Giving them Zone Armor they begged for instead of wasting money on Talon toys would have unstretched them a lot.
We could do everything now present on the Steel Talons docket for a small fraction of the total investment it would take to even
begin to "give [Ground Forces] the Zone Armor they begged for."
There's a reason we haven't done Ground Force Zone Armor factories
so far. You know that reason as well as the rest of us. They're a huge expense in terms of Capital Goods, it's likely to cost something like 18 Military dice to complete the full set, and that full set is just what it takes to finish
the first wave.
By the same standards that you're applying to the Talons to call their equipment "toys," equipping all of Ground Forces with Zone Armor is a massive boondoggle. It's a bad standard either which way, one that comes about by selectively ignoring the costs of a project one approves of, and the benefits of a project one doesn't approve of.
Which takes time and material of which NOD has a limited amount, so setting up a bunch of facilities seems like it would have reduced their ability to do stuff elsewhere, one I could see, multiple would badly divert resources. More so since NOD industry is not shared between warlords and NOD industry has to be hidden and decentralized within each Warlord territory.
You're not wrong. On the other hand, I can totally imagine a "submarine Nod warlord" whose whole
thing is occupying a handful of underwater cities that GDI doesn't know about and cannot easily locate, at which the Falaks are manufactured, and from which underwater tiberium harvesters roam. Given how badly GDI's naval forces have fared over the course of the Tiberium Wars, I think this is at least plausible, even if we shouldn't just casually assume that it's true.
true , two of the labs hit were deep in the blue zones
Hm. I think this may be based on stuff from the Discord, but from what I saw in the Discord myself, the labs in question...
Well, they're in a Blue Zone in the sense of "an area relatively free of tiberium," but they're not in a Blue Zone in the sense of "a densely populated and highly desirable area that would be easy to occupy and fortify." Which makes them easier targets.
Just because it fits the topic, orbital research laboratories to get some of our tech out of Nods hands are gated behind Columbia.
Makes sense- though aversion to putting tiberium in space means that a lot of our our most impressive tech will still be on the ground, and the need to
manufacture stuff groundside will mean that there's Cool Shit for Nod to steal for the foreseeable future.
It will turn what is right now, easy enough to do with just a shadow team or two, into something where you might need up to 20 shadow team, with expected heavy casualties for NOD.
As long as Steel Talon is unfunded, we should assume that NOD can breach any facility if they want to. They have shown capacity for even deep blue strikes, so trying to hide deep in our lands will only hinder, not stop them.
By literally the exact same logic, mind you, funding the Talons more heavily only hinders, not stops them. Furthermore, we do fund Talon projects; the word "unfunded" is a provocative choice of phrasing and not accurate. It can reasonably be argued that we should fund them
more, but we face a constant dice deficit in the Military category despite having spent something like half or more of all our Free dice on military projects over the past five or so in-game years.
There's just...
a lot to do, and trying to shame the thread over not doing everything simultaneously isn't doing anyone any favors.
Who should we neglect?
Space Force? We have specific Plan commitments forced on us by the legislature.
Navy? They're on the ragged edge of being unable to secure convoys against Nod attack, and their weakness is, for example, a major handicap preventing us from easily doing projects like Karachi.
Air Force? They're barely able to maintain air superiority over the battlefield in the face of rapidly advancing Nod aviation.
ZOCOM? Stretched thin by all the Red Zone operations we're using to maintain our military. Ignoring them entirely is probably just as risky as ignoring the Talons entirely, and frankly they get as little or less attention from us than the Talons do if you don't count MARV hubs as a ZOCOM project (you shouldn't).
Ground Forces? We haven't actually
done that much for them lately except build consumables factories, which are a Plan commitment.
...
There's only so much we can do here, so competitive self-flagellation over which branch of the military we've neglected is a losing game.
We
CANNOT afford to put ourselves in the position of the boxer who, every time he is punched in one place, panics and moves his hands to cover that place, then gets punched somewhere else and moves his hands to cover
there. We need to look ahead to where our
future vulnerabilities are most likely to be, and cover those, while also retaining our own ability to hit back effectively.
Frankly, I think our greatest vulnerabilities are in the naval situation and the lack of SADN to defend key global infrastructure targets from Nod cruise missile attack. The Talons not being perfectly able to defend our research labs is a relative secondary issue.
