Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

[Calvin]

Planting a flag on a blue zone and getting away practically scott free seems like a solid Nod win and GDI lose.

Click to shrink...

We lost on one front, not on every front.

That is a bit of a plot hole. TW3 started with NOD taking out the ion cannon network (and gdi leadership), exactly because any big attack from NOD (anything beyond a raid) is supposed to be taken down with a space laser.

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According to the Battle of St. Petersburg post, we do use the Ion Cannons to harass Nod formations, they've adapted to them by marching far apart.
They're also very good at hiding infrastructure in Yellow Zones, and I'm not actually sure what our recon satellite coverage is.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Planting a flag on a blue zone and getting away practically scott free seems like a solid Nod win and GDI lose.
That said, i understand it was a political victory more than anything.... but it cuts both ways. If the public doesnt want NOD blood spilled by the rivers after that one, it would be really weird. I mean, its the kind of black eye that GDI has to answer.

Click to shrink...

Well, notably, Nod didn't actually do a ton of damage. Remember that well within living memory, Nod invaded numerous Blue Zones and did a ton more damage than this in a gigantic war. That was about 10-13 years ago. Stahl planting a flag is gonna push a lot of people's buttons, but it's not some kind of unprecedented outrage.

[Also, real talk, Stahl's gonna make us pay to go after him when he's on the defensive]

As to the Open Hand Party, remember, they're not the party of "Nod isn't a threat" or "we love Nod." I think they can survive this quite well.

Yeah.... but the thing is that Kane cant magic it up. He needs the infrastructure to make his stuff which is what really stops him. He probably has all the dara about how to make all kind of bs tech, but the industry to make the tools to make the industry to make that tech?
The fact that nod can keep pumping out more and more advance shit, while supposedly losing industrial capabilities is weird. If anything, i expected human waves tactics with simple tech augmented with tiberium.

Click to shrink...

Well, a lot of their basic tech is that, only with some degree of mechanization because they can't just throw away soldiers. But it's still kit ultimately designed to be put together in a village machine shop or a modest town's light industrial district at most, and to only need a handful of "advanced" parts to be supplied. If the attack buggy itself is very basic, but its onboard laser cannon is a bunch of 'dumb' optics plus three kilograms of lavish STU expenditure because Nod has nigh-arbitrary amounts of the stuff... Well, you're not putting much demand on your civilization's high-tech manufacturing footprint to make such a device.

As to the high-end stuff, I imagine that one of the things Kane's got is the equipment to do limited production runs of some really sweet tech. Like, maybe he spent ten years obsessively working on a xenotech 3D printer design that could build damn near anything he had the blueprints for out of raw elemental feedstock in between the First and Second Tiberium Wars. It'd make a lot of sense; that was a long period of down-time for him. And notably, in the First War Nod forces were mostly using fairly straightforward conventional weaponry like tanks, machine guns, bazookas, and flamethrowers. They didn't start getting exotic and doing unearthly wacky shit until the second war.

The trick is that Kane probably keeps a lot of the production capacity for this stuff under tight control in places that are relatively secure from GDI attack even with orbital fire on call. Places like his Threshold Tower, which could probably laugh off an energy blast big enough to blow the planet up underneath it. Or like India, where there's a lot of real estate to hide things in and few if any GDI-sympathizing observers to pinpoint targets. Or buried underground beneath a Red Zone, with tiberium kept at bay from that specific site with more ultratech.

And then the stuff he actually produces tends to be low-mass but hella impressive, and able to be installed into less sophisticated machinery to achieve remarkable results... Or high-mass but distributed only to the elite.

That is a bit of a plot hole. TW3 started with NOD taking out the ion cannon network (and gdi leadership), exactly because any big attack from NOD (anything beyond a raid) is supposed to be taken down with a space laser.

Click to shrink...

Yeah.

But one thing you'll notice is that Nod didn't launch much in the way of concentrated attacks into GDI territory in the years immediately after Tib War III ended. I'm guessing that was because they spent considerable time developing doctrine for avoiding getting taken out too easily by ion cannon fire. How they do that, I dunno.

Maybe some combination of good communications, dispersion, and constant use of both active cloaking and decoy generators to make it unreliable to just blindly fire ion cannon blasts in the general vicinity of where an enemy is suspected to be, simply because you wind up zorching 100 patches of random forest to nail like three tanks or something, and then your ion cannons have all shot their bolt and are recharging when you need them.

 

[doruma1920]

Speaking of the problem of finding where NOD is to blast them with an Ion Cannon, did we ever find out exactly what Low Orbit Support Satellites do? Cause if they are surveillance and recon sats they could help with the former problem. If they are less info gathering and more alternate Orbit-to-Surface attack platforms that would be useful as well, especially to bypass Ion Disrupters or if we wanted an option that wasn't kill everything in the general area. We should only need 5 dice to finish Phase 4 of Enterprise (96% chance) and it might be a good idea to continue what we were doing last turn and put a die into Orbital Clean Up (for a 98% chance) to see what they do.

To change the subject to Agriculture, aside from continuing to slow walk Freeze Dried Food Plants, I'm curious if we should put the remaining Agri dice into Kudzu to work on that plan goal, or to put them into more BZ Aquaponics just for the additional Food cushion.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Hmm, here's a somewhat modified draft of mine.

---

[] Draft Plan No AI Left Behind (Isolinear Edition)

910+(Service Budget)/945 R
7/7 Free dice

Infrastructure 6/6 Dice 110 R
-[] Yellow Zone Fortress Towns (Phase 4+5) 232/550 (4 Dice, 80 R) (72% chance of Phase 5)
-[] Rail Network Construction Campaigns (Phase 3) 159/300 (2 Dice, 30 R) (84% chance; one die would not be enough)

Heavy Industry 5/5 Dice + 5 Free Dice 210 R
-[] Continuous Cycle Fusion Plant (Phase 5) 232/300 (2 Dice, 40 R) (~100% chance, median result 92/300 on Phase 6)
-[] Nuuk Heavy Robotics Foundry (Phase 3) 118/640 (7 Dice, 140 R) (74% chance)
-[] Isolinear Chip Development (1 Die, 30 R) (??% chance)

Light and Chemical Industry 5/5 Dice 95 R
-[] Reykjavik Myomer Macrospinner (Phase 4) 378/640 (4 Dice, 80 R) (81% chance)
-[] Chemical Fertilizer Plants (Phase 2) 94/300 (1 Die, 15 R) (1/2.75 median)

Agriculture 4/4 Dice 60 R
-[] Freeze Dried Food Plants 73/200 (2 Dice, 40 R) (80% chance)
-[] Blue Zone Aquaponics Bays (Phase 2) 3/140 (2 Dice, 20 R) (74% chance)

Tiberium 7/7 Dice 120 R
-[] Yellow Zone Tiberium Harvesting (Phase 7+8) 183/300 (4 Dice, 80 R) (Phase 7, 23% chance of Phase 8)
-[] Railgun Harvester Factory (Dandong) 0/70 (1 Die, 10 R) (~100% chance)
-[] Intensification of Green Zone Harvesting (Stage 5+6) 63/200 (2 Dice, 30 R) (91% chance of Stage 6)
--[] (Appears to give 16% chance of hitting Stage 7, which is contingent on Fortress Towns Phase 5)

Orbital 6/6 Dice 110 R
-[] GDSS Enterprise (Phase 4) 456/765 (5 Dice, 100 R) (96.5% chance, median outcome 114/1535 to Phase 5)
-[] Orbital Cleanup (Stage 9) 41/85 (1 Die, 10 R) (98% chance, 13% chance of Stage 10)

Services X/5 Dice ?? R
-[] Totally Unknown, up to a 35 R budget. May raid this budget for other projects.

Military 8/8 Dice + 2 Free Die 205 R
-[] Strategic Area Defense Networks (3 Dice, 60 R) (2% chance)
-[] Wingman Drone Deployment 0/??? (3 Dice, 60 R) (??% chance)
-[] Carrier/Frigate Shipyard 0/??? (3 Dice, 60 R) (??% chance)
-[] Neural Interface System Refits (Talons) 77/105 (1 Die, 25 R) (~100% chance)

Bureaucracy 4/4 Dice
-[] Security Review (Bureaucracy) (3 Dice)
-[] Bureaucracy Pummeling Itself Hilariously (1 DIe)

 

[Ithillid]

Low Orbit Support Satellites do?

Click to shrink...

So the Low Orbit Support Sattelites are going to be a mix of projects, from orbital supply caches, to stealth field spotters, to potentially a number of other things.

 

[doruma1920]

-[] Freeze Dried Food Plants 73/200 (2 Dice, 40 R) (80% chance)

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I thought we were slow walking Freeze Dried Food Plants? 1 die would still give us a chance of finishing it, not much of one admittedly. Is there a particular rush to finish it? Mostly asking cause I'd like to put a die into Genetic Engineering and Hallucinogen Development each which would cost 40R, and switching one die from Freeze Dried to either more Food or one of our Plan commitments would save us 10R.

 

[IndustrialVice2]

I thought we were slow walking Freeze Dried Food Plants? 1 die would still give us a chance of finishing it, not much of one admittedly. Is there a particular rush to finish it? Mostly asking cause I'd like to put a die into Genetic Engineering and Hallucinogen Development each which would cost 40R, and switching one die from Freeze Dried to either more Food or one of our Plan commitments would save us 10R.

Click to shrink...

It occurs to me that we may be getting a Services project to reverse engineer a certain flying battleship. We may want to reserve some resources for that.

 

[doruma1920]

It occurs to me that we may be getting a Services project to reverse engineer a certain flying battleship. We may want to reserve some resources for that.

Click to shrink...

All the more reason to save a bit of extra R, though I would have thought it would be a military project at least initially. Genetics and Hallucinogens are nice to haves not need to haves.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Notably, this draft plan shouldn't be thought of as a strict requirement, but as a baseline for negotiation...

I thought we were slow walking Freeze Dried Food Plants? 1 die would still give us a chance of finishing it, not much of one admittedly. Is there a particular rush to finish it? Mostly asking cause I'd like to put a die into Genetic Engineering and Hallucinogen Development each which would cost 40R, and switching one die from Freeze Dried to either more Food or one of our Plan commitments would save us 10R.

Click to shrink...

I'm open to dialing back to one die on Freeze Dried Food Plants, but I'm anxious about it because I want that project to complete in a reasonably timely manner so we can use it to squirrel away the food we need for our ambitious Stored Food target. That's going to be hard to meet, especially with our incoming refugee wave likely to eat up lots of surplus Food, Food points that cannot then be diverted.

I don't specifically mind the Services options you list, but we may have other priorities I cannot now predict, something like "re-establish refugee processing system" or "extend medical care to newly conquered territories." The kind of stuff we used to do in Services.

It occurs to me that we may be getting a Services project to reverse engineer a certain flying battleship. We may want to reserve some resources for that.

Click to shrink...

Also possible.

 

[HousePet]

I think the Medical Supplies Factory is more likely to be needed before more Chemical Fertilizer Plants.
Using the 4 Agri dice on Food should cover any damage / increased demand from refugees.

 

[bigking321]

We should definitely spare a die for Hallucinogen Countermeasures development.

 

[Phht]

So, ranking the Nod leadership in terms of threats to GDI:

2 - Stahl. Stahl is the warlord that is the biggest danger to GDI currently. Not because he's dangerous where he is. It's because he's Proper Nod. You know, the fuckers that know just how to maneuver and combat against a conventional military? The ones that played major roles during all three Tib Wars, plus the bush conflicts between those? Stahl's part of the lineage. The only person that's more Proper Nod than him (and still alive) is Kane. Which is why Kane is eternally the number one slot. I'd expect him to be the player character of a Tib War 4 C&C game's Nod campaign.
3 - That fucker in India making Gana.
4-5 - Reynaldo and Mehretu fill these two slots, but I'm not sure which goes where. Reynaldo is a zealot with a degree of competency and sense. Dangerous, but zealots can be handled and they're not necessarily the best choice to be too close to anything important ('sup there Alexa Kovacs). Mehretu's entire shtick is infiltration and assassination. Also dangerous, but not really the guy you have as your right hand running Tib War 4. On the upside, both are more Nod in their strategies than the next guy.
6 - Krukov. He's too happy to engage GDI in conventional set piece battles, and those favor GDI if you don't finish them sufficiently quickly. He's not managed to do so often so far this quest. His playing into GDI's strengths works to an extent because he has large enough forces to absorb the results, but I'd expect him to end up as distraction fronts in Tib War 4 via his conventional warfare.
...
10 - Gideon. I have no clue who fills in 7-9 except Bintang and Shah of the Atom are probably in there. Gideon might even be lower than 10 at this point. Strings of failures with significant loss of assets each time, his masterstroke got preempted by GDI, and his territory is broken into thirds at this point. I'd almost expect his second in command to get a Seth Promotion during a call with Gideon at this point.

 

[Sa'kage]

Wouldn't a lot of landline cables have the risk of being nomned by the Tiberium. Especially out in the yellow zone.

Since Tiberium is spreading alot under ground, it feels like it's gonna happen sooner or later.

 

[BoSPaladin]

That is a bit of a plot hole. TW3 started with NOD taking out the ion cannon network (and gdi leadership), exactly because any big attack from NOD (anything beyond a raid) is supposed to be taken down with a space laser.

Click to shrink...

Something to note is that Ion cannon disrupter tech has gotten to the point where it can be mounted on battleships, thus why we couldn't ion Cannon Bintang for example. Beyond that, I imagine that the critical major bases deep in the yellow zones that Nod have had long term and have had a chance to fortify and build up likely have disruptor fields of their own.

Nod isn't stupid, they know GDI uses ion cannons. Thus as already pointed out their marching/dispersed formations.

In point of fact, it was GDI's indiscriminate bombing of any major vehicle convoys that had the caravanserai beg us to please stop deleting religious pilgrims from orbit.

Beyond that WMD'ing nod cities/major bases likely has A ion disrupters preventing that. Alternatively, nod is fully willing and able to use WMD's of their own for reprisal attacks.

It was pointed out that in ww2 civilian cities/industry were valid military targets due to funding the war effort. And sure, we've been hitting nod industry with conventional bombings fine when we can. But the big ones of 2 nuclear bombs, well the USA was in the fortunate position of Japan being utterly unable to retaliate by that point. The same is not true of nod. We nuke or ion cannon major cities and they have the capacity to retaliate in equal measure if not worse.

We have seen some things like a nuclear bomb from one warlord, and gideons attempt on chivago, but bluntly they're somewhat exceptional. Most Nod commanders don't escalate things to that level because it's not a game they're likely to win. If they even have access to that tech at all.

There's of course moral reasons for why not to just bomb large swathes of the yellow zone into the ground. But fundamentally, there's just no need to. Look at tib war 2 era warlords, a number of whom were GDI puppets. During the Cabal crisis GDI and Nod worked together. Another puppet warlord example being Marcion until Kane got to him. It should be noted GDI and Nod formed a ceasefire in order to combat the visitors when alien invaders attacked. Then there's the qatarists who we've integrated into GDI, a large number of low level former nod militia members and refugees, the work with the caravanserai. even our diplomatic corps.

Point being. A whole bunch of Nod, I'd go so far as to say most of Nod even, are geo-political/military rivals to GDI. (and hell, as this war and the intervening years between tib war 3 and now have proven, GDI is still the Greater superpower of the two) But they're at least semi-reasonable. They can be negotiated with, they can surrender or work with us. They're a pain in the neck sure, and distracting us while we try to deal with tiberium. But currently GDI is expanding its blue and green zones to mitigate and reverse the spread of tiberium. Things aren't that dire that we need to remove nod at all costs, besides which, if we did so, nod may not be abating Tiberium in quite the same way as GDI. Nod allows yellow zones after all, but since they too are harvesting tiberium they do act to at least help limit tiberiums growth and spread somewhat.

Lastly, as for the people themselves. As we've seen by the millions of people fleeing to GDI, being integrated into the system, and put to work. They're not the incarnation of evil we need to destroy at all cost. Most are just people. Some have funny religious beliefs or have volunteered/been conscripted into nod. but they're still just people.

tldr: little need to ion cannon everything into atoms, even if it worked which isn't guaranteed.

 

[Strunkriidiisk]

Well, if we're posting plan draft ideas...

[] Plan Draft: Factories, Refugees, Vanguard-ees

Infrastructure 7/6 (1 free die) 125R
-[] Yellow Zone Fortress Towns (Phase 4+5) 232/550 4 dice 80R 72%
-[] Rail Network Construction Campaigns (Phase 3) 159/300 3 dice 45R 99%

Heavy Industry 9/5 (4 free dice) 145R
-[] Continuous Cycle Fusion Plants (Phase 5) (Updated) 232/300 2 dice 40R 100%
-[] Nuuk Heavy Robotics Foundry (Phase 3) 118/640 7 dice 105R 74%

Light & Chemical Industry 5/5 100R
-[] Reykjavik Myomer Macrospinner (Phase 4) 378/640 3 dice 60R 74%
-[] Medical Supplies Factories 0/225 2 dice 40R 8%

Agriculture 4/4 60R
-[] Blue Zone Aquaponics Bays (Phase 2) 2 dice 20R 74%
-[] Poulticeplant Development 0/50 1 die 20R 95%
-[] Freeze Dried Food Plants 73/200 1 die 20R 13%

Tiberium 7/7 105R
-[] Yellow Zone Tiberium Harvesting (Phase 7) 183/600 3 dice 60R
-[] Intensification of Green Zone Harvesting (Stage 5) 63/100 1 die 15R 100%
-[] Railgun Harvester Factory (Dandong) 45/70 1 die 10R 100%
-[] Railgun Harvester Factory (Bissau) 0/70 1 die 10R 85%
-[] Railgun Harvester Factory (Vladivostok) 0/70 1 die 10R 85%

Orbital 6/6 110R
-[] Orbital Cleanup (Stage 9) 41/85 1 die 10R 98%
-[] GDSS Enterprise (Phase 4) 456/765 5 dice 100R 96%

Services 5/5 95R
-[] Automatic Medical Assistants 0/300 4 dice 80R 67%
-[] Hallucinogen Development 0/60 1 die 15R 88%

Military 10/8 (2 free dice) 200+R
-[] Neural Interface System Refits (Talons) 83/105 1 die 25R 100%
-[] Stealth Disruptor Development 0/40 1 die 15R 100%
-[] Frigate Yard 4 dice, 80+R
-[] Wingmen Factory 4 dice 80+R

Bureaucracy 2/4 (-1 from review)
-[] Security Reviews (Bureaucracy) DC50 2 dice 100%
-one die unused

7/7 free dice
940+/960R total

Lotta this, especially Military, is up in the air until we get harder numbers on what the deployment costs (dice and resources) are. May end up changing out the smaller Military projects for lasers and/or plasma deployment if those are cheap enough, but otherwise I'd prefer to rush out the Wingmen and such and deal with a slightly less ideal kit for a turn. Bureaucracy may end up being tasked to Plan Goal Reduction, depending on if and how the DC or costs change for this coming turn.

As long as the military can keep going on Steel Vanguard we have to go hard on supporting them. I want to pump out at least one each of Forts, Rail, YZ Harvesting, and GZ Intensification per turn as a result - the Railgun Harvester options are mostly just as is to trim the budget while still ensuring* full commitment of dice, but I'd prefer at least one of those as well. Hopefully if the dice are kind we can get 2 phases of Forts out just to make up for this last turn, but I'm not so married to that idea that I want to pull a die off Rail to make it so - 2 basically-guaranteed phases of infrastructure are better IMO than a lower chance of 3 (which with sufficiently bad luck would only be 1 phase instead).

 

[Phrux]

Hmm, here's a somewhat modified draft of mine.

[] Draft Plan No AI Left Behind (Isolinear Edition)

Click to shrink...

Needs more stealth detection and silkplant

 

[Nottheunmaker]

I'm not ready to commit to anything until the final results and turn options are up, but here'ssome thoughts. I'm confident we're going to need more fortress towns and rail lines, and I would like to start spinning up Chicago phase 4 if possible, but that's a hard call right now.

I'm supportive of two dice of freeze drying plants. Sooner is better on those. The other two are Kudzu or food, depending entirely on the refugee situation.

Military wise, Wingman Drones are a must, as are Neural Interface Refits. Frigates or Escort Carriers as well, but we'll see which the navy wants more first. If possible I still strongly favor Mastodon development as well. Wouldn't say no to more one last round of shell plants or ablative armor either.

Orbital is just something I personally don't care about beyond fulfilling plan goals. As such my opinion there isn't worth much.

Services is completely up in the air for me, no strong thoughts until the results and options are up.

Tiberium... well we've got harvesting goals to meet, but I basically favor Railgun Harvester just for the Steel Vanguard support they offer.

 

[HousePet]

Hmmm Chicago 4 needs about 7 dice from either Infra or Tib. Both of those are in high demand at the moment. And it costs 4 Energy, which we likely can't spare.

I can't see it happening before Karachi is finished, or is removed from the table.

 

[Oleg-14191]

Complete stage 1 of Tib power?

 

[Simon_Jester]

I think the Medical Supplies Factory is more likely to be needed before more Chemical Fertilizer Plants.
Using the 4 Agri dice on Food should cover any damage / increased demand from refugees.

Click to shrink...

I don't want to entirely ignore the freeze-drying plants. Again, this is an actual plan goal; we should finish what we started and do it. It's at least worth one die. I'm not saying we shouldn't work on the medical supplies production plants, to be clear.

We should definitely spare a die for Hallucinogen Countermeasures development.

Click to shrink...

Okay. Looking at my plan draft, what do you suggest I cut a die from? SADN? Wingman drones? Shipyards? Or take a Free die off Heavy Industry and accept that Nuuk Phase 3 probably won't finish this turn?

I'm not saying "no," but let's be more serious about this than just "I want X" when there are a lot of competing goals.

Wouldn't a lot of landline cables have the risk of being nomned by the Tiberium. Especially out in the yellow zone.

Since Tiberium is spreading alot under ground, it feels like it's gonna happen sooner or later.

Click to shrink...

If technopathic commandos are staking out your remote black ops base, and if those commandos happen to be Forgotten who can handle tiberium with their bare hands, it's probably not that hard for them to stage an "accident" where your buried landline gets "accidentally" cut by a tiberium growth and getting a remediation team to fly out into the middle of fucking Siberia and splice the cable and abate the tiberium is gonna take a few days.

 

[HousePet]

I don't want to entirely ignore the freeze-drying plants. Again, this is an actual plan goal; we should finish what we started and do it. It's at least worth one die. I'm not saying we shouldn't work on the medical supplies production plants, to be clear.

Click to shrink...

Chemical Fertilizer Plants is not a plan goal...?
I never said anything about dropping Freeze Drying Plants. I said that they cover any Food we might need due to refugees.
???

 

[Simon_Jester]

Agriculture 4/4 60R
-[] Blue Zone Aquaponics Bays (Phase 2) 2 dice 20R 74%
-[] Poulticeplant Development 0/50 1 die 20R 95%
-[] Freeze Dried Food Plants 73/200 1 die 20R 13%

Click to shrink...

I'd rather not do poulticeplants right now. I know they're desirable, but real talk, between feeding the refugees and doing the kudzu plantations, Agriculture is going to be pretty booked up. Just the other +Health projects on offer are cumulatively enough to stack us up to hilarious ICS-esque levels of health supplies (baseline of +20). I don't think we need poulticeplants this Plan to keep things stable, and I'm not sure we'll really be able to spare the dice. Especially if we can't sink that Stored Food Plan requirement, which forces us to produce quite a lot of extra Food over and above what it takes to feed the refugees.

Tiberium 7/7 105R
-[] Yellow Zone Tiberium Harvesting (Phase 7) 183/600 3 dice 60R
-[] Intensification of Green Zone Harvesting (Stage 5) 63/100 1 die 15R 100%
-[] Railgun Harvester Factory (Dandong) 45/70 1 die 10R 100%
-[] Railgun Harvester Factory (Bissau) 0/70 1 die 10R 85%
-[] Railgun Harvester Factory (Porto) 0/70 1 die 10R 85%

Click to shrink...

I'm a little shaky on doing this many railgun harvester factories in one go, not gonna lie. Among other things, we need to conserve some Energy for the shipyards we're going to be building soon, those are likely to be hungry little beasts.

Services 5/5 95R
-[] Automatic Medical Assistants 0/300 4 dice 80R 67%
-[] Hallucinogen Development 0/60 1 die 15R 88%

Click to shrink...

I'd rather slow the roll on AMA a bit, because we might NOT get more Capital Goods this turn, or not much more, if we're unlucky with Reykjavik and Nuuk. Therefore, since we have a large +Health buffer that's unlikely to evaporate in one turn, we might as well be cautious to avoid dipping into our +Capital Goods stash. Because while it may seem pretty solid, we're using that to build a stockpile, one that could conceivably carry us through a disaster like "lose North Boston and have to rebuild it from scratch." That stockpile needs to be pretty substantial; we can't afford to run thin margins of error right now. Health is more or less OK for now, so there's no rush to improve it super-much in a single quarter. Capital Goods is only just now approaching OK.

Military 10/8 (2 free dice) 220+R
-[] Neural Interface System Refits (Talons) 83/105 1 die 25R 100%
-[] Advanced ECCM Development 0/40 1 die 20R 100%
-[] Stealth Disruptor Development 0/40 1 die 15R 100%
-[] Frigate Yard 4 dice, 80+R
-[] Wingmen Factory 4 dice 80+R

Click to shrink...

First, that's 11 dice, not 10. Second, I'm unhappy to not be doing SADN this turn. It's only a matter of time before we start taking some serious cruise missile hits to Important Stuff, and I can totally see Bintang or the Indian warlord popping a sub-launched nuke into our Medina/Jeddah refineries (if not Mecca itself) just as a "fuck you" to GDI and the Caravansarai.

Lotta this, especially Military, is up in the air until we get harder numbers on what the deployment costs (dice and resources) are. May end up changing out the smaller Military projects for lasers and/or plasma deployment if those are cheap enough, but otherwise I'd prefer to rush out the Wingmen and such and deal with a slightly less ideal kit for a turn. Bureaucracy may end up being tasked to Plan Goal Reduction, depending on if and how the DC or costs change for this coming turn.

Click to shrink...

I agree about energy weapons; we can only roll out so many things at a time. Plan Goal Reduction is tempting; I'd especially like to target that Stored Food requirement because it's a pain in the ass and of doubtful actual value. We need our food production rapidly churning out more calories to feed the incoming refugee wave, not sitting on shelves in deep-freeze. The Stored Food requirement seems like an attempt to refight the last war, frankly, and I'd much rather see it renegotiated into just a straight-up +Food requirement or something.

Needs more stealth detection and silkplant

Click to shrink...

Silkplant? Huh?

More generally, stealth detection is nice, but I really want to actually deploy some of the hardware the military was just screaming for. We can roll out stealth more aggressively when we at least have the wingman drones operational; the military is functioning tolerably well with what they have for now.

The problem is that we want to radically boost our anti-stealth capabilities quickly before Nod adjusts. Real talk, we're not going to be able to spare enough Military dice to do that in the near future of the next 1-2 turns. Not unless we sacrifice everything else and further delay projects like SADN, shipyards, and wingman drones.

I'm supportive of two dice of freeze drying plants. Sooner is better on those. The other two are Kudzu or food, depending entirely on the refugee situation.

Click to shrink...

Ehh, I can see slow-walking with one die. Budget's important too, after all.

Military wise, Wingman Drones are a must, as are Neural Interface Refits. Frigates or Escort Carriers as well, but we'll see which the navy wants more first. If possible I still strongly favor Mastodon development as well. Wouldn't say no to more one last round of shell plants or ablative armor either.

Click to shrink...

We can't do all of that without sacrificing our chances of Nuuk completion this turn, and it's probably a bad idea to sacrifice our 74% chance of completing Nuuk this turn.

Hmmm Chicago 4 needs about 7 dice from either Infra or Tib. Both of those are in high demand at the moment. And it costs 4 Energy, which we likely can't spare.

I can't see it happening before Karachi is finished, or is removed from the table.

Click to shrink...

I can't see it now when it competes directly with global "support Steel Vanguard" projects, but as Steel Vanguard winds down a bit in 2060Q3-Q4, I bet we could squeeze it in if we wanted.

It's doing Phase 5 within the current Plan that makes things ugly.

Complete stage 1 of Tib power?

Click to shrink...

We could. It's not necessarily a bad idea when we have PS to burn, I suppose. We could use the Energy for a lot of things we're likely to want soon.

Chemical Fertilizer Plants is not a plan goal...?
I never said anything about dropping Freeze Drying Plants. I said that they cover any Food we might need due to refugees.
???

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The confusion is that you said "four dice on Food production" and I sort of got the idea you meant Blue Zone Aquaponics, not the freeze-drying plants. Of course, the freeze-drying plants are a respectable chunk of +Food in and of themselves, so I guess I may have misunderstood. Sorry.

 

[Nottheunmaker]

Hmmm Chicago 4 needs about 7 dice from either Infra or Tib. Both of those are in high demand at the moment. And it costs 4 Energy, which we likely can't spare.

I can't see it happening before Karachi is finished, or is removed from the table.

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Someone did the math earlier, it's very doable and fits with some of our plan goals. It's not stated to help Steel Vanguard, but considering how badly Giddon did this round that might've changed, and could be a good way to make ours gains stick.

Pure speculationon my part, but it makes sense to me.

We can't do all of that without sacrificing our chances of Nuuk completion this turn, and it's probably a bad idea to sacrifice our 74% chance of completing Nuuk this turn.

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And capital goods eats more power and everything wants power... I've pushing for Liquid Tiberium power pretty consistently, but with our power needs growing so much we really should get on it.

 

[Strunkriidiisk]

First, that's 11 dice, not 10. Second, I'm unhappy to not be doing SADN this turn. It's only a matter of time before we start taking some serious cruise missile hits to Important Stuff, and I can totally see Bintang or the Indian warlord popping a sub-launched nuke into our Medina/Jeddah refineries (if not Mecca itself) just as a "fuck you" to GDI and the Caravansarai.

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Thank you for the reminder - I'd originally budgeted to have an admin die in there before I dropped it.

As for SADN, the issue is it's a huge dice hog - we need 5-6 dice on that for a reasonable chance of getting out a phase in a turn; we can maybe do SADN and one of Wingmen/shipyards if we cut everything else, but not otherwise.

 

[Phrux]

Silkplant? Huh?

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Spider cotton. More expensive than I remembered tho. Your point about massive stealth deployment is very valid, too.