I might be wrong about this but isn't expanding Chicago's processing capability practically required for the Super Glacier Mines some are talking about? The plan was to put them on the long stretch of Red Zone that has almost zero Nod presence due to severing the yellow zone in North America. And then shipping all that mined Tiberium to Chicago for processing.
The only other stretch of controlled Red Zone is in Australia. And I think Australia lacks enough local processing capability to support a SGM complex. So that means shipping the surplus out by cargo ship. Right under Bintang's nose. There were some constructed near Adelaide last turn but will that be enough to support an Australian Super Glacier Mine?
And back to Chicago. How much of Chicago's processing capacity is used right now by local mining?
I think we'll be all right either way, really. GDI knows how to position refinery complexes, we just built a big set of 'em that expanded our overall global capacity from about 2400 to 3000, there are already refineries in every Blue Zone, and so on. Besides, there are at least
four sites for direct pushes into the Red Zones that I can see:
1) Upper Mississippi Valley, roughly Minnesota and Iowa.
2) Great Salt Lake region, roughly Utah.
3) Central Europe, roughly along a line sweeping along the Alps up through Austria and into... Czecho/Slovakia, maybe?
4) As noted, the East Australian Outback.
Tiberium from area (2) would almost have to be processed on the
west coast of North America, since we have no well-secured land shipping route from there to Chicago. Tiberium from (3) could go anywhere in multiple Blue Zones that we might use that broadly reduce to "Northern Europe."
Among other things, note that the recent wave of refineries was built entirely
after GDI's conquests in Steel Vanguard, so they were probably positioned with the possibility of future direct Red Zone mining in mind.
I'm not too worried about it. While I have a Chicago plan, note that I have totally approval-voted a Chicago-free version of the same plan with no qualms! I think it'll be fine.
Because when it comes to refuges and low quality housing (with Chicago blocking another wave of apartments). Those refuges are coming from worse living conditions. They aren't being housed in refuge camps which were a problem at the start of the quest (and were a problem still in canon timeline). Unless I'm missing something we moved everyone who was in low quality housing before the Regency War. So anyone there moved there during the Regency War from Nod territory or decided not to move as housing became available. I think with the trickle from the Bureau of Arcologies (which moves those longest staying low quality housing residents) and us most likely restarting apartments as soon as possible. And even with the current surge we won't run out of low quality housing for 5 turns.
Broadly speaking I agree, but I think Derpmind and others are right to be concerned, and I do want to do my best to improve matters.
There have been some hints in the narrative, by the way, that Yellow Zone refugees may like communal housing better than we think if we play our cards right. There were remarks about them having trouble getting used to transitioning from big clannish extended family lifestyles to GDI's more atomized way of life... Well... communal housing. Maybe. If we're careful.
There are a couple other projects that I'd do the same to (especially with Chicago potentially taking up some of the slack for ZOCOM in NA), but c'est la vie.
Hm. How do you see Chicago helping in that way?
Also, I think people are sleeping on alloys because it has a rather ordinary name but it is important to do our major civilian research sooner rather than later.
The way I see it, it's low-cost enough that we can finish it off with a single die in 2062Q1, and any major deployment project based on it would have to wait for
Personal Electric Vehicles anyway.
Unless said deployment project were itself a 10 R/die project, which... Well, my experiences with Heavy Industry projects in the game to date suggest to me that this is unlikely.
