I can confirm I did miss that bit. Thanks.
Hrm...
For the Boston 5 example, for a 6 turn completion it saves us 1 die each turn for 6 turns, and reduces the R cost from 450 to 240. Now that is pretty decent discount. Except that a cost discount for long projects isn't what I'm looking for. I want to get the project done quickly, without the downside from a surge effort.
Others may not feel the same way you do. Part of the point of implementing this is, indeed, to reduce costs and make it more attractive to front-load major industrial projects well in advance, at times when we might otherwise decide we don't have the funds.
With that said...
We are paying 20 Capitol Goods and 2 Free Dice to unlock this system. I feel like it has insufficient whelm.
I do think,
@Ithillid , that the Free dice cost is pushing it a bit much. If we implement this system of lock-in, the Free dice are going to be
extremely valuable and important, even more so than they are now, because they may represent all the wiggle room we have left for urgent or small-scale projects in certain categories. I would much rather pay a higher Capital Goods price to unlock this system than sacrifice Free dice, unless you're planning to provide us with a way to get those Free dice back.
Those Free dice are worth roughly 160 Progress per turn, directed wherever we want, and we'll need that ability to direct that progress where we want more than ever if we're locking in megaproject investments. It is a
big sacrifice to make, and one that will necessarily make us more cautious and conservative about actually using the megaproject-locking system.
Someone remind me please, have we explored the health benefits of exoskeletons yet? Both as a replacement for wheelchairs, and to ensure that anyone hauling heavy stuff for a living doesn't throw out their back.
I'm pretty sure that the widespread availability of various types of robotic drones has done a lot to help address that issue, in that there's presumably some kind of cargo-moving robo-forklift thingy that does a lot of what would in the 20th century have been "heavy lifting."
I am saying that declaring that we are doing all the things and the rest of GDI is doing fuck all is wrong, that the rest of GDI absolutely also needs all the money we can give them, and that we should not be so desperate to hoard all the money we can get away with hoarding.
The rest of GDI needs money. We need money. Everybody needs money.
Right now, we have (relative to our needs) lots of money. The rest of GDI is hard up for money.
In 2062Q1, Parliament takes about half our money and gives it to the rest of GDI. This hopefully improves GDI's situation, but it knocks
us down much harder than it lifts everyone else up. Our budget is cut in half to increase their budget by 50%, and those are not equivalent. And that's fine! But it means we're suddenly knocked down to a level that makes us relatively worse off than the other departments are now. And yet, Parliament isn't going to tell us to quit our jobs- our jobs
as they are presently defined- and take the year off for lack of funds.
Nobody's gonna be happy if (as has happened before) we effectively do nothing with Agriculture and very little with Services for a whole year because those areas are "optional" and we don't have the money to go around. Nobody's gonna be happy if in 2063 Gideon pops a nuclear missile off at North Boston and vaporizes it because we couldn't afford to build the SADN system. Nobody's gonna be happy if we're cramming refugees into the shittiest housing left because it's all we can find, or standing around scratching our heads trying to figure out how to hit an ambitious Capital Goods target.
People will still blame us for this even if we signed away every penny of income we had- because in ten years, it has become
customary under GDI's de facto political system for Treasury to be responsible for these things.
Yes, we do a ton of stuff on top of gathering the taxes and paying the bills, but if it weren't for the fact that we are playing a game, the Treasury would've been forced to shed most of its control on discretionary spending by 2058 because the emergency is over.
Well, assuming there's no way in real life to sell the survivors of multiple apocalypses that the planned economy that lifted them most of the way
out of the last apocalypse is in fact okay.
I suppose that's only happening because this is a game in your opinion, but it's not something so obviously wrong that you can just say "the rest of you are being unrealistic and it's morally wrong for us to want to continue the planned economy, instead of just staying in our lane and mining tiberium quietly." Which is very much the implication that comes out of your post for me and some of the others responding to it.
However, at the same time, we are still responsible for ensuring the rest of GDI also has money to shove around, and I want us to have the biggest revenue stream we can get by end of Q4 2061, so that all the other components of GDI can do things as well, rather than being so constantly starved of funding they have to keep asking the Treasury for everything.
Hell, one of the key issues during the Regency War is that InOps has been effectively underfunded for the entire Plan because despite the Treasury losing something like 50% of its funding, some 300 RpT, GDI honestly needs shittons more money, and even shifting 500 RpT won't get even close to the amount of money GDI in general needs to do all the things that need doing. So I want to shift the largest quantity of money into the rest of GDI possible, and the easiest way to do that is by growing our income stream substantially prior to Reallocation.
I think it's a bad idea to eat the seed corn, and I think that's what you're proposing to do. I get the logic, but we're
really hard up for early 2062 funds here.
If things go broadly according to my hopes, we'll be able to release additional funds in mid-Plan after the Red Zone expansions can resume. We'll have a lot of options. But if we sign away those 75 RpT by hurrying on
Tendrils, we're going to be stuck staring at the long list of stuff we're still,
now, in this moment expected
and unable to do for considerably longer than otherwise. No amount of funds disbursed to the general fund will change that.
