice that normally don't use them, is 540/40 or 13.5 R/turn. That means that any project costing 10 R/turn or less is 'cheap,' 15 R/turn projects are 'a little above average,' and 20 R/turn projects are 'kinda pricey.'
By contrast, 30 R/turn is 'are you sure this is necessary' territory, where just funding one die of the project means you need to find multiple other dice to tune down to 5 R/turn or drop them entirely just to be able to afford it at all.
During the first plan, stations were 30 R/turn and excruciatingly expensive. Now they are merely 'kinda pricey' because we can just spam fusion dice to build them. And since they do very much provide concrete rewards that are objectively valuable, that's a nice starting point.
Ultimately, unless we score a miracle and yoink the Tacitus back from Nod or Kane does us an unexpected favor, we are committed to evacuating Earth eventually. That's our Plan B and Plan A is pretty much a pipe dream right now. We need to get the basic infrastructure set up for our space construction operations to be more or less self-supporting, and that does involve investing seed money up front. But if we don't do it know, we're likely to be kind of boned doing it later, and we're losing out on the various benefits of space infrastructure up front (like the very real bonuses we're getting from having the Philadelphia back up and running at pre-Tib War III levels more or less).
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I mean, no, no we're not.Well we aren't beating Tiberium with that attitude.
That's the point.
I'm totally in favor of shouting "SCREW YOU, we'll build OUR OWN tiberium control network, WITH BLACKJACK AND HOOKERS!" and doing what we can on the subject... but just flinging every scrap of Resources we have at the problem still probably only buys us time for something else to break our way.
So just sitting on our hands and not building the orbital stations we need to get proper space infrastructure up and going and our +RpT virtuous cycle from orbital mining running? Yeah, that's just gonna leave us regretting it in the long run. Same as entirely ignoring mitigation (which we are not doing) would.
I fully plan to shift a bit of emphasis back towards mitigation and orbital (both!) in the near future, but everything's gotta come from somewhere, you know?
