Also to note is that outside of the 5 so far unassigned services dice lightwhisper's Q1 plan is spending the exact same amount of money (625) as Simon's plan, Simon is just spending more on individual projects and so activates less dice.
I'm spending more on a
very short list of individual projects. There may,
may, be something in Heavy Industry or Military that's worth spending 20 R on a die. If we decide in the future that it's better to spend those same 20 R on two dice doing a different project, we can, because this is a draft, not some kind of locked-in thing.
For instance, is it better to spend 20 R on two Light Industry dice to build some kind of civilian consumer good? Better to spend 20 R on two Agriculture dice for caffeinated kudzu, or on one Orbital die to finish the station bay? Or 20 R on one Military die to research MRASP for the Steel Talons? I don't know. I'm not claiming to know. I
tentatively budgeted for a handful of 20 R/die dice, even though we could theoretically activate more total dice otherwise.
Remember that both my plan and Lightwhispers are
NOT finalized; they are rough approximations to give a sense of scale. If we have 625 R to throw around either way, we have 625 R to throw around either way.
How we throw it around, precisely, is a matter for future discussion.
It's a 720R + 100 reserve plan, but yeah. Spending on less-costly projects is part of what I see as worthwhile - because they are worth doing. But my plan also has 95R more than Simon's for Services, other things that may come up, and probably doing a few slightly more costly projects in other areas (like probably changing the GD-3 to the Island development). And, of course, saves 100R for Q2, to ensure we can keep activating everything while hitting glaciers like they owe us money. (Because they do.)
Again, a big part (not all, but most) of why your plan can do this is because you're not trying to work on Chicago in 2061Q4 (and realistically, it will not be completed until late 2062 at the earliest), and not doing the banking reforms (which, likewise, will have to wait at least a year).
This does, yes, let us spend more money activating dice in 2062Q1 to build subways and isolinear computing peripherals and whatnot.
But it's not just a straightforward case of one plan being more efficient than another; we're going to pay a price.
Speaking of which, Simon why the hell wouldn't we front load the cheapest possible projects in Q1?
Because I'm a fucking idiot, of course.
Please don't put "the hells" into questions like that. It's a great way to anger people by implying that they're just too stupid to have thought of whatever it is you just noticed in thirty seconds' thought.
...
Now, more seriously, as noted above, the reason is that I am
tentatively considering maybe possibly spending
a few 20 R/die projects.
In Orbital we have almost nothing important to do
but 20 R/die projects, so doing only the cheapest possible projects would mean sitting around doing almost nothing in the category, which in turn would probably anger Starbound because they literally just spent considerable political capital making sure we'd have 100 RpT worth of moon mining income on hand in 2062Q1
specifically so we wouldn't have to do that.
In Military, there are a
LOT of 20 R/die projects. For instance... (1) ongoing Zone Armor factory construction is going to be important and we'll want to resume as soon as possible. Depending on which plan wins, we may have a third or fourth factory partially completed and just sitting there waiting for one more die, too. And (2) there's the matter of that
Shark-class frigate yard; if we finish it by Q2 or Q3 that's 20 more warships ready in time for Karachi. And (3) there's the question of whether we want to spend a die on the Steel Talons, because their
cheapest projects they have are 20 R/die.
In Heavy Industry, we might hypothetically have any of a number of unfinished projects we might very much want to complete in a timely manner.
So there are several places where we
might, MIGHT, maybe possibly decide it's worth spending 20 R on a single die when we could in theory spend 10 R apiece on two dice doing something else. Or we might not. This is a
draft, notional plan, and I assure you that no matter what happens, it will undergo significant changes between now and the 2062Q1 turn post.
I don't understand why we aren't doing the Medium Tactical Plasma Weapon Deployment. The Steel Talons are even offering 5 PS for it, so they obviously thing it is really important. And it only needs 80 progress.
Because one die is not necessarily enough to finish it and if you've been listening to the conversation you'll see that the odds of getting a second 30 R/die die on the project in 2062Q1 is ahaha
no. We're already funding a quite substantial Talons project this turn, and in some variants (my
Attempting To Have Banks and Walls of Guns variant) we spend a third die on a different Talons project. We'll get to the plasma cannons, but we're at least funding them and it's on something very likely to have valuable civilian spinoffs.
If we really want to show Brig Gen Tali Jackson that we appreciate her, we should be delivering a plasma cannon equipped Titan, dressed up like a Christmas tree. Everybody knows that plasma weapons are a mecha-girl's best friend.
Her new Titan will instead be equipped with reinforced shield generators. She may be a
little disappointed, but given that her
last Titan got kneecapped by antitank missiles and would probably have been even worse off with a plasma cannon that couldn't fire beehive rounds in place of a railgun that could, I think she'll understand.
I am super down with Suzuka and Isolinear related projects. This I can get behind.
Originally, I was quite interested in banking. But the arguments have made sense to me how waiting a quarter or two when we are least bottlenecked is much better. I'm not down with banking for at least this plan.
it won't just be a quarter or two, it'll be a year, because shaking loose 100 R worth of surplus to sign away on a banking reform in 2062Q2 or Q3 is going to be a very hard sell. If we're not willing to do it
now because it'll force us to skip out on
future projects we want, you may be sure we won't do it until we have plenty of money to do everything we pressingly want all at once.
And that won't happen for at least 3-4 turns, because if we're relying on heavy spending of reserve money in 2062Q1-Q2, then as that reserve dries up, our available budget for the subsequent quarters doesn't expand as fast as we'd hoped.
One or two quarters delay for banking does not outweigh the disadvantage on regaining income and dice activation.
I think there's a bias in favor of things that make the numbers we can
see go up (number of Treasury projects completed) over the numbers we
can't see (overall health of civilian economy).
I think that's making a mistake.
I don't think you are wrong, I just feel that the timing is wrong to do it right now. The long-term benefit seems unlikely to outweigh the short-term one (and the long-term benefits we derive from that short-term boost).
The short-term benefit is that we complete a few more subways, apartments, civilian widget factories, railgun cannonball factories, and so on.
"Activate all our dice" isn't magic. We've activated all our dice for the great majority of turns so far in the game, and it hasn't restored the civilian economy. This option has been around ever since the economic census, because the economic census told us, in so many words, that we have a liquidity crisis. Failing to make a move to solve that crisis, so that we'll have an extra 100 R sitting around to activate dice with in early 2062, doesn't strike me as a good move.
