Your first argument only makes any sense if you assume (and I can find no evidence to support said assumption) that we won't do the upgrades to our processing capacity when we need to. That's not a strategic weakness, it is presuming idiocy without support. Therefore, I will not engage you further on this point unless you provide evidence that we will not upgrade our processing infrastructure when we need to.
Your statement about the Saarland facility is false. First, you assume without evidence that it's the specific element of Tib Processing that has not been upgraded, and then assume contrary to evidence and policy that we are using that un-upgraded processing infrastructure when we have upgraded processing plants in place and ready to use.
And the argument that it not being upgraded means that somehow disruptions to our Logistics system would be less troublesome if it were upgraded is completely nonsensical. Also, the Tib Silo upgrade is for long-term Tiberium storage, not the short-term storage that is needed to cope with transport disruptions.
I agree with you that Dmol's idea of a "strategic weakness" tends to revolve around him making up problems and saying "Nod could exploit this, therefore we must act NOW" while ignoring the easy ways for us to solve the problems without doing as he says, and also ignoring the fact that it would be quite difficult for Nod to exploit the thing in question. I don't know where he gets his ideas from.
With that said, the tiberium silos would almost certainly help regularize and stabilize likely
temporary disruptions of transportation, for the same reason that a factory with a warehouse containing a week's worth of components for its products is less sensitive to supply chain disruptions than one that relies on "just-in-time delivery."
Of course, if we had silos, then within 5-10 turns I suspect we'd have Dmol saying it was a "strategic weakness" that we have silos full of tiberium and that we need to, I don't know, research and develop impenetrable force field domes over them...
- Strategic weaknesses are things that we are weak to if a strategy is built around exploiting them.
That definition contains a hidden cow patty that you have stepped on. Two of them, really.
The first is that one must accurately estimate the
magnitude of potential harm. If Nod could easily inflict a certain type of harm, but the actual magnitude of the harm is inconsequential, nobody cares. Nobody cares if Nod can easily
tear down a poster put up by GDI. We just put up a new poster. Shit happens, and we have the resolve and resources to deal with such minor problems as they arise; it doesn't make exhaustive investment to defend our poster charts worthwhile.
The second hidden danger is that one must accurately estimate
the enemy's capacity to inflict the harm. If inflicting this type of harm requires Nod to do something very easy that they can do without risk, then that's bad. If inflicting this type of harm would require Nod to use their deadliest weapons and invite a retaliatory nuclear/ion bombardment of their own territories, or to develop entirely knew and unknown superweapons, or to launch a giant global world war... then that is not so bad. In that case, Nod would have to work so hard to hurt us in this way that if they
did care enough to try... They could also hurt us in many other ways, and this particular attack vector is not an immediate problem. If Nod has to break out the nuclear missiles to do something to us, then the "something" in question is not a strategic weakness, except insofar as "able to be vaporized by a thermonuclear warhead" is a weakness, and that is a weakness shared by
everything, except Threshold-19.
...
You have stepped in both of the hidden dangers in the process of your analysis.
First, you have overestimated the realistic magnitude of potential harm. So long as we maintain a large margin of surplus refining capacity,
which we have for quite some time now, and so long as we maintain a substantial Logistics surplus,
which we do, then the potential for harm caused by disrupting any one tiberium refinery center is just not that great. Even the largest and most precious refineries are ultimately replaceable if we're willing to accept cost and inconvenience to move tiberium around, and even World War level disruptions to our logistical supply chain are manageable as long as we have refineries everywhere.
Second, you have grossly underestimated the difficulty of building a workable
operational plan to exploit the 'weakness' you have identified. If Nod could just casually cut our transportation or delete our refineries from existence by pushing a button, without drawing down overwhelming WMD attacks in retaliation that would ruin them, then they would have already done so. Nod would have to sacrifice manpower and war materiel to
hurt us in this way. It would not be enough to simply say "let's pursue a strategy of disrupting their logistics." They would have to build and launch submarines and aircraft and other tools for attacking our transportation, and many of these tools would be destroyed, and our own forces would not sit idle in the resulting war. It would not be enough for them to simply say "let's destroy their refineries." Those refineries are huge industrial complexes and they are well guarded. Inflicting sabotage on the relevant level would require either weapons of mass destruction (which are very provocative and trigger an intense response) or infiltration on a scale that is virtually absurd to contemplate. Mehretu, Reynaldo, or Gideon could
probably smuggle a nuclear device into a single major industrial complex, though they might also fail... but they cannot simply press a button and delete half the major GDI industrial complexes on the globe all at once.
...
So you say:
"Strategic weaknesses are things that we are weak to if a strategy is built around exploiting them"
But then in practice, your idea of a "strategic weakness" includes things that, if they were done, would not meaningfully weaken us, when it would be very difficult to build a strategy around making those things happen anyway.
- At one point we literally had Tiberium shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to have it processes because of a lack of processing. Then we expanded our processing after having that issue pointed out in the text of an update. What would have happened if NOD had attacked our Logistics or Processing Facilities at that time?
Something very different than what would have happened if Nod attacked our processing facilities
NOW.
...
Your argument is, at its core, an argument for keeping up a solid refining buffer. For having, say, 300 or 500 points of surplus refining capacity at any one time, so that only the most devastating attacks can realistically cause an
immediately consequential loss of refining capacity.
Right now we have a surplus of roughly 800-900 points of tiberium refining capacity. I don't know if you followed the relevant thread discussion, but there are plans to build
Chicago Phases 4+5, which combined give us an additional 750 or so points of refining capacity, probably before the end of 2063. Building still further refineries is a relatively straightforward 2-3 die Tiberium project, easily done
if there is a compelling need to do so.
...
Your argument is also, at its core, an argument for keeping up a solid +Logistics buffer, so that suddenly needing to expend, say, -2 or -4 Logistics shipping things across an ocean when you wish you hadn't had to is
merely inconvenient, not some kind of civilizational crisis.
Right now, our Logistics buffer is up in the twenties. We will have little trouble keeping it up to +10 or more. And we have seen
large Logistics maluses hit us. A sudden -10 Logistics malus is "oh shit, you're fighting a world war and supplying armies everywhere." Or "oh shit, you're fighting a world war and the enemy is raiding your sea commerce everywhere and your navy is too weak to stop them."
These are not, to put it mildly,
small problems, or problems Nod can easily impose on us without paying a price. On our
worst day, the pressures of fighting Nod inflicted a -17 Logistics malus on us... And Nod took a brutal,
terrible beating as the price of doing that. A beating their forces will need years to recover from. Even though much of that malus was from the strains
we inflicted by attacking
them.
The situation is, broadly speaking, under control. We should worry more about other issues, like advancing our understanding of tiberium science and making sure we can fund a large and prosperous economy.
...
You have a very strong tendency in your planning to think "I can imagine a scenario where if things go badly in exactly the way that I imagine, and if everyone is stupid and unprepared, X will go wrong. Therefore, X is the most likely point of failure and the point that needs to be reinforced at all costs, and problems A, B, and C can be ignored because I don't think they will happen."
And you are, importantly,
very dogmatic about this. You are not flexible. You do not stop and consider "maybe other people are right and we are well prepared to deal with this problem in a wide variety of ways."
Being close to our refining cap is a problem, for some of the reasons you have expressed.
This is a problem we
once had, but it is not a problem we need to pretend that we still have. Or that we will always have forever. Please stop.
I think that this is an unsolvable optimisation problem, unfortunately.
Basically everything is a catch-22. Building Columbia early gets us worker accommodation to help with everything else. Building Shala early gives us orbital food production, which relieves strain on orbital logistics. Building the Fusion Yard improves lunar mining, giving us more materials to build with. The Gravitic Shipyard gets us asteroid mining... Okay that one likely has such a big lead time that it probably won't impact the next Plan at all.
Remember, building
Shala and
Columbia won't be as big of a strain on us in the coming Plan as building
Philadelphia and
Enterprise was. If we have the station bay and the
Leopard II yard, then those turn into 2015-point projects... which means roughly 23-25 die projects, depending on whether we complete
Wadmalaw Kudzu Phase 3 and
Orbital AEVA in the next Plan, and I recommend both of those.
We have six orbital dice per turn, so roughly speaking, we need to block out eight turns or half our Plan dice to work on those projects. The
Enterprise bays, all three of them, cost a rough average of, let's say 1500 Progress to be pessimistic, so even if we commit to finishing all three, that's only another 6-7 dice for each bay or about one turn per. We still have about four turns of wiggle room. Roughly one turn worth of wiggle room is eaten by the promise to SCED that we'll build them at least one
Conestoga. That leaves three... in other words, something in the vicinity of 1500 Progress.
I'm pretty sure we actually
could start our first-wave asteroid mines during the current Plan.
Especially since we would also have to build further mines, not just the shipyards. And space mining is significantly crap without Columbia/Shala for RnR, so delaying those to build more mining is a pretty bad taste option. So I think the Shipyards will have to go at the end.
I think it is desirable to get the fusion yards early, not just to increase shipping
capacity, but to increase shipping
efficiency. When we are done with
Columbia and probably
Shala, our next probable attractive megaproject will be either a "city in space" orbital colony of which
Columbia is the prototype, or a large moon base. Either of those will be a lot easier to do if we have copious amounts of near-space shipping capacity that is well designed to move bulk cargoes.
Basically, the fusion yard can work away in the background replacing dozens or hundreds of runs by relatively inefficient shuttles hauling cargo inefficiently with a handful of bulk ore carriers hauling cargo more efficiently, and at the end of the process,
hey presto, things are better and we can more easily move on to our next plans! Because we got the fusion yard done early and so the lead time on building spaceboats was shorter.
The gravitic yard is a little different because it's a lot more expensive and because we're not currently using gravitic ships for
economic purposes.
That will have Columbia finishing later 2063 and Shala early 2064. Assuming that we spread dice across both up to phase which seems like a good idea. Orbital colonists without good food production seems awkward.
Not really. Our space launch infrastructure is very widely distributed, we have hundreds of spacecraft, and there just are not enough people in outer space right now to eat THAT much food.
We don't have millions of pressure-suited chain gang workers with pickaxes toiling away in the moon mines; it's all heavily mechanized and automated. The mass of ore coming back
down from the mines vastly exceeds the mass of rations we ship
up to the mines. So if we can afford to ship ore from the moon to Earth orbit, then the burden of shipping food from Earth to Earth orbit,
while significant, is not ultimately that big of a deal. Remember that our orbital workers on
Enterprise boast of "eating like a king" (by GDI standards). We're not having trouble feeding them.
Shala is critical to our long range plans for sustainable space colonization, but it is not in any immediate sense a bottleneck. By contrast, the need to prototype livable accommodations for our moon miners and space industrial workers
IS something close to a bottleneck... but that's a
Columbia problem.
After that, we'll have quite a few direction options to consider. Just filling out our Bay slots is around 3000+ progress needed (including the two Shipyards). Meaning that if we go with that, we likely don't get anything else big done in the next Plan. Not that completing a suite of mostly self sufficient orbital stations is a bad thing.
...But bays are only 400-500 point projects tho...?
The other main alternative would be to finish the Enterprise Bays, and build a lunar orbiting station, or a Mars orbiting one. Building both would be unfeasible in the coming Plan, as these need to be basically self sufficient from day 0. So I expect that they will be expensive.
A station in orbit around the Moon would not need to be truly self-sufficient; we could ship stuff in and out of it easily. We already do that for plenty of operations and bases on the lunar surface.
