You have mentioned it in the past yes, but if it's not in your plans reliably just 'mentioning' it doesn't count for a whole lot right now does it?
I also find it rather disingenuous of you to claim that other people in the past didn't do enough for SADN, meanwhile, your current plan has 5 military dice+1 AA dice, while other plans have 7 full military dice into SADN.
It almost seems like you're just trying to poke holes in other peoples plans and find fault. If you wanted to put more effort into SADN you could.
My perspective is that there's some risk of going very abruptly from undercompensating for the threat to overcompensating for the threat. We perceive "oh dear, we have forgotten to attend to this" and try to react by pouring resources into the program most directly connected to "this." But other threats and problems have not gone away, and ignoring them will not help us in the long run.
But in this case, the effective countermeasure to the threat of al-Isfahani's nuclear arsenal is
time, not more 2063Q1 dice spending over and above what is necessary to get Phase 1 done and Phase 2 at least significantly underway.
This is not me being disingenuous, unless you want it to be. This is me being nuanced.
...
Regardless of whether we spend 7 dice or 5.62 dice in 2063Q1, waiting until late 2064 gives us time for an SADN rollout to be fairly effective at covering us against the obvious attack vector.
Likewise, regardless of which number of dice we spend, 5.62 or 7, going ahead in late 2063 does
not give us time for that defense to be effective. Because of rollout time, we will have only the vaguest beginnings of a defense network up and in place, even in the Phase 1 sites we'll definitely be finishing in Q1 anyway, let alone the Phase 2 sites whose completion date is in question.
Thus, neglecting all or nearly all other projects to maximize SADN spending becomes, in practical effect, an overreaction to the problem. Which wouldn't be an issue, really, the resources certainly aren't wasted!
Except that the response comes the expense of ignoring other problems that were real concerns previously.
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The counterargument to my point here is that we can choose to delay the Red Zone border offensives, too, to give ourselves time to properly complete preparations for them instead. My counter to that counterargument is that the Plan commitments and promises we made have given us considerably less flexibility in the timing of the border offensives than of Karachi. We can delay Karachi's start time to 2064 without any general sense of our promises being broken, so far as we know. We cannot do the same with the border offensives, and even waiting until 2063Q3 to start runs us up against our deadline barring extreme dice overexpenditure in Q3.
He can't have it both ways. If SADN isn't important enough to put more dice into then he shouldn't complain about other plans not putting more dice into it. On the other hand, if he does feel it's important, it's a simple matter to add more dice into his own plan.
Because "important" and "not important" don't exist as a strict binary. There's a spectrum. The operative question is "are we doing enough?"
2-3 dice per turn on SADN every turn for the past four turns would have been enough to leave us fairly well prepared this situation. Because of deployment times,
if we plan to go ahead with a 2063Q4-2064Q1 Karachi date, no amount of SADN spending would be truly adequate
now. But if we make the sensible strategic move of delaying our 'GO' date, then suddenly the extra time thus bought
Good planning doesn't consist of deciding what the single most important thing and throwing everything at it.
Good planning consists of deciding what the most important project needs, then seeing what is left elsewhere. Even a very important project may not have the answer to "what does this project need" be "everything."
It reads to me like he's just using it as a convenient issue to try and discourage support for other plans.
I can't control your perceptions.
It's why Simon wishes SADN was looked at earlier and why it's not hypocritical that he's only immediately concerned about phase 1.
Well...
If we still had more Military dice to play with and had rolled better on the zrbite guns so that Phase 1 was finished, I'd be happy to try and throw more stuff in hopes of getting
SADN Phase 2 this turn. Even now, I've tried to at least give us a slim but not hopeless chance of getting it this turn. I want Phase 2 to be as far along as possible this turn for very obvious reasons- the same as everyone else!
But we did roll a Natural 1 on the zrbite guns. And we did start the Department of Munitions which gives us one less Military die of wiggle room to play with for projects like SADN. And we are constrained to two Free dice on the military per turn. And all this other stuff is coming together, to where the pressure
cannot be relieved by rush-building SADN alone.
And so I mentally sigh, push Karachi back to after the 2064 hurricane/monsoon season dies down, and buy us time to finish rush-building SADN
and accomplish some other leftover priorities we were already working on.
Regarding the SADN I really feel like we need more than just 5 dice + an AA one right now...
People are right that more dice on SADN now wont help in the next few turns since phases 1 and 2 probably wont get started any quicker but in 6-8 turns they will mean that phases 3 and 4 of the SADN will be a turn or two further along the process of being rolled out. start rolling out phases 3 and 4 faster which we will need to start mitigating large scale nuclear strikes. I doubt they will be finished in time but even having them a turn further along the rollout process would help reduce the damage.
They won't be a turn further along the rollout process.
They'll be about 1.7
dice further along the rollout process. Phase 3 still isn't getting done until 2063Q2, and still has a very good chance of getting done that turn either way with heavy focus on it (which I for one intend to write into my 2063Q2 plan).
The big X-factor is getting Phase 4 done in 2063Q3... But frankly, SADN up through Phase 3 already gives us enough coverage that al-Isfahani's deterrent starts to look a lot less dangerous, to where GDI can look him in the eye and say "you can't actually hamstring us, all you can do is get a reputation as a gigantic war criminal for killing millions of people, many of them Yellow Zoner refugees, in low-priority non-military targets, and then die like a dog. You should seriously just cut a deal" and al-Isfahani will have good reason to think he's right.
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