TBH, to finish Boston without any major trouble we need to shelve either Alloys 6 or Repulsorplates.
Would prefer to shelve Alloys, we have other ways of increasing income.
Oh? I haven't done a rigorous dice cost analysis there in some time. Have you run the numbers? Cool. Can you run them by me?
Big Logistics boost Is probably preferable ATM. Plus long-term benefits.
Honestly, the +Logistics is the least of my reasons for wanting the repulsorplate deployment. We have pretty solid Logistics, we have reason to expect that stat to increase by +13 in the near future as we finally finish the suborbital shuttles, and Karachi is hopefully going to help too. Unless we intend to build a whole bunch of conventional glacier mines (and there's no obvious reason we should), or fight World War 7 some time soon (and I hope not) it's really not something we need to worry about right now.
It's the military and technological benefits that have me interested.
Looks like we are finally looking down the hard timeline for getting 2CCF online.
Aside from the 9 phases of CCF plants we built (16*9 = 144 Energy) we also constructed the precursor plants of:
-Fusion Power Prototype: 1 Energy in
Q3 2055 (The first Fusion plant)
-Fusion Peaker Plants: 4 Energy in
Q1 2056 (The single sub plant component for the CCF design)
-Synchronized Cycle Fusion Plants: 8 Energy in
Q1 2057 (The prototype for the CCF design)
Therefore there were a total of 1+4+8+144 = 157 Energy from CCF and precursor plants. Therefore we need to produce 156 Energy in 6.5 or 7 years to replace the stuff that is going to go offline.
For the 7 year case that is 28 turns and therefore would mean an average 5.57 Energy per turn needed. 4 of that is covered by the DEA and therefore we would need 1.57 Energy per turn.
For the 6.5 year case that is 26 turns and therefore would mean an average 6 Energy per turn needed. 4 of that is covered by the DEA and therefore we would need 2 Energy per turn.
2CCF is approximately 4 dice needed per phase on average, and produces 19 Energy. Therefore, that is roughly 4.75 Energy per die. Therefore on average as long as we invested at least 1 die per turn into 2CCF, we should be good for both the 6.5 year and 7 year goals.
Personally I think we should stick to a stable 1-2 dice on 2CCF to give us a bit of a buffer and for use in Energy consuming projects.
You're slightly underestimating the problem here (though two dice on fusion plants should still mostly carry us).
Remember, we built
most of the fusion plants in a gigantic surge during the Regency War- we finished five phases in six turns, actually. This was tapering off in early 2061, with as I recall a last phase in 2061Q4. As such, our effective deadline for getting most of that -156 Energy shortfall dealt with is about, oh... 2-3 turns, roughly less in practice than if we treated it as "we're gonna lose all that energy in one big thwack on the expiry date of the last plant."
I think Rakuhn did a good analysis on this, though something about it makes my brain hurt a bit.
The last line is Phase 4 and it costs STUs. I somewhat expected the increase in Energy costs for Phase 4, but the STU cost is an unanticipated surprise. I guess it shouldn't have been though, we haven't built the Infernium Refits yet.
I was kind of mentally braced for it, because we're explicitly doing a ton of rollout of what are explicitly modern infernium disco ball lasers. If anything, it's a pleasant surprise that we could build that many air defense infernium lasers for 'only' half the STU cost of refitting the whole navy with the disco balls.
I'd have naively expected the STU cost of SADN to be the one that totaled -2 STU and the cost of the naval laser refits to be -1 STU.
Huh. I was expecting more about the newer cities getting connected, military supply lines, and expanding into red zones to assist the harvesting.
Guess stuff has been ticking along in the background and it doesn't have the same impact it would have had several turns ago.
I don't think this was us actually completing a phase, so we can't expect miracles.
I thought fixing lactose intolerance was one of the first things we did when we did human genome editing?
Yeah, but that doesn't mean we actually
went in and edited everyone's DNA. That would have been an insanely massive project, and there'd be huge numbers of people mad at us if we did it in a high-handed way.
...crap. That's a big problem.
...
Yeah, we should probably do the Tiberium growth thing. We need some new options.
Yeah, it'd definitely be good to have some sense of the "manual control" option for tiberium. If we're
lucky, the Scrin "suction hose" apparatus can be separated from the "make tiberium grow faster" apparatus; the fact that we were able to modify our inhibitors to stop pushing the tiberium underground is promising along these lines. But yeah, we should do the enhanced growth spikes, because it turns out they don't
only enhance growth.
Do ZOCOM use APCs?
They can't be using those ones now, as they don't fit zone armor.
Maybe it would help them greatly to have access to them, for exactly that reason.
In the long term, yes, in the short term, it's not the MBTs we need to upgrade to work with Zone Armour (although the Predator does need replacement), it's the IFVs that we need to make play nice with ZAI formations, especially now that we are starting to move the entire infantry force over to Zone Armour instead of just ZOCOM, which often operated very light on vehicles because of the poor terrain of the Red Zones.
Prioritizing IFVs over tanks frankly makes sense, yes. On the other hand, if we're really trying to optimize for ZOCOM's needs, we need grav-lev hover APCs, and the planning for this starts getting more ambitious. Something to bear in mind.
It's still not a project where I expect to be able to seriously contemplate deployment until 2064 or later, and I want to make sure we leave some wiggle room for MARVs in 2064 because we're probably not going to have time in early 2065 while Karachi is ongoing.
