Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
[X] Enhanced Security Services
[X] Arya Gulati
[X] Brigadier General Tali Jackson
[X] Graduates
-[X]Orbital
-[X]Tiberium
[X] Arya Gulati
[X] Brigadier General Tali Jackson
[X] Graduates
-[X]Orbital
-[X]Tiberium
- Location
- Mobile, Alabama
We showed favoritism to a major religion. The followers of others are watching. It's a moot point atm those locations are Red zones. However. When they're free of Tiberium? I expect some people will want them rebuilt. The way they look I'm sure will be hotly debated. The location has weight to it. Even if the buildings are gone.
I am very confused. What did you think I was saying? Because my comment was purely a "yes, this is an additional bonus for completing the Planned City project". I don't see how you got "that was its only benefit" out of that.
There's literally nothing left in Rome and Jerusalem besides some GPS coordinates, if we somehow eliminated the deepest Red Zones on Earth and scraped all the Tib off those GPS coordinates all we'd have is a bunch of bare rock. Tiberium's probably even eaten away at geographical features at this point, I'd guess there's not even a Temple Mount (like, the hill made of rock that has probably been swiss-cheesed by Tib) left much less any of the historical buildings etc. that everyone actually cares about.
Judaism has 1) always been small and 2) always been good at rolling with the punches, I'm sure "next year in Jersulaem" is said even more ironically every Passover and otherwise they're just getting on with life. Christianity has likely shattered into a zillion different sects by now and the Catholic/Protestant-descended sects that I'd expect to mostly dominate the GDI at least never really put that much weight on Rome/Jerusalem anyways. Certainly nowhere near the same weight that Islam puts on Mecca/Medina where it's a core pillar of most sects that you HAVE to visit Mecca at some point in your life if at all possible.
I don't think there's much value to be had in another major project tied to a specific geographical area for an Abrahamic religion if we've already ticked Islam's boxes, the other two big ones can deal with it they're much less geographically focused anyways.
Judaism has 1) always been small and 2) always been good at rolling with the punches, I'm sure "next year in Jersulaem" is said even more ironically every Passover and otherwise they're just getting on with life. Christianity has likely shattered into a zillion different sects by now and the Catholic/Protestant-descended sects that I'd expect to mostly dominate the GDI at least never really put that much weight on Rome/Jerusalem anyways. Certainly nowhere near the same weight that Islam puts on Mecca/Medina where it's a core pillar of most sects that you HAVE to visit Mecca at some point in your life if at all possible.
I don't think there's much value to be had in another major project tied to a specific geographical area for an Abrahamic religion if we've already ticked Islam's boxes, the other two big ones can deal with it they're much less geographically focused anyways.
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- Location
- The internet
[X] Brigadier General Tali Jackson
Derpmind checked and as you can see we rolled 11 99s.
- Location
- USA
Page 686, Derpmind helpfully compiled a list. We've rolled 11 99s in comparison to 9 100s over the quest. So yeah, looking pretty good imo.
And one of the 99's was on the tib satellites, a crit there would have given us 1d5+1 instead of 1d4+1 we have now.
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[X] Graduates
-[X] Tiberium
-[X] Orbital
[X] Michael O'Brian
[X] Arya Gulati
[X] Brigadier General Tali Jackson
Changing my vote up just a little since Hideo Daishi isn't getting any traction, swapping him out for O'Brian. We really could use the extra Orbital die from him as long as we also get Graduates, I think our first new Orbital die should come from Grads but if we want a second (and we probably do with the targets we picked) then he's a good way to get a second die.
-[X] Tiberium
-[X] Orbital
[X] Michael O'Brian
[X] Arya Gulati
[X] Brigadier General Tali Jackson
Changing my vote up just a little since Hideo Daishi isn't getting any traction, swapping him out for O'Brian. We really could use the extra Orbital die from him as long as we also get Graduates, I think our first new Orbital die should come from Grads but if we want a second (and we probably do with the targets we picked) then he's a good way to get a second die.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah. I'd actually been thinking about that a bit after my last post. Land-based aviation usually isn't too limited by how much physical space is available to park the aircraft; you can base two or three helpful drone-buddies at an airbase for every actual combat aircraft and while it may be expensive, at least everything will fit.
But since the wingman drones aren't that much smaller than the corresponding combat aircraft- they can't be, to achieve the same performance characteristics- yeah, no surprise that putting them aboard a carrier is tricky. If having enough pilots to go around is still a problem, you might see the carriers flying drones anyway, but naval aviation is going to be the last place the drones start operating. Partly because of the space issue where they directly displace human piloted aircraft, and partly because landing on a carrier deck is the hardest kind of landing and making sure the drones can do it on autopilot involves an extra qualification step to build navalized wingman drones.
@uju32 , based on this, plus the fact that the Super Orca design is already finalized anyway, I think we should just skip bothering to get any new techs before developing the escort carriers. There's an argument for working on plasma cannons or shimmer shields before developing the Havoc, maybe, but the escort carriers have waited long enough.
Yeah, maybe, but if we've already rolled back tiberium (read: built the TCN), then a lot of the work of reconstruction will be a much simpler task, and it might very well be one that could/should proceed without much input from Treasury.
The Mecca-Jeddah-Medina complex of planned cities exists in the form it does because of a very specific combination of pressures, including:
1) Muslims quite frankly caring more about getting it done,
2) it being more logistically possible because it doesn't involve penetrating into the Mediterranean where Boyle's bomb turned basically everything all around it into a Red Zone,
3) Having to deal with Nod,
4) Having to deal with tiberium.
Post-TCN, (2) and (4) are no longer in play, and (3) may not be either, so things are likely to be very different.
@Derpmind has a post on it; she's a big fan of the bonus and I don't blame her.
As a practical matter, we're gonna be rolling roughly fifty dice every turn for the rest of the plan. Assuming d100 results are truly random, that means we can expect to score a crit about every other turn from Sarang's bonus, on average. So figure on getting an average of 7.5, probably somewhere between six and nine, crits out of this.
The thing is, we're already planning reallocation of a die from Services to Orbital anyway, because Seo doesn't have Granger's Service bonus and even without that, half the time we didn't fully utilize Services anyway under the last plan. I may end up eating these words if Litvinov has a barrel of surprises, but I don't think we're going to be doing THAT much with Services this plan that requires a ton of dice.
So basically, if we're looking at an Orbital die from Graduates, plus that, we're looking at four Orbital dice in Q2, then five Orbital dice per turn starting in Q3 with reallocation, increasing to six once we get the Philadelphia Phase 5 up and running probably some time in late 2059.
At that point, we've already got less like 56 Orbital dice (the baseline if we didn't do anything to get more of them except finish the Philadelphia) and more like 80 Orbital dice. Factoring in Seo's bonuses, it's no longer really in question whether we can hit our Plan targets. Getting a sixth/seventh Orbital die from O'Brien is almost redundant. Not that the guy's useless, but there may be better choices.
Well I was mostly thinking that getting a permanent die added to the base pool from O'Brien would eliminate the need to reallocate a focus die to Orbital. We could move it to Infra instead for example, or even keep it in Services if we wanted to because that's the sector that generally has civilian-focused R&D in it so having an extra die could end up being pretty useful with Seo. This is why I wanted to do recruitment drives before focus reallocation, so that we can change our focus after seeing what we get from recruitment. Making decisions about who to recruit based on what you want to do with the foci next turn is coming at it backwards imo.
Faith
Some idea of what I'm doing.
- Location
- Land of Waves and Warmth
Some Noddy: "I hear Dr Granger is going to be teaching a course on Tiberium Physics-"
Kane: *already opening wigs4u in a new tab*
I'm actually thinking it would be nice to have O'Brian and Orbital Graduates, so that we get up to 5 Orbital dice, and the +2 bonus will cancel out the starting -2 penalty, which then will lead to getting the +2 bonus in 2 years.
- Location
- Mobile, Alabama
Kane in a wig walks up: How do you do fellow students? I am also here for classes.
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
+1 die to two sectors is huge. Another die is more than enough to make up for the temporary -2 progress penalty. More importantly, this is near-certain to be a permanent upgrade - Masses of graduate students can't be assassinated or all retire at once.
On the subject of which sectors to choose, Orbital is often limited by its 3 dice and is somewhere we can expect ever-increasing investment into as GDI's orbital presence expands. Both Tiberium and Military are sectors that we're happy to fully activate, and often gobble down free dice. But of the leading choices, I don't think Infrastructure is a good one. It already has a high 5 dice and rarely uses free dice. And if you want an extra die to help with Karachi, we'd be better off putting that extra die into Tiberium since Tiberium has the larger die bonus. (Or if you think we'll still only use 1 Tiberium die for Karachi each turn, remember that finding the room for that one die has often been difficult.) Plus, this upgrade is permanent, and in future Plans we likely won't need 6 dice in Infrastructure.
I've already said more than my fair share about Sarang. To be brief, given past records we're likely to see between 4-6 more Crits this Plan with her, and each of those Crits are bonuses equivalent to the traits offered by these Recruitment options. And if you don't like her character, her Politically Flexible trait means she won't actually be imposing her attitudes or beliefs on anyone.
A very strong +1 die to a sector we're very eager to have extra dice, along with a nice +2 progress bonus. I think Michael would combine really well with the Graduates. We're certain to find ways to spend those 5 dice for both this and any future Plans, and it'll save our Free Dice for elsewhere.
On the one hand, this offers a significant boost to our defense against assassinations, and those really suck. On the other hand, we already have large defensive bonuses, and with the current votes only hiring two more named personnel to the Treasury, we're only going to have five total targets for them to protect. Last time assassination targets came up, Ithillid rolled a 3d47 on the Discord to determine NOD's targets. Ithillid had a list of 47 names, and only some of them were from the Treasury. Only then were dice rolled in-thread to determine how successful those assassination attempts were. (And of those three targets, only Dr. Takeda was from the Treasury.) So for the bonus from this choice to even kick into effect, we'd have to have the misfortune of one of our five Treasury characters picked out of 45 to 50-ish names.
It was rotten luck that saw Dr. Takeda assassinated, and it'll be rotten luck if it happens again. But given how unlikely it is for an assassination attempt to even target the Treasury for thse Security Services to defend against, I don't think this option is as useful or necessary as the thread thinks it is.
Similar to things like the Edinburgh Virtual Intelligence Research Centre or the Advanced Technical Laboratories, this is a permanent bonus that has no costs save taking one of our recruitment slots. That said, its limited scope and small bonus makes this a poor choice. (5 progress out of every 100 is roughly equivalent to a +2.5 bonus per die, and only for Infra projects.)
She gives us a massive +10 bonus. Over five dice a turn, that's +50 extra progress, or almost an extra die's worth each turn. The average Infra die (after the Settled In bonus finishes) will go from 67.5 to 77.5 progress, so that's on average 405 progress from six dice compared to 387.5 progress from five dice.
She does require a lot from us in building Karachi, but it's much less thorny to build a Planned City with a progress bonus that big. So while in some sense we're spending more progress than she gives us, we still want more Planned Cities.
+2 dice in Military. For the cost of three Steel Talon projects, which simply aren't that expensive in resources, and that we'll have an extra 30 dice this Plan for. Tied with the Graduates for the most effective choices, I'd say.
How much is -30 progress on power plants? Well, if we built five power plants, then he'd save 150 progress. Seo's bonus to Heavy Industry will go up to +22 per die from the Settling In bonus, or 72.5 progress per die. So if we build five power plants this Plan, we'd save roughly two dice worth of progress. Total. And he'll cost us an average of -10 PS this Plan. If we could have him for free, we'd still take him, but after doing this analysis I think he's our weakest pick.
So, that's my opinion/analysis of all our choices. After all that, here's my revised vote:
[X] Graduates
-[X] Orbital
-[X] Tiberium
[X] Sarang Mikoyan
[X] Arya Gulati
[X] Brigadier General Tali Jackson
[-] Michael O'Brian... if we could pick five choices instead of four.
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