This is about where I'm at, even though we don't need it immediately we will inevitably need another 16 power eventually so we should just chuck 1 die/turn at the partially complete phase until it's done.
Whether it's "one until done" or "hang fire, then two, then one more if we need it" is something I'll want to think about with a bit more nuance.
Regarding DAE - is it actually worth it?
Given increases in Energy demand, +3 Energy per Q for -1 HI die doesn't look worthwhile.
No, and yes. We've just gone through a period of extremely intense Energy consumption because
nothing eats Energy like war factories, and we've been doing almost everything we could to slam out shipyards, drone fighter production lines, and whatnot for the past several turns. We've still got some of that going forward, but it shouldn't be as intense, simply because we're not frantically trying to build a zillion such factories in about three turns.
Now, the first-generation fusion plants we've been building are, on average, +16 Energy for
four dice, so that's a better exchange rate than the DAE offers... But on the other hand, we're also paying more Resources, at 20 R/die instead of 10. Which isn't irrelevant these days; Treasury is going to be under pressure to invest funds in the civilian economy, so economizing will help, and as new xenotech projects show up, we're going to need all the funds we can get to implement them.
It's not strictly mechanically optimal, but it's
respectable. Second generation fusion may make it look less impressive, but I have a sneaking suspicion that second generation fusion may kick the cost of fusion plants up to 25-30 R/die, too, raising some of the same issues.
Given that we're being fairly unsubtly signaled to spin off some dice in hopes of picking up more, I think DAE is worth a shot. It's much more appealing to me than, say, the Light Industry Capital Goods bureau, which isn't particularly cost-effective compared to its Heavy Industrial counterpart.
I can easily see us in a situation of needing more Fusion at the same pace with less HI dice, if we activate Department of Alternative Energy.
We'll need about three less (first-generation) fusion phases over the course of an entire Four Year Plan. As a benchmark, we built eight during this Plan. If next Plan is as Energy-intensive as this one (hoping not, but hard to be sure without a lot of thought), then we cut our requirements from eight phases to five. Probably four unless second generation fusion turns out to be a real disappointment.
My perspective is that we are unlikely to regret going from around a brigade (Phase 4) to more of our most rapidly-deployable, widely-available forces given the tendency of NOD to start trouble with little warning and almost no predictability of where. Also, they are likely to be the basis for any forces we use to attack Europa.
See, we can bat that back and forth forever. You say "more OSRCT is good," I say "I think we've passed the point of diminishing returns, at least until we find out whether further OSRCT phases will be part of the next set of Plan goals."
We're not even contradicting each other. There are lots of things that it would be good to have more of, and in a game with limited resources to invest, there are lots of things that it would be good to have more of
but where we have to stop ourselves at some point rather than pursuing the goal past the point of diminishing returns.
I disagree strongly. First, Microfusion Cells have been stated to not impact the current Improved Fusion project.
I've just had this conversation in the last 24 hours, so...
Please check what I said in this post.
This is a reasonable course of action (though spending very heavily on shuttles could undermine our goal of saving up Resources for the next plan, in principle). The catch is that we won't be doing glacier expansions right away in 2062. But yeah, a big part of the reason I keep slamming out...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
Suffice to say that the wording I
know I've seen makes it clear that no, we can't just turn the cold fusion "micro" cells into full-sized power plants directly.
That is not the same thing as saying "our scientists won't learn anything about how to design better fusion reactors from understanding these things."
I do not recall, one way or the other, Ithillid saying "this project will have no effect on the
Improved Fusion project."
"This design doesn't scale" and "understanding this design has no impact on your ability to do that other design" are not the same thing.
With that said...
Second, this seems to be falling into the trap that we hit with many military platform developments - making the perfect the enemy of the good. The shielding techs might impact this improvement to fusion power, or they might unlock a timer for the *next* improvement... while we know we have an improvement ready to roll out. I posit that doing the improvement now will have a greater marginal benefit than waiting to get all our ducks in a row, because it gets the advancements we have now into action. Which will allow analysis of them, how they work, and still allow for integration of new technologies into the next iteration of improvement.
This is valid up to a point. I want to have at least
some of the relevant techs in place, simply so our researchers actually have anything to work with in designing the improved model, and so that we're not stuck re-researching the upgrade project every couple of year. But other things (particularly the shielding techs) are costly and may be hard to fit into the research cycle in a timely manner, so waiting on them may be too much of an ask.
There are a couple things you're missing. First, that +3 is likely to grow over time and improved technologies.
NItpick: "Alternative energy" covers fairly well understood 20th century power technologies- chiefly wind, solar, and hydroelectric. I'm not sure we're going to get much advancement out of those areas.
Or we could not make the same mistake we did with the frigates and CVEs by waiting for the perfect set of technologies to make it work.
I mean, I would like to have fusion plants produce 30 Energy per phase for the same or similar costs.
But I'm perfectly fine with a redesign that only does us 18 per phase while we unlock more technologies and have to do another upgrade development to integrate new technologies 4 years later.
I'd like to strike a middle ground here because there's no real emergency. Our worst case scenario is that we have, say, two or four less Energy than we otherwise would because we built one more phase of fusion reactors before doing the improvements; our best case scenario is that we avoid having to burn more Heavy Industry dice in the middle of the Plan because
oh hey we finally got around to researching _____ and it's just the thing.
So saying "it's time, even if we only get +18 instead of +16" when we could wait a short time and do 1-2 more techs in hopes of getting to +20... Well, again, I think this is an instance where we
do have the luxury of waiting a bit. If the Energy numbers don't bear me out in saying that, after I've had a chance to calculate later, I'll reconsider.
