I mean, we don't always put dice on fusion reactors, so you gotta ask yourself, do you value efficiency more than you value consistency and reliability? Four dice *might* get you a new fusion reactor, but four turns of DAE always get you 16 or 20 power, no nat 1s to bother you or make you worry.
And then there's the need to replace fusion reactors. If our energy is coming out of fusion, then we need to build twice as much fusion to get over that hump that is coming. Like, I want you to understand, this was a big argument on the Discord, we had someone arguing that we needed DAE, Bergen and full-throttele fusion and to stop building alloys RIGHT NOW because we were hurtling towards -144 energy. I'm not that apocalyptic, but that -144 energy is coming for us all Simon. This isn't gonna be as simple as sliding the old reactors out and building new ones-we're gonna have to bulldoze fusion reactors less than 10 years old and build new ones on the old footprints. Might be nice to not have to do that in a big hurry, right? Might be nice to just have something ticking away, right? So when the time comes, you do have enough reserve to do things in a controlled way, rather than hastily slamming out a reactor phase every other turn.
Let me first just say, Vehrec, that people sometimes call me condescending. I get call-outs. People say it's downright toxic sometimes.
But if I wrote to everyone the way you write to me? I'm pretty sure they'd call me condescending a lot more often than they do now.
So on the one hand, I'm trying to teach myself to make deliberate, specific gestures of courtesy and to find positive things to say and to avoid repeating myself too many times and so on and all the things other people are telling me I shouldn't do.
And then, sometimes, I'm getting this.
Not gonna lie. It's kind of frustrating.
...
So to go back over this:
Four dice *might* get you a new fusion reactor, but four turns of DAE always get you 16 or 20 power, no nat 1s to bother you or make you worry.
I was half tempted to apply the same tone I get from your post. That would have started with something like "Vehrec, Vehrec, Vehrec, if you're going to..."
But no, I'll skip that.
...
If "four turns of DAE always" potentially gives 20 Energy, you're talking about the situation after all five phases of alloys, with a -25% bonus to costs.
But in that situation
Second Generation Fusion Plants, now costing 325 Progress, would be down around 275-ish Progress. At which point four dice give us a really, really good chance of completion, because we're getting about 137 points just off the dice bonuses (even if we don't do Heavy Industry AEVA, which we should), and then we just need to roll (roughly) 133 or less on 4d100.
So I feel like you're exploring the very desirable possible consequences of the alloy foundries for improving your favored action. But you're not looking at the similarly desirable certain consequences of them for the action you don't favor.
...
More generally, you're right that speed matters. That we are genuinely hurrying to produce as much Energy as possible, to make up for the huge deficit we'd face if we had to shut down all the first-generation fusion reactors at once.
But then efficiency also matters. The fewer dice we have to spend to get the same amount of Energy, the more we can do to resolve our problems quickly. Right now, we can't hurry a fusion solution at all, because the state of Bergen limits our options. But given that we are going to need to shut down first-generation reactors for major overhauls or outright scrapping, we will
need to hurry... and yet we are obliged to fulfill other Plan commitments, such as the enormous North Boston project we promised Erewhon and that the rest of GDI is also counting on in its way.
Dice efficiency still counts for something, and there is no likely situation where DAE gives us more dice efficiency than fusion power.
...
Now.
In all fairness, DAE is
close enough in efficiency that it's not somehow a super-unworthy project.
Sure, we genuinely do get less Energy from "X fusion dice plus one DAE die per turn" than we get from "X+1 fusion dice per turn." Let us not try to pretend otherwise; it leads to pretzel logic.
Despite this, there are reasons to go for DAE. There are assorted narrative reasons, which others outline better than I do.
On top of that, the budget is, in spite of everything and thanks in no small part to the Squid's art, frustratingly tight. With projects like Bergen, the gravitics bay, the alloy foundries, and the IHG refineries on the horizon, that's only going to get worse in the long run. DAE does, if nothing else,
save money, letting us activate a Heavy Industry die every turn on something that's
almost as good as if we were spending on fusion plants, but at a -10 R cost differential.
DAE is not a worthless or useless project. If I liked a plan well enough, and it had DAE, I'd go for it with only a faint reflexive grumble.
I think you've miscounted. 3.85 dice is the mean required dice per phase. 2 dice per turn only needs slightly less than average or better, to get a phase out every two turns.
We can be reasonably confident with 2 dice. And any further Alloys Foundries makes that more reliable. (3.62 dice per phase with the next Foundry. 3.2 dice per phase with all Foundries.)
With all foundry phases in place, yes. With only the two we have, not so much. The point is, never being able to put three dice on something that takes 300-ish points to complete makes it a risky proposition to rely on it, because you need an "oh shit" backup plan if it doesn't work. It's still efficient, but you need a backup.
With the confidence of being able to put more dice on fusion, you don't need a backup constantly in place in case of emergencies, and you're not likely to be forced to do something like frantically throw 4-5 dice at a wave of ion power refits when you were really
really hoping to spend those dice on Karachi, or something like that.
Now, if we can complete all the alloy phases, at that point two dice per turn on fusion looks pretty good!
But at that point, you're talking about completing an 1800-point megaproject at 40 R/die, and then I have to ask whether it's really worth it to avoid the trouble of completing a 700-point megaproject at 30 R/die.
[Yes, that oversimplifies, but the point is that Bergen was something we wanted to do anyway
too, so having added incentive to at least hammer through Phase 4 isn't such a bad thing]
Since Karachi construction will not meet resistance from major warlords rushing it is probably not needed? We can slow walk it with Infra and leave Tib dice for other projects?
You're not wrong, but it's still desirable to avoid working on it during any Q3 (peak monsoon season), and probably desirable to get it well established quickly. After all, it's probably still going to face opposition from local Nod warlords who stand to lose a lot of power, unless the Bannerjees work harder than we have any grounds to expect when it comes rein in their subordinates.
And the Shah of Atom is not out of the picture, nor is he a treaty signatory, so we'll need to present him with something that looks like a tough nut to crack, something that's more trouble than it's worth for him to challenge. He might actually be pleased at the prospect of help abating tiberium around him and all that, but we'd need to convince him that pushing us back into the sea singlehandedly isn't a good idea.
Also, frankly, we
do have a bunch of stuff that needs doing in Infrastructure. Shifting the entire burden of Karachi onto that department, which now has much lower dice bonuses than Tiberium, would mean spending more dice to complete and giving up on a lot of desirable projects. Though to be fair, we could also get more done in Tiberium if we worried less, so it gets complicated.
Nonetheless, I do at least want to push Karachi with a reasonable minimum of, say, 5-6 dice per turn on turns when we're working on it. It deserves to be taken seriously.
Unfortunate as the imaging might be we might need to those low density housing to draw interest and boost hope. So we can improve the berth rate of the population.
Why is the low-density housing key to 'hope?'
The people who aren't having kids because of perceived hopelessness don't feel that way because they don't think they'll get a luxury apartment. They feel that way because they're worried their kids will die on Earth from tiberium.
If they look at our space habitats and see big spacious condos for a select few, they'll run the numbers on the odds of
their kids getting to go up to a station like that and think "not likely." That's the problem we've had all along so far. Even though we've obviously been making a serious space colonization push ever since the mid-2050s, people didn't really feel in their hearts that GDI was serious this time about making it an option for everyone. Or they doubted that if we try to do so, we'll succeed.
Luxury condos in space won't solve that problem, because they're fundamentally
not a serious attempt to engage with the problem of "does the bulk of today's human population, and their children, have a realistic hope of surviving in space if tiberium can't be stopped?"
