I'm just hoping we don't find any spider-shaped ships buried under Syria Planum. Because that would be cause for *external screaming*. And then deployment of a cluster of Ion Cannon satellites to cover that area.
(Granted, the idea of Kane as an agent of the Shadows does make way too much sense.)
Well, we've spent twenty-five years trying to figure out what the fuck he wants.
I just hope we get to wave at him.
Yeah comparing how many dice we've spent to what the canon GDI spent is kind of a bad comparison, even if we've spent about as much on the military as them we've asked the military to do WAAAAAAAAYYYYYY more than the canon GDI did. Canon just turtled up behind the BZ walls and spammed defenses, we're actively holding a lot more territory in both the Red and Yellow Zones that the canon GDI never went anywhere near and this is just the start we've got grand dreams of pushing out across the rest of the planet.
If the military says they aren't ready for offensives then they aren't ready for offensives and we need to pour more money down their throats, and the fact that we've spent about as much as they need to securely turtle up in the BZ's doesn't refute that it fits it pretty well.
THIS part, however, is important. Canon GDI wasn't asking the military to hold much territory outside its well fortified Blue Zones. This placed a much lesser strain on their manpower and equipment, helped along by the fact that for much of the time between Tib Wars III and IV, Kane was probably content to
let GDI stay there, because he was planning for needing their help to build the TCN. While individual Nod commanders probably harassed GDI just as they're doing to us, there was probably no full-court assault that really forced GDI to put its military to the test.
Whereas we, by pushing into Nod's territory, have forced such confrontations... and our forces have been found, if not
wanting necessarily, at least not as tough as we'd like.
More likely for the sequel quest or if we get an absolutely brilliant roll. Plus I'm certain that requires a manned landing.
To be clear, when I say "amazing discovery on Mars," I mean "some kind of extraordinarily valuable minerals" or something, not like... space archaeology, cool as that would be. The point being that because the Moon is much closer to Earth and has much lower delta-V requirements for launch from its surface, it's a lot more likely to be a good source of raw materials in the short run.
Although realistically even if we did have people on Mars, a few hundred people can't exactly scout a whole planet. Mars isn't a location or a region; it's a land surface roughly equal to the combined area of all Earth's continents. If we DID find anything shortly after landing on Mars, it's either by hilarious luck or because the explorers specifically went to a site because a robotic probe had already flagged it as interesting.
This is probably what we're going to end up doing tbh, I was running the numbers on MARVs for fun a little while ago and the trends don't look good for them. Right now at this specific moment in time they're really useful as abatement/harvesting that protects itself, but once the military is available to protect more dedicated Tiberium sector harvesting/abatement the MARVs suddenly go right back to the bottom of the priority list. For example:
1. Red Zone Hub/SMARV fleet combo: ~5 dice and 100 Resources for 3 abatement, 25 income
2. Red Zone mining: ~5 dice and 125 Resources for 3 abatement, 30-60 income and 3 phases of glaciers unlocked
3. Red Zone containment lines: ~5 dice and 125 Resources for 6 abatement, 20-30 income
Alternatively:
1. Yellow Zone Hub/SMARV fleet combo: ~5 dice and 100 Resources for 3 abatement, 15 income and some refugees
2. Yellow Zone harvesting: ~4 dice and 80 Resources for 4 abatement, 5-10 income and more refugees
3. Yellow Zone fortress towns/intensification combo: ~4 dice (3 Infra 1 Tiberium) and 60 Resources for 1 abatement, 5-10 income and max refugees
These numbers are pretty heavily rounded just to make them pretty instead of a bunch of decimals that don't fit neatly into whole dice/multiples of 5 Resource costs, but they're mostly rounded in favor of MARVs the ugly numbers look even worse for them. Once the military gives the signal that they're ready to go on the offensive and take territory again I don't see any reason for us to do MARVs with Free dice. Putting 2 Free dice into a Red Zone MARV fleet/hub will be just straight up worse than taking those same Free dice and putting them into an actual dedicated Tiberium project that gets the nice fat Tiberium roll bonus and gets us more abatement/income for the same cost.
MARVs real niche is self-protecting abatement, which lets us at least make progress on something even while the military can't cover new commitments, but once that situation ends then we don't have much use for them. Alternatively once mutation gets really bad they're a way to turn base Military dice into abatement at a kinda meh but still acceptable exchange rate, but that argument doesn't hold if we're adding Free dice to the Military sector so that we can do MARVs because those Free dice would be getting even more abatement/income as Tib dice. Only when we're desperate enough to start needing our base Military pool to work on any abatement source possible rather than more generally useful equipment do I see MARVs really coming back.
Yeah. As long as the military
isn't truly "good enough" that we can afford to spend Military dice as opposed to Free dice on MARVs (and we are a long, LONG way from getting to be that complacent), MARVs will never be as efficient a way to handle tiberium as Tiberium projects. We're building them because we promised to, and because they do reap rewards we have no other reasonable way of acquiring
right now, but we cannot and should not go on spending Free dice to make sure we can keep building them forever; they are strictly inferior to a lot of the alternatives in the Tiberium area, as you've demonstrated.
It's just that we need to spend a ton of dice on the military to upgun them to the point where they can
cover those projects. Which does kind of put us in a vicious cycle, because the dice we spend on MARVs are dice we
don't spend on the conventional military, or on civilian projects that directly support major military (like the Johannesburg macrospinner, or North Boston -> Factory Refits). Which in turn delays the time at which we hit a level of military readiness in line with our ambitions against Nod in the Yellow and Red Zones.
Ah, just gotta be brief right now, but I had a quick thought on this: While there are lots of MARV locations total, we're kinda halfway towards filling out South America.
RZ-6 North: Complete.
RZ-6 South: Complete.
YZ-5a: In Progress.
YZ-5b: Unstarted.
YZ-5c: Unstarted.
BZ-8: Unstarted.
Even just slow-rolling it with 1/die a turn, we could wall off South America and then severely reduce our military presence there to go elsewhere.
We can probably pass on BZ-8, but this isn't a bad idea. The catch is, just by finishing the 'B' and 'C' Yellow Zone hubs... Well, at that point we're basically committing about 12 Military/Free dice and 200+ Resources to Operation Close In On South America. That's totally something we can do if we want to, but we should be asking ourselves, would those same resources committed to more conventional military preparations do us more good?
Like, suppose we spent 12 dice on shell plants and ablative tile factories? I bet Ground Forces would thank us, then play the theme music from
Popeye the Sailor where he eats his spinach and punch Nod over the horizon.
Suppose we spent 12 dice on North Boston to get us closer to the day when we can refit the war factories and churn out vast swarms of war materiel to make like an Assyrian and crush the land of Nod under our iron-shod boots?
(Indeed, the Assyrians invented the iron-shod boot for the express purpose of assisting in conquest!)
From a military standpoint, the issue with MARVs is that they can't be redeployed. At most a fleet could travel to the next hub over, assuming the terrain is favorable. They therefore lack a bit of flexibility as a military project.
While I don't have any strong opinions on how much we should spend on MARVs going forward, I would suggest pairing MARV deployments with establishing planned cities and other similar localized high-value projects to help provide additional security from the start.
MARVs are huge, but they're not bigger than a ship, so we could probably
in theory design a naval MARV transporter... but it'd be a hell of a project. And since in practice the thing that makes a MARV profitable to operate is that it rolls around munching tiberium, and there's
always more tiberium to munch in any given Yellow/Red zone... There's just no real need for such a thing.
The military may whistle up MARV support for an operation if it's available, but they're not Bolos. They're giant civil engineering vehicles that just so happen to be very well defended.
