I've fucked up badly explaining my points. Let me try again hopefully with better communication on my end. Hopefully:
- I have no intention of doing the Vein Mines, and sorry for calling it Yellow Zone Mining, until the new plan. As such the Claws are not urgent. They are cheap enough to finish in the new plan so doing them in Q4 with 3 Dice while also doing another round of 4 Dice into Ion Energy is what I am planning for the Tiberium Department in Q4. Then finishing the Claws and surge Tiberium Harvesting in Q1 of the new plan. Since I'm planning on doing two phases of Ion Energy from my point of view the Fusion Plants can keep.
The vein mines are not going to be worked on until 2062Q1, to be sure, but at that point they become a very important operation, of high priority.
As a matter of logic, if we want to use the claws for vein mining, it is to our advantage to have the claw deployment done
before we begin the vein mining, rather than waiting to roll out the claws until after the vein mining is already underway. Thus, I consider the claws to be high enough priority that it is worth investing the three dice in Q3 with an eye to Q4 completion. I also consider Red Zone mitigation important enough that the RZ-7 inhibitor is more important to me than ion power, especially since I am confident of having the Phase 9 fusion reactors well in hand for when we need more Energy than if provided by our current surplus plus the boost from
crystal beam lasers and
Bergen Phase 3
- My bad on saying I was going to do Fusion Plants in Q4. I do want to do them then, but as you've pointed out that only happens if everything in my plan goes as planned which is possible and likely, but not certain. I am doing the Phase 9 of Fusion Plants in Q4 if I finish Lasers and if Alloys Development needs another Die or Alloys are good as an early plan Action because they are cheap to do and keep the costs down in both meanings of the phrase. Otherwise I'm probably doing Alloys as they are probably worth more at the start of plan with their reduction of various costs.
In practice, your plan, as it now exists, simply does not give us a reasonable chance of pushing the Phase 9 fusion plants to completion quickly. Furthermore, in our experience, nearly every revolutionary industrial technology winds up requiring a lengthy deployment phase. The crystal beam industrial lasers were easy enough to develop, for instance, but actually implementing them worldwide turned into a 600-point major project.
If
Advanced Alloys turns out to be similarly intensive, or more so, then we do not have the luxury of shutting down all our industrial projects for two, three, or four turns of pure monofocus on deploying the advanced alloys. We will need to make sure we have enough Energy to last. And the time the deployment completes is likely to have little to do with when it
starts, and much more to do with how long it takes us to supply the resources and dice necessary for deployment.
- What I was referring to with that joke comment is that as part of my upbringing in Serbia I have been taught that recursive arguments where one thing is done that enables another thing to be done that then enables the first thing to be done so that the second thing can be done is a hard coded logical fallacy if there is an increasing price involved in doing either of the things because that way lies destitution. So the moment the Labor prices jumped from 1 to 2 I was done with making plans that do Fusion Plants so long as an alternative exists.
Labor is not a particularly scarce resource for us. Our nation's population just jumped enormously from a wave of immigration, we have large numbers of people re-entering the workforce because of prosthetics technology, and we know for a fact that advances in automation have the potential to save labor in various industries if we see fit.
Saying "aha, I will cleverly avoid devoting an extra +1 Labor to run this set of fusion plants by instead spending two more dice and 60 more Resources to get 10 Energy instead of 16 Energy," for example, is an instance of false pattern-matching. This is not the kind of self-destructive circular pursuit you are apparently thinking of.
This alternative is DAE + 2 Phases of Ion Power.
DAE is,
in the short term of Q3 and Q4, inferior to spending the two dice on the fusion reactors, because 16 Energy is a lot more than 6 Energy and it makes little difference to us right now whether we spend 20 R or 10 R activating each of those two dice.
In the context of 2062Q1 and later, it may make sense to found the DAE, but right now, in the present moment, is the wrong time to do it. By the time it is the right time to found the DAE, we can already have Phase 9 of the fusion plants... if we do not waste Heavy Industry dice by founding the DAE prematurely when its return on investment is poor.
Ion power is an attractive option, but Tiberium dice are valuable, even when Treasury doesn't stand to profit from resource extraction operations directly. Completing two phases of ion power reliably will cost eight dice. We may need three dice for the mandatory refineries, and that it is quite important to have tiberium claws ready by the end of 2061Q4 so that we can mine veins efficiently in the new year, which may take five dice easily. With only fourteen dice to work with, and the real possibility of needing as many as eight of those dice for important projects, getting two phases of ion power is difficult, and even one phase of ion power means giving up some good things we could do otherwise (like the RZ-7 inhibitor).
In short, I'm comparing:
1) fusion + 1 phase of ion power + having enough Tiberium dice to be more flexible and do more things, versus
2) DAE + 2 phases of ion power
(1) comes out looking better on most metrics.
...I can't see your argument as anything other than you saying you will roll more Dice to get more Energy so you can build more Capital Goods while ignoring the fact that if we pay 2 Die permanently we get more Energy and more Capital Goods while making it harder for them to be sabotaged.
I am not sure I can help you here.
Both fusion power phases and DAE involve large numbers of power plants being built all over the world. We don't just build a single giant reactor in one place that generates +16 Energy. A phase of fusion reactors is not in any sense
easy to sabotage; if it were easy, Nod would probably do it a lot more often. Wind and solar power stations aren't easy to sabotage either, but if your argument centers on the idea that DAE is better because it's "harder to sabotage," then you are trying to invoke an advantage that has never mattered in our entire game so far, and it is hard to imagine how it could have more than a small marginal impact at any one time. Nod cannot just go "lol I sabotage your power plants" and instantly shut down -20 Energy worth of fusion plants, unless they have the kind of capacity to go on the attack that would equally well let them do immense damage in all sorts of other ways.
DAE is not magic. It turns dice into Energy on certain terms. Whether these terms are advantageous to us is a matter of arithmetic and common sense, and cannot be settled by reference to jokes or memes or pre-existing pre-conceived notions. It's a math problem, informed by facts in the game narrative, but not by 'facts' we make up under our own power. Nor is it a problem we can solve by paying attention to all the costs and drawbacks of doing things one way, while ignoring all the costs and drawbacks of doing things another way.
Because from my point of view your argument is ignoring the benefits of a decentralized Energy source and a renewed civilian Capital Goods infrastructure for an Energy source that is getting long in the tooth at this point.
You...
do... realize that we can take the DHIA Capital Goods spinoff bureau without
also taking the DAE, right? They're not mandatory paired projects. We can do one if it seems advantageous, and leave the other alone if it does not,
in that moment, also seem advantageous. My plan, for instance, does include the DHIA because I consider it worthwhile. I do not,
at this time, consider the DAE similarly worthwhile, when there is a more dice-efficient and acceptably cheap way to use two more Heavy Industry dice in the current plan to bring in a lot more Energy, and then just start the same bureau later.
If I can get 16 Energy with 2-3 dice, instead of getting 6 or 9 Energy with those same dice, then there are good arguments for doing so.
- I see the DDM as a means of getting Capital Goods into the civilian markets which is something we have had a lot of complaints over the past few turns in-game. As such since even if I put 4 Dice into Nanotubes there would be no guarantee it would get done, it would be a coinflip, I'm finishing the civilian drones and doing the DDM to get the renewal of the civilian economy closer to being done.
I myself have my own plans for getting the same result, you may have noticed. They revolve around directly releasing Capital Goods from the state-owned enterprises to the economy.
But DDM's Capital Goods are not automatically released to the civilian economy. That is why they end up in the same pool with the rest of our Capital Goods. They may benefit the civilian economy, but that doesn't mean they are the only thing that would. A distributed set of carbon nanotube foundries would
also benefit the civilian economy. There is more than one way to accomplish these things, and the nanotube foundries are just as good for this as DDM is, for as long as it is possible to spend dice on either thing.
We will get more Dice including options for getting more Free Dice, as OP has mentioned before in thread, and more Department Dice next plan as such paying with Dice after the plan goals are complete and before a new plan start is a good way to stockpile more Resources into our reserve so we can use them to rebuild faster in the new plan.
1) We have to pay the Resource cost of all these departments. Taking on extra departments we can't pay for has the potential to make it considerably harder to work on projects while we recover our income in 2062, so we should think carefully about whether each Department is
worth it, on a case-by-case basis. Just because some of them are good ideas, doesn't mean they all are.
Furthermore, we have no guarantee that we will get
unlimited new dice. Look back at the previous Four Year Plans. In each Plan (particularly 2054 and 2058, the years most like what 2062 will be), we got the opportunity to recruit new groups to Treasury. Sometimes these group options gave us bonuses to existing dice. Sometimes they just gave us more dice. Sometimes both. But we only ever get a limited number of these options; we do not just get to take as many additional dice as we want right away. It is a bad idea to plan on the assumption that no matter how many dice we give up, and no matter what categories we get them in, we will be sure of being able to replace
exactly those dice.
I am very reluctant to sacrifice two each of Heavy Industry and Light Industry dice before I
know what recruitment options we have available in the new Plan, and have considered the impact of having to fund those agencies in the new Plan. Because Light Industry dice are critical to our ability to make progress in material science (access to nanotubes, myomers, and superconductors being examples). And Heavy Industry dice are critical to our ability to do a lot of other things at the foundation of our economy. We may have ambitious targets pushed on us by Parliament that
demand that we have, say, five each of Light and Heavy Industry dice just to get the job done... and we cannot be perfectly sure that we'll get those dice back if we give them away now.
Lets hope this is not a massive mistake
What about the plan makes you worry that it is a massive mistake?
FMP is thankfully starting to get rid of its racism and breaking off with IF and is working on becoming a YZ Party so perhaps throwing them a bone is worth looking at
I'm not sure Old FMP ever
was racist (or Zone-ist, which is frankly the new substitute for racism in the globalized GDI political system). They were willing to exploit Yellow Zoners in sweatshops, but they were perfectly willing to exploit Blue Zoners too, when they could get away with it.
New FMP, or rather, the movement within FMP that is trying to pivot the party in that direction, seems in many ways actively anti-Zoneist, because it specifically trying to create new structures within GDI that bypass the (frankly Blue Zone-privileging) power structure of the state bureaucracy and the planned economy.
It just so happens that these parallel structures... resemble a market economy.
Initiative First can burn in hell however
You may be assured that even if Initiative First offered us political deals, I would think very long and very hard before even
contemplating the act of even
suggesting taking them, let alone actually doing so.
IF can't reposition. FMP can.
If they are smart they will continue to reach out to YZ immigrants who want to open businesses.
I would not be surprised if sometime in the near future they and IF are at odds. And a vote against something FMP wants is actually something IF approves of.
IF will continue to shrink, maybe not at the speeds we want, as we improve standards of living and YZ immigrants prove to not be the problem IF says they are. That'll pull off the nimby types and those who were just worried about being displaced. The hardcore aren't going anywhere but hopefully they'll become a rump party of a few members in Parliament.
They kind of already are a rump, what with being roughly 10% of Parliament and the only party that has (proportionately speaking) the least leverage with the ruling politicians. With the ironic exception of the Open Hand microparty, no other GDI party is so thoroughly trapped on the outside of the power structure, looking in. Even if IF were twice as large, they'd still be inconsequential. Not because there is no other party so small, but because there is no other party whose agenda is so discordant with the consensus the dominant coalition works within.
