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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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Rule 3: Be Civil, or, "Please avoid trolling in the future. It is not at all civil or productive."
Disband the Steel Talons, just get some high-confidence grunts to guard our R&D instead of a bunch of virgin nerds looking forlornly at their feet.
 
marids said:
I still don't get why was the least funded group was the primary defender of R&D sites. Why rely on questionable 'quality' when the ground forces should have sheer quantity to spare for simply adding more numbers to solve the problem? That or just make a new department whose sole responsibility is to defend R&D, since plenty of voters should agree on the importance of keeping what technology GDI has secure vs spending more resources to get more tech when that just isn't as much of a priority as other concerns.
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The simplest answer why that is are quest mechanics. The Talons are the thing to throw money at to both gib tech and make tech dev safer. It is how it is and personally I find how it is a little frustrating. Talon projects should be more RpD and less Progress expensive instead of being comparable to some Ground Force projects.
 
KlavoHunter said:
Disband the Steel Talons, just get some high-confidence grunts to guard our R&D instead of a bunch of virgin nerds looking forlornly at their feet.
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Klavo, I've known you for a long while and I like you, so I have to ask with something of a troubled mind:

Are you serious?

Hazard said:
Even 1 factory of ZA would help out ZOCOM substantially, as it means they don't have to babysit ground and space forces nearly as much with the Zone Armours they've got.

But really, what we should be doing is trying to improve the lowest Confidence military arms as well as ready for boosting the higher Confidence ones. Which, right now, means pouring money into the Steel Talons for a bit, and get the Air Force and Navy ready for further operations.
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Doing anything meaningful for the Air Force and Navy means huge deployment projects, as indeed it has meant major deployment projects. Remember the Super Orcas? The naval point defense refits? The plasma missile development we wound up having to do two dice on over two turns? The Aurora bombers to give us more of a strike option?

Like, literally just go back and count. Aside from specific Plan commitments to increase availability of ammunition and anti-laser ablatives, we've been doing relatively less for the Ground Forces lately, and quite a lot aimed at improving the position of the Air Force- not so much for the Navy since the point defense refits finished, mind you, but that wasn't that long ago.

The biggest gaps in our strategic posture right now are, in no particular order:

1) A second-rate navy (only mitigated by the fact that Nod's own naval presence is second or third-rate itself).

2) An Air Force that is relying heavily on its ability to use swarm tactics (with concomitant high casualties) to take down Nod's frontline air superiority fighters.

3) Not having adequate defenses in place against Nod launching WMD strikes against key industrial mega-nodes like Chicago, North Boston, and Mecca/Medina/Jeddah.

Just addressing those alone is going to mean massive investment of dice at great expense. We can only work on so much at a time without slow-walking everything to ridiculous levels.

TheFourthman said:
Can't be super surprised when the guys who guard your tech are underfunded. Hell look at at just the way we built stuff they said was important. After we got a member of their organization for extra rolls. We let stuff auto complete. Don't really do that with any other branch.
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Either point to an example where we were even OFFERED an auto-completion on a non-Talons military project, or drop that and start making honest arguments instead.

BOTcommander said:
The simplest answer why that is are quest mechanics. The Talons are the thing to throw money at to both gib tech and make tech dev safer. It is how it is and personally I find how it is a little frustrating. Talon projects should be more RpD and less Progress expensive instead of being comparable to some Ground Force projects.
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I mean, we've never actually done a "roll out entirely new category of tank" project or something for Ground Force. The deployments we've done for the Talons represent something as transformational for the Talons as that first wave of Zone Armor would be for Ground Forces. Just introducing the Havoc and the neuro-helmets is kind of a big jump for them.
 
People calling for the Talons to be disbanded do realize that without the Talons we'd have none of the revolutionary technology paths that are available to us now right?

No myomer. Which means no advanced prosthetics and no myomer plants.

No crystal laser. Which means we'd be stuck on PD lasers until we got lucky enough with Nod gacha.

No Crawler tech. Which means we'd be out of a paradigm shift of a technology that complements MCVs and can be more responsive than MCV centered forces against Nod breakthroughs and can support mobile offensives against Nod held territory (Assault Crawlers would be like the Fatboy from Supreme Commander).

No GDI plasma weapons/particle weapons tech.

No Neural Interface tech that'll eventually be disseminated to Air Force.

And who knows what else that we haven't seen yet due to not having done enough Talons projects. The GM outright stated that had we disbanded the Talons we'd not see any of the truly revolutionary technology, rather we'd be seeing *iterative* improvements on what we had instead.
 
I don't know why some people are dooming so hard right now.

Yeah, it sucks that nod did some stuff and got some gains on us. That always sucks.

But it could have been so much worse.

Imagine if we had done the Karachi sprint. We would have all of the bad stuff we have now plus a absolute ton more going wrong.

I'm just breathing a sigh of relief we didn't lose Chicago and whatever other really important things.
 
Where the hell did "disband the Talons" come from, that hasn't been an option for most of a decade and won't be coming back? If we had taken it back during the first year of the game, it also wouldn't have totally dissolved them, because it wasn't actually a disband the Talons action it was a demobilize the Talons action. As in, stop making them pull triple duty as elite assault troops AND security guards AND a research bureau. We would have demobilized their field formations and turned them into a series of OKB's focused on testing next gen tech, not just zeroed out their budget line and told everyone to go home.

And again, it's entirely pointless and a waste of effort to argue about it because the option doesn't exist and hasn't for like 8 in game years.
 
Crazycryodude said:
Where the hell did "disband the Talons" come from, that hasn't been an option for most of a decade and won't be coming back? If we had taken it back during the first year of the game, it also wouldn't have totally dissolved them, because it wasn't actually a disband the Talons action it was a demobilize the Talons action. As in, stop making them pull triple duty as elite assault troops AND security guards AND a research bureau. We would have demobilized their field formations and turned them into a series of OKB's focused on testing next gen tech, not just zeroed out their budget line and told everyone to go home.

And again, it's entirely pointless and a waste of effort to argue about it because the option doesn't exist and hasn't for like 8 in game years.
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I am pretty sure no one said about disbanding Talons right now.
I said we should have done so when we still could, but idea that people are arguing for disbandment now, seem to have come from opponents of such.
 
Going back to the Zone Armor, it was less that the factories ate too many CapGoods and more that the factories ate too much Energy. Seriously those things eat -4 Energy/Factory, and there's six of them in the first phase alone. In comparison -1 CapGood/Factory for -6 CapGoods isn't really that much.
 
Shard of Victory said:
We'd still have them, we just wouldn't have to go through Mechwarrior-wannabe middlemen.
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No. We wouldn't have them. Outright. What branch would think of 'lets put some of a MCV's capability into a mobile platform that can support forces on the move' instead of considering the MCVs to be good enough?

The *Talons* are the ones that push for revolutionary technology despite risks of failure and dead ends and projects turning out to not be as expected (mystery boxes). Ground Forces and other branches will not go for risky pushing of the technological frontiers (they explicitly do not like mystery box options) and instead look more to evolutionary instead of revolutionary. Talons are the branch to fund in order to future proof our military.
 
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aceraptor said:
No. We wouldn't have them. Outright.
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Yes we would, if anything a Talons structure focused solely on R&D instead of having to split their attention across multiple missions would have given us them even faster. I think a demobilized Talons would have given us plenty of tech, but more focused on civilian/industrial applications and with more dead ends on the real crazy stuff in exchange for more successful products that could be easily rolled out to mass use. A more conservative R&D strategy than "lmao cool plasma cannon let's strap it on a Titan and throw it at the Brotherhood, hope it works" for sure, but that's not the same thing as halting R&D. Instead of strapping alien space guns to mechs and just seeing how they work on an active battlefield we'd be running exhaustive testing on alien space guns in a lab somewhere for a few years and eventually produce a fixed heavy weapon to issue out for Ground Forces fortifications or whatever. Not just ignore the alien space guns.
 
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aceraptor said:
No. We wouldn't have them. Outright. What branch would think of 'lets put some of a MCV's capability into a mobile platform that can support forces on the move' instead of considering the MCVs to be good enough?

The *Talons* are the ones that push for revolutionary technology despite risks of failure and dead ends and projects turning out to not be as expected (mystery boxes). Ground Forces and other branches will not go for risky pushing of the technological frontiers (they explicitly do not like mystery box options) and instead look more to evolutionary instead of revolutionary. Talons are the branch to fund in order to future proof our military.
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Crawlers are the only thing where your argument holds up, and do we really need pointlessly huge, easy-terrain only landships costing more then tank division? There are reason why "make tanks bigger" was abandoned in reality. Do we we really need factory-supertank, when we already have Maus-sized MARVs rolling around?
 
Shard of Victory said:
I am pretty sure no one said about disbanding Talons right now.
I said we should have done so when we still could, but idea that people are arguing for disbandment now, seem to have come from opponents of such.
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Feel free to either stop trying to relitigate votes that happened an in-quest decade ago, or stop posting entirely. Because you seem to be just trying to stir up shit, rather than anything that will lead to a productive discussion and enjoyable quest.
KlavoHunter said:
Now that's the reaction I was going for! :tongue:
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If you could not engage in trolling, that would be nice.

Also, if people could cool it with the whaargarbling about "oh, no, people are saying we got hit by NOD" based on fragments of first drafts from Discord - most of the time, when something like this happens, there is a lot of context missing that leads to initial reactions shaping later actions in ways that the actual events do not support.
 
Shard of Victory said:
We'd still have them, we just wouldn't have to go through Mechwarrior-wannabe middlemen.
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I thought our R&D were called "The Scrin" and "The Brotherhood of NOD", anyways.
They have all the cool stuff, and we don't. Because we're GDI and GDI is all about making boring, practical, effective stuff.

Which seems to be working out just fine, really. There's this short sci-fi story written by some obscure guy named Arthur C Clarke about how a faction that chased cutting-edge technologies too hard, lost a war to a faction that churned out stuff that just plain worked...
 
KlavoHunter said:
I thought our R&D were called "The Scrin" and "The Brotherhood of NOD", anyways.
They have all the cool stuff, and we don't. Because we're GDI and GDI is all about making boring, practical, effective stuff.

Which seems to be working out just fine, really. There's this short sci-fi story written by some obscure guy named Arthur C Clarke about how a faction that chased cutting-edge technologies too hard, lost a war to a faction that churned out stuff that just plain worked...
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Tbf we do do our own R&D, it's just that XCOM-ing is really fast and tends to produce big notable leaps instead of the incremental steps stuff the Talons and our civvie R&D produces.
 
KlavoHunter said:
I thought our R&D were called "The Scrin" and "The Brotherhood of NOD", anyways.
They have all the cool stuff, and we don't. Because we're GDI and GDI is all about making boring, practical, effective stuff.

Which seems to be working out just fine, really. There's this short sci-fi story written by some obscure guy named Arthur C Clarke about how a faction that chased cutting-edge technologies too hard, lost a war to a faction that churned out stuff that just plain worked...
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We've already discussed Superiority to death, a few times. The main problem they had was in pulling back operational units for refits in the middle of a war, not in chasing new tech. We do sometimes chase the Shiny a bit much, but we're not really in danger of making those mistakes.

And yes, our R&D outfits do a lot of reverse-engineering NOD and Scrin stuff, but then there is a lot of work they do in making it actually work, making it possible to mass-produce, and making it not kill the people using it. And, of course, the "how do we make this work better" incremental tech advances that we never see until something new pops up.
 
The only thing I could hold the Steel Talons for is when they had the supposed Stealth Tech from Nod to only leave it in storage in a lab that is practically abandoned and not ship said tech to the heart of our Blue Zones to have it researched, reverse-engineered, and deployed for our own use.

Instead it got raided by LEGION in their own backyard.
 
Anyone who thinks GDI has no cutting edge stuff is probably forgetting the Sonic weaponry, the fuck huge Ion Beams, the Firestorm barriers, the Mammoth MkII, Adaptive Armor, Shockwave artillery…. I could go on.

Needless to say, the route to proliferating half of this stuff, especially in new formats is with the Steel Talons.
 
Sailor_Skarro said:
Going back to the Zone Armor, it was less that the factories ate too many CapGoods and more that the factories ate too much Energy. Seriously those things eat -4 Energy/Factory, and there's six of them in the first phase alone. In comparison -1 CapGood/Factory for -6 CapGoods isn't really that much.
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Eh. -24 Energy is about six Heavy Industry dice. The extra fusion plants wouldn't be that much of a stretch... except that the need for them distracts from Capital Goods projects, which loops us right back where we started.

Shard of Victory said:
Crawlers are the only thing where your argument holds up, and do we really need pointlessly huge, easy-terrain only landships costing more then tank division? There are reason why "make tanks bigger" was abandoned in reality. Do we we really need factory-supertank, when we already have Maus-sized MARVs rolling around?
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I'm pretty sure MARVs are a lot bigger than the Maus. Mammoths are probably somewhere close to the Maus in general scale, if only because the things are quad-tracked and have a hilariously larger turret than a normal tank.

Superheavy ground combat units are just a thing that, well... objectively does work in this setting.

Deal with it, or find another universe to play in that doesn't involve this thread.
 
Okay, so I am seeing a lot of unwarranted panic in the thread, and a lot of talons hate. Let me break down what happened. You got hit by a squad of psionic supercommandoes. Yes, they knocked over your stuff. That is what happens when psionic supercommandoes hit the field for the first time. The thing is that this is also the Talons succeeding. They are not getting knocked over by a conventional assault, they are forcing the Brotherhood of Nod to break out revolutionary abilities that you did not know could be done, in order to steal your tech.
 
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