Yeah, but what I was pointing out is that the proposed system gives a benefit to the behaviour it was not intended to support.
The proposed system does make rushing a megaproject cheaper. This is contrary to the goal of the proposal.
The goal is not to make rushing a megaproject cheaper in the sense of "same result, but now for fewer dice, so you can get it done faster!" This may occasionally be the result but that is likely to be a coincidence. The goal is to make
completing a megaproject cheaper. Which is not the same thing.
You keep telling the QM "no, this mechanic should have the effect of letting us rush-complete megaprojects a lot faster," but the QM doesn't even want that to happen. It's just... not what he's trying to accomplish here.
Every time I see people trying to form specific policy positions based on the just-for-fun omake I wrote it wilts my desire to ever write anything like that again.
For the record, my post wasn't even a policy position, that was "I dunno, I don't think we're gonna see full Kane Masterstroke Tier Nod action to retake or destroy the
Bogatyr," which... real talk, I don't think we will, for a lot of reasons other than textual analysis of your omake.
This was then followed by basically the exact same analysis of Kane's situation and incentives that I've been making for months now, modified only by Steel Vanguard's successes in the interim. Including the reasons I don't think Kane really gives a shit whether or not we've got access to the
Bogatyr.
So does about 10-20 random omake written by a crowd in the discord, which is all the GDI online sections are. Maybe sometimes Granger is written by Squid, but other than that, you should take them with a hefty grain of salt.
Oh, you may be assured that I am taking
everything Kane said in that glorious rant with a grain of salt.
In particular because Kane made it spectacularly obvious that he was staging the whole thing in the full knowledge that GDI would see it. He avoided giving away anything that we don't already know with the possible exception of:
1) The Indian warlords' names- which are
unreported to Treasury, at any rate.
2) The fact that Kane has access to detailed information about several high level GDI officials' families, private communications, and
sugar intake. Which, while important information, is at this point unsurprising.
Kane didn't give any of the warlords specific orders except for Gideon, and I am definitely
not trusting that those orders are accurate since they were issued on-camera. At the same time, they are also one of approximately two sets of orders Gideon can realistically be expected to carry out successfully, given that his conventional forces are worn down to a nub. Honly other realistic option is a thermonuclear murder-suicide in which he crashes and burns in an attempt to take BZ-2 and all its contents (notably including Chicago, North Boston, and a sizeable chunk of our naval capacity and other war production) with him. If that happens, we will
know.
...
At the same time.
Kane is a rational actor who responds to incentives. We have a rough clue of what some of his incentives are from the endgame of
Command and Conquer 4 and the knowledge that the TCN is a (theoretical) thing in this timeline. We can observe many of Kane's other incentives by comparing the balance of powers and forces between Nod and GDI and extrapolating from known facts.
So in many ways, the omake just provides a focal point for us to talk about what we already knew, while bringing into the forefront the in-character fact that Kane is at least
taking an interest in the high-level strategic direction of Nod as a confederation.
When it comes to things written by other people that I include in my updates, I am usually (not always, I am simply human after all) quite serious about them. GDIOnline is something that I care about, and like, and the opinions in there, for the most part, are ones where somebody in the crowd holds that opinion. It might not be a popular one, or one that has any bearing on lived reality for the vast majority of the people, but well, rule of large sample sizes applies here. For the Kane piece, it is something where it is scenery chewing purple prose, but that is also informing some of how I approach Kane taking a public position. At the same time, it is what Kane is speaking in a scene where he knows he is bugged and can make a show of things.
Yeah. At the end of it, GDI (and by extension we the players) end up in a condition where all we
really know is that we've just watched Kane do a livestream performance in which he rants at his warlords and humiliates most of them
right in front of us. And they
know they have been humiliated right in front of us.
It wouldn't actually, per se, surprise me if they all suddenly started following a coordinated war plan because Kane has plans for an attack on GDI, one wildly at odds with everything he said in the rant... except that this is a
terrible time for Kane to attack GDI, because the instruments he would use to do so have just had the crap blasted out of them.
But if something like this had happened after an isolated string of warlords individually taking shots at us and failing, or after a warlord dogpile in which
they were on the offensive and then pulled in their horns after AUTUMN ARCHER fended them off... I'd be fully braced for it to all be a complete deception.
As it is, I think it comes across a bit more as "Kane has actual strategic reasons to order a pause and for his subordinates to abstain from pursuing further full scale war with GDI at this time, and he knows that we've probably figured this out, so he makes a virtue out of necessity by signaling to us that
he knows that we know that he knows and so on."
But honestly at this point I'm just running around in circles and the actual omake itself just makes it more fun to do the speculating that I'd be doing anyway just from the bare datum of a three-line summary of that omake.
Looking at this I can only conclude that the energy drain from constantly charging those reserve batteries are the 2 Energy invest for 1 stored is some kind of political graft event. Never mind how they eat up 4 consumer goods of space for one reserve energy. Back up generators with some kind of chemical fuel source would be more efficient for the space an investment. Granted probably also off to the side so it takes nothing else out if it explodes. Also probably an issue needing local tar berry production in the local sewage processor to fix really. Maybe research into some kind of stable chemical fuel with at least a decade of shelf life or regular use of the older fuel.
...You are
badly overthinking this.
There are a lot of obvious reasons for the Consumer Goods value of an arcology phase to change other than "we reconfigured the arcology to have more or less Energy Storage capacity."
For instance, a change in the level of amenities the already-existing light industrial and commercial zones within the arcologies are providing. Greater publicization of the arcologies being available leading to higher public satisfaction, so that "people are getting to live in arcologies" registers as more general happiness. Greater effort to use the funds available to incentivize and expand private-sector enterprises that not only furnish arcologies but also make their services available to the community at large, creating a virtuous cycle.
Heavy Industry: 5 dice +15 bonus per dice.
[ ] Continuous Cycle Fusion Plants
average 50 rolls: (300/65): 20 resources per Die) (+16 Energy) (-1 Labor)=4.61 dice per CCFP. 5 dice+100=16 energy.
[ ] Division of Alternative Energy
(+3 Energy per turn, -10 Resources per turn, -1 Heavy Industry Dice)
5 dice+50 resources equal to 15 energy
Your math is off here; our Heavy Industry bonus is +29, not +15. Because of this, the real calculation works out much closer to four dice per fusion reactor.
Division of Alternative Energy is dice-inefficient but Resource-efficient; we get 12 Energy for four dice and 40 R instead of 16 Energy for four dice and 80 R. Further development of fusion power in the reasonably near future is likely to increase this effect. Overall, the Division is probably worth it, but only because we're likely to run into Resource scarcity issues both early in the Plan, and potentially later in the Plan if we're under heavy pressure to redirect funds into the private sector civilian economy.
[ ] Distributed Heavy Industrial Authority (New)
(+2 Capital Goods per turn, -30 Resources per turn, -1 Heavy Industry Dice)
Fast. Cheap. Good. Classic 'Pick Two' scenario. Its fast and good but not really cheap, but saves on the ever drained energy budget so there is that. Only real issue is at 5 dice in Heavy industry its going to drag free dice into this category regularly to do the big projects if this is done this plan. So your not really saving dice only dragging them in from else where.
I note you didn't do a rundown of the per-die costs.
This is one die for 2 Capital Goods at 30 R. Compared to
North Boston Phase 5 (thirty dice for 32 Capital Goods at 15 R/die), this is equally Resource-efficient and
far more dice-efficient. It doesn't have all the ancillary rewards, but also lacks ancillary costs. Well and good. Compared to
Nuuk Phases 4+5 (45 dice for 96 Capital Goods at 20 R/die), it is
competitive- slightly less efficient in dice and considerably less in Resources, but with the considerable advantage that we don't have to wait 1-2 years for the rewards to arrive.
These two are somewhat dubious investments. You only have 5 dice in this category so -2 would leave you with 3 left and require free dice not to make this category mostly useless this plan. I can't recommend these ones currently. The actual projects involved tend to be a better use of dice for now.
Very few, if any, Light Industry projects reliably provide more than +2 Consumer Goods or +1 Capital Goods per die invested in the project. Certainly, none provide better benefits at
significantly less dice cost without major corresponding costs in other indicators (Energy, for instance).
It reduces the number of "actual projects," as in "planetary-scale major construction programs" that the department can arrange, but that doesn't mean it isn't using the dice and budget efficiently.
Bureaucracy (4 dice)
[ ] Banking Reforms (New)
(Must maintain 100 resources in reserve.)
An excellent thing to do fourth quarter, as your going to lose a lot of resources afterwards anyway when the next leg of the plan kicks in. Unless all goals are met and you don't want to start projects without them getting in the way of the plan right then. Necessary long term, but expensive now.
I'm not sure it works the way you think, though I'm curious what
@Ithillid means. Does the banking option require
us to keep 100 R in reserve at all times? Or do the 100 R just straightforwardly vanish from our accounts to be managed separately?
[ ] Predictive Modeling Management (New)
(-10 Capital Goods) (Changes dice to 2d50)
More of the same above. Except it may get less bad if you do the 2364 progress left on 'North Boston Chip Fabricator (Phase 5)' to make better AI for this. Probably.
Actually there is a major advantage to
Predictive Modeling Management, one your style of analysis isn't likely to spot.
It greatly reduces dice variance.
When you roll a d100, there is an 80% chance that the output will be somewhere between a 11 and a 90. 10% of outcomes are outliers on either side. This is very high variance, which means that it is very hard to predict what a project is going to do. We've seen this many times- we roll two dice, they're both below a 20 or above an 80, and a project either surges to completion (making us feel like fools if we invested a third die), or fails to thrive (see for instance the freeze drying plants).
When you roll 2d50, there is an approximate 80% chance that the output will be somewhere between a 24 and a 79. Only 10% of outcomes are below 24 and only 10% are above 79. This means that you can predict with considerably more confidence what is likely to happen when you roll, say, two or three Infrastructure dice.
Before the planning option, you're rolling 3d100+102. An unlucky outcome (10th percentile) is 188; a lucky outcome (90th percentile) is 319.
After the planning option, you're rolling 6d50+102. An unlucky outcome is 210; a lucky outcome is 301. The reduced "swing" makes it much easier to predict what will happen when you roll dice, avoiding quite a number of problems we've encountered over the course of the game.
There is also an effective +0.5 to all dice here, because the mean result of rolling a d100 is 50.5, but the mean result of rolling 2d50 is 51.
