Hey is it possible to go full craft world Eldar in the long further?
Depends on what you mean by "full Eldar." If you mean "the main focus of our civilization and most of our population is on space stations because a giant apocalypse wiped out our home planet," that's definitely possible, though kind of a defeat condition what with the whole "Earth is destroyed by tiberium" thing.
If you mean "long-lived, psychic, all that jazz," then that's kind of... maybe, maybe not, possibly definitely no, pending the results of biological research.
- 2 Die on Improved Hewlett-Gardner Tiberium Processing Plants to get more processing space opened up, 1 Die to finish off the Enchanced Tiberium Spikes and get our Spikes improved so they pull Tiberium up, 3 Dice on Securing Yellow Zones so we can have more territory to mine and expand into and 1 Die on Coordinated Abatement to get that done and our diplomatic relations improved with some warlords.
Personally, I think we have a variety of projects that are higher priority than
Secure Yellow Zones, such as
Forgotten Research.
- 2 Die on Shala to finish that off and 3 Dice each on both Shala Species Restoration Bays to try and keep what we have of our biosphere left as soon as possible.
I strongly suspect that rush-building two species restoration bays in parallel will not get us better results than working a bit more gradually. Among other things, we've repeatedly seen that rush-building any one thing in space tends to result in doubtful quality
- 2 Die on Biosculpting to finish that off and 2 Die on portals because Bureaucracy is full of Actions to take this turn and I'm done slowrolling Portals or risking them not finishing next turn as well.
@Derpmind is still right and we should get portals as soon as we can every time we can until we have the tech done.
Given how incredibly expensive portal dice are, it's a
big sacrifice to take two of them when one has a 40% or so chance of completing the project.
Now, we do actually have the money to throw around if we really want to, but it's a
big sacrifice. Personally, I don't expect a two-dice portal plan to win this upcoming turn vote.
It has Inferno Gel so I'll vote for this, but I'm conflicted over Particle Beam Dev. It's a higher level tech then the lasers, we have both the old and modern versions, and we have that phasing technology from the Scrin that could really give them some extra kick. That's saying something, Particle Weapons kick damn hard as is.
However, developing them to that point is going to cost time and resources. We're going to have to iterate on it and test it. It'll probably stay in the Talon's hands alone for a while. And we're going to need STUs for it.
It's probably at least worth doing the basic tech development project before next generation
AFVs, as opposed to support vehicles. That'll give the designers at least some chance to integrate them into the designs.
The development project itself is something I think we can slip in.
Speaking of Military projects, I had a bit of a thought. Here's a bit of analysis looking at the median dice for different types of projects:
Tech Development
Military Particle Beam (Tech) 1 die
Inferno Gel (Tech) 1 die
Binary Propellant (Tech) 1 die
NovaHawk (???) 1 die
Next-Generation Armored Support Vehicles (Platform) 1 die
Next-Generation Armored Fighting Vehicles (Platform) 1 die
SSN (???) 1.5 dice
Total: 7.5 dice
We could do all of our military tech development in only one turn. However, at least two (and up to four) of them are (Platform) projects and so would have a limited time window to usefully deploy them in.
Hm. I will note that historically when we've had trouble with (Platform) projects disappearing off the docket, it's been associated with our problematic relationship with the Navy.
Someone in the Navy seems to be of the mindset that the best way to communicate with us is to take their projects off our docket on the grounds of
"Sure, I guess you just don't want to build this then." And they're pretty damn quick off the dime in doing so, relative to the other branches of the military. Frankly, Space Force is similar. I'm surprised they don't talk to the Militarist Party and get their to-do list integrated more fully into the Four Year Plan goals, because then they'd have a much better chance of getting what they wanted prioritized along with the other stuff that we
do have to promise instead of being optional. [grumbles]
Anyway, the point is, the
Island-class in particular has had a fraught history because the Navy isn't sure they want the ships, and they're gotten it into their heads that
we're not sure we want them to have the ships. By contrast, Ground Force
definitely wants next-generation tanks, IFVs, and so on, and the Air Force
definitely wants the NovaHawk fighter. I don't think those projects will disappear off our docket nearly as quickly, and by 'quickly' I mean 'within a couple of years.'
They almost certainly won't disappear like that if we build even the first stage of the factories, I'd say.
These are projects the military clearly wants, so it's far more likely that they'll use political leverage to
force us to fund the project, rather than just sloping off into the distance and giving up on them.
Non-Munition Non-Refit Non-MARV Deployment
Orca Wingmen Drones 1 AA die
Island Class Assault Ship 1 die
Orbital Nuclear Caches 2 dice
Stealth Disruptor 2 dice
Modular Rapid Assembly Prototype Factory 2 dice
Unmanned Support Ground Vehicle 3 dice
ASAT Defense System 4.5 dice
Initiative Laser Systems 7 dice
Zrbite Sonic Weapons 7 dice
GD-3 (Phase 1-3) 10 dice
Ground Forces Zone Armor (Set 2) (Phase 1-6) 21 dice
Governor-A ???
Transorbital Fighter ???
Total: 59.5 dice + 1 AA die
We have a bunch of dice-cheap projects here, so it makes sense to do all the non-Steel Talon ones together all next turn. But we also have many that require more than a turn's worth of 6 dice, and deciding between them will be a task fr the turn after next.
Well, we still have a quite sizeable commitment of
Ground Force Zone Armor factory rollout for the Four Year Plan as a whole. That's something we straight-up promised to do. And with Ground Force's training establishment for zone armor having been operational for two years, I suspect they're getting up to the point where actual supplies of power armor are starting to become a bottleneck again, so maybe we'd better push that.
Though in 2064 I'd like to push that
alongside dice spent on the Navy and Space Force, plus also basic development work on particle beams, the NovaHawk, and the next generation armored vehicles.
If we're trying to build multiple MARVs at the same time, roughly 2/3rds of the dice will come from Tiberium. That still means 11-ish dice from Military for doing all the RZ MARVs, but that's less than the dice needed for the current set of Zone Armor. Meaning the problem for doing RZ MARVs is in large part finding turns where we have 4+ dice in Tiberium free.
Well, for that, it helps that the refinery refit program having apparently been nixed. Probably because of the new MARV refinery concept and the impending Visitor-tech refinery designs, both of which provide better prospects of mass STU production than we can hope to scrape out of refitting our remaining 'conventional' Hewlett-Gardner refineries.
After all, at the end of the current Plan, we'll have
roughly 3200 RpT worth of tiberium mining income for GDI as a whole. We already have about 1350 RpT worth of IHG refineries at the end of this turn, and we'll probably be building at least another 450 points in a phase of new refinery construction for the Plan target, so that brings us to 1800. That leaves about 1400 RpT of tiberium going through conventional H-G refineries instead of second generation 'IHG' refineries. As I recall, going from HG to IHG converts us from one unit of STU per 100 RpT of resources to one STU per 90 RpT- it may be less favorable than that, but I'm trying to be optimistic.
If so, then the entire refinery refit program is only good for about +1.5 units of STU, probably/hopefully rounding to two units, for what remains an 1100-point, 35 R/die megaproject. It's just not worth it when we have better and cheaper ways of getting the same end result, and I think Litvinov knows it. And with that, well,
per Doruma, we have about 28 Tiberium dice to play with, making it a lot more practical to do Red Zone MARVs.
An issue I see with particle weapons is that we currently have trouble powering them. Nod gets around this by liquid tib cells, making everyone Big Mad. We can use microfusion cells for them, but we haven't even started that business yet.
Without the secondary tech, I find the primary one questionable. We can power them at the vehicular level, but how well? It risks being a well designed, cutting edge, utterly fragile tech that falters in the wild conditions of war without either tib in a can or sun in a can.
There are applications for which this really isn't a problem, because we have a prodigious supply of electrical power on hand. For example, fixed AA defenses (which tend to be hardwired into large power plants), orbital weapons platforms (our ion cannons are apparently
already very large but crude particle cannon, and they work well as a proof of concept), and next-generation warships.
It's at least worth looking into.
No, difficulty in taking food from shala and getting it to the people who need feeding.
Okay, though that's what I mean by "offloading the food." Basically, problems with the loading dock and the shipping of the food. Sorry for not explaining well.
On the other hand, this is yet another thing making me glad we didn't go for the
Core Crops Bay option, because that makes it sound like we'd run out of capacity to ship the food off the station just from the size of the core itself, let alone if we extended the core's bulk agricultural output still further. If
Shala can turn out so much food that it's growing, say, 5,000 tons of beans a day and we can only get 4,000 tons of beans a day off the station, then it does us very little good to increase
Shala's capacity to produce up to 7,000 tons of beans a day.
