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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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I'm surprised the Cheyenne Mountain Complex wasn't severely undermanned given our Yellow Zone expansion, but I suppose ZOCOM getting more stuff helped? Looks like they still got the Tacitus, though that's probably for the best since you know, at least we can be fairly sure that Kane won't accidentally destroy it with careless tinkering.
 
Arcus said:
I'm surprised the Cheyenne Mountain Complex wasn't severely undermanned given our Yellow Zone expansion, but I suppose ZOCOM getting more stuff helped? Looks like they still got the Tacitus, though that's probably for the best since you know, at least we can be fairly sure that Kane won't accidentally destroy it with careless tinkering.
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Uh.

The words were:

[15:09:23][10/30/2052] [Location: Rockies; Tacitus Lab] excessively fortified. [MissionObjective][Retrieve_Tacitus].fullfilled = false. SuccessChance([MissionObjective][Retrieve_Tacitus].fullfilled = true) > 0.987. [Subject: GDI Commander; unknown] resistance 8.64 higher than expected. Recalculating approach.

So break that down, sentence by sentence:

1) "Wow, this Tacitus lab sure is heavily fortified!"

2) "Our mission objective to retrieve the Tacitus is not fulfilled."

3) I'm pretty sure this one means "Depending on whether I report probabilities as a percentage or a decimal, we have more than a 98.7% chance of taking the thing, or more than a 0.987% chance of taking the thing, respectively" The former is bad (even if it doesn't mean Kane's pet robot has the Tacitus, it means said robot thinks it will soon have the Tacitus). The latter would be weird ("there is still almost a 1% chance of success, not giving up" maybe?)

4) "The GDI commander, I dunno who, is resisting harder than we expected. Probably quite a bit harder. Better try something different."

...

It's honestly hard to parse from this whether Nod's attempt to seize the Tacitus succeeded or failed, only that it ran into trouble and didn't succeed easily or quickly.
 
Simon_Jester said:
It's honestly hard to parse from this whether Nod's attempt to seize the Tacitus succeeded or failed, only that it ran into trouble and didn't succeed easily or quickly.
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Breaking it down:

1) LEGION is being frustrated because wow did the base commanders in the Rockies watch too much Home Alone, WHY ARE THERE SO MANY LAND MINES

2) Yeah, basically that.

3) First one, LEGION totally still thinks he can get the Tacitus, and keep in mind this is an Epic Battle and what we rolled for Military Stuff.

4) Yeah, basically that, because everything is covered in traps and death and LEGION has reserves, but not infinite reserves. LEGION is bleeding hard for every inch of mountain, and he still has plenty more meat grinder to go.


MonkeyTypewriter said:
Oh hey, logs of LEGION impersonating Quatar to frame her for treason. No way that's in any way embarrassing to a certain bald mastermind.
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Whoops, LEGION really shouldn't have left his diary lying around where it could embarrass his dad.
 
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Well, I suppose that since we know there were three battles, one where both sides fucked up but GDI won, one where GDI blew Nod out of the water despite Nod not having begun the battle in the water, and one OUR BATTLE WILL BE LEGENDARY engagement narrowly won by Nod... that does sound like the last of those three.
 
If anyone wants basic translations of the entries:

"Dad handed me over to this other lady named Alexa and told me to go get the Ion Cannon Network plans, I can totally do this for him"

"Alexa told me to go attack Temple Prime while pretending to be Killian for some reason, I don't really get how this is useful at all but she's the boss I guess"

"Ow, ow, so apparently yesterday Alexa tried to murder me and then self-terminated, except 'yesterday' was three years ago- OW, and now Dad is monologuing at me and I really can't focus right now, I'll listen to it later"

"Why are there so many land mines? How did they even get this many land mines set up without triggering a chain reaction when one gets set off? Okay, so I don't quite have the Tacitus for Dad yet, but I can still do this, I just need a better approach"

"This fucking dumbass just got all my cyborgs blown up, does he not know how expensive those are? Why would he even position them there, that was way overextended, ugh, this is going to cause me problems."
 
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Since the Discord is talking about SPAAACE! I might as well get to posting some of the Space discussion points.

This is a Delta V map. It takes about 9.25 kilometers per second of DeltaV in order to get to Low Earth Orbit, Another 2.4 to get to Geostationary. Getting to The Rest of the Solar System, is relatively cheap, at least in terms of propulsion. Right now, every payload you send up, has to get you through that initial massive hump in order to get, well, anywhere.
 
It's hard to think of what might happen, if Nods got their hand on Tacitus, they will be able to learn it's secret and how to create control node, but if GDI still has it, with how they still didn't have a way to unlock it and still causing damage because they might cause it to explode and lost it.
 
A proposed plan for next-turn that might get 13 out of the 128 or so needed bits of Consumer Goods, finishes up Boston, gets some extra resources and some general reconstruction. I'm betting that blue-zone will actually go down in progress needed, but probably only by about 100 points or so.

-[] Blue Zone Reconstruction (Phase 2) 33/500 3 dice 30R
-[] Yellow Zone Reconstruction (Phase 3) 82/200 2 die 30R 63%
-[] North Boston Chip Fabrication (Phase 3) 474/600 3 dice 45R 90%
-[] Toy Plants 68/100 1 die 5R 92%
-[] Personal Pharmaceuticals Plants 0/200 3 dice 45R 43%
-[] Luxury Aquaponic Bays 0/100 2 dice 20R 77%
-[] Blue Zone Perimeter Redoubts (Phase 3) 138/200 1 die 20R 82%
-[] Tiberium Glacier Mining (Phase 4) 68/200 2 dice 60R 82%,
-[] Craft Shops and Maker facilities 0/200 4 dice 20R 99%,
-[] Reopen the Publishing Houses 0/150 3 dice 30R 96%
-[] GDSS Enterprise (Phase 1) 0/100 1 die 20R 24%
-[] Orbital Strike Regimental Combat Team Development 53/75 1 die 15R 97%
-[] Point Defense Battery Development 0/40 1 die 10R 79%
 
It's a decent plan but I'd rather pull some dice out of the Reconstruction and put them into a Fusion Die for the Enterprise.

Nevermind, I see the Enterprise, it's just buried down at the bottom.

Also, why Personal Pharmaceuticals over, say, Personal Electronic Appliances? Same amount of Dice required and it's 15R cheaper.
 
Why the gross over completion for
-[] Craft Shops and Maker facilities 0/200 4 dice 20R 99%,
-[] Reopen the Publishing Houses 0/150 3 dice 30R 96%
?

Unless there are confirmed bonuses or overflow it is more efficient to put 2 of those dice elsewhere.
 
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Enduring Victory: Victory on the Battlefield.
  • Threadmarks
    • Enduring Victory: The Global Defense Initiative in The Aftermath of the Third Tiberium War.

    The Global Defense Initiative had been bloodied by the Third Tiberium War however it had achieved a decisive victory, effectively destroying many elements of the Brotherhood of NOD, and driving off an alien invasion.

    In the years following the war, many engagements were conducted between the Initiative and the Brotherhood of NOD, mostly smaller ones conducted as firefights between Initiative defenders and attacking NOD raiders. In nearly all cases these fights were tactically indecisive. The Brotherhood often managed to pull back functionally intact, while the Initiative usually lacked sufficient mobile assets for pursuit and destruction.
    In the aftermath of the war, all portions of the Initiative's military forces looked to establish an ambitious plan of reforms. While Dr. Granger effectively fobbed them off for much of the plan, he did begin producing new equipment for them. Granger's priorities, as much has he has said in any case, were directly aimed at Tiberium abatement and winning the peace, rather than preparing for war as examined in the last two chapters. This lack of preparedness caused substantial casualties as a final flare up in July of 2052. While few of the engagements were particularly large, GDI's forces took substantial damage, and some faced destruction. However, the initial conflicts quickly petered out, a result of a lack of manpower, and, as it would turn out, having a substantially more important goal

    Following the rise of the Marked of Kane, a cyborg army assembled by the Brotherhood of NOD over the decades after the Second Tiberium War, there were three decisive battles over the course of October and November 2052. At Los Angeles, Cheyenne Mountain, and Siberia, the Initiative and the Brotherhood clashed one more time with the arsenals that had defined the Third Tiberium War.

    Battle of Los Angeles (21 v 14)
    On the morning of October 9, 2052, one of the largest NOD air flotillas ever seen was spotted out at sea closing towards the Tiberium infested ruins of Los Angeles. A flight of Apollo fighters, of VF 332 lead by captain Harold Mannock, effectively ran into the flotilla on a long range training patrol. Large air flotillas were nothing new. With the expansion of GDI's power into the Yellow Zones, the Carryall had become an increasingly large part of NOD's logistics, and so required large convoys to be relatively safe on the hundreds or thousands of kilometer flights to resupply various NOD bases. The first indication of something being wrong was a new type of aircraft in NOD's arsenal. A variant of a Venom, it carried air to air missiles, clearly derivatives of those carried by the Stealth Tank of the era, but packed as twins instead of tens. While it would be seen in future combats for decades to come, it was one of the models first seen above Los Angeles. While most of the force was typical for the NOD arsenals of the Third Tiberium War, Venoms armed with either machine guns or laser weaponry, there were a handful of these new units.

    The flotilla was initially thought to be a deep penetration resupply run for NOD operations across the west and midwest, operating from transport bases somewhere in South America. However, it proved, in records captured during Operation Dawn Star, to be the primary convoy for the Marked of Kane to the Battle of Cheyenne Mountain. While an intelligence failure for INOPS, the initiative was lucky to be able to find the force at all. NOD had proved both before and after to be preternaturally good at avoiding patrols and slipping through radar nets.

    Captain Mannock lead his men in what would become one of the signature moves of the Appollo fighter, a fast, head on attack through the center of the enemy formation. Slashing in behind a wave of missiles, Mannock claimed three kills, a small portion of the twenty that his flight brought down. Calling for reinforcements, the officers in command initially did not believe him, although they did vector in a group of Firehawks for confirmation. While two of the four did get shot down, they accounted for six Venoms, and radioed confirmation to local airbases, prompting a more full scale response. As the morning continued flight after flight was vectored in, fed piecemeal into the action as the NOD aircraft were not meaningfully delayed. There were never enough missiles, never enough aircraft to meaningfully punch through into the combat boxes that had been established around the transports. Rather than breaking to engage, the vast majority of the formation remained in formation, and focused their efforts on getting out of the battlespace. While some missiles did leak through, it was rarely enough to actually bring down a carryall, with their four redundant rotors.
    Having expended his munitions, Mannock returned to base, and was one of the few flight leaders to be able to make two engagement runs. Closing in on the tail of the formation, Mannock's flight downed three Carryalls and a further half dozen Venoms, making Mannnock a triple ace, and bringing two others of his flight aces in their own right.

    In the late morning, GDI forces broke contact as the available fighters had expended their munitions, and were low on fuel. While losses for the Initiative were far lighter than the Brotherhood, the Brotherhood did manage to achieve their objective and pass through the battlespace. The Initiative made no real further efforts to conduct interception. With the contact broken, NOD forces would be able to be over the horizon in any direction before any GDI forces could return.

    In total, the Initiative sent some sixty Firehawks and sixteen Apollos to fight the air battle over Los Angeles. While the casualties were incredibly lopsided, six Firehawks and two Apollos downed and four pilots recovered, compared to over a hundred NOD aircraft, the limitations of the technology were on full display. While capable of inflicting absolutely lopsided casualties, Initiative air forces, like during the Third Tiberium War, were oftentimes unable to prevent NOD from completing its objectives.

    Battle of Cheyenne Mountain (91 v 94)
    Cheyenne Mountain had a long history of preparation for war. Nearly a century prior, it had become the site of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. A city built inside the mountain, the complex was intended to survive a nuclear exchange. With the end of the threat of nuclear war via the Ion Cannon network, Cheyenne mountain was repurposed as a site for the very most secure of scientific research. The crowning jewel was the Tacitus, an alien supercomputer seized from Kane after the Second Tiberium War, and transported to the site before the beginning of the Third.
    The minds behind one of the most valiant defeats in GDI's long history of valiant defeats were Colonel Tali Jackson, and Colonel Daniel O'Neil (Ret.) Colonel O'Neil arrived at the site shortly before the beginning of the Third Tiberium War, having been part of the convoy that brought the Tacitus to the base, and assuming command of the defenses. This began a process of defense in depth. Ranging from Raider and Trooper kill teams, to deep minefields nearly everywhere aside from the main roads, which were covered by fighting positions for both tanks and Titans. On each of the mountain passes, O'Neil had rigged explosive charges, ready to literally bring down the mountain on any invader. By the end of the war however, O'Neil was ready to retire. His subordinate, Lt.Colonel Tali Jackson was promoted to take his place.

    Colonel Jackson continued to prepare the defenses, and with the aftermath of the war, her preparations took a far more improvised character. Tensioned wire with hand grenades daisy chained along it, missile pods stripped from disabled vehicles concealed to create crossfires of dumbfire rockets, arrays of captured rifles, mounted to sweep an area with fire, using the recoil to tap the weapons left or right. While few have ever been on any GDI manual of arms, most proved quite effective in the defense of the mountain.

    On October 30th and 31st, elements of the Marked of Kane, supported by units from NOD cells across the American Southwest, totalling some 60 thousand men bore down on the roughly six thousand under Colonel Jackson. A combined arms force drawing from ZOCOM, the Steel Talons, and mainline GDI forces, the area had been marked as a low priority for upgrades, especially as the Marked of Kane had seemingly focused on the asian theater. Traditionally, a three to one numerical advantage would be needed to win an offensive battle against an entrenched enemy. Kane, and Legion had a ten to one edge. It would prove to be just barely enough.

    The plan was simple, and brutal in its efficiency. Waves of expendable infantry and light vehicles, sourced from local NOD forces hit the defenses along every avenue of approach, while a hard core of Black Hand and Marked forces drove straight up the central approaches, bulling through fixed defenses, minefields, and mobile assets alike. While the Marked on this first day of fighting suffered lesser casualties than the other forces, they made little progress, aside from clearing a number of Colonel Jackson's defenses. By the end of the first day, Jackson's forces had been forced back from the first and second line, but held at a third and final position before reaching the base of the mountain complex. Jackson's losses had been heavy. Unable to break contact, one of her battalions had been destroyed, and another three mauled in the days fighting. While her reserves were still functionally intact, including most of her Zone Suits, by the end of her first day of fighting, she had taken two and a half thousand casualties, mostly dead or unrecoverable. While the fighting died down overnight, the Marked continued to skirmish with the defenders, until the early hours of dawn the next day. At that point, Kane's forces renewed their assault, hammering at a join between two of the weakened battalions.

    Jackson was forced to deploy her one battalion of Zone Troopers, some of the best men she had, to blunt the blow. Holding for nearly two hours, the Zone Troopers shot themselves dry of every round they had, a nearly unheard of occurrence during the Third Tiberium War, before they too were overrun. Down to only about one and a half thousand by noon, Jackson's men and women fought a desperate delaying action through the research complex, their vehicles abandoned as they tried to hold off their attackers. It was not enough. By 1500, the Marked of Kane had broken through, and seized the Tacitus. A half hour later, reinforcements arrived from the Californian Blue Zone, and drove off the rear guard hunting Jackson and her people through the corridors of the compound.

    The results were bloody for both sides. By the end of the battle, Jackson had less than five hundred combat effective soldiers remaining, and had expended every vehicle under her command. For the Brotherhood, precise numbers are difficult, but estimates place the casualties at somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand dead, wounded or captured on the mountain itself. In the following weeks, another five thousand were found abandoned to their wounds at encampments near the mountain. While a tactical and strategic victory for the Brotherhood of NOD, Jackson was lionized in the media, as leading a doomed effort that very nearly succeeded.


    Operation: Dawn Star (70 v 3)

    Operation Dawn Star began November 1 2052, in a titanic display of GDI's material superiority. Three disparate forces, Army Groups from Blue Zones 7, 16, and 18, encircled and destroyed tens of thousands of NOD cyborgs, many of which were destroyed still in their caches. General Svetlana Cherdenko, acting in overall command of the operation, had nearly three months of relative inactivity to build up her forces. The first six battalions of artillery, nearly a dozen wings of Orcas and Firehawks, ten full loads of ammunition for every tank, APC, and pittbull in the force, and reinforcements drawn from as far away as South Africa and Australia converged on the Marked of Kane in one of the largest battles of the 21st century.

    The postwar crisis on the far eastern battlefields had begun in July, with cyborg armies boiling out of the ground. While initial GDI estimates placed the numbers at between two and three hundred thousand, postwar assessments and analysis have placed the numbers at close to half that, somewhere between 40-90 thousand, of which no more than forty thousand were active and in the battlespace at any given time. Numbers on the various non cyborg forces, raised both from local NOD assets and shipped in over the previous months, are still unknown, but almost certainly raised the numbers from two corps, to between five and ten. NOD organizational confusion however, means that these numbers are always going to have a wide spread. The battlefields, while initially confused, quickly settled, with combat fronts across China falling into a near reenactment of First World War era trench warfare, with tanks and other mobile assets playing a secondary role in the face of massed deployments of Battle Bases and infantry entrenchment. In response NOD began lining trenches of their own, alongside turreted hardpoints, and a number of Obelisk heavy emplacements.

    Preparation for Dawn Star began in early August, as the first wave of fighting concluded. While there had been a number of shattered forces, Cherdenko, one of the first officers on the scene, had filled in those units with green recruits, many only days or weeks out of boot camp. Few were ready to fight the boogymen of the Marked of Kane, which had become legends of the 2nd Tiberium War. Knowing this, Cherdenko had prepared a strategy of overwhelming firepower. Instead of relying on the fighting strength of her mobile assets, her strategy was much like Haig's at the battle of the Somne. Victory through massive application of firepower.

    In the predawn light of the First, armored infantry clattered through the night, moving towards jump off positions forward of the entrenchments that had lined the battlefields. At 0630, the first wave of fire lit off the attacks, with masses of both fixed and mobile artillery tearing the night open in blasts of smoke and flame towards pre registered targets. At the same time, a rolling barrage of Ion cannon strikes pummeled the Brotherhood's front lines, wiping out strongpoints and punching holes that armored and infantry columns raced through, encircling NOD defenders too slow or too shell shocked to get away. In the air, holes opened in NOD's air defense system allowed Firehawks and Orcas to stream into the battlespace, hunting fleeing remnants and striking deep into the rear lines.

    It was here, in this first exploitation phase that GDI's artillery truly showed its worth. A 203mm /L50 gun can fling a shell weighing nearly a hundred kilograms, and with a filling of ten kilograms of explosive nearly thirty five kilometers. As GDI's forces surged through NOD's lines, the carefully husbanded Captain model Zone armors and hundreds of forward observer teams called in strike after strike, pounding NOD resistance into bouncing rubble rather than allow it to stall the advance. Pockets of NOD forces were left behind, shattered and disorganized for sweeping forces behind the front lines to mop up at their leisure.

    GDI's advance did stall out, not due to NOD action, but due to the weather. While GDI's forces were far stronger than any of the other armies that had tried to fight in the depths of Siberian winter, it, like all the others, faced the wrath of general winter, and bent the knee. In late November, as snow and ice covered the ground, and storms blotted out the sky, Svetlana Cherdenko called a halt to further offensive operations. While regrouping took through the end of the month, it would prove to also be the general's last battle. Svetlana Cherdenko had been poisoned by Tiberium during the Third Tiberium War, and had been fighting a losing battle ever since. During the last days of the regrouping effort, Cherdenko collapsed, and was rushed to a field hospital, where she died on November 30. While one of the largest battles of the era, and a massive victory for the Initiative, one played up in public media, in internal affairs it was overshadowed by more major losses, most notably the Tacitus in the raid on Cheyenne Mountain.

    A Lasting Question
    The efforts to win an enduring victory in the aftermath of the Third Tiberium War, opened questions of policy, of goals, and of what it means to be a Global Defense organization. While militarily, the Initiative was slow to rebuild from the war, and slow to learn the lessons taught by the Brotherhood of NOD, economically and socially, the two Grangers reshaped and reformed the Initiative from a government for, by, and of, the Blue Zones, to one that represented a global population, one that often had other concerns and other more pressing issues than the Brotherhood of NOD.
     
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    • It was clear that the battle for the Tacitus Nod would win. * cough * * cough * quite extraordinary that of the 3 fight we 2 win but just lose this fight * cough * * cough * pure coincidence :)
     
    Shame Kane got the Tacitus but that was probably always going to happen, or at least was very highly likely. We made them bleed absurdly hard for it, both at Cheyenne and around the world, even if we didn't pull off a flawless victory on every front Nod lost a lot more teeth here than they did in the canon timeline. It's going to take them a long time to bounce back from getting the majority of the Marked crushed in Siberia and the absurdly steep losses suffered at Cheyenne, especially if we keep up the pressure on the Yellow Zones and start competing for the recruits/resources they would usually have uncontested out there.
     
    Yeah, I was honestly expecting us to lose the Tacitus, it being this close is a pleasant surprise.

    Also, I think the Marked of Kane might potentially be completely wiped out as a subfaction now (at least in terms of cyborg ground forces, they probably still have lots and lots of air units) between Cheyenne Mountain and Cherdenko, so that's excellent.
     
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    I'd love to be able to read this but all i can see is a wall of text. Is it possible for you to add some spacing between the paragraphs please?
     
    Fingers crossed for options to co-opt or reverse engineer the TCN asap. Then again if we can do a good enough job pushing back the zones it might not be as vital anyway.
     
    Too bad that while it looks like we won two of the three engagements, it was Kane that ultimately won this conflict.

    While the Brotherhood might have suffered heavy losses, I don't think that matters all that much to the true enemy, namely Kane himself. His goals are likely going to be advancing just fine. They seem to do that no matter how many times Nod itself loses against GDI.
     
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