I am contemplating doing that, and perhaps also swapping a Vein Mine die to Liquid Tiberium power, but am hesitant to do so if there are people who think that would change the plan sufficiently that their already-existing votes would be problematic.
If I were you, I'd do it.
Notice that your plan surged in popularity after you pointed out that under your plan, we'd have a much larger reserve fund and in consequence be much more free to activate all dice in 2062Q1 even if we are unable or unwilling to divest ourselves of any budget line items.
(if, to be clear, we postponed the banking reforms until late 2062, didn't bother with
Chicago Phase 4 until probably around the same timeframe, and made some other changes on a smaller scale)
Nobody has encouraged me to cut dice from tiberium power and put them on vein mining. I don't think there's much demand for it, frankly, and my sense is that people don't care which we do. If they did, you'd probably be getting
more pushback against your plan. I suspect that an option that trades -1 Capital Goods for a bunch of income that we then immediately lose three quarters of isn't as attractive to voters as an option that gives us power plants we get to keep. I could be wrong, but that's my gut instinct.
Yeah, if you want an "anti-biomonsters in tunnels" weapon, go for Zone Armor or the GD-3 rifle. Inferno gel is mostly being looked at as an anti-vehicle weapon, and while it might have side uses, I'm not particularly enthused by it.
In all fairness, antitank weapons get shot at biomonsters
a lot, because Nod biomonsters blur the line between "infantry" and "vehicle" in terms of firepower and durability, very much as power armored human troops do.
I won't be surprised if, in the event that we develop inferno gel, it gets used on biomonsters. I just don't expect it to be a "killer app" weapon that shuts them down as a threat significantly better than, say, large caliber SAPHE rounds for railguns designed to be carried by Zone Armor. Because that kind of incendiary mix has disadvantages, which is a big part of why even Nod doesn't use it
primarily.
i think there's a tendency among the people with a lot of gaming experience to think "inferno gel is fire, fire damage is best against squishy organic 'meat' opponents, biomonsters are basically just big 'meat' opponents, all squishy-like, so the gel will work on them." But this game seems to run on a more simulationist perspective. And it's not obvious that a splatter of incendiary will stop a heavily engineered cyborg animal whose skin is almost certainly totally deadened to pain and also guarded by armor, when multiple railgun hits won't.
Not clear on why Chicago has gotten the love compared with other things, but I'm not unhappy to get that finalised, and don't want to pester people for something they no doubt explained 50 pages ago (like, wow the discussion here moves fast).
The biggest reasons for me, at least, are:
1) Because it's +6 Capital Goods for 550 Progress, which isn't great but is
pretty good by the standards of anything that isn't a Heavy Industry megaproject and we can't afford to do any of those right now anyway.
2) Because we've committed to finishing it now as a Plan commitment, and getting 500-650 or so points of the project out of the way now means we have more room to do other things later.
3) It's also a civilian production center, and a sizeable one, which helps a lot.
