- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Thank you for being willing to address what I said on at least some level.
I will note that if I weren't feeling relatively mellow, I might be deeply pissed off at you saying "if you actually believed _____ was as critical as you said." See, that implies that I'm overtly lying, like, I'm trying to trick you into doing something stupid even though I know it's wrong. But, well. Your actual argument is more along the lines of "Simon's priorities are structured wrong," not "I have proven that Simon is deliberately lying to me." So I'm going to apply the Principle of Charity and assume that you're not accusing me of somehow trying to trick you with lies or something.
Now, moving on, let me try to explain myself in a way that will be a little more clear to you. We can, loosely speaking, rate problems along two axes: important and urgent. Problems are important if the consequence of letting them blow up on us would be particularly bad, while they are urgent if action needs to be taken on them immediately. These two aspects of a problem are interconnected (a problem with no consequences cannot be very urgent), but they're still separate.
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The tiberium refinery expansion is both very important and very urgent.
It is very important because tiberium refining is critical to everything else we do; it's the cornerstone of our economy. Any globally significant disruption to refining could potentially cost us hundreds of Resources worth of income, which would be a big deal. Tiberium refining is a load-bearing component of our economy on every level and nothing important can be done without tiberium refining.
Additional to this, it is very urgent, because of two reasons. First, our ability to expand our income is bottlenecked by us being so close to our refinery cap, and we want to expand our income as soon as possible. Second, a huge fraction of our tiberium refining capacity is in extremely vulnerable locations, places our enemies have targeted in the past and will target in the future, and that are of such extreme strategic value that there is almost no doubt as to whether the enemy will or will not attack them. Since such an attack is likely to come in no more than a few more turns, this means we have even more reason to hurry up and build more refineries.
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The Reykjavik macrospinner is pretty important and moderately urgent.
It's very much desirable to have that macrospinner, for good reasons that I don't need to tell you. But whereas tiberium refining is the core of our entire economy, myomer production is merely one of many valuable strategic goods. Our economy will not grind to a halt if supplies are temporarily interrupted. Even a worst-case scenario (Mehretu smuggles a nuke into the Johannesburg plant and blows the whole place to smithereens) can only inflict so much harm (to be clear, that's a lot of harm, but it's not as much as if we lost 360 or 600 points of tiberium refining capacity from hits to our Planned Cities). Conversely, gaining the services of more macrospinner phases is good, but it's merely a good thing to have, not an absolutely vital building block that we need for anything else to happen well for us.
But the urgency is lower. While the planned cities that do so much of our tiberium refining are so exposed and so targeted that there's no real chance of them NOT being attacked in a war, the macrospinner is only one of many guarded targets. The main reason we even worry about it is because it's in Africa, and Mehretu operates out of Africa, and we treat "Africa" as a single big region. But Mehretu has hit plenty of targets far outside of Africa, and hasn't hit everything in Africa, and he might very well pick a different target (say, our glacier mines in northeast Africa) even if he wanted to show off. Since the probability of the macrospinner being attacked, while high, isn't 100%, and since our economy can survive a temporary cut in myomer production much more easily than it can handle a temporary cut in tiberium refining, the problem of macrospinner redundancy is, while still important, not necessarily as totally urgent.
Having a backup macrospinner is desirable, but it's not an oh shit must move right now problem the way having backup tiberium refineries is. Again, it IS important, but there are relative degrees of importance, and relative degrees of threat.
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Housing is pretty important but only a little urgent. We can easily complete more phases of housing at any time, thanks to the apartment and communal housing projects. We have a quite sizeable surplus, enough that nobody's in any danger of being homeless or living under canvas even if we do no housing construction this turn. It's a big political issue that we can't afford to ignore, and we have big projects on the subject that we need to do before the end of the Plan. But we've completed multiple projects in the recent past, so we have some breathing room.
Building a bigger Logistics surplus is pretty important and kind of urgent. That Logistics surplus is an important preparation for a war we know is coming. Whereas we can be almost certain that Nod will attack our refineries around Jeddah/Medina and probably Chicago and there is a real danger of us losing refineries, and whereas it is likely that Nod might try to attack our myomer macrospinner... It is practically 100% certain that we will suffer Logistics penalties from Nod raiding and from the strain of supplying our own fighting forces during such an intensive war. There's no plausible way for us to mobilize to fight several warlords at once without Logistics costs; even the small campaigns we've fought against them in 'peacetime' sometimes cost us Logistics, and that's with no more than one or two of them getting ornery at once. And as for urgency, well, the war starts soon. BUT us taking a Logistics hit, or even going into Logistics negatives, isn't necessarily an all-crushing disaster. It'd be bad, but it's something we can probably grit our teeth and power through, and furthermore there is no pressing need to have a Logistics project done literally this turn as opposed to next turn.
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So to summarize, building more Housing is less important than building more Logistics, but building more Logistics isn't so immediately critical that it's absolutely important to stack up a 98% chance of completing a logistics project this turn. Thus, Infrastructure effort can reasonably be divided between Logistics and Housing projects, with an eye to completing some work on both now, and more work on both later.
Building the refineries IS absolutely critical and must be done as soon as possible, which justifies a heavy investment to give us an excellent chance of accomplishing the project.
Building the macrospinner is desirable, even necessary, but not as important as the refineries. Not because it is unimportant, but because tiberium refining is the core of our entire economy and big parts of our refinery infrastructure are totally going to be attacked very soon and we have almost no doubt that this will happen.
So there are limits to what I will sacrifice for the macrospinner, and I am less willing to sacrifice for the macrospinner than for the refineries.
However, you make a fair point that it might be worth sacrificing two dice of Perennials to get one more macrospinner die. Because the Perennials project is not as important OR urgent as ANY of the issues listed above. We have to do it to fulfill a plan requirement, but there is no real danger of us failing to do so. Putting it off a turn or two more would be largely harmless, though we'd get less Consumer Goods benefit out of it before the end of the Plan and the delay COULD conceivably force us to do another Consoom project.
You can totally have a different opinion, but please don't call me a liar just because I don't share your priorities or think some of the things we agree to value are more important than other things we agree to value.
