Believe you me - I want Karachi more than anyone, I spent a solid week brainstorming the details with Sword before it was presented to the thread. Thank you for making its thread debut post, by the way, it was appreciated!
And you're right - Karachi is our main mid-term objective. The thing punching Krukov's factories out with Auroras though is that it's a short term one.
The plan (and inspiration) for the Karachi Sprint starts with getting war factory refits first, and that's capital goods limited. We're about to hit the energy surplusses we need to go hard on heavy industry, but that's the turn after next at soonest that we can finally do the sprint itself, and that's if we risk a capital goods shortfall by doing it the same turn HI sectors is supposed to complete.
With aurora dev this turn and aurora deployment next turn, doing the most time critical part of smacking Krukov can happen without interfering with Karachi - and the deterrence value will pair nicely with the surge of GDI steel from refits to cover for the construction period.
And then once Karachi IS completed, phase 5 in particular? The Auroras will come in handy once again to start making strikes on India itself with Karachi as the FOB. This is critical, because the logistics cooridoor the sprint will create does not interdict the travel path that the cyborgs were shipped along to get to Krukov, so establishing the ring of steel is only the first step to addressing India's far-flung patronage.
As such, I firmly believe that far from needing to choose between them, Krukov retaliation and the Karachi Sprint are priorities that benefit each other.
Why smack Krukov? I'm not seeing why we'd make this a priority. Sure it feels good, but this is TW2-vintage stuff and schematics he apparently looted. If he doesnt have this thoroughly reverse engineered and his work force thoroughly familiar with it, Im a monkey's uncle. His infrastructure is distributed. And we'd be in no position to follow up.
Never do an enemy a small injury.
There's also the fact that we know very little about who he is fighting. There's that one Far Eastern guy who is sponsoring reconstruction of Nod China into a military threat and threatening our Himalyan-Korean rail lines, but thats it.
Their strategic goals,their red lines, their restraint? All mysteries.
We know Krukov is not going to hit a fortress town with a nuke or other WMD, both because of prior history, and because he had the opportunity and didnt during St Petersburg. We cant say the same for whoever the rebels are.
And even if the rebels are people we can live with, there's the risk of delegimising them by attacking Krukov while he is fighting them and allowing him to paint them as tools of the Initiative.Getting characterized as a GDI patsy is presumably a career- and mortality-limiting step in the Brotherhood. Sometimes leaving well alone is the best option.
My attitude towards Krukov and his domestic troubles is best summed up as:
View: https://youtu.be/_DbDKPvl3Vw
Let them fight.While they're doing so, we can ignore him.
Yes, we're going to want Auroras before the end of the year. Preferably before the start of Karachi.
But I'd rather not do it this turn, and not before the Orca Refit strengthens both the Air Force and our carrier-based airwings.
Ideally we'd do it the same turn as Wingman Drones, and roll them both out.
Ah, this again.
I was worried about that too, a bit - but that's been firmly kiboshed by the uprising of Krukov's underlings in the east. He can't afford to take those factories offline, because he needs to produce war material to bring his people to heel on top of also needing to replenish his depleted stocks from the St Petersberg attack. And that's given plenty of time for InOps to get in and catch wind of any attempted migration that could happen later.
Why?
Stalin moved 1500 factories and 16 million people in the first six months of Operation Barbarossa in the latter half of 1941. ~500 to the Urals, 250 to Central Asia, >200 to Western Siberia, and more further afield. This was in the face of a major ground and air invasion by the Nazis, and with no advance warning it might be necessary. Using 1940s tech.
Krukov planned for this offensive against GDI. A hundred and fifty kay troop offendive requires a lot of staffwork.
He would have taken into account the possibility of PoW interrogations leaking strategic intel, especially since GDI commandos and orbital strikes are a present threat. He would have built stockpiles and had plans for relocating stuff.
Dude is demonstrably good at conventional warfighting and strategy.
Stuff like this plays into his thematic and mechanical strengths.
I was skeptical about being able to rush Auroras from bar napkin to existing in sufficient numbers for a deep penetration raid into NOD territory. If Krukov's busy with having to re-conquer a bunch of rebelling subordinates though I don't think he'll be able to spare the attention and lost production to break down and move all the factories so maybe we DO have a window.
I'd still prefer some Infra dice going into the ICS so we can start chipping away at that before we run down our logistics too far and have to do something less efficient but faster. Not enough to stop me from voting for it though, staying ahead of the curve on arcologies is fine too. Sure the immediate yelling has died down but if we want to keep people quiet we have to keep up the trend.
I assume Krukov can walk and chew gum at the same time, same as us.
Even if we rolled right and had Aurora RnD done in this turn and built Aurora factories in the next turn, the earliest we'd have Auroras in operation would be Q3 2059. Battle of St Petersburg was Q3 2058.
Auroras are (probably)great. Auroras are not likely to proc soon enough to do anything to Krukov besides propaganda points.
Previous historical examples of GDI doing exactly this proves otherwise. GDI has killed warlords in the past and these listed things have not happened. There are few truly uniting factors in NOD the most notable of which is Kane, otherwise the amount of infighting is like Stargate SG-1 System lord levels with multiple starscreams.
Citation needed please.
I do not recall GDI successfully targeting major warlords in the mainline games; the only occasion I recall that might sort of fit is Renegade. And I dont believe we have been targeting warlords here in this quest.
Maybe InOps has, but it has never been mentioned.
And there are good arguments they would not do such things except in extremis anyway, because instability in a WMD-capable opponent is not actually a good thing to anyone who doesnt like tanning under mushroom clouds.
Nitpick:
The missiles didn't have a ten kilometer CEP. The roughly twenty missiles landed within a ten square kilometer area.
Assuming a circular error, the odds are that none of the missiles landed more than about two standard deviations off the target (since there were only twenty of them). To a rough order of magnitude approximation, we might thus conclude that the radius of the zone the missiles landed in is roughly double the CEP of the missiles (in that half the missiles landed within a distance equal to the CEP of the target).
A ten square kilometer circle... Well, divide by pi, r-squared of the circle is about 3.2. Take the square root of 3.2... About 1.8.
So, missiles landed up to 1.8 kilometers from the point of impact, roughly, one might say. As argued above, this suggests a CEP of roughly one kilometer, not ten kilometers.
It should also be noted that these were surface-skimming cruise missiles, not ballistic missiles, so they have a very different attack mode.
Thats fair. I misremembered it as being within ten kilometres of the fab, instead of in a ten square km are.
I specifically called out the Scud because the guided version had a TV camera in its nose for recognizing its target in the late 1980s, and it was a Mach 5ish missile with a CEP of ~50m. A cheap subsonic, 100-300km range cruise missile from the Brotherhood would, IMO, be able to manage that much as guidance against a fixed target.
Well, just for starters, it's safe to assume he has the seven actual TCN techs... Of which we have two and would have to get quite, quite lucky to roll the other five.
And in canon Tib War Four, he not only knew how to build the TCN, he knew how to build into it other, additional functions that benefited him, and that GDI didn't begin to understand.
Yeah.Kane and LEGION remain the wildcards here.
Question is whether he has the skilled industry/human resources to actually translate the technology to industry, or if he'd still need GDI. Canonically he needed GDI. In this quest though? Well, I suspect that if he cracks Scrin nanoassembly construction tech in this timeline, things could get rather difficult.
The question is how, and in what ways we benefit, from smacking Krukov. If we smack Krukov by developing a useful new military capability for GDI, then that may open the path to doing other useful things in the future- such as using Aurora bombers to take out a Nod superweapon quickly and cleanly even if it is shielded against orbital fire.
And what are the costs, because there is always blowback to attempting regime change.
Especially with as little indepth knowledge as we seem to have(at least in the Treasury; InOps probably knows better).The United States toppled Saddam Hussein and got ISIS. The Soviets toppled Hafizullah Amin and got the mujahideen, who birthed the Taliban.
As for weapons, we are currently confident we have the technology to deliver a seventy ton Predator and its crew from orbit to the ground safely in a drop pod. That same technology will deliver that same drop pod, stuffed with an equivalent weight of 1-ton supersonic cruise missiles or glide bombs(or for that matter torpedoes) to an altitude of 50km before it births its malignant spawn.
Im reasonably sure we have that end of things covered. Just gotta do OSRCT.
