Well once the carrier is sunk the convoy now has no carrier at all and we lose the convoy anyway. We're mostly facing attacks from subs and aircraft against our convoys and frigates specialised in AA and ASW do a pretty good job of fixing that without being single, fragile points of failure for an entire convoy
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
it's realistic-you just won't be able to do much else even at a 68% confidence of completion. Two frigate yards and carrier conversions will suck all the air out of the room and leave nothing else for military even with free dice being pulled in.
That said, the Frigates have a big sign on them that says 'Install advanced laser HERE when researched', so maybe we should put a die on that research problem if we're getting ready to build them in numbers?
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And unfortunately i think it's necessary. Hell, i'd vote for all 3 yards but i'm pretty sure it wouldn't win the vote
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Bold statement here: Since there is a big concern about ships for Karachi and given that we have an incoming refugee crisis from the land we're taking and given that the navy needs some serious buffing. Perhaps we should negotiate to delay karachi by a year or 2.
Promise it for either halfway through or at the end of next plan to get through reallocation, settle the refugees and sort out the navy.
Promise it for either halfway through or at the end of next plan to get through reallocation, settle the refugees and sort out the navy.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well yeah, but we are still planning on trying Karachi, and Nod hasn't yet put forth their full naval effort. Between those two facts, I'm expecting the next year to be kind of rough on the naval front.
And so is the Navy.
It's in the update:
"While so far, the raiding activities have been warded off with naval escorts, it is only a matter of time before the Brotherhood manages to do significant damage to GDI's ability to maintain global supply networks. With the Navy still distinctly short on modern hulls, and with only a relative few currently under construction, it is likely to be the element that drags GDI's offensives to a halt."
The conversion carriers aren't going to deterministically get insta-sunk the minute the enemy blinks in the general direction of the convoy.
The total absence of a carrier will, deterministically, be a problem, because it means a fleet carrier is tied down filling that hole in our deployment, which means one less fleet carrier doing something more harmful to Nod elsewhere.
Frigates and conversion carriers aren't mutually exclusive in any normal sense of the word, because we can do the conversions and still have frigates with at most a few months' delay, tops, on a specific tranche of frigates that show up three months later than they otherwise would.
Frigates supported by something, anything capable of naval aviation will be a lot more effective than frigates unsupported. That's why the Navy even wanted the light/escort carriers in the first place!
That sounds like you have an exact Progress cost figure for the yard. Mind sharing?
It depends. Because I do still intend to put some effort into wingman drones. All our worries about the Air Force didn't magically disappear just because we're more freaked out about the naval situation at the moment.
And I'm really reluctant to give up entirely on SADN.
What button do we push to negotiate with Arya Gulati, and what do we do if she says "fuck you, I spent years of my life and leveraged every contact I have keeping up my end of the bargain" and resigns?
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I'd guess its [ ] Request Reduction in Plan Commitments (New) and honestly, if she decides to throw a fit because we are even attempting to bring up the possibility of a delay, fuck her. Her working at the treasury is not worth the lives we risk because we cant prepare right for this operation.
- Location
- The Underdark
It is the Plan Commitment Renegotiation button. Which will basically have, in the results post a thing that says
Plan Goal
-[ ] Alternate goal 1
-[ ] Alternate goal 2
-[ ] Pay PS
-[ ] Keep Goal
My concern for the merchant conversion is along these lines.
A) Almost everyone both in the Quest and in the Military was gungho for Eastern Paris... except the Navy. As soon as they said they had no confidence in the plan it was abandoned despite being favored by basically every one else.
B) The Navy hates the Merchant conversions and has already flat out told us they want both promises to replace them AND will still complain about them to the Legislature as much as possible.
C) IE when we want to due Eastern Paris again the Navy is still going to be the most hesitant. Hell if their shipyards are built they may specifically try to delay that operation until they have the ships built.
So D) Are we prepared to push through the Karachi Sprint/Eastern Paris when the Navy inevitably resists it when we dropped it last time in the face of Naval resistance?
Cause if we take the costs of building the Merchant conversions and than the Navy talks us into Delaying the sprint again its gonna be super frustrating.
A) Almost everyone both in the Quest and in the Military was gungho for Eastern Paris... except the Navy. As soon as they said they had no confidence in the plan it was abandoned despite being favored by basically every one else.
B) The Navy hates the Merchant conversions and has already flat out told us they want both promises to replace them AND will still complain about them to the Legislature as much as possible.
C) IE when we want to due Eastern Paris again the Navy is still going to be the most hesitant. Hell if their shipyards are built they may specifically try to delay that operation until they have the ships built.
So D) Are we prepared to push through the Karachi Sprint/Eastern Paris when the Navy inevitably resists it when we dropped it last time in the face of Naval resistance?
Cause if we take the costs of building the Merchant conversions and than the Navy talks us into Delaying the sprint again its gonna be super frustrating.
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- Outside the Box
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I really have to protest at the inclusion of Blue Zone Apartment Complexes in seemingly everyone's plans. We have a massive +34 Housing buffer. Even though we expect many refugees, there's no need for those apartments currently. We can build housing fairly quickly, and we have the Housing buffer to give us time to do so when it becomes necessary.
What is necessary for next turn are Fortress Towns and Rail Networks. As seen in the update, Rail Networks in particular are critical for the war effort. Our military is going to be advancing even further into the Yellow Zones next turn; we should be absolutely as confident as possible that we finish the next phase. And meanwhile the Fortress Towns will be necessary for blunting NOD counter-attacks and helping hold all the new ground we're taking. Even a single turn's delay on these projects finishing will have a negative affect on the war and all of GDI's forces fighting in it.
Meanwhile, yes, much of our Housing reserve is in Green Zone housing and the Terminus cities. But two things: The war (and Fortresses+Railways) is pushing our GZ borders outward. The better we secure that new territory, the more secure and safe our GZ housing will be. Secondly, many of the Terminus cities... aren't. We built those cities at the edge of the Blue Zones. But our Blue Zones have substantially expanded since then and continue to do so. Many of the Terminus cities are in Blue Zone territory now. So while it's not High Quality Housing, it's certified Blue Zone housing. For refugees arriving from NOD territory, it might not be perfect but it's good enough. I hear you can go outside with your face mask off and everything.
Delaying for at least a year will absolutely get my vote. It means more frigates and possibly even CVLs in time for Karachi. That would also further reduce any need for conversions
Huh, makes me wonder if after the war settles down there will be projects to update those terminus cities to full blue zone standards?
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Hence, the suggestion to renegotiate Karachi to next plan if possible. Hell, if she refuses or demands it in this plan then we can refuse and just do it next plan anyway.
Also leaves us free to build actual carrier yards with the frigate ones and leave the conversions as-is. Since the biggest reason I see for them being done, particularly from @Simon_Jester, is to free up 3-6 fleet carriers for Karachi.
Yeah, i think we either have to slam as much navy funding right now into frigates as we can and sod everything else for a turn or not do karachi next year. I'd rather the second than the first as long as we don't delay building dockyards too much
Keep in mind I fully support the Karachi Sprint.
I am warning Simon about the issues facing us pushing through even a revised Karachi sprint after investing in Merchant conversions. Which the posters above me prove the issue exists.
I am warning Simon about the issues facing us pushing through even a revised Karachi sprint after investing in Merchant conversions. Which the posters above me prove the issue exists.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The entire point of the proposed crash building of frigate yards and merchant conversions is to at least bolster the Navy's position enough that we are prepared to push for Karachi, even if the Navy's still nervous. Don't assume we're going to do something mindless like panic and forget our own goals; we took certain actions for a reason.
Furthermore, the main reason we called off Karachi 2060 wasn't because the Navy alone, it was that we learned the warlords were going to be dogpiling us right then and were worried about military disaster if we had the bulk of our best troops all concentrated fighting in one place while people all over the world attacked us.
As to the merchant conversions, I was already planning to replace the merchant conversions anyway, so I don't mind promising to do them. From my point of view, making those promises costs nothing, and the merchant conversion project is just a (PS-expensive) way to get some cheap flattops that will actually be available in time over and above the ones I'd planned to build anyway.
The problem I foresee is that while that works well enough for renegotiating, say, the Stored Food requirement... Arya Gulati isn't in the same position, and it seems doubtful that she'll be easy to convince to settle for anything besides Karachi. So if we can't or "can't" do Karachi, then we're kind of screwed as far as I can tell. At least, insofar as she has the ability to screw us over, which is to a significant but not disastrous degree.
My plan gives us an 84% chance of completing a phase of railroads and we don't even know if there's another phase gated behind that one; it hasn't shown up on screen.
As to Housing... I'm trying to keep us from having to resettle refugees in places that may be in danger as the war goes on. We really don't want our Housing total to be down so low that we're settling people in Chicago or a South American fortress town while the Regency War is still going.
Another factor is just plain Resource budget; funding three or four dice of fortress towns is just hard with all the other 20 R/die stuff we're doing.
The apartments aren't ideal but we WILL need them, and even with the 2-2-2 arrangement my plan uses, we still have very high supermajority chance of getting both a phase of railroads and a phase of fortress towns completed.
If you can think of anything in my plan that's "wasted money" enough to justify scrapping 20 R worth of income, I'll consider spending those two dice on fortress towns instead of apartments if you convince me.
I oppose us cancelling the plan for Karachi unless the war situation does something we don't predict. The only reason we're having trouble with it is because we neglected projects we should ideally have done anyway (though we very much had our reasons). We're working on those projects now.
Karachi is important/desirable enough for its own sake that I'd prefer not to renege on it. We knew there'd be a war during this Plan. We knew the Navy needed ships. I think we can manage this, but we need to take actions to bring about success in the plan, rather than abandoning the plan because we didn't prepare ourselves and refuse to do what is necessary.
I think we should rush-push one frigate yard (both is likely to be an unrealistic stretch goal if they're as big as @Vehrec keeps implying) and the carrier conversions, both of which will be highly useful in the short term even if we don't do Karachi. We'll then get aggressive about finishing the escort carrier yards as promised, along with more frigate production.
I think we're allowing panic to color our reactions here. The situation is manageable as long as we take the right steps to keep things more or less under control.
I think we can and should stay the course, and that the merchant conversions combined with an aggressive shipyard program will permit us to do so. The Navy is not a happy branch of the military right now, and rightly so, but all we can do is try to make sure there are physically more hulls in the water as fast as we can reasonably make that happen and hope for the best, because this isn't Red Alert and we can't change the past.
- Location
- Earth
There will continue to be more phases of railroads until the entire planet is a massive fuzzball of railway lines.
- Location
- Wall Gazing
The way I see it, for R reasons we can have all but one of the following: Prep for Fusion 6 in Q3, Prep for Nuuk 3 in Q3, Prep for SADN 1 in Q3, Chicago Prep, Frigate Yard, Carrier Refits, and Wingman Factory. And if I had to choose one of those to cut it would be Chicago, SADN or Fusion 6. The first can be done, it is a nice to have and we would be investing in it to prep it for Q3 or 4. The second is a risk that NOD will succeed with some variant of Giddyboy's Tib-Nukem idea. The third puts us in a position where we will need ~4 dice to guarantee Fusion 6 in Q3. Which will hold us back from completing Nuuk 3 in Q3.
Something I haven't mentioned is Hallucinogen Development, its not as applicable to @Simon_Jester 's proposals, but it is something that has been in mine. I consider it important to helping develop our understanding of long term effects to NOD's version, and because I dislike leaving dice fallow. It's also a huge thumb in their eyes as one of their 'Weapons of Peace' turned to actually peaceful ends. I am considering cutting it from the my docket as despite my preferences we need the R elsewhere.
My main concern is R use elsewhere in the plan. We also will need that Housing at some point and its better to get refugees further away from the front.
Then we loose her +10 to infrastructure, which is huge, not as huge as it was at the start of the Plan, but still significant.
I am entirely in favor of doing the Plan Commitment Renegotiation to see if we can push Karachi back a year, so that either we have the frigate hulls to keep convoys running, or NOD is licking its wounds and is no longer taking the Navy's full attention. If all else fails, we *do* have a number of +PS projects to make up the cost if we have to just go "here's some Political Support, have fun with your new toys legislators".
For military projects this turn, I want to finish off the Neural Interface refits (1 die), do the Naval PD development for Inferium lasers (1 die), do the TAL pod deployment, which will give the Air Force a boost to effectiveness that they can just plug in (I'm assuming about 3 dice), and then dump the remaining 5ish dice on shipyards. Probably 1 die on the Battleship Yard project for carriers, and then 4 on a Frigate yard. But this is kinda tentative.
For military projects this turn, I want to finish off the Neural Interface refits (1 die), do the Naval PD development for Inferium lasers (1 die), do the TAL pod deployment, which will give the Air Force a boost to effectiveness that they can just plug in (I'm assuming about 3 dice), and then dump the remaining 5ish dice on shipyards. Probably 1 die on the Battleship Yard project for carriers, and then 4 on a Frigate yard. But this is kinda tentative.
- Location
- Outside the Box
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Put down another die for 99%. As seen in the update, railroads are absolutely critical for the war effort. Even if there's no extra phases and we waste a lot of progress, an extra die is a price well worth paying for certainty on something so important.
Again. We have +34 Housing. Even if we had, say, -5 Housing per turn from refugees, that'd still be five or six turns before we end up scraping the barrel. That's more than enough time to do Apartments on a later turn.
More generally, after the military's done pushing GZ borders out, we're going to switch to doing a lot of consolidation. That's the time when building BZ Apartments will be best done. But right now any slacking on the projects that help the military's offensive will hurt us.
There are other things I'd
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Discord Semi-AMA Info
So, as the semi-co-QM-cat of the Quest, I was slightly bored several hours past and instituted a slight AMA on the Discord. After the round of sillier questions, there are several things that is worth sharing over in the Thread. Here are some of the following things I have said, the more important ones making their way here:
- The design philosophy for GDI Quest is a simple one: Failing challenges are part of the process. Screwing up is not game over. This will get some manner of elaboration further down but like, don't be too disheartened over failure. That just means either Ithillid or me will just wedge in some form of consequences but ultimately one survivable, if not mitigable.
- There is a question on the matter of 'what is the biggest mistake thus far in the Quest' and Ithillid has already mentioned it: It's not internalizing that any naval buildup is inherently a long-term concern. More than that, though, the trend of the smaller mistakes that cropped up is the desire to be perfectionist and exactingly optimal in weapon developments. This has resulted in some jank designs – laser PD being ultra souped up and the Havoc only getting a new design ten years after Quest start – but more recently, this manifested in the Wingman Drone discussions and on the worth of developing the tech before doing Escort Carriers. And... essentially more words have been put forth on the arguments rather than just doing them. This isn't an indictment on 'the thread should invest more on the Navy', but more of 'the thread should have invested earlier'. Because war or no war, Karachi or no Karachi, the now un-turtle forward posture of the GDI necessitated hulls earlier.
- And then, the current discussions. Karachi. I will be frank here and more to the point, I can't say much because the answers to this is still wrapped around the bundle of mess that is India – and thus classified – but I can say the following hint: The thread's assumptions and consensus(es) on Karachi over the past months have alternated between heavily overestimating and underestimating the dangers involved. It had been fun to watch the speculations but after nearly five IRL months of pinning down the shape of the conflicts, the delight has overstayed its welcome. I can't exactly press y'all to commit to resolving the matter of India now that said mistake has been highlighted, but after a certain point, the matter may come knocking. Might not be over the course of the Regency War, but until the matter is revealed IC – as Ithillid has noted, he's not spending the hundreds of words on the brief if the Questers aren't spending even a single dice on the Planned City yet – the subcontinent will remain a mystery.
To clarify, because co-cat-QM had to bludgeon it into my head on discord:
Means "Less botes available than that time decade ago when humanity nearly got vored".
I do agree that Karachi is something we want at the earliest opportunity, but, reading options available, I got strong impression that until all three frigate yards launch their first batch (circa 9-12 months) and we do at least CAMs (also 9-12 months), doing Eastern Paris will be incredibly painful at best.
I think your favourite colour was quite important to ask
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Outright dropping her is last-resort but she does have a stated habit of fighting officials over projects.