Orbital cleanup, there's a fair chance of completing the station bay, stage 12 also gives a discount to stations. Useful for long term making the stations cheaper so they require less dice. Stage 11 of orbital cleanup meanwhile unlocks energy satellites which look to be useful with our difficulties with energy generation.
I'll be pleasantly surprised if finishing orbital cleanup makes
stations cheaper. And we've been explicitly told, more than once, that the solar power satellites won't provide +Energy to our overall economy; they're a prerequisite for certain other space infrastructure projects.
Furthermore, your choice to invest 2+E dice into the cleanup project means that you have to leave the
Leopard II factory with only a 4% chance of completion, which means that we
still won't be positioned and ready to start our new space stations in 2062Q2 anyway even with the cleanup project done, unless we're planning to go ahead without the
Leopard IIs, in which case why are you even bothering to spend on the shuttle factory at all?
well if you read the rest of it below that you'd see I continue on for a bit.
But to say it plainly here. 795 is the minimum but border offensives potentially has another 20, orbital cleanup maybe another 10, possibly some money from banking and general tax money. say 5 each and that's 835R total to spend.
None of that changes my analysis.
Our budget this turn is 855 R, so we're still looking at having less money to spend in Q2 than in Q1 under your plan.
Furthermore, you make much of activating "every single last dice we have," but I could quite easily do the same thing more efficiently simply by choosing different projects. If you weren't specifically deciding to build fortress towns despite the cost, you could save 30 R by switching to other Infrastructure projects. Research into
Microfusion Cell is entirely optional this turn, and could be a second die in
Electric Vehicles, saving another 10 R. Throwing most of our Free dice at Agriculture isn't a particularly wise course of action, either. Because while getting good food to the public is a priority for the plan, we have many ways in which to do that and it will be much easier to do that if we have a solid and sustainable budget capable of activating all our dice at 15-20 R/die. And MARVs are a very inefficient way to get income (and for that matter Red Zone abatement) compared to some of the other options currently available to us in terms of tiberium mining.
Your plan spends much of our cash reserves on expensive projects that are at best optional. Furthermore, it is not making full and adequate preparations to replace that cash reserve with new, sustainable income streams.
And sure, my plan doesn't get as much money as other plans, but repeatedly, where we actually get limited, particularly late in the four year plans, isn't in resources but in the amount of dice we have available. So activating every dice we can right from the start might actually be more efficient long term.
You say that, but then you have numerous dice focused on things that aren't even Plan requirements and don't directly contribute significantly to Plan requirements, while in other areas you make massive investments that only make sense if you're trying to "overachieve" on the Plan targets and get them done in a hurry.
Likewise, I don't understand why you're interested in "opening up... possibly even glaciers" when you're already ignoring the glacier mining option that is already available to you and that the vast majority of other plans being used in the quest include.
Sure, it's all stuff you want "in and of itself," but when you try to put it together to form a coherent picture for what GDI is trying to accomplish, and how we expect these moves to work together to give us good choices and options in the future, It just doesn't make sense.
I'm honestly not sure where you got the idea that I was advocating for luxury housing.
I get the mechanical reasons why the communal housing experiments are a good (even great) idea. And I'm sure someone waiting in line at a refugee camp while getting shot at on a daily basis would be happy to get anywhere to live. And it's a central feature of the quest narrative that the bureaucracy of GDI, a global hegemon with no real competition, is... not like a real-world bureaucracy in a lot of regards (aka the suspension of disbelief on that point is required for enjoyment of this quest).
I'm still going to be amused at the idea that, when faced with the need to house tens of millions (?) of people, the solution that bubbles to the top, because it's the most efficient in terms of numbers as presented at an upper management meeting, is to stuff people into what are basically college dormitories. But I suppose our senses of humor don't overlap on that.
Sorry, I'm a bit cranky about it.
The problem is that we
literally only have a fairly short list of ways to house people at all. Like, the total list is:
Greater Arcologies
Fortress Towns
Apartments
Lesser Arcologies
Communal Housing
That's
it. Options (2) and (4) are shitty conditions, (1) is expensive luxury housing, (3) is a limited option we're running out of phases of, and I feel like you're laughing at me for trying (5) when I'm running out of ideas here.
The irony of "bureaucrats make dorms" is not entirely lost on me, but we're running out of buttons we're even allowed to push. And this is
after or alongside a massive expansion in which we built 60 Housing worth of much more normal and higher quality apartments, anyway, so there.
Living in space is already hard enough, the least we can give people is the privacy of their own four walls.
Well, there's some potentially problematic aspects to giving each person's space domicile its own, for example, kitchen facilities (you
really don't want kitchen fires on a space station).
Communal housing doesn't necessarily mean "everyone has to put up with bunk beds." I dunno how things will shape out.
Now with properly matched control groups, rather than trying to discover after the fact how much of a governance difference between age-16-voting and age-18-voting is from the age or from other regional factors IRL.
